1772-1834. English poet, one of the founders
of the Romantic movement. A friend of Southey
and Wordsworth, he collaborated with the
latter on Lyrical Ballads 1798. His poems
include `The Ancient Mariner', `Christabel',
and `Kubla Khan'; critical works include
Biographia Literaria 1817. While at
Cambridge, Coleridge was driven by debt to
enlist in the Dragoons, and then in 1795, as
part of an abortive plan to found a Communist
colony in the USA with Robert Southey,
married Sarah Fricker, from whom he
afterwards separated. He became addicted to
opium and from 1816 lived at Highgate,
London, under medical care. As a philosopher,
he argued inferentially that even in
registering sense- perceptions the mind was
performing acts of creative imagination,
rather than being a passive arena in which
ideas interact
mechanistically. As a critic, he used
psychological insight to brilliant effect in
his Biographia Literaria and Shakespearean
criticism.