Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an interesting man. I thought it was cool how he and another guy ( a friend from college, Robert Southey* wanted to start up a Utopian society in the US. Utopian! They were going to call it "pantisocracy" and it was going to be on a River in Pennsylvania. It didn't work out in the end but not until after Southey convinced Coleridge to marry his wife's sister. I wasn't really able to find out why he didn't want to and why he allowed himself to be convinced to, but I thought it interesting that he was utopian in beliefs and he married for a reason other than love. I wonder if they did the naked standing in front of each other thing? From his portraits, that would not have made her very excited about the prospect of marriage either...

He was very good friends with Wordsworth but they had a falling out eventually. Before that though they wrote a collection of poetry called Lyrical Ballads. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the opening poem. It was a big hit and because they both used current english and modern emotions, they were very popular as well as revolutionary. He is sometimes called the father of romanticism. Again, interesting because he is Utopian... i don't think of Utopians as romantic, although Moore was definetely revolutionary.