Pantisocracy and marriage
At the university he was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet
Robert Southey. Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a
utopian commune-like society, called
pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795 the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker, but Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy. He grew to detest his wife, whom he only married because of social constraints, and eventually divorced her. During and after his failed marriage, he came to love a woman named Sara Hutchinson, who did not share this passion and consequentially caused him much distress. Sara departed for
Portugal, but Coleridge remained in
Britain. In 1796 he published
Poems on Various Subjects.
In 1795 Coleridge met poet
William Wordsworth and his sister
Dorothy. They became immediate friends.
Around 1796, Coleridge started taking
opium as a pain-reliever. His suffering, caused by many ailments, including
toothache and facial
neuralgia, is mentioned in his own notebook as well as that of Dorothy Wordsworth. There was no stigma associated with taking opium at the time, but also little understanding of the dangers of
addiction.
The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in
Nether Stowey, Somerset, and Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles (5 km) away, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. Besides the
Rime of The Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem
Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative poem
Christabel. During this period he also produced his much-praised "conversation" poems
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,
Frost at Midnight, and
The Nightingale.
In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry,
Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English
romantic movement. Though the productive Wordsworth contributed more poems to the volume, Coleridge's first version of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the longest poem and drew more immediate attention than anything else.
In the spring of 1798, Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev.
Joshua Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on the strength of Rev. Toulmin, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin,
In the autumn of 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in
Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. During this period he became interested in German philosophy, especially the
transcendental idealism of
Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th century dramatist
Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy
Wallenstein by the German Classical poet
Friedrich Schiller into English.
Coleridge's greatest intellectual debts were first to William Godwin's Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's Observations on Man, which is the source of the psychology which we find in "Frost at Midnight." Hartley argued that we become aware of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived by noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy").
Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a continued desecration of literature itself.
In 1800 he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends at
Keswick in the
Lake District of
Cumberland to be near
Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. Soon, however, he was beset by marital problems, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers, all of which fueled the composition of
Dejection: An Ode and an intensification of his philosophical studies.
In 1804 he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Commissioner, Alexander Ball. He gave this up and returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to
Malta and then travelled in
Sicily and
Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium.
Thomas de Quincey alleges in his
Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested, however, that this reflects de Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's.
His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814.
Between 1810 and 1820 this "giant among dwarfs", as he was often considered by his contemporaries, gave a series of lectures in London and
Bristol – those on
Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers.
In 1817 Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the home of the physician James Gillman, at 3 The Grove,
Highgate, London, England. In Gillman's home he finished his major prose work, the
Biographia Literaria (1815), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed much poetry here and had many inspirations — a few of them from opium overdose. Perhaps because he conceived such grand projects, he had difficulty carrying them through to completion, and he berated himself for his "indolence." It is unclear whether his growing use of opium was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression.
He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman home, notably
Sibylline Leaves (1820),
Aids to Reflection (1823), and
Church and State (1826). He died of a lung disorder including some heart failure from the opium that he was taking in Highgate on
July 25, 1834.
