Samuel Taylor. Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge - quotes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(1772-1834)

poet, literary critic and philosopher

In politics, what begins with fear usually ends in madness.

All women over seventy that I know can be divided into three categories: 1) dear old ladies; 2) old women; 3) old witches.

Every action is imperfect. Even the creation of the world contradicts my idea of ​​the greatness of the Lord.

For most of us, experience is the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the path traveled.

Critics are usually people who would be poets, historians, biographers, etc. - if they could.

He who begins by loving Christianity more than the truth will end by loving his own sect or church more than Christianity, and finally himself more than everything else.

Swans sing before they die. It would be nice if some people died before they started singing.

People, for the most part, do not feel as alien anywhere as they do at home.

A man who marries for love is like a frog jumping into a well. There's plenty of water, but you can't get back out.

The shortcomings of great writers are usually their strengths, taken to the extreme.

Unrequited love often becomes the cause of misogyny, just as too much thirst becomes, as some think, the cause of hydrophobia.

Prose is words in the best order, and poetry is the best words in the best order.

The poet consciously suspends disbelief for a moment; this is the essence of poetic faith.

The happiest married couple I can imagine would be the union of a deaf man with a blind man.

Writers of sayings are somewhat like Cyclops: they also have only one eye, only this eye is on the back of their head.

A good person is never as good, and a bad person is never as bad as they are considered to be.

You can't jump over your own shadow.

I don't believe in ghosts anymore: I've seen too many of them.

The plagiarist is always afraid of being robbed.

If you want to look good next to a sage, make a good impression on him; and if you want to look good next to a fool, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.

Painting is something between a thought and a thing.

No great poet can fail to be at the same time a great philosopher.

He who boasts that he has made many friends has never had a single friend.

Before the flame of sin is extinguished and sorrow fades, death will come to us with friendly participation; an open bud facing the heavens gives the sky its color.

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Conrad Hilton and Elizabeth Taylor May 6, 1950 Elizabeth Taylor, one of the most striking actresses in the history of cinema and a rare beauty, also gained dubious fame as a woman who married as many as eight times! And twice - for the same thing

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BARNUM, Phineas Taylor (1810–1891), American impresario 86 Every minute a simpleton is born (There are enough simpletons for our age). // There's a sucker born every minute. Attributed to Barnum since 1894 (unfounded). In print, this expression was already quoted as a proverb in 1883

From the author's book

COLERIDGE (Coleridge), Samuel (Coleridge, Samuel, 1772–1834), English poet 672 Prose is words in the best possible order; poetry - the best words in the best order. “Table Talk” (“Table Talk”, 1835), July 12, 1827? Knowles, p. 227? “The right words in the right place...” (C-99). 673 Flaws of the Great

Samuel Taylor Coleridge(Coleridge) (1772-1834) - English poet, philosopher and literary critic. Representative of the "lake school". From democratic sentiments (the poem “The Taking of the Bastille”, 1789) he moved to conservative positions (the collection “Lyrical Ballads”, 1798, together with William Wordsworth; the unfinished fragment of “Kubla Khan”, 1798). The poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", dramas, lectures on William Shakespeare (ed. 1849), literary memoirs.

In politics, what begins with fear usually ends in madness.

Coleridge Samuel Taylor

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born 21 October 1772, at Ottery St Mary, Devonshire. His father was a poor provincial priest. For some time, Samuel studied at the Faculty of Theology at Cambridge University. The writer's early work was marked by an interest in social issues; in 1789 he wrote the freedom-loving poem “The Taking of the Bastille” (published in 1834), but already in 1794, together with Robert Southey, he created the drama “The Fall of Robespierre,” condemning revolutionary terror. Denial of violence is also the pathos of Coleridge's tragedy Osorio (1797; revised edition entitled Repentance, 1813).

Every action is imperfect. Even the creation of the world contradicts my idea of ​​the greatness of the Lord.

Coleridge Samuel Taylor

In 1798, "Lyrical Ballads" by Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth appeared - a manifesto of English romanticism. The writer was attracted by the spirit and forms of the folk ballad, which he imitated, for example, in “The Poem about the Old Sailor”, published in “Lyrical Ballads” (Russian translation was done by Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov, in 1919; and V.V. Levik in 1967).

