Today is the birthday of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England
(1772). Coleridge is the author of poems such as "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," and "Frost at Midnight." As a small boy, he spent a lot of time reading. His favorite book was The Arabian Nights.
His father died when he was 10, and then he had to go off to boarding
school at Christ's Hospital in London. It was known as the "blue-coat
school," where everyone had to wear a blue gown, a blue cap and yellow
stockings. Coleridge hated it there. He would later write that "I was
reared / In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, / And saw nought
lovely but the sky and stars." But he had one teacher who helped inspire
him to become a poet. He said he learned that "in the truly great poets
... there is
a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of
every word."
Coleridge
went to college in Cambridge. Then he dropped out to join the army. He
didn't want anyone to know who he was, so he called himself Silas Tomkyn
Comberbache. He wasn't a very good soldier, though, and soon he left to
rejoin society and talk about the new ideas of the French Revolution.
He also spent time with the poet Robert Southey. The two of them dreamed
up an idea to start a utopian village along the Susquehanna River in
Pennsylvania. They said it would be a place where there was no
aristocracy.
Southey said, "When Coleridge and I are sawing down a tree, we shall
discuss metaphysics; criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo, and write
sonnets whilst following the plough."
Coleridge
never went to Pennsylvania, and instead he ended up getting married to a
woman named Sara Fricker. In 1797, Coleridge and Fricker moved to a
small house in the country. There he tended a vegetable garden and doted
over his newborn son. That same year he became good friends with the
poet William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. One winter evening, the
three of them took a long walk in the nearby hills called the
Quantocks. They timed their walk so they would be able to watch the
sunlight change to
moonlight over the sea. It was then that Coleridge came up with the idea
for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a poem about a sailor who brings
a curse upon his ship after he kills an albatross. In 1798, he included
the poem in a collection he published with Wordsworth called Lyrical Ballads.
The book was the foundation of the Romantic movement in poetry.
Wordsworth said they were trying to write poems where "ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual way."
Coleridge was often sick. The doctors prescribed him small doses of
opium, and he gradually became addicted to it. By the age of 30, he had
become very depressed. He quarreled with his wife and fell in love with
Wordsworth's sister-in-law. He wrote a poem called "Dejection: An Ode"
and then sailed to the island of Malta to improve his health. He
gradually regained his strength and lived to write many more poems.
Coleridge said, "I could inform the dullest author how he might write
an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own Life with
honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them."
And
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