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When Dorothy and William Wordsworth settled at Alfoxden outside the village of Holford in order to be near Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then at Nether Stowey, Somerset, Dorothy Wordsworth noted in her Journal.

Our principal inducement to live here was Coleridge’s society. He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind and spirit... at first I thought him very plain, that is for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, and has a wide mouth, thick lips and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing hair, half-curling and rough. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them.

     Coleridge described himself with characteristic self-mockery and humour:

“My face unless when animated with immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed, almost idiotic good nature. ‘Tis a mere carcase of a face: fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression . . .”

     The poet, one of the first of the Great Romantics, who dominated the English literary stage in the early nineteenth century, was also philosopher, lecturer, critic and journalist. He had too many gifts, and his talk could even enchant Lord Byron, himself no mean conversationalist and wit; although he mentions Coleridge a little disdainfully in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers:

Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?
Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
Yet still obscurity’s a welcome guest
If inspiration should her aid refuse
To him who takes a pixy for a muse,
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to elegise an ass.
So well the subject suits his noble mind,
He brays the laureat of the long-ear’d kind.

     We must forgive Byron’s youthful sarcasm, induced no doubt by some of Coleridge’s metaphysical ramblings.

     The ninth and youngest son of a vicar-schoolmaster, the Rev. John Coleridge, Samuel was born on 20 October 1772, in the town of Ottery St. Mary, a place that has lost little of its old charm. There are still members of the family in the vicinity, and Captain the Hon. Lord Coleridge, KBE, presently spends some time in the lovely old Chanter’s House, associated with Oliver Cromwell in 1645. The style of the fine parish church of St. Mary is reminiscent of Exeter Cathedral, and the countryside is true ‘poets landscape’. Among Coleridge’s early poems are the Songs of the Pixies, that he called ‘an irregular ode’. This was inspired by one of his favourite walks to a spot called “The Pixies’ Parlour”, and of which he wrote:

The Pixies, in the superstition of Devonshire, are a race of beings in visibly small, and harmless or friendly to man. At a small distance from a village in that country, half-way up a wood-covered hill, is an excavation called “The Pixies’ Parlour”. The roots of old trees form its ceiling; and on its sides are numerous cyphers, among which the author discovered his own cypher and those of his brothers, cut by the hand of their childhood. At the foot of the hill flows the River Otter. To this place the author conducted a party of young ladies during the summer months, on which occasion the poem was written.

     His father died when he was eight, and the sensitive boy spent a lonely childhood. He was much in the habit of going off and dreaming by himself, and on one occasion fell asleep too near the bank and fell into the Otter. He clambered out in a state of shock, but fell asleep again. To this cold soaking he attributed much of the ill-health that dogged him through life, and induced him to take, first laudanum, and then opium.

     But it was to one of these opium-inspired dreams that we owe the poem Kubla Khan, which Coleridge was feverishly writing when he was disturbed, as the story goes, by the intrusion on unwelcome business of a ‘person from Porlock’, who came probably to collect a debt:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea . . . . .

     But this poet of visions, legends and ballads, was also an exquisite observer of nature, as evinced by such poems as Frost at Midnight, and such lovely lines as

Tis a month before the month of May,
And the spring came slowly up this way

from Christabel.

     He was as subtle an observer as his friend, William Wordsworth, but more fanciful.

     Coleridge was primarily the poet of ‘Imagination’, that ‘shaping power’ as he called it that leads to ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. When he and Wordsworth decided to collaborate on The Lyrical Ballads, a collection that ushered in the Romantic era of poetry, Coleridge was to write the legends and ballads, Wordsworth to portray real persons and places in, as he described it, ‘the language really used by men’.

     While only a handful, Coleridge’s contributions include some of the best-known and loved in English poetry that inspired both Byron — in the Shipwreck scenes of Don Juan (Canto II) — and Keats in La Belle Dame Sans Merci and in Lamia.

     In Frost at Midnight, Coleridge records his nostalgic longing for the scenes of childhood:

                           I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church-tower
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come.

     In that late 18th century in Devon, when ‘to be young was very heaven’, Dorothy and William Wordsworth with Coleridge walked on the Quantocks and along the Bristol Channel, where on a misty and mysterious stretch called Pebble Reach, Coleridge conceived the idea of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that poem that is permeated by the West country. From Watchet, the Mariner sailed. The ship dropped below the Church of St. Decuman, that stands on a hill outside the town. The bluff at Minehead might well be the Hermit’s habitation “in that wood which slopes down to the sea”.

