Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet and critic, born in Devon and educated at Cambridge, which he left without a degree after a brief, pseudonymous enlistment in the dragoons. His friendship with Wordsworth produced Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which opened with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Kubla Khan and Christabel followed. Opium addiction, an unhappy marriage and a quarrel with Wordsworth broke his poetic career, but he became the most influential English critic of his age through his lectures on Shakespeare and the Biographia Literaria of 1817, which brought German philosophy into English thought. He was also, by every account, the greatest talker of his time.