After a trip with Wordsworth to Germany in 1798 - 1799, Coleridge became a promoter of German literature and idealistic philosophy in England, and translated Johann Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein. The most prominent representative of the “Lake School,” Samuel was a profound theorist of English romanticism, the principles of which he outlined in his “Literary Biography” (1817). Remarkable examples of romantic criticism include his lectures on Shakespeare (published in 1856). The journalism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is imbued with the spirit of political conservatism.

For most of us, experience is the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the path traveled.

Coleridge Samuel Taylor

Essays:

Select poetry and prose, ed. by S. Potter, L., 1933;

The poetical works, L., 1938.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - quotes

In politics, what begins with fear usually ends in madness.

Samuel Coleridge - English romantic poet, critic and philosopher, an outstanding representative of the "Lake School" - was born October 21, 1772 in Ottery St Mary and was the youngest of ten children. His father served as a pastor in Devon.

At the age of 9 he was sent to London's Christ's Hospital school, where he spent his childhood and where his only friend was the later famous Charles Lamb. In 1791 entered Cambridge, studied classical literature, but was expelled from the university for sympathizing with republican ideas. He became interested in the ideas of the French Revolution and began to conduct passionate propaganda in its defense. Together with the poet Robert Southey, who was also expelled from school “for freethinking,” he gave lectures in Bristol on political and historical topics, published brochures and the newspaper “The Watchman” (8 issues were published). Inspired by revolutionary ideas, he wrote the poem “Taking of the Bastille” ( 1789 ).

Disillusioned with the French Revolution, he unexpectedly enlisted as a soldier and only a few months later was released from service. With the help of friends, Coleridge returned to the university, where he stayed before 1794. This year he wrote, together with R. Southey, the tragedy “The Fall of Robespierre” ( 1794 ), which condemns revolutionary terror.

Disillusioned with “old Europe,” the two of them decided to go to “free America” to organize a commune there, which Coleridge intended to call Pantisocracy. The trip did not take place due to lack of funds. Following this, a period of final disappointment in all revolutionary and educational ideals began for Coleridge.

In 1795 Coleridge and Southey settled in Bristol and married the two Fricker sisters. Coleridge had to think about making money; the public lectures he gave for this purpose were full of attacks on the then powerful Prime Minister W. Pitt and were published under the title “Conciones ad populum.” They did not have any material success, just like the publication of the weekly newspaper “Watchman”, undertaken by Coleridge, which at the very beginning had many subscribers, thanks to the eloquence of Coleridge, who traveled to several counties to promote the newspaper. Among the many failed attempts to get established is also the publication of Coleridge's first collection of poems, entitled Juvenile poems ( 1796 ).

Coleridge becomes a romantic, immersed in primitive times and the Middle Ages. Coleridge's letters during this time testify to the poet's difficult home circumstances, poverty and the first beginnings of the disease, which gave rise to his passion for opium. In 1797 Coleridge's family moved to the village of Alfoxden, and he lived there next door to W. Wordsworth and in constant communication with him. Together they went on endless walks and excursions. This best period of Coleridge's poetic work includes the poem "Genevieve", "Khubilai Khan", "Dark Lady" and the best of his great poems, "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel". In 1798 he found a publisher for the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth), this collection was a manifesto of English romanticism. The period of creative growth lasted no more than two years, during which the poet created his best works.

Funded by patrons, Coleridge and Wordsworth and their sister visited Germany, where they attended lectures at the University of Göttingen and studied German literature and philosophy. This journey had a tremendous influence on the development of his philosophical worldview.

The following year both poets traveled around the English lakes. Coleridge took from there deep impressions of the beauty of his homeland. That same year, Coleridge began working for the Morning Post; his political articles were most notable for their attacks on Pitt; soon, however, he changed politics and settled with his family on the lakes, near Wordsworth and Southey; the proximity of three poets of similar spirit led to the nickname of the “lake school” coined by the Edinburgh Review. Meanwhile, Coleridge's health began to deteriorate; he traveled to the island of Malta, but returned home even more unhealthy, and the developing addiction to opium weakened his mental activity. His poetic creativity was declining, and the main interest of the period between 1801-1816 is the publication “The friend” of weekly essays with political and philosophical content.

