Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Born on October 21, 1772, in Ottery St Mary, Devon, the youngest of ten children of a vicar and schoolmaster, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a precocious, dreamy child who read voraciously and lived largely in his imagination. His father died when he was eight, and he was sent to Christ's Hospital school in London, where he met Charles Lamb. He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, but never took a degree, enlisting briefly in the Light Dragoons under the alias Silas Tomkyn Comberbache before being rescued by his brothers. In 1795 he met William Wordsworth, and their friendship produced one of the most consequential collaborations in English literature: Lyrical Ballads (1798), whose opening poem was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. That same astonishing year he composed "Kubla Khan," a fragment he claimed to have conceived in an opium dream, interrupted by the infamous "person from Porlock." His critical masterwork, Biographia Literaria (1817), helped establish modern literary criticism and introduced German idealist philosophy to the English-speaking world. But opium addiction, which began as a treatment for rheumatic pain, consumed his middle years, wrecked his marriage, and strained his friendship with Wordsworth. He spent his last eighteen years lodging with the physician James Gillman in Highgate, where he held legendary Thursday-evening monologues that drew writers and thinkers from across London. He died on July 25, 1834, his genius fitful but undeniable.

On a November evening in 1797, walking the Quantock Hills with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, Coleridge began plotting a ballad to help fund the trip. Wordsworth, recalling a book about a sailor who shot an albatross, suggested the crime and its curse. By the end of the walk, the Ancient Mariner had its shape.