Coleridge was a magician of the word, an irresistible poet of nature and imagination, a wildly inventive writer of letters, notebooks, essays, critical reviews and a unique poetical autobiography, a political, social and literary journalist, and a marathon talker and walker.

His friendship with Wordsworth revolutionised English poetry. He divided his time between the West Country, the Lakes, London and Germany, and drank deeply of the life and landscapes of all of them, while writing, thanks to them, some of the most famous and lovely poems in English. 

To meet the Ancient Mariner, old man and poem, at school is never to forget either. He is the Flying Dutchman, the storyteller in the railway carriage, the reminiscer whom we may at first mistrust but who rapidly metamorphoses into a gripping benediction before our reading eyes. We can be rooted to the spot by him at any age. With any luck.