SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge was one of England’s greatest poets, literary critics and philosophers. He was also a West Country man who happened to be friends with William Wordsworth.
In the latest in the World Poets series of lecture performances with readings at Brendon Books, Graham Fawcett examines the life of this great man.
Coleridge was a magician of the word, a hauntingly irresistible poet of nature and the imagination, a wildly inventive writer of letters, notebooks, essays, critical reviews and a unique poetical biography of himself.
He was also a thoroughly engaged political, social and literary journalist, and a talker for whom off the cuff was tantamount to off the starting-block and as though his train of thought could run through Clapham Junction on every platform simultaneously.
He was an inveterate cross-country walker who covered in record time distances we might think twice about even by bus.
His friendship and collaboration with William Wordsworth revolutionised English poetry. He divided his time restlessly between the West Country, the Lakes, London and Germany, and drank deeply of the life and landscapes of all of them, while writing, largely thanks to them, some of the most justly famous and lovely poems in the English language.
Brendon Books, Taunton. Thursday, April 14 at 7pm. Tickets £10.
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