It’s a trope that’s as old as the written word: the brilliant artist whose creative genius is intricately tied to substance abuse—or so the genius usually believes. For Hemingway, it was alcohol; for ...

No writer has had as much ink spilled in the interpretation of his works only to remain so woefully undervalued in the popular imagination as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Despite co-creating English ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known for the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a doozy of a poem that includes spirits, zombies and, of course, a rotting albatross. As it turns out, since the English ...

Break-ups had happened before of course. Henry VIII's split from the Vatican comes to mind, or Socrates' spat with the Athenian state, but this is the break-up over which we still take sides. Even ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In 1797, Wordsworth and his adored sister Dorothy lived for a little over a year as Somerset neighbours to ...

Was "the person from Porlock", who interrupted Coleridge at work and is blamed for depriving the world of a epic poetic masterpiece, actually his opium dealer, meeting him by arrangement with a fresh ...

“The problem isn’t that the government is broken,” Greg Coleridge says, whipping out one of many activist slogans he’s been repeating so long they’re inextricably threaded into the fabric of his ...

In July 1913, friends of the African British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor gathered in his hometown of Croydon, England, to lay a plaque on his grave in anticipation of the first ...