Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Who Was Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the founders of the English Romantic movement and one of the most original minds of his age — a poet, philosopher, and literary critic whose work ranges from the haunting supernatural ballads of his early career to the systematic philosophical theology of his later years. Born in Devon in 1772, the son of a vicar, he was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Cambridge, where he developed the wide reading in philosophy, theology, and science that would mark everything he wrote.

His collaboration with William Wordsworth produced the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 — the volume that launched English Romanticism — and his contributions to that collection, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the fragment “Kubla Khan,” are among the most celebrated poems in the language. His addiction to opium, which began as a medical treatment and became a lifelong struggle, cast a shadow over his productivity without entirely extinguishing his creative output.

His later work, including Biographia Literaria (1817) and the Aids to Reflection (1825), represents one of the most serious attempts by a Romantic poet to develop a systematic theology and philosophy that could integrate the new science, the new literature, and the old faith. He is significant for TLA because his entire career can be read as a sustained attempt to understand how the imagination — which he defined as the living power and prime agent of all human perception — participates in the divine creative act.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — 1798
• Kubla Khan — 1816 — written c. 1797
• Christabel — 1816 — fragment
• Biographia Literaria — 1817
• Aids to Reflection — 1825
• Dejection: An Ode — 1802