Sunday, March 2, 2008

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner


























After reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner I was sort of interested in learning a bit about the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I wanted to see what led to his writing of this interesting poem, and to learn a little bit about him. I decided to do something a little different this time, and look up one main website. From these websites I will try and find out as much information about him that I possibly can. This will not only help me to understand more about the author and his lifetime, but how to compare good and not so good websites.



Sameul Taylor Coleridge:

Coleridge was born October 21, 1722 in Ottery St Mary, Devonshire. Believe it or not he was the youngest of 10 children. There seems to be not enough information about his childhood years. Information is very scarce and is lacks several key years. From these several websites stated below I found an okay amount of information. There was little to none about his childhood. Basically what was already mentioned is all that was in the text. I could find a goood amount of information about his learning experiences and how he became a literature writer. He went to a Christ's Hospital School located in London and later transferred to Jesus College. After this he got married to Sara Flicker who sadly, he was not in love with. Coleridge's first writings came out in 1776. These were known as the Poems on Various Subjects. His brothers helped out with the money situation and helped him to get on his feet and be able to do his literature. It is known that he had a start of a good relationship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Meeting these people helped to lead him to his writing of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. After this he started to secretly fall in love with Sara Hutchinson and ended up writing a couple of literary poems on her. It was later found that he was addicted to opium and was debating to commit suicide. Even though some of his work was left unfinished, it was still later published. He ended up dying for what seems to be an unknown reason, but his death occurred in London on July 25, 1834. This is just a little bit of the information that I was able to gather up about him. It seems he was a pretty interesting fellow. Although websites really seem to lack in information; the first website shown below gives a pretty good analysis of his life through a timeline.


http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/resources/time_line.html
http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/

No comments: