Coleridge and opium

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Born	October 21, 1772(1772-10-21) Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England
Died	July 25, 1834 (aged 61) Highgate, England
Occupation	Poet, critic, philosopher
Literary movement	Romanticism
Children	Sara Coleridge, Derwent Coleridge, Hartley Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Coleridge was widely known to have been a regular user of opium as a relaxant and analgesic. The degree to which he experimented with the drug as a creative enhancement is not clear. Although Coleridge largely kept his addiction as hidden as possible from those close to him it became public knowledge with the 1822 publication of Confessions of an English Opium Eater by his close friend Thomas de Quincey. The Confessions painted a rather negative picture of Coleridge and his reputation suffered accordingly.

Coleridge and Opium

Where Coleridge first developed his opium habit is an issue of some scholarly dispute but it clearly dates from a fairly youthful period in his life. Coleridge’s own explanation is clearly laid out in a letter to Joseph Cottle. The explanation may, in fact, be the truth as Coleridge remembered it, but as with much of what Coleridge says, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Coleridge writes;

However, as good as this story is, everyone who has dealt with the issue of addiction knows, any statement by a victim of addiction concerning their drug use should not be taken at face value. Whatever Coleridge said about his use of opium during the time of this painful illness, most scholars agree that he had resorted to the use of Laudanum (the tincture form of opium) before this date, particularly during times of nervousness and stress. Because Laudanum was widely available and widely used as an analgesic as well as a general sedative, many people were given the drug for all sorts of medical and nervous complaints. Coleridge was probably given the drug numerous times in his youth during several bouts of rheumatic illness. These small medicinal dosages seldom led to full-blown addiction but for Coleridge, who experienced the painful return of the symptoms many times in his life, it surely introduced him to the use of the drug much earlier than his story to Cottle admits. Regardless of when and where Coleridge’s opium addiction began, it is clear that the more reliant on the drug he became, the more his work suffered, the less he was able to focus and concentrate, and the more strained his relations became. In fact, it is arguable that any analysis of Coleridge’s life must be done against the constant background of opium usage. But as important as the issue of opium is in Coleridge’s life, it is never a straightforward issue because he often hid it from public and familial view and at other times he exaggerated its importance to his work. In the 1816 publication of this major ‘opium’ poems Coleridge purposely drew a connection between his creative work and his opium usage. Desperate for some financial success with his poetry, Coleridge intentionally attempted to portray himself as a dreamy-opium eater because he, perhaps rightly, believed that it would draw a morbid fascination to his work. Opium played an interesting role in the public image of Romantic literature. There was, for a long time, a kind of cult glamorization of the drug and a morose allure to stories of its usage for respectable members of the bourgeoisie who were titillated by such taboo subjects. It was with this in mind that Coleridge generated an image of himself as dreamy poet who created drug induced fantasies.

This dreamy image of himself began even before he was widely known to have been addicted to opium. In one of a series of biographical letters written to his friend Thomas Poole Coleridge painted this picture of himself, a picture that would always endure. Coleridge writes:

This slothful image was one that endured even with some of Coleridge’s close friends and may have been consciously created by Coleridge in the earlier part of his career in order to draw attention away from his addiction. It was only later, as pointed out above, that Coleridge perceived an advantage to drawing attention not to himself as simply a slothful scholar but a dreamy opium eater. However, again one must treat the idea that Coleridge’s most famous poems were actually rooted in his opium usage with a degree of scepticism. The most popular story that connects Coleridge’s work with his opium usage was created by Coleridge in his well known story of the creation of Kubla Khan. Coleridge wrote:

{{cquote|The author continued for about 3 hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines … On waking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole and taking up his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, & and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surfaces of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the later!.^[2]