A Poet in the Family: The Coleridge Archive 27 February to 27 April 2007

A fascinating insight into the character and behaviour of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is revealed through his own notebooks, together with journals, correspondence and reminiscences from family and friends in a small display at the British Library from 27 February - 27 April 2007.

The exhibition, entitled A Poet in the Family, looks at Coleridge through the eyes of some of his closest friends and relatives. It includes manuscripts by his children Derwent and Sara Coleridge, and his nephews Edward and John Taylor Coleridge, recording their complex mixture of feelings - from love and admiration to exasperation and sheer bewilderment - towards the erratic genius in their midst.

A notebook entry from 1808 shows Coleridge analysing the workings of his own mind, and remarking wryly that 'My Thoughts crowd each other to death.' The exhibition includes several awed descriptions of his renowned table-talk - though as other items reveal, reconstructing his conversation after the event was no easy matter. His nephew John Taylor Coleridge writes in his journal: 'It is impossible to carry off, or commit to paper his long trains of argument, indeed it is not always possible to understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question in so original a manner.' Sara Coleridge writes in a letter: 'My father generally discoursed on such a very extensive scale that it would have been an arduous task for me to attempt recording what I had heard. When alone with me he was almost always on the star-paved road, taking in the whole heavens in his circuit.'

The journal of Coleridge's nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, also sheds new light on the composition of his best known poem, The Ancient Mariner. In 1836, he records Wordsworth's account of the genesis of the poem.  'My uncle had been told a dream which some friend's friend had had of a skeleton ship - on that hint he worked - & as he worked he stated that there must be some cause for his Mariner's sufferings - some crime committed by him.  W. had lately read in Shelbrook's (or Sheldrake's) voyages of a sailor having shot an albatross, that came to the ship, & asked my Uncle if he did not think that would do - he thought it would, and adopted it.' According to the journal entry, Wordsworth also claimed to have suggested the idea of 'the dead men rising to work the ship' and to have actually written two lines of the poem himself - the lines near the beginning of the poem where the wedding guest 'listens like a three years' child: / The Mariner hath his will'.

Elsewhere there are stinging indictments of Coleridge's personality, include a letter from Robert Southey, ruling out the idea of a possible reconciliation between the poet and his wife. Southey writes, 'He considers nothing but his own ease. His habits.are destructive of all comfort and domestic order.' In one of the letters on display, his son Derwent reflects on some of the flaws and paradoxes in his father's character: ' As a poet, and as a philosopher, nay even as a critic and conversationist - no less than as a man - with much of the very highest excellence there was always some defect - some screw loose in the marvellous and on the whole admirable machine.'

Formerly preserved in family ownership at the Chanter's Hours, Ottery St Mary, Devon, the archive was acquired by the British Library last year with the aid of generous grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, the Friends of the National Libraries, the Friends of the British Library, the Lynn Foundation, the Gamlen Charitable Trust and the Denton Wilde Sapte Charitable Trust.

The archive is currently being archived and will be fully accessible to researchers in 2008.

For further information, contact Ruth Howlett at the British Library Press Office: +44 (0)20 7412 7112 or ruth.howlett@bl.uk

Notes for Editors

A Poet in the Family: The Coleridge Archive is on display in The Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library from 27 February to 27 April 2007. Admission free.

The British Library is the national Library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. Further information is available on the Library's website at www.bl.uk.