Samuel Taylor Coleridge · CatalogSamuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge · CatalogSamuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the youngest son of a Devon vicar, was educated at Christ's Hospital and Cambridge.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the youngest son of a Devon vicar, was educated at Christ's Hospital and Cambridge. With William Wordsworth he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), which opened with his Rime of the Ancient Mariner and helped launch English Romanticism. A brilliant talker, lecturer on Shakespeare and philosophical critic, he struggled for decades with opium addiction and ill health. His Biographia Literaria (1817) and Aids to Reflection (1825) shaped Victorian criticism and theology. He spent his last eighteen years in the household of the physician James Gillman at Highgate.
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“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”
Frost at Midnight is a meditation in blank verse that Coleridge wrote in February 1798 at his cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, and published that year in a pamphlet with Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode. It is the finest of his conversation poems, quiet poems that speak as if to a companion and move from a present scene into memory and back.
The Dungeon by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798) is presented here as a complete poem for reading aloud and memorization. The hosted edition preserves stanza spacing for recitation practice.
The Foster-Mother’s Tale by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798) is presented here as a complete poem for reading aloud and memorization. The hosted edition preserves stanza spacing for recitation practice.
The Nightingale by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798) is presented here as a complete poem for reading aloud and memorization. The hosted edition preserves stanza spacing for recitation practice.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the long literary ballad with which Coleridge opened Lyrical Ballads in 1798; the text here is his revised version in seven parts. An old sailor stops one of three young men on their way to a wedding feast and, holding him with his glittering eye, forces him to listen to a tale.
Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions is Coleridge's sprawling, brilliant and frustrating account of his development as a poet and critic, published in two volumes in 1817. It is not a full autobiography but a book about ideas, held together loosely by his life.