Coleridge

The second half of Coleridge's life is difficult territory for biographers, who always find it convenient if their subjects fought their way through various youthful ordeals before achieving a definite and decisive self-sufficiency. But this is precisely what Coleridge did not do. E.M. Forster once said that "if life is a lesson, he never learnt it," and Sisman is able to cover his later years in a single final chapter. Coleridge, it seems, is the poet who never grew up: a producer of friendship but seldom a consumer, and a dispenser of delight and encouragement to everyone except himself and his unlucky wife. He tried to make a joke of his private troubles, saying that "if any woman wanted an exact & copious Recipe, 'How to make a Husband completely miserable,' I could furnish her with one." But he was not the type to relish misery: He felt that it "degraded" him and made him "a worse man." And somehow he never stopped writing.
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