Short answers, pulled from the story.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known for the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan", and for the prose work Biographia Literaria. He was also a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a highly influential literary critic, particularly in relation to Shakespeare.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on the 21st of October 1772 in Ottery St Mary, a town in Devon, England. He was the youngest of ten children of the Reverend John Coleridge, who was both the local vicar and headmaster of a grammar school.
Coleridge was treated with laudanum for physical illness and crippling bouts of anxiety and depression that plagued him throughout his adult life, possibly stemming from rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. The treatment fostered a lifelong addiction; at its worst, he was consuming as much as two quarts of laudanum per week.
Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief". The Rime of the Ancient Mariner gave English the idiom of an albatross around one's neck, the near-quotation "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink", and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man". The line "all creatures great and small" may also trace back to the poem.
Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner during 1797 and 1798 while living in Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset. William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth lived nearby at Alfoxton Park, and the poem was published in the joint volume Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
Coleridge influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and the beginnings of American transcendentalism through his interpretation of Immanuel Kant's concept of intuition. His critical lectures on Shakespeare revived interest in the playwright, and his Biographia Literaria shaped literary criticism through figures including T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and A. O. Lovejoy. His theological writings shaped Anglican thought through the mid-nineteenth century.