Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in the small, rural Devonshire town of Ottery St. Mary in southwest England on October 21, 1772. The son of a Church of England parish vicar, John Coleridge, and Ann Bowdon Coleridge, the boy entered Dame Key's Reading School in 1775. In 1778 he began studies at the Henry VIII Free Grammar School, which was headed by his father.

When John Coleridge died in 1782, Samuel was sent to the Christ's Hospital School in London. The youngster was considered dreamy and eccentric by fellow schoolboys, in part because of his enthusiastic interest in metaphysics. He was considered extremely precocious.

In 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, but in spite of his scholastic abilities and outstanding intellect, he did not find the experience stimulating and left the university in 1794 without graduating.

On a visit to Oxford in June of that same year, he met Robert Southey...