I’ve recently finished reading Richard Holme’s splendid two volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and topped it off with Adam Sisman’s equally splendid Wordsworth and Coleridge: A Friendship . Coleridge’s was not a happy life, what with the failure of his marriage and the opium addiction that caused him such terrible physical and mental suffering. Much as I admire what I know of his work, I’m left with a mix of sympathy and irritation for the man. There’s no doubt that the problems within his marriage caused him much suffering, but I can’t help thinking that this was in large part because his wife Sara did not nurture his creativity. She does not seem to have been his intellectual or creative equal – Dorothy Wordsworth (not an objective witness) called her “the lightest weakest silliest woman” who lacked “sensibility”. Clearly a most unsuitable wife for a poet. She was not his muse, and she was too busy looking after his children, cooking, cleaning, and washing to act as his a