Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Poet, philosopher, critic, seminal thinker; b. Ottery St. Mary, Devon, Oct. 20, 1772; d. Highgate, London, July 25, 1834. He was the youngest son and ninth child of Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery and master of the grammar school there, by his second wife, Anne (nee Bowden). While studying at Christ’s Hospital (1782-91), the young Coleridge was known as an eccentric but gregarious virtuoso, and formed an important friendship with Charles Lamb (1775-1834).
Career and Works. Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge (1792), as exhibitioner and sizar; but after a brilliant and tempestuous beginning, he joined the Dragoons (1793). After release from military service, he met (June 1794) his future brother-in-law Robert Southey (1774-1843); he never seriously resumed his university career. In Bristol in 1795 Coleridge and Southey sought unsuccessfully the means to found an ideal community in the U.S. In the same year he married Sarah Fricker, by whom he had four children. At that time Coleridge began to establish his reputation as a poet and journalist. He met Unitarian intellectuals and for a time intended to become a Unitarian minister, but by 1802 the Trinitarian doctrine had become the basis for his theological reflections.
Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in 1796 and was joined in 1797 by William and Dorothy (1771-1855) Wordsworth. In 1796 and in 1797 Coleridge had published collections of his poems. In 1798 his poetic gifts flowered in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, in some of his other contributions to the volume Lyrical Ballads, which he published jointly with *Wordsworth, and in his “conversation poems.” His visit to Germany in 1798-99 enabled him to master the German language and gave him his first acquaintance with Immanuel *Kant and German philosophy. In 1800 he moved to Keswick, Cumberland, to be near the Wordsworths and Sara Hutchinson (1775-1835). In April 1804, hoping to halt the deterioration of his health and escape from marital unhappiness, he went to the Mediterranean, where for a time he was private secretary to the governor of Malta, and then acting public secretary. He also traveled in Sicily and Italy. Coleridge returned to English in July 1806 - ill, addicted to opium, estranged from his wife, uncertain of his future - relying upon the Wordsworths for comfort and direction. At Grasmere he wrote his periodical, The Friend (1809-10, 28 numbers). His alienation from the Wordsworths, which had been deepening since 1807, was never repaired after 1812. Coleridge was in London and Bristol from 1811 to early 1815, working intermittently as a journalist and lecturer; he was in poor health and spirits, and was looked after by new friends, until he finally resolved to break his drug addiction.
The renewal of Coleridge’s powers was marked by his collection of poems, Sibylline Leaves, and his Biographia Literaria of 1815. In April 1816 he took up residence with Dr. James Gillman in Highgate, London, where he remained until his death. Coleridge’s early Highgate years were his most prolific: in 1816 he produced the Christabel volume and The Statesman’s Manuel; in 1817, the second Lay Sermon, Biographia Literaria, and Sibylline Leaves; in 1818, On Method, a much-enlarged Friend, and two pamphlets on the factory children; and in 1818-19, an important series of literary lectures and the Philosophical Lectures (ed. K. Coburn, 1949). Coleridge never completed his philosophical-theological opus maximum, and published only two more books, Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830), but he issued collective editions of his poems in three volumes (1828, 1829, 1834).
Coleridge’s daughter and his nephew H. N. Coleridge (1798-1843) prepared new editions of his work after his death, and collected and edited much of his unpublished writings. The work of accurate editing, long deferred by the difficulties of the task, should be fulfilled with the edition of the Notebooks (ed. K. Coburn, 4 v. New York and London 1957, 1962; 11 v. planned), Collected Letters (ed. E. L. Griggs, 4 v. Oxford 1956, 1959; 6 v. planned), and the Collected Coleridge (K. Coburn, gen. ed; 4 v. New York 1966; about 23 v. planned).
His Influence. Coleridge’s poetry at its best is characterized by sensitive craftsmanship, a symbolic rather than descriptive thrust, and a way of making myth out of his interior life and the actual world. The strength of his criticism arises from his acute introspective understanding of the psychology and ontology of poetry. Imagination, a way of mind that he distinguished sharply from fancy, is the supreme realizing activity in which a person becomes unified. His Biographia Literaria, though allusive and difficult, laid the foundations for the complex critical revolution of the 20th century; Coleridge’s splendid critique of Wordsworth’s unique genius has not been superseded; and the fragmentary records of his Shakespeare lectures have been influential.
Coleridge’s philosophy has Platonic and Kantian origins, but transcends both in establishing an organic (or dynamic or polar) framework in which he sees life as the interpenetration of opposites. J. S. *Mill regarded Coleridge and *Bentham as “the two great seminal minds of England in their age,” and recognized that in all his thinking Coleridge “expresses the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the 18th century,” i.e., mechanical *materialism. Unity was always Coleridge’s theme; and life, his guiding analogy. In the absence of a central philosophical work from Coleridge, his reputation and influence as philosopher and theologian depend on scattered passages in his various writings and on the recollection of his lectures and conversation. His philosophy has a strong ethical bias: “My metaphysics are merely the referring of the mind to its own consciousness for truths indispensable to its own happiness.” Reason and understanding correspond in the ethical field to imagination and fancy in the poetical, and faith is “the personal realization of the reason by its union with the will.” An admirer of the *Caroline divines and *Cambridge Platonists, he was familiar also with the work of Johann Eichhorn (1752-1827) and F. D. E. *Schleiermacher, as well as that of the contemporary English Biblical scholars; he greeted with enthusiasm the emerging historical and anthropological analysis of the Bible (see BIBLE, VI). In the posthumously published Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840) he sought, in an age of “Bibliolatry,” to establish the invulnerability of the Bible, not by avoiding criticism, but by insisting on broader and deeper understanding of Scripture. He had an important influence on the New England transcendentalists (see TRANSCENDENTALISM, LITERARY); and his theological influence in England is acknowledged by Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), Thomas *Carlyle, J. C. Hare (1795-1855), F. D. *Maurice, and John Henry *Newman, among others.
Bibliography: Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. SHEED, 7 v. (2d ed. New York 1884), crabbed and incomplete; Inquiring Spirit, ed. K. COBURN (New York 1951), best gen. introd. to his thought; Poetical Works, ed. J. D. CAMPBELL (New York 1903), ed. E. H. COLERIDGE (Oxford 1912), standard but needs revision; Biographia Literaria, ed. J. SHAWCROSS, 2 v. (Oxford 1907), useful nn., but text superseded by the Everyman ed. by G. WATSON (New York 1956). J. D. CAMPBELL, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of His Life (New York 1894), the best biog. E. K. CHAMBERS, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study (Oxford 1938), useful. Bateson CBEL v.3, 5, best cumulative bibliog. J. H. MUIRHEAD, Coleridge as Philosopher (New York 1930). C. R. SANDERS, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, N.C. 1942). B. WILLEY, Nineteenth Century Studies (New York 1949). A. H. HOUSE, Coleridge (New York 1953). J. D. BOULGER, Coleridge as a Religious Thinker (New York 1961). Illustration credit: National Portrait Gallery, London.