Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), British poet and critic. After various unsuccessful enterprises, he met William Wordsworth in 1795 and together they published Lyrical Ballads (1798). This includes Coleridge’s best-known poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a supernatural tale of the disasters that befall the crew of a ship when one of its members kills an albatross. By 1802 Coleridge was addicted to opium and had almost stopped writing poetry. He turned instead to lecturing and writing on literature and philosophy in such works as Biographia Literaria (1817).
“He was a mighty poet and a subtle souled psychologist; all things he seemed to understand of old or new, on sea or land, save his own soul, which was a mist. Charles Lamb, ‘Coleridge’”
