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2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge（1772-1834）
Life:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism. He
was born in Ottery St. Mary on 21 October 1772, youngest of the ten children
of John Coleridge, a minister, and Ann Bowden Coleridge. He was often
bullied as a child by Frank, the next youngest, and his mother was
apparently a bit distant, so it was no surprise when Coleridge ran away at
age seven. He was found early the next morning by a neighbor, but the events
of his night outdoors frequently showed up in imagery in his poems (and his
nightmares) as well as the notebooks he kept for most of his adult life. His
father died in 1781, and Coleridge was sent away to a London charity school
for children of the clergy. He stayed with his maternal uncle. Coleridge was
quite a prodigy; he devoured books and eventually earned first place in his
class.
In 1791, his only sister Ann inspired Coleridge
to write Monody, one of his first poems, in which he likened himself
to
Thomas Chatterton. Coleridge was in bad health around this time and
probably took laudanum for the illness, thus beginning his lifelong opium
addiction. He went to Cambridge in this year. In spite of some scholarships,
he rapidly worked himself into debt with opium, alcohol, and women. He had
started to hope for poetic fame, but by 1793, he owed about £150 and was
desperate. Therefore, he joined the army.
His family was irate when they finally
found out the case. His brother George finally arranged his discharge by
reason of insanity and got him back to Cambridge. It was there that he met
Robert Southey, and they became instant friends. Both political radicals,
they began planning Pantisocracy, their own socio-political movement.
Southey was already engaged to a girl named Edith Fricker, and introduced
Coleridge to her sister Sara. Within a few weeks, Coleridge was willing to
marry Sara, which he did in October of 1795. Then, Southey and Coleridge had
started arguing over Pantisocracy, and finally Southey agreed to his
family’s wish that he become a lawyer instead of emigrating. Southey’s best
gift to posterity was the fact that he introduced Coleridge to William
Wordsworth. This period also witnessed Coleridge taking opium in periods of
sickness and depression.
In June1797, he walked to Racedown, Dorset, where
he met Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Based on the mutual love of
poetry, critical discussion, the response to the political and social
problems of the age, an intense friendship sprang up among them, which
shaped their lives for the next 14 years and proved to be one of the most
creative partnerships in English Romanticism. Also in this year, he
published his collection Poems, which was well received and took him on the
fast track to fame. Between 1797 and 1798, they lived and worked intimately
together. Some of his famous poems came out at this time such as Kubla Khan,
a poem celebrated his opium-vision; and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a
record of his nightmare sea-voyage with powerful metaphysical overtones,
which was suggested by Wordsworth. In 1798, the famous Lyrical Ballads, his
collaboration with Wordsworth, was published. Though it was unaccepted by
the intellectuals at that time, this publication is an experiment in English
poetry that achieved a revolution in literary taste and sensibility—the
creation of Romantic Movement.
Disenchanted with the political
developments in France and relieved the annoyance called by the poor
critical reception of Lyrical Ballads, the three went to Germany. In
Germany, he studied
Kant,
Schiller and
Schelling. After return to London, he
translated Schiller’s Wallenstein, which made him begin to plan a great work
on
metaphysics.
In 1800, he moved to the Lake District with the
Wordsworths. As the increasingly unhappy of his marriage life, he felt
deeper and deeper in love with Wordsworth’s future sister-in-law Sara. This
mental tortuosity and a string of illnesses brought on by the damp climate
of the Lake Country made his use of opium becoming a crisping addition.
In 1801, Coleridge turned to newspaper work to
try and recover financially. He was convinced he would die soon. In 1804, he
left for Malta in hopes of a cure from the warm climate. Coleridge had also
hoped for a release from his addiction, but this was not to be. He returned
to England in 1806, and, plucking up his courage, asked for a legal
separation from his wife. Though Sara was furious, the separation happened.
Coleridge’s paranoia and mood swings, brought on by the continual opium use,
were getting worse, and he was hardly capable of sustained work. His
friendship with Wordsworth at this time was all but nonexistent. Coleridge
again wrote newspaper articles to earn a living, and a further supplement by
various lecture courses. Most of his remaining work was non-fiction, except
for a play or two, and included such works as Biographia Literaria (1817), a
work on nearly everything.
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