Life & Background
Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772, the youngest of ten children, and sent to Christ's Hospital school in London after his father's death — where he met Charles Lamb. He left Cambridge without a degree, briefly enlisted in the dragoons under a false name, and planned with Southey a utopian community on the Susquehanna that never materialised. His partnership with Wordsworth from 1797 produced the most productive year of his life. Prescribed laudanum for rheumatic pain, he became dependent on opium, and addiction, an unhappy marriage, and a broken friendship with Wordsworth shadowed his later decades. He spent his final years under the care of a physician in Highgate, lecturing and talking with extraordinary range, and turned increasingly to philosophy and theology.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
An old sailor stops a man on his way to a wedding and compels him to hear his story. His ship, driven south by storm into a world of ice, is followed by an albatross that seems to bring good fortune; the Mariner shoots it, without stated motive. The wind drops, the ship is becalmed in a rotting sea, and the crew hang the dead bird around his neck. A spectral ship arrives carrying Death and Life-in-Death, who dice for the crew; the Mariner alone survives as the two hundred sailors drop dead around him. Watching water-snakes in the moonlight, he blesses them unawares, and the albatross falls from his neck. He is brought home, and is condemned to wander and retell the tale.
Coleridge's assignment in Lyrical Ballads was the counterpart to Wordsworth's: to take supernatural subjects and give them sufficient human truth to procure what he later called that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. The poem uses the ballad stanza, archaic diction, and a marginal gloss added later, creating a deliberate distance between the raw narrative and its interpretive frame. Its refusal to supply a motive for the killing is the crux: readings range from Christian allegory of sin and penance to a study of arbitrary guilt, with the tidy moral of the closing stanzas widely regarded as inadequate to the horror preceding it.
Why Coleridge Matters
Coleridge's criticism has arguably outlasted his verse in influence. Biographia Literaria introduced the distinction between the primary and secondary imagination and between imagination and fancy, giving English criticism its central Romantic vocabulary; his Shakespeare lectures reoriented English criticism away from neoclassical rules towards organic form. Kubla Khan and Christabel established a strain of fragmentary, dreamlike Romantic writing, and his account of composition under opium became a founding myth of inspiration. For examinations he pairs constantly with Wordsworth — collaboration, disagreement over poetic diction, and the eventual critique of the Preface in Biographia Literaria.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner1798
- Frost at Midnight1798
- Christabel1797–1800
- Kubla Khan1816
- Dejection: An Ode1802
- Biographia Literaria1817
- Lectures on Shakespeare1811–19