Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ( 1772 – 1834 )
Coleridge was born in Devon, the son of a village vicar. He was a temperamental child and an avid reader. He went to Cambridge University but did no take a degree. In 1797 he became friendly with William Wordsworth. Toghether they settled in the Lake District and planed the Lyrical Ballads ( 1798 ), a major landmark in English Romanticism. When the poet’s health weakened, he took to opium and became an addict. He struggled against his drug addiction for the rest of his life. Coleridge was one of the most gifted and learned men of his time. He laid the basis for modern Shakespearean studies and wrote on various aspect of politics, philosophy and theology. His Biographia Literaria ( 1817 ) explains his own theory of Romantic poetry. He is well known to general readers for his three famous and extraordinary poems – The rime of the Ancient Mariner ( 1798 ), Kubla Khan ( 1816 ), Christabel ( 1816 ) which all share the same dream-like quality and highly evocative language.
The Rime the story of a Mariner who is punished for killing an albatros. He is eventually forgiven but has to travel endlessly to teach people to love and respect all Good’s creatures. The world of the Rime blends ordinary experience and supernatural events. Natural landscapes are described in a vivid manner but also cherged with a deeper symbolic meaning. The dominant atmosphere is uncanny and eerie. The poem reproduces some features of the traditional ballad with variations: the rhyme scheme, the stanza form and the supernatural theme. It differs from the traditional ballad in that it is very long, rich in figures of speech, whit lengthy desripition of natural landscapes and a moral drawn at the end. An aesthetic interpretation of the Rime sees the Mariner as the artist who breaks the bounds of convention in search of beauty and self-knowledge, is saved by the power of imagination and eventually passes on his discovery of truth to ordinary me.