‘Did Coleridge find his contemporary Quakers wanting?’ Photo: Illustration from the 1877 edition of ‘The Rme of the Ancient Mariner’, by Gustav Doré
Rime and reason: Jonathan Wooding investigates Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘Coleridge enthusiastically defends George Fox.’
by Jonathan Wooding
18th August 2023
One night in 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was busy turning a dream into a poem. The text became famous as ‘Kubla Khan’, but it was never fully completed – Coleridge was interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’ and found that the rest of the poem ‘had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’. Who knows what was lost?
