Born on 21st October 1772, Coleridge was the youngest child in the family and also perhaps the most pampered. Unlike other children, he took to reading very early in his life and by the time he was six, he had already read a host of masterpieces including The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe. Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in a world of his own. He lived, to use his own phrase, in an ‘age of anxiety’. He too, like Wordsworth, was affected by the French Revolution. But while Wordsworth was ecstatic about it to go to the extent of declaring “bliss was in that dawn, to be young it was heaven”, Coleridge’s response was more muted. The books he read had an immediate impact on his impressionable mind. The Arabian Nights, in particular, made so great an impact on his mind that he began to be haunted whenever he was alone and in dark.

Coleridge was a poet and philosopher by calling, and a preacher, a journalist, a lecturer and playwright by circumstance. What he actually attempted to do was to transform the mechanistic psychology of the eighteenth century and to ‘initiative a reaction against it’. He was an orphan who got on badly with his elder brothers; a keenly affectionate, but often sick and frustrated man constantly haunted by self-pity and remorse. A great deal of it is visible in Dejection: an Ode which was originally written as a verse-letter addressed to Sara Hutchinson, the wife of William Wordsworth with whom he had become very close. The ideal of ‘poetical completeness’ that he came to deal at length in his Biographia Literaria found its first outlet in this poem. By the time he came to write this poem, Coleridge was gripped with ennui, “that loss of enthusiasm which was the tragic malady of the Romantics”.

Coleridge, who had a love of the Great and Whole, ran away from home at the age of eight after a quarrel with his elder brother. He spent the night sleeping on the banks of a stream. Coleridge himself admitted later that this nocturnal adventure was the cause of his ill-health. Coleridge’s father died in 1782 when he was barely ten years’ old. The dire financial crisis forced him into a charity school in London. Charles Lamb was one of his senior inmates at the school. Lamb was to describe him as a “young Mirandula” and as the “inspired charity boy” in one of his essays. In 1790 he joined Jesus College. Under an assumed name of Silas Tomkyns Comberache he enlisted himself with the Light of Dragoons at Reading in 1793. He was retrieved from here in 1794, facilitating his return to Cambridge. He was however not destined to complete his degree. He left Cambridge the same year and moved to Bristol where he began to live with Robert Southey with whom he had a chance meeting in one of his vacations. They became friends and dreamed of establishing an ideal community which later came to be known as pantisocracy. At Bristol, he delivered a series of lectures on the obtaining political problems. Some of his poems had already seen the light of the day by then. In 1795 he married Sarah Fricker. Southey was also engaged to her sister. It is a strange coincidence that Sarah also happened to be the first name of the wife of Wordsworth with whom Coleridge was to have an important and lasting bond. Coleridge was already on the threshold of the most important phase of his life. After marriage, he stayed at Clevendon in Somerset for sometime and during this stay he wrote and published a political magazine called The Watchman. Having fathered a child in December, 1795, he moved to Nether Stowey. He had already met Wordsworth earlier who was clearly impressed by his qualities. Impelled by the desire to stay close to the Coleridges, Wordsworths moved to Alfoxdon. The two young men in 1798 collaborated and jointly published the first edition of The Lyrical Ballads. It carried with it a brief advertisement in which the poets modestly claimed that the poems written by them were ‘experiments’ to find out how far the language of conversation of the ‘middle and the lower classes’ could be adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.