ABSTRACT
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, journalist and literary critic who was a pivotal figure in the romantic artistic movement that grew in nineteenth-century Britain. Coleridge had a long friendship with fellow poet William Wordsworth, and together they founded the romantic movement initiated with their co-authored ‘Lyrical Ballads’, which included ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, perhaps his best-known poem. ‘The Raven’ was written by Coleridge at around the same time as the much-better-known ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. In line with the aristocrat conservationists later discussed, Coleridge came to the conclusion that the landed gentry were a bastion against unfettered industrialization. Coleridge suffered from depression and illness and had a long-standing opium addiction. He moved to Highgate in his forties under the care of a personal physician, but it was there that he died and is now buried.
