Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was a poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism. He and William Wordsworth published the LYRICAL BALLADS in 1799, marking a conscious break with 18th-century tradition. Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an OBE. The first volume of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize.