In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

(lines 51-53)

Coleridge did more than gaze at the stars during these formative years. He was an enthusiastic and extraordinarily brilliant student. When he went on to attend Cambridge University in 1791, he was al­ready a proficient scholar. Yet Coleridge found even less at Cambridge that really interested him than Wordsworth did. He fell into idleness, carelessness, and debt, and in 1793 he left Cam­bridge to join the army under the wonderful pseu­donym of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. But Cole­ridge was miserable as a soldier, and with the help of his brothers he was sent back to Cambridge for a second chance. He left again in 1794, how­ever, without taking a degree.

As a young man Coleridge held radical views on politics and religion. During the summer of 1794 he met the poet Robert Southey, who had similar views, and the two friends set about planning a small Utopian community in America to which Coleridge gave the name "Pantisocracy" ("equal rule by all"). In London, Coleridge met a real-estate agent who persuaded him that their community ought to settle on the banks of the Susque-hanna, in Pennsylvania. To further the cause of the community, Coleridge became engaged to Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's own fiancee. Their hopelessly unrealistic scheme never materialized. Coleridge felt obligated, nevertheless, to go through with his marriage to Sara Fricker, al­though he characterized his attitude at the time as being "resolved, but wretched."

Coleridge and his wife Sara lived at Nether Stowey, in Somerset. In 1795 he met Wordsworth, who soon moved with his sister Dorothy to Alfox-den House only a few miles away. Thus began the great collaboration that would culminate in the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and the hap­piest and most productive time of Coleridge's life. Coleridge's specific role in Lyrical Ballads, as he later described it in his Biographia Literaria, was "directed to persons and characters supernatural." "With this view," he goes on to explain, "I wrote the Ancient Mariner," which was the opening poem of the collection. But in fact the collabo­ration between Coleridge and Wordsworth was re extensive than this division of labor suggests.

Not only did they discuss their poems with each other, but one poet would actually contribute ideas, lines, and even entire stanzas to poems chiefly written by the other. Thus Wordsworth suggested the shooting of the albatross and contributed lines 13-16 and 222-227 of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Coleridge contributed the first stanza of "We Are Seven" and suggested numerous other details in Wordsworth's poems. His most significant contribution came in the manner and structure of "Frost at Midnight," where the complex relation between meditation and natural description provided the basis for Wordsworth's technique in "Tintern Abbey."

Coleridge went with Wordsworth and Dorothy to Germany in the winter of 1798-1799. There, at the University of Gottingen, he began his lifelong study of Kant and other German philosophers. Cole­ridge was to become very important in introduc­ing the advances of German philosophy to English poets and thinkers. Upon their return to England, both the Wordsworths and the Coleridges moved north to the Lake District, Coleridge and Sara set­tling at Greta Hall, Keswick, in 1800. This year marks the beginning of an agonizing period in Coleridge's life. He had become increasingly dis­tant from his wife and had fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, whose sister, Mary, Wordsworth was to marry in 1802. Sara Hutchinson did not return Coleridge's affections, however, and he suffered bitterly from her rejection. It was also about this time that Coleridge began taking large amounts of opium, the standard medical remedy in that day for the painful attacks of rheumatism from which he was suffering. But the effects of the drug, Coleridge soon realized, were more harmful than the disease: he became emotionally and psychologically dis­traught and unable to sustain his creative work. He expressed his despair in one of his major poems, "Dejection: An Ode," published in 1802:

My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? (lines 39-41)

By 1806, when he returned to London from an unsuccessful visit to the Mediterranean to restore his health, Coleridge's unhappiness and his addiction to opium had brought him to the verge of total collapse. A quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810 seemed to be the final blow. Yet the very fact that Coleridge was able to express his sense of physical and mental failure in such a powerful and accom­plished poem as the "Dejection Ode" points up the extraordinary feat of his continuing literary efforts during these years. Those efforts may have been in­consistent and far inferior to what Coleridge was ideally capable of, but they are still remarkable.

In 1808 he began his career as a public lecturer in London. Coleridge was the most eloquent speaker and conversationalist of the Romantic Age. His lectures on Shakespeare and other writers have become classics of literary criticism. During the next few years he also wrote for newspapers and magazines, began a periodical called The Friend, and wrote a successful tragedy called Remorse.

In 1816 Coleridge moved to Highgate, a northern suburb of London, and placed himself in the care of Dr. James Gillman, a wise and kind physician who was able to control Coleridge's use of opium. Coleridge's recovery, though never complete and always dependent on the care of Dr. Gillman and his wife, was more successful than he had ever hoped. In 1817 he finished and published the Biographia Liteiaria, which he had begun and worked on intermittently since 1815. Coleridge himself saw the Biographia as an account of his "literary life and opinions," and it contains some of the central formulations of Romantic literary theory. The Biographia also contains some of Coleridge's best applied criticism of the poetry of previous periods and of his own time. It includes a searching discussion of Wordsworth's poetic ideals as they were expressed in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Through the Biographia and his public lectures, Coleridge joins Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and Samuel lohnson in the select circle of great "poet-critics" in English literature.

The last years of Coleridge's life were relatively quiet and satisfying. He finally made up his quarrel with Wordsworth, and in 1828 they toured the Rhineland area of Germany together. In Highgate, Coleridge received a steady stream of admirers from both England and abroad. (One of his Ameri­can visitors was Ralph Waldo Emerson.) They came to see the great man, and to hear his fascinat­ing, eloquent, endlessly fluent conversation. When Coleridge died in 1834, the Romantic Age lost one of its greatest minds and personalities.