Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher born in Devon. Educated at Christ’s Hospital—where medical laudanum use ignited a lifelong opium addiction—he later left Cambridge without a degree. In 1795, he married Sara Fricker, though they eventually separated. Coleridge's key partnership with William Wordsworth led to Lyrical Ballads (1798), launching the English Romantic movement and showcasing his famed poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Renowned for coining terms like "suspension of disbelief," Coleridge spent his later, illness-plagued years living with physician James Gillman before dying of heart failure.