Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel in a few years around 1798, when he and Wordsworth were neighbours in Somerset and planned Lyrical Ballads together, and then wrote little poetry for the remaining thirty-six years of his life, disabled by opium and self-doubt. He turned instead to criticism and philosophy, and the Biographia Literaria, part autobiography and part theory of imagination, brought Kant and Schelling into English criticism and settled his account with Wordsworth. His talk was the wonder of London. Mill called him and Bentham the two seminal minds of the age.