Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped define a poetic movement with his original topics and emotional content. His contributions to the definitions of poetic genres were nigh unprecedented. Coleridge, along with other successful poets, created a new form of poetry called Romanticism. This movement was characterized by emotions, experience, and esoteric exoticism (Holmes 166). Even at a young age Coleridge wanted to feel the emotions and view the secrets of the world that would later fuel his work. His childhood nanny noted that:
When, at the age of two, he came to be inoculated, he howled when the doctor's tried to cover his eyes. It was not the pain, but the concealment of mystery which upset him. (Holmes 2)
Coleridge's early life was filled with ideas that, instead of being contained within the sphere of conventional thought, seemed to float around the space surrounding his otherwise mundane world. His parents explained this behavior by saying that, "He was a drifter and dreamer, yet capable of sudden, short burst of extreme imaginative intensity" (275). These behaviors later manifested themselves into debt, isolation, and depression. Yet, as Coleridge himself claims, he had only fallen from grace to experience the emotions and harness the ensuing creative outbursts (275). Still, despite these claims, Coleridge felt it necessary to momentarily alleviate his lonely pain by means of opium escapes. He would use the drug to cure both his colds and his loneliness (270). This continued substance abuse was ironically the source of his greatest poetic achievement, "Kubla Khan". This poem is widely regarded as a monument attesting to Coleridge's genius (270). Ironically, with such a large following and such influence, it seems that no critic can ...