We’ve spent the last four days walking the Coleridge Way in west Somerset from Nether Stowey to Lynmouth. In the evenings I read the first volume of Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions (1989). I didn’t know much about Coleridge’s life or many of the details of the origins of English romantic poetry, but the combination of walking and reading has given me some interesting insights.
Coleridge grew up in Ottery St Mary in Devon and attended boarding school at Christ’s Hospital School before studying at Cambridge. He was a brilliant scholar, but endured a difficult personal life from early childhood. At Cambridge he developed the idea of pantisocracy with Robert Southey and others. This was to be a utopian community of equals. But despite efforts to move to America and put this into practice, it never happened. Instead, he cultivated a career as a metaphysical poet, reading voraciously (‘the last person to read everything’, I heard recently on a podcast). After spending some time in Bristol Coleridge moved to Nether Stowey near the Quantock Hills to be close to his friend Thomas Poole. While here he developed a strong friendship and professional partnership with William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
In 1797-98 Coleridge and Wordsworth wandered around the Quantocks and Exmoor (now the Coleridge Way) and wrote poetry. A co-authored volume was published in 1798 as Lyrical Ballads, which is often seen as the birth of English romantic poetry. Walking the Coleridge Way allows some sense of the fusion of physical experience and ideas that came together in the ideas of Coleridge and Wordsworth. A second edition was published in 1802 with a preface that is often seen as an early manifesto of romanticism.
The years after Nether Stowey remained productive for Coleridge, but were not always particularly happy. After moving to Germany with the Wordsworths they went their separate ways, and although they remained friends the relationship shifted. Coleridge left his wife Sara in Somerset as he studied in Germany and his second child died while he was away. The title of the second volume of Holmes’ biography Darker Reflections suggests that worse is to come.
Religion, Environment, History 