Young poet details low mood and disappointment in love in 1795 letter, written not long before he met Wordsworth.
He would go on to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, two of the greatest English poems.
But in a letter written when he was 22, Samuel Taylor Coleridge revealed he was contemplating packing it all in and fading into obscurity.
The letter, which is being offered for sale by the London rare books and manuscripts dealer Bernard Quaritch, details his low mood and disappointment in love, and appears to allude to an opium addiction.
The young Coleridge writes he is finishing a work of “consequence”, believed to be his long philosophical-political poem Religious Musings.
But he adds that he is planning to “bid farewell forever” to the stress of writing. “I mean to retire into obscure inactivity, where my feelings may stagnate into peace,” he writes.
The letter was written to his friend George Dyer, a leading English radical who championed the young Coleridge, in January 1795, shortly after he left the University of Cambridge.
It almost certainly alludes to Coleridge’s infatuation with Mary Evans, with whom he had been in love since his schooldays. The news of her engagement to another man brought “bitter disappointment” – as he puts it in the letter.
In what may be allusions to both lost love and opium, he says in the letter: “My delirious imagination had early concentrated all hopes of happiness in one point – an unattainable point! This circumstance has produced a dreaminess of mind, which too often makes me forgetful of others’ feelings.”
He thanks Dyer for “a very flattering review of a very indifferent composition of mine”, The Fall of Robespierre, a three-act play that Coleridge and Robert Southey wrote with the intention of raising funds for “pantisocracy”. This was a scheme to found a commune in rural Pennsylvania with 12 men and 12 women who would marry and bring up their children in an equal society without private property.
Coleridge is deprecating about some of his first poems, published in the newspaper the Morning Chronicle, though writes that two are “not so bad as the rest”.
Soon after writing the letter, he headed to south-west England and met Wordsworth. In 1798, the pair published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, considered to be a starting point for the English romantic age.
A standout in the collection was Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In 1797, Coleridge put his quill pen down on the wondrous Kubla Khan, which he apparently wrote after experiencing an opium-influenced dream.
The Coleridge letter, which has a price tag of £10,000, is one of 80 items in Bernard Quaritch’s new catalogue of English books and manuscripts from 1500 to 1840.
