Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A Lake Poet
About
Life
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. 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 fiance Sara Fricker. 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 Watchman. 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.
Coleridge was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824. He died in Highgate, near London on July 25, 1834.
Poems
1. I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
2. A Child's Evening Prayer
3. A Christmas Carol
4. A Couplet, Written In A Volume Of Poems Presented By Mr. Coleridge To Dr. A.
5. A Day Dream
6. A Mathematical Problem
7. A Soliloquy Of The Full Moon, She Being In A Mad Passion
8. A Tombless Epitaph
9. About The Nightingale
10. Absence: A Farewell Ode On Quitting School For Jesus College
11. Addressed To A Young Man Of Fortune Who Abandoned Himself To An Indolent And Causeless Melancholy
12. Aeolian Harp, The
13. Answer To A Child's Question
14. Aplolgia Pro Vita Sua
15. As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood
16. Blossing Of The Solitary Date-Tree
17. Brockley Coomb
18. Christabel
19. Cologne
20. Come, come thou bleak December wind