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Essay on The Life and Works of Samuel Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) written with William Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, as the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary. After his father's death Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital School in London (Ashton, 1996). He also studied at Jesus College. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey. He moved with Southey to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he married the sister of Southey's fiancée Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love.
Coleridge's collection Poems On Various Subjects was published in 1796, and in 1797 appeared Poems. In the same year he began the publication of a short-lived liberal political periodical The Watchma (Ashton, 1996).He started a close friendship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, one of the most fruitful creative relationships in English literature. From it resulted Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and ended with Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". These poems set a new style by using everyday language and fresh ways of looking at nature.
The brothers Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood granted Coleridge an annuity of 150 pounds, thus enabling him to pursue his literary career. Disenchanted with political developments in France, Coleridge visited Germany in 1798-99 with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and became interested in the works of Immanuel Kant. He studied philosophy at Gottingen University and mastered the German language (Ashton, 1996).
He attended lectures at Gottingen, Germany, where he mastered the German language. Upon his return home he wrote some of the principal papers for the "Morning Post," and also translated some dramas of Schiller................
