Rosemary Ashton’s acclaimed biography presents Samuel Taylor Coleridge – poet, critic, thinker, plagiarist, cultural omnivore, enchanting companion, feckless husband, fabled conversationalist, guilt–ridden opium addict – in all his complexity. Ashton shows how Coleridge’s writings in verse and prose are especially directly expressive of his opinions and emotions and traces his development through friendship and marriage.An authority on nineteenth–century Anglo–German cultural relations, she maps and measures the profound influence of German philosophy upon Coleridge’s thinking and theorizing in illuminating detail, thus placing Coleridge’s reputation within the context of both British and German Romanticism.