     The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was planned as a collaboration to be sold for five pounds to the Editor of The Monthly Magazine in order to defray the expenses of a long walk the two poets decided to take, from Stowey to Watchett, Linton and The Valley of Stones. After the first eight miles of the walk, Coleridge took over the poem, but it was not finished until the following March, when Dorothy wrote in her Diary: “Coleridge dined with us; he brought his ballad finished. A beautiful evening very starry, the horned moon . . . . .”

The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white,
From the sails the dew did drip —
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon with one bright star
Within the nether tip.

     But all this happened when Coleridge was already married to Sarah Fricker, Southey’s sister-in-law, and they were living in the little thatched cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset — a cottage preserved by the National Trust, containing four rooms that look as they did when the Coleridge family lived there from 1797 to 1799, together with a paying guest named Charles Lloyd, son of one of the early proprietors of Lloyd’s Bank.

     Extraordinary experiences were already behind Coleridge, such as his enlistment in the Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkyn Cumberbacke, and his association with Robert Southey in a plan of communist living called Pantisocracy, that envisioned the establishment of a kibbutz-like settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna River in America. This plan, fortunately for the starry-eyed idealists, never got off the ground.

     Unhappy with his wife, he left her and his children to the care of Southey, who had a little more money, and to the philanthropic Wedgwood Brothers, who granted Coleridge an annuity, and took care of his family while the poet went to Germany with the Wordsworths. He is said to have learned German in six weeks, “by talking with children and with the peasants”, and was able to translate Wallenstein by Schiller.

     In his celebrated Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes his attempts to publish an idealistic periodical called The Watchman, and tells how he set out to make this known:

     My pampaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attach was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall, dingy man in whom length was so predominant over breadth that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry-poker. O that face! The lank, black, twine-like hair, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like the scortched aftermath from a last week’s shaving . . . . .

     But the tallow-chandler, like so many others, refused to support The Watchman and Coleridge goes on to relate its sorry end:

Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. For, happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant qu3ntity of paper into the grate, in order to light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness: “La, Sir!” replied poor Nanny, “Why it is only Watchmen.”

     In the Biographia Literaria, he gives some good advice, no doubt inspired by his own harsh experiences of poverty and failure:

Never pursue literature as a trade. With the exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual of genius, healthy or happy, without a profession, i.e. some regular employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically that an average quantum only of health, spirits and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unnanoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight, as a change and recreation, will suffice to realise to literature a larger product of what is truly genial than weeks of compulsion. Money and immediate reputation form only an arbitary and accidental end of literary labour.

     His association with the Wordsworths in the Lake Country is a famous literary story, recorded minutely in Dorothy’s spontaneous and exquisitely-written Grasmere Journal:

Sunday, 31st August 1800 . . . . . a great deal of corn is cut in the vale, and the whole prospect, though not tinged with a general autumnal yellow, yet softened down into a mellowness of colouring, which seems to impart softness to the forms of hills and mountains. At 11 o’clock, Coleridge came, when I was walking in the still clear moonshine in the garden. He came over Helvellyn. Wm was gone to bed, and John also, worn out with his ride round Coniston. We sat and chatted till half-past three . . . . . Coleridge read us a part of Christabel. Talked much about the mountains, etc.

     Unfortunately, this idyllic and productive friendship was not to last, and Coleridge suffered much because of his tragic love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson.

     For a while Coleridge lived in Malta, as private secretary to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. His chronically poor health did not improve, and after travelling for a while in Italy, he returned to England and took up the editing of a newspaper, The Morning Post. His predilection for opium grew, and from 1816 to his death in 1834, he was cared for by his friends, Dr. and Mrs. Gilman, at their home in The Grove, Highgate, where, from the windows of his room, he loved to watch the sunsets over the Park of Caenwood.

     He continued to philosophise and lecture, but never much returned to poetry which he had virtually forsaken with the great ode Dejection, written in 1802, and addressed to Sara Hutchinson. One of his lifelong friends was Charles Lamb, who never recovered from the shock of Coleridge’s death, and who described him as “an archangel a little damaged”.

     Coleridge is buried in Highgate Church, not as one would have supposed, in the old churchyard of his beloved Ottery, in ‘the sweet shire of Devon’.

     A fitting epitaph was written long after, by his grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge:

Stranger, beneath this roof in byegone days
Dwelt Coleridge. Here he sang his witching lays
Of that strange Mariner, and what befel,
In mystic hour, the Lady Christabel.
And here, what time the Summer’s breeze blew free,
Came Lamb, the gentle-hearted child of glee;
Here Wordsworth came, and wild-eyed Dorothy!
Now, all is silent but the taper light,
Which, from these Cottage windows shone at night,
Hath streamed afar. To these great souls was given
A double portion of the light of Heaven.

     It was Coleridge who had written in a letter of December 17th 1798, to his friend, John Thelwall:

The light shall stream to a far distance from my Cottage window.