'Poet's Corner' - Ottery St Mary Library - Ottery St Mary, Devon - UK Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

An information board outside Ottery St Mary Library, which gives a little local history and information about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet.

The board tells us about the artistic bench nearby, (visit link)

On Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it says:
"Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John and Anne Coleridge who lived opposite St. Mary’s Church in Ottery St Mary. John was the vicar and also master of the local Grammar School. It was clear from his very early years that Coleridge was not an ordinary child; at three years old he could read a chapter in the bible, and at seven he was reading the Arabian Nights. His father was his preferred companion and he would accompany him around Ottery on parochial business. When his father died in 1781, Coleridge was approaching nine years of age. His mother felt there was little hope of educating such a child prodigy in Ottery St Mary, so she sent him to the Christ’s Hospital School in London, where he boarded and felt abandoned.

It was at Christ’s Hospital he discovered friendship and a gift for effortless, mesmerising oratory. He won a place at Cambridge, but very soon money troubles drove him out of the university, and briefly into the army. Then, with Robert Southey - a future poet laureate - he devised a radical scheme for the perfect society which he called Pantisocracy. At the end of 1797 Coleridge and wife Sara moved, with their 18 month old son Hartley, to Nether Stowey. Here he began his long association with Wordsworth, and the two years at Stowey 1797-99 were the period during which his most famous poetry was written.

The publication of Sibylline Leaves and Biographia Literaria confirmed his celebrity as a leading writer, critic and talker. The Ancient Mariner was now republished with additional marginal commentaries, and both Kubla Khan and Christabel - formerly Coleridge’s oratorical party-pieces, were published at the insistence of Lord Byron who had been much impressed by them. His health, never robust, entered a final decline in the early 1830s and in spite of rallying to some extent in 1833, by the beginning of the following year he was clearly very ill. Coleridge died at Highgate on 25th July 1834."


The area around the library and church is known as the 'Cultural Triangle', a town enhancing project that comprises a series of historic landmarks of Ottery St Mary placed in the shape of a triangle in the town’s conservation area. The buildings and monument incorporated in the Cultural Triangle are worth visiting as part of a guided tour given by the Information Office.

Ref - (visit link)

Type of Historic Marker: Information board Historical Marker Issuing Authority: Ottery St Mary Town Council Give your Rating: Age/Event Date: Not listed Related Website: Not listed

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