Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, and philosopher and one of the central figures of English Romanticism. After early association with Wordsworth in the project of the Lyrical Ballads, he spent time in Germany absorbing the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and the early Romantics, returning to introduce their ideas into English thought. Biographia Literaria combined philosophical autobiography with criticism, while Aids to Reflection and the late Constitution of the Church and State developed his religious and political philosophy. His distinction between fancy and imagination shaped Anglophone aesthetics.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at Ottery St Mary in Devon, the youngest of ten children of a country vicar. After his father's death he was sent to Christ's Hospital in London and on to Jesus College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree. The 1790s were spent in radical journalism, in the formation of his lifelong friendship with William Wordsworth, and in the joint publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), to which he contributed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

A study trip to Gottingen in 1798-1799 introduced him to Kant and the early German idealists and shaped the philosophical direction of the rest of his life. The subsequent works include Christabel and Kubla Khan, the lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, the Biographia Literaria (1817), the Lay Sermons, the Aids to Reflection (1825), the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), and the late Notebooks and Table Talk. From 1816 he lived under the care of the surgeon James Gillman in Highgate, where his lifelong opium addiction was kept under partial control.

Coleridge transmitted German idealism into English letters, distinguished imagination from fancy, defended the spiritual constitution of human personality against mechanical psychology, and articulated a vision of the 'clerisy' as the cultural conscience of the nation. His influence on John Stuart Mill, J. H. Newman, F. D. Maurice, and the tradition of Anglican theological liberalism is profound. He died at Highgate in July 1834.