Episode Details

In 1793 a clumsy recruit who kept falling off his horse enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. He was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a brilliant Cambridge student fleeing debt and heartbreak, and his brothers eventually had him discharged on grounds of insanity. This episode draws on letters, medical records and manuscript drafts to trace the poet from his isolated childhood in Ottery St Mary, terrified of the dark by the Arabian Nights, through Christ's Hospital and a headmaster who tore up sloppy poems, to the failed Pantisocracy scheme with Robert Southey and the unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker it left behind.

We look at the golden window with William and Dorothy Wordsworth that produced Lyrical Ballads in 1798, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the opium-dream fragment Kubla Khan interrupted by the person from Porlock, and the intimate conversation poems that democratized the sublime. The episode then follows his immersion in Kant and German idealism, the laudanum habit that reached two quarts a week and shattered his friendship with Wordsworth, his rescue of Hamlet's reputation in the 1810 Shakespeare lectures, his final 18 years under Dr. James Gillman's care in Highgate, his influence on Emerson and John Stuart Mill, and the 2018 discovery that his coffin was not where everyone thought.

• Why a rigorous, almost mathematical approach to structure stayed with Coleridge from his school days
• The Pantisocracy: a utopian commune in Pennsylvania planned by intellectuals with no agricultural skills
• How the empiricism of Locke clashed with the active mind of Kant, and why Coleridge chose the latter
• Eggs in a teacup with cayenne pepper, night terrors, and the erratic guest who wore out his welcome in the Lake District
• Reading Hamlet as a mind paralyzed by overthinking, and criticism as psychological analysis