Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 to 1834) was an English poet and critic, co-founder of English Romanticism with Wordsworth through Lyrical Ballads (1798). His sea poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner anchors that collection and remains his best-known maritime work; Kubla Khan and Christabel followed. He drew nautical detail partly from voyage narratives such as Shelvocke’s 1726 account of an albatross shot off Cape Horn. His Biographia Literaria (1817) set out the imagination-versus-fancy distinction that shaped later sea writing and Ruskin’s criticism.