Coleridge’s Opium Habit
The first Romantic Poet with a gossip-worthy private life was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The youngest son of a vicar, Coleridge was a fine scholar, but also a temperamental and dreamy child. His degree in Classics at Jesus College, Cambridge, was disrupted by heavy drinking, a tempestuous love affair, and an interest in French revolutionary politics (see below). After joining the army out of despair, Coleridge was bought out of his regiment by his brother on the grounds of insanity, and began writing poems. He met William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1797, and poetry was never the same again.
Coleridge was a phenomenally talented poet, producing all manner of works from the archaic-pastiche of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to poems lamenting his loss of the creative impulse such as Dejection: An Ode. The writers’ block painfully described in Dejection was largely due to Coleridge’s prodigious consumption of opium, in the form of the tincture known as laudanum. He later claimed in a letter that he began ‘the ACCURSED Habit’ as a treatment for swollen knees, but it swiftly got out of control, and was to have a severe impact on his career as a poet.
Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan, was actually the result of an opium dream. Having had his usual dose of laudanum one night in 1797, Coleridge fell asleep reading a passage about the summer palace built by the Emperor of China, Kublai Khan, at Xanadu. He claimed to have composed 300 lines of poetry in his sleep, which hurried to write down upon waking. Unfortunately, ‘a person… from Porlock’ knocked at the door, breaking his concentration, and the poem was never completed. The 54 lines he managed appropriately end, ‘for he on honey-dew hath fed/ and drunk the milk of Paradise.’
The damage wrought on his health by his heavy opium use meant that Coleridge’s finest work all dates from his early years. Of his three most-acclaimed poems – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan – the latter two were never finished. As well as harming him physically, Coleridge’s opium use also worsened his already nervous disposition, and caused him to lose confidence in his own work, despite a legion of admirers. Wordsworth, who never used laudanum, later became Poet Laureate, whilst Coleridge’s poetic gifts shrivelled up and his drug habit plunged him into crippling depression. Don’t do drugs, kids.