S. T. Coleridge Biography Facts and Poems
S. T. Coleridge Profile
Name: S. T. Coleridge
Full Name: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Father Name: John Coleridge
Mother Name: Anne Bowden
Birth Date: 21st October, 1772
Birth Place: Otter St. Mary in Devonshire
Education Institutions: Jesus College, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Wife Name: Sarah Frickar
Occupation: Poet, Philosopher, Literary Critic
Died Date: 25th August, 1834
Death Place: Highgate, London, United Kingdom
Buried Place: St Michael's Church, England
S. T. Coleridge Biography
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a famous English poet. He was also a philosopher and critic. He was born on the 21st October, 1772 at Otter St. Mary in Devonshire. His father was the vicar of Otter St. Mary. His father died in 1782. Then he was sent as a charity student to Christ‘s Hospital. He stayed there for about 8 years. There he became an ambitious and uncommon precocious school boy. His unbelievable memory and his ambition led him to learn all kinds of knowledge and turned him into an eminent scholar. By the time he got himself admitted into Jesus College, Cambridge in 1791.
Once he fled to London and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons in December 1793, under the name of Silas Jomkyn Cornerback. There he could not be taught to ride horse. Some Latin lines written by Coleridge on a stable door gave out his identity. He was discharged and his brothers sent him back to Cambridge again. But he left the university without any degree in 1794.
His health was as usual ill, the years from 1795 to 1802 were a period of fast poetic growth and intellectual. His first work a drama named “The Fall of Fobespierre” was published in 1794. In 1795 Coleridge married Sarah Frickar. Then he was struggling to earn his bread. He delivered lectures on various topics, literary and political, preached in Unitarian pupils. His first volume ―Poems on Various Subjects published in 1796. Now he came into close relation with William Wordsworth. They had much similarity.
In 1798 they jointly published a little volume of this poetry Lyrical Ballads. During this period Coleridge wrote almost all his best poems like Nightinglae, the first part of Christable love, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, etc then he wrote many poems. Afterwards he became philosopher and critic.
However afterwards he had became gradually deflected. Soon his health broke down and suffered much. He died on the 25th August in 1834.
S. T. Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner Poem, which is a poetic masterpiece, Coleridge introduced the reader to a supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a crew of dead men, the overwhelming curse of the albatross, the polar spirit, the magic breeze, and a number of other supernatural things and happenings, but he manages to create a sense of absolute reality concerning these manifest absurdities. With that supreme art which ever seems artless, Coleridge gives us glimpses from time to time of the wedding feast to which the mariner has been invited. The whole poem is wrought with the colour and glamour of the Middle Ages and yet Coleridge makes no slavish attempt to reproduce the past in a mechanical manner.
The whole poem is the baseless fabric of a vision; a fine product of the ethereal and subtle fancy of a great poet. But in spite of its wildness, its medieval superstitions and irresponsible happening, The Ancient Mariner is made actual and vital to our imagination by its faithful pictures of Nature, its psychological insight and simple humanity. In it the poet deals in a superb manner with the primal emotions of love, hate, pain, remorse and hope.
He prayeth best who loveth best is not an artificial ending of the poem in the form of a popular saying, but it is a fine summing up in a few lines of the spirit which underlies the entire poem. Its simple, ballad form, its exquisite imagery, the sweet harmony of its verse, and the aptness of its phraseology, all woven together in an artistic whole, make this poem the most representative of the romantic school of poetry.
S. T. Coleridge Christabel
Christabel, which is a Segment, seems to have been planned as the story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcerer in the shape of the woman Gerldine. Though it has strange melody and many passages of exquisite poetry, and in sheer artistic power it is scarcely inferior to The Ancient Mariner, it has supernatural terrors of the popular hysterical novels. The whole poem is suffused in medieval atmosphere and everything is vague and indefinite. Like The Ancient Mariner it is written in a homely and simple diction and in a style which is spontaneous and effortless.
S. T. Coleridge poem Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan is another Segment in which the poet has painted a gorgeous Oriental dream picture. The whole poem came to Coleridge in a dream one morning when he had fallen asleep, and upon awakening he began to write hastily, but he was interrupted after 54 lines were written, and it was never finished.
Though Coleridge wrote a number of other poems—Love, The Dark Ladie, Youth and Age, Dejection: an Ode, which have grace, tenderness and touches of personal emotion, and a number of poems full of very minute description of natural scenes, yet his strength lay in his marvellous dream faculty, and his reputation as a poet rest on The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan where he touched the heights of romantic poetry.
