Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

The English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the son of a Devonshire clergyman. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge, but left to join the Royal Dragoons in 1793. Although he returned to his college soon afterwards he never took a degree. He entertained ideas of setting up a utopian commune, a pantisocracy (equal government by all), in America and during a trip to Germany in 1798 he studied the ideas of Schelling, Kant and other German philosophers. Due to poor health, Coleridge was treated with opium, which led to a lifelong addiction that came to influence his career negatively, but although his oeuvre is modest in terms of number of published works, he is a poet and thinker of enormous importance.