English · 1772–1834
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was poet, philosopher, critic, theologian, and talker — the most intellectually ambitious English writer of the Romantic period. His poems (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel) are among the most famous in English; his Biographia Literaria is the most important work of English Romantic criticism; and his Shakespeare lectures transformed how the plays are read. Opium addiction and self-doubt prevented him from completing most of his projects.