It’s Friday…can 80s icons quit dying?  Lord.

Speaking of death, today we’re pouring some out for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who bought it on this day in 1834.  Mistah Coleridge, the man who practically invented “tortured genius,” finally got what must’ve felt like a merciful exit from this waking fever dream we call life.  And for you English majors keep literary score at home, yes, we’re talking about that Samuel Taylor Coleridge – the Romantic poet with the golden tongue and a bloodstream that, by the end, may have been roughly half laudanum.  He was the guy who gift-wrapped the English language two of its most intoxicating verses, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan,” and still managed to moonlight as a literary critic while spiraling into the kind of addiction that makes rock stars look like amateurs.

Now, if you’re not an English major and have been sleeping through every literature class since seventh grade – or, worse, you were “too cool” for the Romantics – allow me to explain who we’re dealing with.  Coleridge was one of the OG hyper-literate provocateurs of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when England was waist-deep in boys with big brains, big egos, and bigger quills.  Alongside his bro-from-another-poetry-mother, Wordsworth, Coleridge kicked off the Romantic movement with their 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads.  This book was basically the thing that brought high-minded poetic ambition and made it accessible by using the ballad form. Basically it threw out the belief that poetry had to be highbrow to count.

But here’s where it gets tricky because, while Wordsworth really leaned into the who pastoral perfection shtick, all rolling hills and sublime nature moments, Coleridge steered straight into the weird, the metaphysical, and occasionally the completely unhinged.  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is this long-as-hell, chaotic ocean hallucination featuring doomed sailors, a cursed bird, and a whole shitload of Christian allegory mixed with existential dread.  It is haunting and brilliant, but pretty nuts.

Then there’s “Kubla Khan,” a poem so drenched in drugs (okay, how about “narcotic overtones”?)  you almost feel high just reading it.  Supposedly thrown together during an actual opium haze and notoriously “unfinished” due to someone knocking on the door mid-writing session, it’s one of the most “psychedelic” works ever to be penned in the Queen’s English.  Xanadu, sacred rivers, pleasure domes…shit yes!  It’s basically what happens when a world-class poet falls face first into his medicine cabinet and gets a direct connection with the divine just before the signal goes dead.

Speaking of cabinets full of Illicit Substances, Coleridge’s dance with opium wasn’t a casual flirtation; it was a full-blown toxic relationship.  Toward the end of his life, the line between Coleridge the man and Coleridge the addict blurred into oblivion.  You’d think a poetic genius who wrote such ethereal bangers would just moonwalk into immortality with swagger.  But no.  He spent his later years riddled with debts, estranged from his acquaintances, and bunked up in a London pad called Highgate under his doctor’s quasi-supervision.

Coleridge was a mad genius.  He was hopelessly flawed but still managed to open our minds as to what poetry could do.  He was a bit of a pain in the ass.  When you owe money to everybody in town, but all you do is babble about convoluted metaphysics, it pisses people off.  But that he was able to create what he did out of his own personal chaos is something you can’t help but respect.

So tonight we pour some out for Uncle Sammy.  Genius, no matter how bruised or broken, doesn’t die quietly.  And he sure as hell didn’t either.

N.P.: “Sinner” – Robert Randolph