Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), born in rural Devonshire, attended school in London and later in Cambridge. A sensitive, intelligent, but often rather lonely student, he left school in debt, dissolution, and disgrace to enlist in the Light Dragoons. Not suited to the military life, he was soon rescued by friends and returned to the university, although he never graduated.

In 1795, Coleridge met William Wordsworth, the friend and fellow poet with whom he would collaborate on the influential Lyrical Ballads, which championed poetry written in the language of common people. Coleridge suffered from rheumatism and took laudanum (an opium derivative), following the standard medical procedures of the day. He became addicted to the drug around 1800, soon after becoming estranged from his wife. In 1810, at his lowest point, he had a terrible argument with his friend Wordsworth. Despite his agonies, Coleridge continued to write, lecture, and publish. After finding a caring physician who reduced the strength of his addiction, Coleridge regained his tranquility, reconciled with Wordsworth, and made peace with his former wife.

Perhaps because of his tragic addiction, many of Coleridge's most intense work efforts, including "Kubla Khan," remain unfinished and exist only in the form of scrawled notes. Nonetheless, Coleridge is considered today one of the great poets of his era and an influential literary theorist. In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge introduced the idea of the "willing suspension of disbelief" central to the reading of literature. He also drew an interesting distinction between fancy, which he thought of as "memory emancipated from the order of time and space," and the higher faculty of imagination, which transcends the senses and brings knowledge of ultimate realities.