The fight against opium deprived him of the strength to work, and besides, he lived separately from his family, with strangers. Over the years, a religious revolution took place in him; he became a believer, a Christian, and began to write a lot on religious and philosophical issues. All of his prose works were written at this time; chief among them are "Two-Lay Sermons," "Biographia Literaria," "Aids to Reflection," "Church and State," "Literary Remains," and a religious reflection entitled "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit." Coleridge also spread his ideas in conversations; his house in Highgate was a gathering place for the best minds of the time, who came to listen to the elderly philosopher-poet. Some echo of these conversations was preserved in the book Table Talk compiled by his nephew and son-in-law.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (born October 21, 1772, Ottery, England-died July 25, 1834, near London), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English, and his Biography Literaria(1817) is the most significant work of general produced in the English Romantic period.

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tragedy: Coleridge

But it is not certain that what was good for the revolution was good for tragedy. Coleridge in his critical writings of 1808–18 said that:

Early life and works

About, about, in reel and route

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

After the death of his shipmates, alone and becalmed, devoid of a sense of movement or even of time passing, the mariner is in a hell created by the absence of any link with life. Eventually, however, a chance sight of water snakes flashing like golden fire in the darkness, answered by an outpouring of love from his heart, reinitiates the creative process: he is given a brief vision of the inner unity of the universe, in which all living things hymn their source in an interchange of harmonies. Restored to his native land, he remains haunted by what he has experienced but is at least delivered from, able to see the ordinary nightmare processes of human life with a new sense of their wonder and mercifulness. These last qualities are reflected in the poem’s attractive combination of vividness and sensitivity. The placing of it at the beginning of Lyrical Ballads was evidently intended to provide a context for the sense of wonder in common life that marks many of Wordsworth’s contributions. While this volume was going through the press, Coleridge began a complementary poem, a Gothic ballad entitled “ ,” in which he aimed to show how naked energy might be redeemed through contact with a spirit of innocent love.

Troubled years

Early in 1798 Coleridge had again found himself preoccupied with political issues. The French Revolutionary government had suppressed the states of the , and Coleridge expressed his bitterness at this betrayal of the principles of the Revolution in a poem entitled “France: An Ode.”

At this time the brothers Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, who were impressed by Coleridge’s intelligence and promise, offered him in 1798 an annuity of £150 as a means of subsistence while he pursued his intellectual concerns. He used his new independence to visit Germany with Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy. While there Coleridge attended lectures on physiology and at Göttingen. He thus became aware of developments in German scholarship that were little-known in until many years later.

On his return to England, the tensions of his marriage were exacerbated when he fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife, at the end of 1799. His devotion to the Wordsworths in general did little to help matters, and for some years afterward Coleridge was troubled by domestic strife, accompanied by the worsening of his health and by his increasing dependence on. His main literary achievements during the period included another section of “Christabel.” In 1802 Coleridge’s domestic unhappiness gave rise to “ ,” originally a longer verse letter sent to Sara Hutchinson in which he lamented the corrosive effect of his intellectual activities when taken as a refuge from the lovelessness of his family life. The poem employs the technique of his conversational poems; the sensitive rhythms and phrasing that he had learned to use in them are here masterfully deployed to represent his own depressed state of mind.

Although Coleridge hoped to combine a for Sara with fidelity to his wife and children and to draw sustenance from the Wordsworth household, his hopes were not realized, and his health deteriorated further. He therefore resolved to spend some time in a warmer climate and, late in 1804, accepted a post in as secretary to the acting governor. Later he spent a long time journeying across Italy, but, despite his hopes, his health did not improve during his time abroad. The time spent in Malta had been a time of personal reappraisal, however. Brought into direct contact with men accustomed to handling affairs of state, he had found himself lacking an equal forcefulness and felt that in consequence he often forfeited the respect of others. On his return to England he resolved to become more manly and decisive. Within a few months he had finally decided to separate from his wife and to live for the time being with the Wordsworths. Southey atoned for his disastrous youthful advice by exercising a general supervision of Coleridge’s family for the rest of his days.

