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Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Friendship That Launched English Romanticism

“In the great and burning alphabet of earth and sky, the page that is read is not the one that is printed.” — Coleridge on Wordsworth, in Biographia Literaria, 1817

The friendship and collaboration of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) is one of the great literary partnerships in the history of English literature. The two poets met in 1795 and within a few years had produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), the founding document of English Romantic poetry. Their partnership, marked by extraordinary creative collaboration but also by long separations, painful misunderstandings, and personal tragedy, shaped the entire subsequent development of English Romanticism and remains one of the great stories of literary history.

The First Meeting

Wordsworth and Coleridge first met in 1795, in Bristol. Wordsworth, then in his mid-twenties, had been developing his poetic ideas in a series of early works, including the “Salisbury Plain” poems, the Guilt and Sorrow poems, and the “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches.” Coleridge, slightly younger, had been writing the early political and conversational poems, the play The Fall of Robespierre (1794), and the first drafts of some of his greatest works.

The two poets discovered an immediate affinity. They shared a deep love of nature, a sympathy for the political ideals of the French Revolution, an interest in the new German philosophy, and a desire to revolutionize English poetry. Within months of their first meeting, they were making plans for a joint publication.

The Lyrical Ballads (1798)

The result of this collaboration was the Lyrical Ballads, published anonymously in 1798. The volume was a deliberate experiment in a new kind of poetry — a poetry that would use the “real language of men” and treat, in Wordsworth’s famous formulation, “incidents and situations from common life.” The volume included Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan” (or rather, its incomplete first version), and Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Tintern Abbey,” and many other poems.

The 1800 second edition, with Wordsworth’s famous preface, was a major theoretical event. The preface became one of the most influential statements of poetic theory ever composed, and it set the agenda for English Romantic poetry for the rest of the century.

The Collaboration

The Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership was not only a literary friendship but a profound intellectual and personal bond. The two poets lived near each other in the Lake District for several years in the late 1790s and early 1800s; they walked together, talked together, wrote together, and shared their deepest ideas about poetry, philosophy, and life.

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) is in large part an account of the Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership, and it remains one of the central documents of English Romantic theory. The chapter on Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction, in particular, helped establish the Wordsworthian conception of the poet as a man speaking to men.

The Difficulties

The Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership was not without its difficulties. The two poets had very different temperaments — Wordsworth was steady, sober, increasingly conservative; Coleridge was brilliant, unstable, increasingly opium-dependent. The political differences between them widened as the French Revolution descended into the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. Coleridge’s increasing opium addiction, his marital difficulties, and his growing sense of personal failure put a great strain on the friendship.

The autumn of 1799–1800, when the two poets were both living at Dove Cottage in the Lake District, was the high point of the collaboration. After that, the two poets saw less and less of each other. Their friendship never entirely broke off, but it lost much of its earlier closeness. Coleridge went on the famous trip to Malta and then to Italy in 1803–06; he returned to England in 1806, increasingly dependent on opium and increasingly unable to write poetry. Wordsworth, in the meantime, was developing the great autobiographical and meditative poetry that would eventually become The Prelude.

The Major Works of the Partnership

The major works produced by the Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership include:

Lyrical Ballads (1798; expanded 1800) — the founding document of English Romantic poetry.
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” — one of the great narrative poems of the English language.
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” — one of the great lyric poems, and one of the foundational myths of the Romantic conception of the imagination.
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” — one of the great meditative lyrics, a major statement of the Romantic vision of nature and the inner life.
Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” (1850) — the long autobiographical poem, in many ways the central work of English Romanticism, which contains many of the great passages about the Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership.

The Long Influence

The Wordsworth-Coleridge partnership has had a profound influence on the way we think about English Romanticism. The image of the two poets walking in the Lake District, talking about poetry and philosophy, has become one of the central images of the Romantic imagination. The way we think about the Lyrical Ballads, the Romantic conception of the poet, the Romantic theory of imagination — all of these are deeply indebted to the partnership.

The page on English Romantic Poets treats the larger context of the English Romantic movement; the page on The Romantic Ballad treats the great narrative poems of the Romantic ballad revival, including the Ancient Mariner; and the page on Romantic Odes treats the great lyric tradition that the two poets helped establish.