Samuel Taylor Coleridge - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Overview

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (icon; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

, was a founder of the Romantic Movement

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

in England and a member of the Lake Poets

Lake Poets

The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review...

. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and was published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss...

and Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep in 1816...

, as well as for his major prose work Biographia Literaria
Biographia Literaria
Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of MY LITERARY LIFE and OPINIONS, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817. The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical...

. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist

German idealism

German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...

philosophy to English-speaking culture.

Unanswered Questions

Was Coleridge a linguistic learner? How does this relate to his poetry?

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Quotations

Poor little foal of an oppressèd race! I love the languid patience of thy face.

"To a Young Ass", li. 1 (1794)

Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! Yea! every thing that is and will be free! Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest Liberty.

"France: An Ode", st. 1 (1798)

Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

"Frost at Midnight", l. 72 (1798)

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility.

"The Devil's Thoughts", st. 6 (1799)

Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows, Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

"The Homeric Hexameter" (translated from Friedrich Schiller|Schiller) (1799)

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

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