A favourite Poet - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I remember well reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for English at school and finding myself utterly bored by it - shows what an unappreciative little bugger I was in those days! However in my later years I've developed an appreciation for poetry and in particular of Coleridge's most famous and widely discussed poem - Kubla Khan.

He wrote Kubla Khan in 1797, apon waking from an opium induced sleep at his rented accommodation near Nether Stowely in Somerset. Writing furiously and frantically as the words came pouring out, he was nevertheless disturbed by the now infamous insurance salesman from Porlock. Desperate to get rid of him and return to his poetry, Coleridge nonetheless was kept talking for an hour by the man and upon returning to his notes, found that he only had fragments of the poem that he could recollect. And so an unfinished masterpiece it became..... until a further 8 lines were discovered!!


Then all the charm
Is broken - all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. Stay awile,
Poor Youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes -
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

(reprinted from the University of Virgina website)


Nether Stowely was certainly fertile grounds for his rich imagination as he wrote another one of his famous poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner here. He was also visited by another great literary icon of the time, William Wordsworth whilst he was recuperating and they jointly complied a book called Lyrical Ballads, which for many became the starting point of English Romantic movement, characterised by poems that dealt with the revolt against the scientific rationalization of nature. Poems dealt with feelings of trepidation, awe and how one felt, in other words - human nature.

Even though he was plagued his entire life with ill-health and drug addiction, Coleridge continued to write and lecture. He was asked to give a series of lectures on the great bard, William Shakespeare in Bristol and London in 1810-11, and it was largely due to the popularity of these lectures and Coleridge's brilliant and dynamic presentation of them, that there was a renewed interest and appreciation in Shakespeare. In fact, his lecture on Hamlet -a play largely derided by the critics was instrumental in its renewed popularity. His notes are still used to this day by many English lecturers as supplements to the text.

However his addiction became worse and he returned to London, where he was to write the Biographia Literia (1815) a dissertation of sorts. Consisting of 23 chapters it consisted of his writings on a variety of subjects, including some poetry and prose and criticisms of the writings of others. His worsening depression and dependence on opium led to his increasing depression and inability to write. Coleridge often berated himself for his "indolence" as he so succinctly put it, in being unable to complete projects. Sadly this was the beginning of the end and in 1834 he died at the relatively young age of 61 of a lung infection and heart failure - probably the result of the increasing quantities of opium dissolved in brandy that he consumed.

Complex, tortured as was evident from the depth of his feelings and emotions in Kubla Khan, Christabel and Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which he seems preoccupied by visions and hellish turmoil to his Biographia Literia where he takes a more philosophical yet still somewhat irritated look at the borders between imagination and fancy. He is still one of the lesser known icons of that period and his poems are worth reading - they are not pretty happy love stories but emotion, passion and even opium induced ramblings at times, but there are definitely an example of a master of his craft.