Coleridge published a periodical, The Friend, from June 1809 to March 1810 and ceased only when Sara Hutchinson, who had been acting as amanuensis, found the strain of the relationship too much for her and retired to her brother’s farm in Wales. Coleridge, resentful that Wordsworth should apparently have encouraged his sister-in-law’s withdrawal, resolved shortly afterward to terminate his working relationship with William and to settle in London again.

The period immediately following was the darkest of his life. His disappointment with Wordsworth was followed by anguish when a wounding remark of Wordsworth’s was carelessly reported to him. For some time he remained in London, nursing his grievances and producing little. Opium retained its powerful hold on him, and the writings that survive from this period are redolent of unhappiness, with self-dramatization veering toward self-pity.

Late life and works

In the end, consolidation came from an unexpected source. In dejection, unable to produce extended work or break the opium habit, he spent a long period with friends in Wiltshire, where he was introduced to Archbishop’s commentary on the First Letter of Peter. In the writings of this 17th-century divine, he found a combination of tenderness and sanctity that appealed deeply to him and seemed to offer an attitude to life that he himself could fall back on. The discovery marks an important shift of balance in his intellectual attitudes. Christianity, hitherto one point of reference for him, now became his “official” creed. By aligning himself with the Anglican church of the 17th century at its best, he hoped to find a firm point of reference that would both keep him in communication with orthodox Christians of his time (thus giving him the social approval he always needed, even if only from a small group of friends) and enable him to pursue his former intellectual explorations in the hope of reaching a Christian synthesis that might help to revitalize the English church both intellectually and emotionally.

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One effect of the adoption of this basis for his intellectual and emotional life was a sense of liberation and an ability to produce large works again. He drew together a collection of his poems (published in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves) and wrote (1817), a rambling and discursive but highly stimulating and influential work in which he outlined the evolution of his thought and developed an extended critique of Wordsworth’s poems.

For the general reader Biography Literaria is a misleading volume, since it moves bewilderingly between autobiography, abstruse philosophical discussion, and literary criticism. It has, however, an internal of its own. The book’s individual components—first an entertaining account of Coleridge’s early life, then an account of the ways in which he became dissatisfied with the associationist theories of and other 18th-century philosophers, then a reasoned critique of Wordsworth’s poems—are fascinating. Over the whole work hovers Coleridge's veneration for the power of imagination: once this key is grasped, the unity of the work becomes evident.

A new dramatic piece Zapolya, was also published in 1817. In the same year, Coleridge became associated for a time with the new , for which he planned a novel system of organization, outlined in his Prospectus. These were more settled years for Coleridge. Since 1816 he had lived in the house of James Gillman, a surgeon at Highgate, north of London. His election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824 brought him an annuity of £105 and a sense of recognition. In 1830 he joined the controversy that had arisen around the issue of by writing his last prose work, On the Constitution of the Church and State. The third edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works appeared in time for him to see it before his final illness and death in 1834.

Evaluation

Coleridge's achievement has been given more widely varying assessments than that of any other English literary artist, though there is broad agreement that his enormous potential was never fully realized in his works. His stature as a poet has never been in doubt; in “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” he wrote two of the greatest poems in English literature and perfected a mode of sensuous lyricism that is often echoed by later poets. But he also has a reputation as one of the most important of all English literary critics, largely on the basis of his Biography Literaria. In Coleridge's view, the essential element of was a union of emotion and thought that he described as imagination. He especially stressed poetry’s capacity for integrating the universal and the particular, the objective and the subjective, the generic and the individual. The function of criticism for Coleridge was to discern these elements and to lift them into conscious awareness, rather than merely to prescribe or to describe rules or forms.

