Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, and studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, before leaving in 1794 without a degree. With William Wordsworth he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), which opened with his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and helped launch English Romanticism; "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel," both written years earlier, appeared together in a pamphlet in 1816. Addicted to opium from the 1790s, he wrote his critical and philosophical study Biographia Literaria (1817) while living under a doctor's care in Highgate, London, where he spent his last eighteen years. He died there at sixty-one.