Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great Romantic poets. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age, and his writing spanned a wide range of topics, including religion, literary theory and politics. A heavy drinker, he was also addicted to opium. He died aged 61 on 25 July 1834 after years of personal discomfort and disappointment.
With his friend, William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief”. He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism.
Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression and was physically unhealthy. He was treated with laudanum, which established a lifelong opium addiction.
Coleridge’s 1795 marriage to Sara Fricker was unhappy and, although they spent much of it apart they did have four children. At this time, he began a friendship with William Wordsworth who greatly influenced his work. Together the two of them entered one of the most influential creative periods of English literature. From 1797 to 1798 he lived near Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, in Somersetshire and the two men collaborated on a joint volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. The collection is considered the first great work of the Romantic school of poetry and contains Coleridge’s famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The dampness of the climate, the growing addiction to opium, and the various marital quarrels plunged Coleridge into a deep state of unhappiness. After taking a swim without drying his clothes, Coleridge fell ill with rheumatic fever, which caused him severe pain, and for these reasons he began to make heavy use of opiates such as laudanum, at first sporadically, then chronically.
In 1804 Sara and Coleridge separated and he fell in love with a woman named Sara Hutchinson. However, he remained married to Sara Fricker until his death. Believing that the English climate was detrimental to his health, Coleridge embarked on a three-year trip in 1804 that took him to Malta, Sicily, Naples, and Rome in the hope that the milder climate could help his health. It did not improve, but the addiction to opium did worsen.
In his later years, as his dependency on the drug increased, his literary capability began to decrease. Alienated from his family, he spent the last eighteen years of his life with his physician, who was able to help him control his addiction, thus restoring his literal competence and social acceptance. By the time of his death, he was considered a legend of his time.
In 1824 Coleridge was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, which brought him a pension of 100 guineas.
Coleridge died in Highgate, London as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium.