Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" - and for much of his life, he seemed to be asking the world to practice it on his behalf. Born on the 21st of October 1772 in the small Devon town of Ottery St Mary, he would go on to found the Romantic Movement in England, reshape how we read Shakespeare, introduce German idealist philosophy to a culture steeped in empiricism, and leave the English language richer by phrases that millions use today without knowing where they came from. Yet he spent years battling a crippling opium addiction, a failed marriage, and the suspicion - shared even by himself - that he was constitutionally unable to finish what he started.

  His two most famous poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan", were written in a period of barely two years while living in a rented cottage in Somerset. One was interrupted, the story goes, by the arrival of "a person on business from Porlock". The other would become the opening salvo of a literary revolution. The questions his life raises are not small ones: how does a man so often paralysed by illness and addiction produce work that reshapes an entire literary culture? And what do we do with a philosopher who conceived one of the grandest intellectual projects of his age and left it unfinished on his desk?

• 2. A Childhood Spent in Books

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  At six years old, Coleridge was already reading Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights by firelight. He recorded the memory with startling precision in a series of autobiographical letters to his friend Thomas Poole: one tale from the Arabian Nights, involving a man compelled to seek a pure virgin, made such a deep impression that he was haunted by spectres whenever darkness fell. He described watching the window where his books lay, waiting for sunlight to fall on the spines so he could seize one and read against a warm wall.

  His father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was the vicar of St Mary's Church in Ottery St Mary and headmaster of a local grammar school established by King Henry VIII. Samuel was the youngest of ten children by John's second wife, Anne Bowden. When his father died in 1781, eight-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London. It was there that he met Charles Lamb, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator.

  The schoolmaster at Christ's Hospital left a permanent mark on Coleridge's thinking about language. In his later autobiographical work Biographia Literaria, Coleridge recalled the man demanding that students justify every phrase and metaphor: if the same idea could be expressed more plainly, the exercise was torn up on the spot. That rigour shaped a poet who, as his contemporaries later noted, was more meticulous in reworking his verse than any poet of his generation. From 1791 to 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1792 he won the Browne Medal for an ode attacking the Atlantic slave trade.

• 3. Nether Stowey and the Great Poems

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  The years 1797 and 1798 were the most productive of Coleridge's life, spent in what is now called Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset. It was there, in the company of William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth - who had rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles away - that he composed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the symbolic poem "Kubla Khan", and the first part of Christabel.

  "Kubla Khan", Coleridge claimed, arrived during an opium dream, written in "a kind of a reverie", drawing on the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his legendary palace at Xanadu. Its composition was said to have been broken off by the arrival of "a person on business from Porlock" - an interruption so famous it has since appeared in science fiction and been riffed on by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita. Whether the Porlock story is literally true has been debated ever since.

  When Coleridge and Wordsworth published their joint volume Lyrical Ballads in 1798, it proved to be the starting point for the English Romantic age. Wordsworth contributed more poems, but the real centrepiece was Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - the longest work in the collection and the one that drew more attention than anything else. That same spring, Coleridge walked eleven miles to Taunton to preach at Mary Street Unitarian Chapel while its minister, Reverend Joshua Toulmin, grieved the drowning of his daughter Jane on the 15th of April 1798. Coleridge's letter to John Prior Estlin describing the episode shows a man who could observe human suffering with both tenderness and theological precision.

• 4. Opium, Laudanum, and Collapse

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  Coleridge's physical troubles began in childhood, possibly with rheumatic fever, and throughout his adult life he suffered crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Scholars have speculated he had bipolar disorder, though the condition had no name in his lifetime. The treatment prescribed was laudanum, an opium tincture then in common medical use, and it fostered an addiction that dominated the second half of his life.

  By his own account, at the worst point he was consuming as much as two quarts of laudanum a week. The consequences cascaded: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarrelled bitterly with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and placed himself under the care of a Dr. Daniel in 1814. Thomas De Quincey, in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, claimed that a period of travel in Sicily and mainland Italy from 1807 to 1808 marked the point at which Coleridge became a full-blown addict - though scholars have suggested De Quincey may have been projecting his own experience onto his subject.

