Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote three of the best poems in English and spent forty years failing to finish anything else. He was the youngest of ten children of a Devon vicar, sent to Christ's Hospital in London after his father died, and left Cambridge without a degree - at one point enlisting in the dragoons under a false name and being bought out by his brothers. He planned with Southey to found a communal settlement on the Susquehanna, called pantisocracy, and married Sara Fricker largely because the scheme required it. The scheme collapsed; the marriage lasted unhappily. The extraordinary period was about eighteen months from 1797, living near Wordsworth in Somerset, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel and - by his account - Kubla Khan, written from an opium dream and broken off by a visitor from Porlock. Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798 with Wordsworth and changed English poetry. He had been given laudanum for rheumatic pain as a young man and was addicted for the rest of his life, which wrecked his health, his marriage and his friendship with Wordsworth. He turned to criticism and philosophy, importing Kant and Schelling into English, and the Biographia Literaria of 1817 is the founding text of English literary criticism - the distinction between imagination and fancy, and the phrase willing suspension of disbelief, are his. He spent his last eighteen years living with a doctor in Highgate who managed his dosage, and talked. Everyone who mattered came to hear it, including Emerson.

• Lived: 1772 CE – 1834 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: poet, philosopher