Author: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Biography:
COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834: ODNB)
The youngest in a large family, he was born on 21 Oct. 1772 at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, the son of a country clergyman and schoolmaster, John Coleridge, and his second wife Ann (Bowden) Coleridge. After the death of his father in 1781, Coleridge was sent to a charity school for orphans, Christ's Hospital, London, and from there to Jesus College, Cambridge. Though a prize-winning student, from a lack of resources and some imprudent enthusiasms, he left the university without a degree. Thereafter, he had to support himself and his family as best he could by writing and lecturing. His gift for intense friendships proved a mixed blessing: at Bristol in 1795 he married Sara Fricker, the sister of Robert Southey's (q.v.) fiancée, and later fell hopelessly in love with the sister of Wordsworth's (q.v.) wife. He later lived apart from his wife and three children. But Tom and Josiah Wedgwood supported him with a no-strings annuity for many years, and James and Ann Gillman took him in and helped him to bring his opium addiction under control. At difficult moments in 1796 and 1816 when his name was recommended to the RLF as a deserving case (in 1816 by William Sotheby, q.v.), they granted 10 guineas and £30 respectively. He turned his hand to journalism, translation, political theory, aesthetics, theology, and philosophy, as well as to different literary genres. Milestones in his poetic career were his collaboration with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798); the publication of a major collection, Sibylline Leaves, in the same year as an autobiography, Biographia Literaria (1817); and the supervision of Poetical Works in three volumes in 1828. He died and was buried in Highgate; there is a bust of him in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. (ODNB 4 May 2018; RLF #41) HJ
Other Names:
- Coleridge
- S. T. Coleridge