  In Highgate, London, the physician James Gillman took Coleridge in during April 1816, first at South Grove and later at 3, The Grove. Gillman was partially successful in managing the addiction. Coleridge would spend 18 years under the Gillman family's roof; they even built an addition to their home to accommodate him. The house became a place of literary pilgrimage. Thomas Carlyle described the scene: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle." Carlyle also noted that while the practical intellects of the world dismissed him as "a metaphysical dreamer", to the young generation he was a kind of magus, speaking strange things from Mr. Gillman's house.

• 5. The Critic Who Remade Shakespeare

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  From 1810 to 1820, Coleridge delivered a sustained series of lectures in London and Bristol on Shakespeare and Milton, and these lectures rebuilt Shakespeare's reputation among contemporary writers. The lecture on Hamlet given on the 2nd of January 1812 was considered the finest and has influenced Hamlet studies from that day forward. Before Coleridge, critics from Voltaire to Samuel Johnson had belittled the play; Coleridge rescued it, and his thoughts on Hamlet are still published as supplements to the text.

  Biographia Literaria, his major prose work, was mostly drafted in 1815 and finished in 1817 across 23 chapters of autobiographical reflection and literary theory. T. S. Eliot called Coleridge "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last", crediting him with natural abilities greater than those of his contemporaries and with a capacity to mix logical analysis and emotion in a way no one had managed before. Critics including I. A. Richards and A. O. Lovejoy acknowledged their debts to his philosophy of poetry.

  Coleridge also helped bring German idealist philosophy - in particular Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism - to an English intellectual culture that had been shaped almost entirely by empiricism. He had enrolled at the University of Gottingen in February 1799, attending lectures by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and after returning to England he translated Friedrich Schiller's dramatic trilogy Wallenstein into English. His revised and expanded edition of The Friend, published in 1818, drew on law, philosophy, history, and literary criticism and was felt by writers and thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• 6. Phrases That Outlived Him

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  Even people who have never read a line of Coleridge speak his words. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner gave English the image 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 "He prayeth best, who loveth best; All things both great and small" may be the origin of the phrase "all creatures great and small".

  "Kubla Khan" has had an equally busy afterlife. Orson Welles named the palace in Citizen Kane "Xanadu" and quoted the poem in its newsreel segment. The song "Xanadu" by Rush was directly inspired by the poem. The 1984 Iron Maiden song "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" introduced the poem's story to an entirely new audience. In Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Coleridge and both major poems feature prominently in the plot. The 1984 Frankie Goes to Hollywood song and album "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" drew directly from "Kubla Khan", including lines from the poem in the title track.

  Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge personally, referenced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice by name in Frankenstein, and some of the novel's descriptions echo it indirectly. She also recalled, as a child, hiding behind a sofa and hearing Coleridge's voice chanting the poem aloud. The card game Magic: The Gathering later included quotations from his poems in the flavour texts of several of its cards - a peculiar form of canonical immortality that Coleridge, with his appetite for the preternatural, might have appreciated.

• 7. Theologian, Philosopher, Unfinished Monument

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  Coleridge's religious journey tracked a wider arc: raised Anglican, he served as a Unitarian preacher from 1796 to 1797, then returned to the Church of England in 1814. His theological writings - Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817, Aids to Reflection in 1825, and On the Constitution of the Church and State in 1830 - shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century with a depth that surprised even those who knew his poetry best. Figures including F. D. Maurice, B. F. Westcott, and John Oman all acknowledged his influence. Thomas Erskine was once called "the Scottish Coleridge".

  Then there was the Opus Maximum, Coleridge's attempt at a post-Kantian philosophical synthesis. He worked on it across many manuscripts throughout the Highgate years and never published it in his lifetime. It finally appeared in print in 2002, and critics remain divided on whether it resolved the philosophical questions he had pursued for most of his adult life. Coleridge often berated himself for "indolence", but the sheer length of his published works - a standard collected edition running to 34 printed volumes across 16 major works, edited by Kathleen Coburn and others from 1969 to 2002 - makes that self-criticism look like another example of the suspension of disbelief he had asked his readers to practice.

  He died in Highgate on the 25th of July 1834 from heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly connected to decades of opium use. His coffin, along with those of his wife Sarah, his daughter Sara, his son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge, and his grandson Herbert Coleridge, was moved to St Michael's Church, Highgate, after an international fundraising appeal in 1961. A memorial slab in the nave reads: "Beneath this stone lies the body of Samuel Taylor Coleridge." St Michael's has since announced plans to restore the crypt and open it to the public.