Samuel Coleridge

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge

     Few writers deserve as much attention as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with his colorful life and expressive poetry. Born in 1772 into a family of twelve and the youngest of nine brothers, Coleridge lived a sheltered and introverted childhood with his books. The death of his father only added to the loneliness of his childhood. His life changed, however, with the Storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution. A spark lit within him, and he began reading revolutionary literature and writing radical poetry. Though his former education had been dreary, attending Cambridge opened up a whole new world to him in which he quickly excelled.

    Coleridge developed his own philosophy, ‘Pantisocracy,’ in this period after reading the political works of William Godwin, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft. Along with Robert Southey, Coleridge in essence preached a theistic notion of social equality with a radical, quasi-Communist twist. He believed social inequality stems from private ownership of real estate, which earned him the tag of ‘Jacobin,’ a radical reformer. Still dealing with the legacy of the Enlightenment era, he struggled to blend his Anglicanism with the voice of scientific reason. Although his commitment to Pantisocracy dissolved with time as Southey moved away and Coleridge married, Coleridge remained an outspoken critic of society and an active poet. Around 1795, he also composed ‘The Nightingale’ for Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband. He became known more for his poetry than his ideology as his poems spread through England and France.

Mary Wollstonecraft influenced Coleridge in more ways than one. After reading her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he wrote letters to his friend Southey telling him the kind of woman he would prefer to marry. He was looking for a woman who led a determined and moral life, not deluded by conforming to the latest fashion. Soon after, he would fall in love with Sarah Frickley and marry her. When Coleridge renounced his previous sporadic, romantic relations and devoted himself to Sarah, he wrote austere poetry in unrhymed verse to display the vice of these former relations and give a grave warning regarding Wollstonecraft’s more progressive edicts about love and marriage. This forceful poetry alerted women to behave morally or else! Yet Coleridge supported Wollstonecraft’s attack on the subjugation of women in marriage, or what was commonly referred to as ‘Hemiplegia,’ a term progressive thinkers used to mean living half a life. He read Wollstonecraft’s Maria, a chilling story based on her sister’s life where a young woman deals with an abusive upbringing and then loses all rights and freedom in a dreadful marriage. After reading this, Coleridge proposes in an essay the radical vision that men should be held accountable for adultery too. In the height of patriarchal dominance in Europe, Coleridge must have sometimes been seen as a radical, but he firmly believed in aspects of the progressive thinking Mary Wollstonecraft encouraged.

    During the next stage of his life from 1797 to 1799, Coleridge interacted with William Wordsworth extensively. For a while, they lived near to each other, so besides their frequent letters, they met on a number of occasions. This era also signified a time when political turmoil in England was greatest, so not surprisingly, Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote their most prolific pieces in that time. The two writers shared similar viewpoints on divine love, imagination, and nature and found each other agreeable. They, however, could not write collaboratively so Lyrical Ballads was a collection of the two
men’s works written separately. Comparing the great works of Coleridge (Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) to Wordsworth (The Prelude) in this period reveals some remarkable similarities in their descriptive qualities and Romantic themes. At this point, their relationship was peaceful, but later on, Coleridge’s radical views on women’s rights did not mesh with Wordsworth’s more conservative views, and they went their separate ways.

   After 1800, Coleridge explored many new avenues while continuing to write what emotions stirred him. A notorious opium user, he often wrote spontaneously and would later edit these preliminary brainstorms or sketches. Coleridge continued to revise his longer poems through the years. He wrote some twelve versions of Kubla Khan and eighteen versions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in his lifetime. Interestingly, the newer editions of the poems are not exactly revisions, rather they are fine tunings of the great works that suited him at different points in his adult life. He took these poems with him when he traveled to Malta or ventureed to his retreat at the Lake District of England. He would continue to revise his works and write new ones until his death in 1834, establishing himself as one of the founding fathers of British Romanticism.

- by James Tucci