Most of Coleridge’s best work, and all the poems recorded here, were written during the years 1797–8 between walking and talking with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Coleridge and his wife, Sara, then moved to Nether Stowey, with their now young family and it was near here that Coleridge met William Wordsworth and began a friendship which, despite difficulties, had a profound influence on the work of both poets, and on the development of English poetry itself. Coleridge and Southey married two of three sisters who had been involved in the abortive plans. In 1794, during a walking tour from Cambridge where he was an undergraduate, he met Robert Southey and together they devised a plan to set up a commune of six families in the valley of the Susquehanna, New England, a scheme which eventually collapsed in argument and conflict. ‘I was reared / In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim / And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.’ (‘Frost at Midnight’) After the death of his father he attended Christ’s Hospital School: Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the tenth and youngest child of the schoolmaster of the country town of Ottery St Mary.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |