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Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
A lonely boy raised in a charity school, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed of domes in air but lost himself in a laudanum addiction. His friendship with Wordsworth coincided with the most productive periods of his life; the rest of the time he struggled. He wrote incisive new criticism of Shakespeare and did newspaper work when he could, but his addiction cost him his livelihood, his friends, and even his family. He believed that plain speech had more power than the ornate elocutions of Milton or Pope, and that imagination was the key to great poetry. Upon those simple principles, he and Wordsworth launched the Romantic Age.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |