St. Paul's Churchyard
London EC4M
UK
Coleridge is, famously, one of the great Romantic poets, a group renowned for their wild lives and living outside respectable society. A brilliant and innovative poet, Coleridge was also, perhaps surprisingly, a man of profound faith and insight into the Christian life.
Malcolm Guite, poet, priest and academic, has written a new biography telling the life of the poet through the lens of his great poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Written when Coleridge was just 25, it traces a journey which begins in high hopes and good spirits, leads to an intense encounter with human fallibility, fear and loneliness, before coming home to a renewal of faith and vocation. It is however much more than an individual’s story: it is a profound exploration of the human condition itself. Malcolm Guite will explore Coleridge’s life, faith, and poetry and bring him into fresh light as a subtle, surprising and profound theologian.
Malcolm Guite is a poet, theologian and song-writer. He teaches in the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge and is Chaplain of Girton College,Cambridge. He also lectures widely in England and North American on theology and literature, has published poetry, theology and literary criticism and worked as a librettist. His latest book is Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder 2017).