Samuel Taylor Coleridge was William Wordsworth's sidekick. The two were good friends, and they spent a lot of time taking long walks together and talking about poetry. In fact, they were so close that Coleridge contributed some of his own poems to Lyrical Ballads. But poor Coleridge suffered from an inferiority complex—he just didn't think he was as good as his best friend Wordsworth. And, what's more, he suffered from depression.

Not only did this guy develop a lot of the themes and ideas that would become important in British Romanticism, but he also pushed the writing of poetry in new directions. Coleridge wrote a series of poems that came to be known as the "conversation" poems. That's because their language was conversational and informal, which was pretty groundbreaking at the time.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798)

Coleridge's long poem, first included in the Lyrical Ballads, is the spooky story of a sailor's voyage in the Antarctic and other places. In the Antarctic, the Mariner kills an albatross (a bird) and things go way wrong for the ship and it's crew after that.

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (1798)

In this most famous of Coleridge's "conversation" poems, there's lots of nature, emotion, and imagination—it's as Romantic as Romantic poetry gets. In it, poor Coleridge is lamenting the fact that he can't go on a walk with his buddies (which include Wordsworth). But that's okay because he's sitting under a lovely lime-tree bower and he realizes he's just as happy sitting there as would be taking a walk.

Chew on This

Like his friend Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge found a lot of inspiration in nature. Check out Coleridge writing about nature's inspirational power in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison".

The sublime is a big theme in Romantic poetry. And in Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" we see it reflected in the spooky, icy landscape.