Tackling a Coleridge poem

Abstract

Wordsworth and Coleridge tend to go together and there are good reasons for this pairing apart from the obvious one of their joint production of Lyrical Ballads. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge was born into relative middle-class comfort, the youngest son of John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St Mary in Devon, and his wife Anne, née Bowden. Like Wordsworth he went to Cambridge, and like Wordsworth and indeed most young people of the time with a grain of idealism he was stirred by the revolutionary enthusiasms of the early 1790s.