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- Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772. The youngest of 14 children, he was educated after his father's death and excelled in classics. He attended Christ's Hospital and Jesus College. While attending college, he befriended two other Romanticists, Charles Lamb and Robert Southey, the latter causing him to eventually drop out of college and pursue both poetic and political ambitions. Although he often wrote poetry, his talent did not manifest until after 1794, when he transitioned into what would later be described as Romantic poetry. During this time, he worked with Southey on developing an ideal political government called Pantisocracy. Eventually, Coleridge would give up his political ambitions and focus on his poetic career. (en)
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- At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll - and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments - one tale of which made so deep an impression on me that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark — and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay — and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read. (en)
- I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master ... I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own ... In our own English compositions ... he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words ... Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, ... to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. (en)
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