Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher, a central figure in English Romanticism and a founder of the Lake Poets alongside William Wordsworth and Robert Southey.

Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, he studied at Cambridge but left in 1794 due to debts and ill health. He formed a lifelong friendship with Wordsworth in 1797, and their collaboration produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), a landmark in English poetry that championed plain speech and emotional immediacy.

Coleridge wrote major poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, works that reflect his interest in imagination, nature, and the supernatural. He was also a prolific critic and thinker, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) offered a theory of poetry and aesthetic philosophy, emphasizing the primacy of the imagination over mere fancy.

In later years Coleridge lived in the Lake District and in London, married to Sara Fricker, with whom he had several children. He faced financial difficulties and long-term opium use, yet he remained a productive writer and lecturer. He died in London in 1834. Coleridge’s work influenced Romantic poetry and modern literary criticism, shaping debates about imagination, perception, and the nature of poetry.