ABSTRACT:
Coleridge was born in the age whieh was clamouring for change in social, political and religious fields. In the last decades of the eighteenth century the idea of personal morality and social solidarity underwent a drastic change and they came to be replaced by individual freedom and dignity of man: This shift of attitude to a new set of values was popularized by the French Revolution, and poetised by the Romantics. Coleridge Jived and fought for these new values and novel ideas; moreover, in his personal and public life he valued friendship, love, sympathy and freedom more than anything else.Coleridge was a favourite of both the parems.But was more attached to his father By whom he was presumably more loved. This·parental love resulted in envy and jealousy of the other children in the family. Sometimes he was bullied and sallied by his brother. Franck and also received several bad names and thumps too from Molly the nurse. It was not surprising then that he kept aloof from them, and suffered the acute pangs of alienation in his childhood itself. The story of his life in the later years is the story of painful isolation. of aching solir.ariness, of a lonely mind talking to itself in verse or the obverse of it, of a mind suffering, explaining and justifying. Coleridge seems to have .grown the feeling of insecurity and emotional precariousness since his childhood. Later he disconcertingly felt that he did not belong to the family where. he was born. felt a strong sense of repulsion for il When he left his home for school education, he was so much disappointed and disgusted with bis parental home that he returned to it. only on holidays and wrote to his people very rmely : very strangely and surprisingly enough, he did not even go ro attend his mother's funeial in 1810. At Christ's Hospital he lived in poverty, went hungry on many occasions, suffered the pains of loneliness, and yet he made the most of the moments in solilUde and ttanquility to which he dedicated " the feeling heart, the searching soul" 1 and kept the poet in him alive. Thus as a child, boy and youth he lived a lonely life.Coleridge married Sara fricker on the ,advice of the fellow-poet Roben Southey, Sara’s brother-in law. His premature marriage to her meant the abandonment of Evans, whom he sincerely loved and presumably wanted to marry.As husband and wife they were two poles apart and gave each other nothing but pains and misunderstandings, which cast a deep shadaw on thai their life and resulted eventually their separation and . isolation. He was avid for company. made friend with many men and women. Loved them from the bottom of his heart but got in return nothing but despair and disappointment which are evidences by his poetic question. “why was I made for love and love denied to me.”2 His relationships with others always remained inconstant.