Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The poem tells of a sailor who kills an albatross and must wander under a supernatural curse. It first appeared in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, the book Coleridge published with William Wordsworth.

Kubla Khan was published in 1816 with a preface describing it as an unfinished vision from an opium-influenced sleep. Its images of Xanadu, the sacred river Alph, and the pleasure-dome made it one of Coleridge's most famous short poems.

Coleridge and Wordsworth collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, a landmark 1798 collection in English Romanticism. Wordsworth contributed poems such as Tintern Abbey, while Coleridge contributed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, mixes autobiography, literary criticism, and philosophy. It is important for Coleridge's ideas about imagination, fancy, and the reading of poetry.