Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge became an English poet, critic, philosopher, and theologian. He is closely linked with William Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, and their 1798 volume Lyrical Ballads is widely seen as a landmark in the rise of English Romanticism.

Coleridge wrote some of the most distinctive poems in English, especially The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel. Alongside his poetry, he was an influential thinker whose Biographia Literaria shaped literary criticism and ideas about imagination, poetry, and art.

His life was marked by brilliance as well as personal struggle, including periods of ill health and addiction, and he spent his later years in Highgate near London. He died in 1834, but his mix of haunting storytelling, philosophical curiosity, and lyrical power has kept his work central to English literature ever since.