Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Charles Lamb was a friend from schooldays, his sister Mary becoming Coleridge’s confidante. Coleridge and Southey shared ideals as young poets, wrote a play together, and planned a utopian community in the U.S. De Quincey was their Lakeland neighbour. Wedgwood and his brother supported Coleridge financially, Davy gave him laughing-gas – Coleridge said Davy’s lectures extended his stock of metaphors. Allston, a lifelong friend, introduced Morse to him. Coleridge and Wordsworth met Klopstock in Hamburg, on their way to a miserable winter in the Harz. Clare thought Coleridge’s conversation over-rehearsed, but his eloquently barbed lines appear on his former friend Hazlitt’s tomb.