Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772, the youngest of ten children, in Ottery St. Mary in Devon. Coleridge would recall his father, the Reverend John Coleridge, as a scholarly, saintly, comically distracted figure; but he was evidently a person of some determination too, having risen from an unpromising background to become vicar of St Mary’s, a handsome and substantial church, and Headmaster of the Grammar School. Coleridge’s mother, Ann Bowdon, came of a farming family from Exmoor. Young Sam (he grew to hate his name) was dreamy, solitary and precociously bookish, absorbed especially by the Arabian Nights, which he devoured at the age of six. (He was to claim that this “early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii” worke

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First published 17 July 2001

Citation: Perry, Seamus. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 July 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=949, accessed 9 February 2010.]