Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a starter of English Romantic Movement, a English poet and a literary critic, was a big giant among the dwarfs in his contemporaries. Just as every famous person has a skeleton on its shelf, this big giant is regarded to having bipolar disorder.

Coleridge entered school at the age of 8, after his father’s death. During his school time, he was hardly allowed to return home, and this distance from his family in this fatal time proved emotionally damaging. This point was illustrated in the line “With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace” from the poem Frost at Midnight.

In December 1793, his third year in Jesus College, Cambridge, he quit school and enlisted in the Royal Dragoons, resulting from his debt or from the girl’s refusing him. Afterwards, rumor has it that he was onset with severe depression. Since then, he has begun to use opium to reduce his both mental and physical pain. Later, Coleridge traveled to Sicily and Italy, hoping that leaving Britain’s damp climate would improve his poor health and thus enable him to reduce his reliance on opium. However, things did not go as he had wished, it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict.

At the age of 45, Coleridge, with his opium addiction deteriorating, his spirit crushed, and his family setting apart, lived in the home of his physicians in London, England. He remained there for the rest of his life. There, he finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (1815), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed much poetry here and had many inspirations — a few of them from opium overdose.

But anyhow, people would still remember for his beautiful ballads, his great contribution the literary world.