Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834
Exmoor National Park
Famous for:
Writer and romantic poet, and opium addict, who wrote Kubla Khan
More info:
Exmoor National Park: Coleridge
The Coleridge Way is a 36-mile route through some of the romantic poets favourite haunts in the Quantocks, Brendon Hills and Exmoor
Early life
Coleridge was the son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary in Devon, the youngest of 10 children. He went away to school in London before attending Cambridge University where he became friends with future poet laureate, Robert Southey, another of the Romantic Poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
A brilliant scholar, Coleridge never finished his studies, but went to live in Bristol with Southey to set up a ‘community’. It failed and the pair fell out. Coleridge left for Clevedon having married Southey’s fiancee’s sister, Sara Fricker.
Rural living
Extract from Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
(extract from Kubla Khan, published in 1816)
Coleridge was scratching a living writing for political magazines and he published some early poetry before the couple, with their son, moved to Nether Stowey in the Quantocks in 1796. His walks on the Quantocks and in Exmoor were a great influence on Coleridge’s work.
National Trust: Coleridge's cottage
Struggling for inspiration
In 1797, unwell and struggling for money, went to Porlock, Exmoor, to try to find inspiration. After walking from Porlock Weir to the village of Culbone, he stayed at a farmhouse where he fell into an opium-induced sleep during which conceived one of his most famous works, the poem Kubla Khan.
He awoke and began to write down the poem with ease, until he was disturbed by a caller to the farm – and on returning to write the rest could only remember a few hundred lines. The unfinished poem was not published until much later, in 1816, at the insistence of Lord Byron.
Poetic friends
By now friends with William Wordsworth, he took the poet on another Exmoor walk which this time inspired The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. The harbour from which the mariner set sail was undoubtedly inspired by Watchet, where the pair stayed.
Moving on
In later life, Coleridge moved away from the West Country and, after remarrying a friend of Wordsworth’s, he lived in the Lake District before ending his days as an opium addict living in Highgate, London, aged 61.
