Alphabeted: Coleridge the Modernist
Barbara Everett, 7 August 2003
“This extremely able but unhappy, unlucky and probably neurotic man experienced grinding misery for a good deal of his life, but when he began to be fully adult, in his middle to late twenties, something special happened. He was old enough to take a breath and look at his life, at how it was and how it was probably going to stay; but also young enough, particularly when surrounded by the bustling confident egoism of the Wordsworth household, to do what Yeats called taking ‘a great kick at human misery’, making it fertile, understanding it and mastering it.”