In all his roles, as poet, social critic, literary critic, theologian, and psychologist, Coleridge expressed a profound concern with elucidating an underlying creative principle that is fundamental to both human beings and the universe as a whole. To Coleridge, imagination is the archetype of this unifying force because it represents the means by which the twin human capacities for intuitive, non-rational understanding and for organizing and discriminating thought concerning the material world are reconciled. It was by means of this sort of reconciliation of opposites that Coleridge attempted, with considerable success, to combine a sense of the universal and ideal with an acute observation of the particular and sensory in his own poetry and in his criticism.

‘s biography on Samuel Taylor Coleridge appeared in the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (see the Britannica Classic: Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

John Bernard Beer

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge(English Samuel Taylor Coleridge; October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devon - July 25, 1834, Highgate) - English romantic poet, critic and philosopher, an outstanding representative of the “Lake School”. Father of the poet Sarah Coleridge (1802-1852) and the writer Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849).

Biography

Samuel Coleridge was the youngest of ten children of his father, who served as a pastor in Devon. At the age of 9 he was sent to London's Christ's Hospital school, where he spent his childhood and where his only friend was the later famous Charles Lamb. In 1791 he entered Cambridge, studied classical literature, but was expelled from the university for his sympathy with republican ideas. He became interested in the ideas of the French Revolution and began to conduct passionate propaganda in its defense. Together with the poet Robert Southey, who was also expelled from school “for freethinking,” he gave lectures in Bristol on political and historical topics, published brochures and the newspaper “The Watchman” (8 issues were published). Inspired by revolutionary ideas, he wrote the poem “The Taking of the Bastille” (1789).

Disillusioned with the French Revolution, he unexpectedly enlisted as a soldier and only a few months later was released from service. With the help of friends, Coleridge returned to the university, where he remained until 1794. This year, together with R. Southey, he wrote the tragedy “The Fall of Robespierre” (1794), which condemns revolutionary terror.

Disillusioned with “old Europe,” the two of them decided to go to “free America” to organize a commune there, which Coleridge intended to call Pantisocracy. The trip did not take place due to lack of funds. Following this, a period of final disappointment in all revolutionary and educational ideals began for Coleridge.

In 1795 Coleridge and Southey settled in Bristol and married the two Fricker sisters. Coleridge had to think about making money; the public lectures he gave for this purpose were full of attacks on the then powerful Prime Minister W. Pitt and were published under the title Conciones ad populum. They did not have material success, just like the publication of the weekly newspaper Watchman, undertaken by Coleridge, which at the very beginning had many subscribers, thanks to the eloquence of Coleridge, who traveled to several counties to promote the newspaper. Among the many failed attempts to get established is also the publication of Coleridge's first collection of poems, entitled Juvenile poems (1796).

Coleridge becomes a romantic, immersed in primitive times and the Middle Ages. Coleridge's letters during this time testify to the poet's difficult home circumstances, poverty and the first beginnings of the disease, which gave rise to his passion for opium. In 1797, Coleridge's family moved to the village of Alfoxden, and he lived there next door to W. Wordsworth and in constant communication with him, together they made endless walks and excursions. This best time of Coleridge's poetic work includes the poem "Genevieve", "Khubilai Khan", "Dark Lady" and the best of his great poems, "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel". In 1798, he found a publisher for the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth), this collection was a manifesto of English Romanticism. The period of creative growth lasted no more than two years, during which the poet created his best works.

Funded by patrons, Coleridge and Wordsworth and their sister visited Germany, where they attended lectures at the University of Göttingen and studied German literature and philosophy. This journey had a tremendous influence on the development of his philosophical worldview.

"Lake School"

The following year, both poets traveled around the English lakes, and Coleridge took away from there deep impressions of the beauty of his homeland. That same year, Coleridge began working for the Morning Post; his political articles were most notable for their attacks on Pitt; soon, however, he changed politics and settled with his family on the lakes, near Wordsworth and Southey; the proximity of three poets of similar spirit led to the nickname of the “lake school” coined by the Edinburgh Review. Meanwhile, Coleridge's health began to deteriorate; he traveled to the island of Malta, but returned home even more unhealthy, and the developing addiction to opium weakened his mental activity. His poetic creativity was on the decline, and the main interest of the period between 1801-1816. is the publication “The friend” of weekly essays with political and philosophical content.



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