Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by Peter Vandyke, 1795. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing VII
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772–1834 · Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the founders of English Romanticism. In 1798, together with William Wordsworth, he published Lyrical Ballads, a collection that reshaped English poetry — Coleridge supplying its visionary, supernatural strand, Wordsworth its everyday one.
“Kubla Khan” (composed 1797, published 1816) is his most hypnotic and mysterious poem: a vision of the Mongol emperor’s pleasure-dome at Xanadu, said to have come to Coleridge in an opium-influenced dream and broken off, unfinished, when a “person from Porlock” interrupted him. Coleridge published it as “a fragment,” and its incompleteness became part of its legend. He is equally famous for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the long ballad of a sailor cursed for killing an albatross.
Plagued by illness, opium addiction, and self-doubt, Coleridge produced a relatively small body of poems but an enormous, restless body of criticism and philosophy. He remains one of the most influential imaginations in English Romanticism.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing VII — The Visionary Fragment & the Surreal →