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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of half a dozen poems that will be read as long as people love poetry, occupies a secure yet anomalous place in English literature. His “conversational” poems anticipate with great power contemporary poetry. Along with his friend, William Wordsworth, he fairly inaugurated the Romantic movement in English with the Lyrical Ballads, and he, more than any other figure, introduced German thought and literature into the English tradition. His literary criticism, especially his lectures on Shakespeare, represents a modern attempt to deal with literature theoretically. And his later philosophical work, disorganized and difficult as it is, contains a treasury of ideas and insights that are only now being understood and appreciated. He anticipated many important ideas in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalysis, exploring the nature of the unconscious and the distinction between the primary and secondary process, and, indeed, introduced into the language such words as “psychosomatic” and “psychoanalysis.” John Stuart Mill thought him one of the “two great seminal minds of English.”
Yet for all that, Coleridge's life and achievement remain deeply troubling. His poetic work was virtually completed by the age of 30, and he spent the next three decades reeling from productive work to grandiose and unrealizable schemes for a grand philosophical synthesis, often under the haze of serious opium addiction, which at times rendered him psychotic. His domestic relations were disastrous, and his friendships were marked by intense intimacy ruptured by misunderstanding and alienation. Intellectually, he was one of the most gifted men of his generation, yet engaged in