Leave the Bird Alone Next Time.
It’s the birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in Devonshire, England (1772). His father died when he was ten. He went off to boarding school and hated it there. He went to college in Cambridge and dropped out to join the army. He thought of coming to America, to Pennsylvania to start a utopian village along the Susquehanna River with the poet Robert Southey, a place where people would cut down trees as they discussed metaphysics.
…about a sailor who brings a curse upon his ship…
But he never came to Pennsylvania. Instead, he married and moved to a little house in the country and became a friend of the poet William Wordsworth. He and Wordsworth took long walks together, and on one walk, one winter evening, Coleridge came up with the idea for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” about a sailor who brings a curse upon his ship after he kills an albatross. It became his best-known poem.
From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
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