"The Ancient Mariner," his greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" was written, or Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel." He was in the prime of life, or what should have been the prime of life--forty years old--when Byron burst into sudden fame with the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812; he was forty-six when Keats published "Endymion"; he was fifty-one when Shelley was drowned.
And of all this gifted company Coleridge, though not the strongest character or the most prolific poet, was the profoundest intellect and the _most originative poetic spirit_.
There was little hint, however, of future greatness or of fellowship with great names in his birth and early circumstances.

His father was a country clergyman and schoolmaster in the village of Ottery St.Mary, in Devonshire, a simple-hearted unworldly man, full of curious learning and not very attentive to practical affairs.

His mother managed the household and brought up the children.

Both his parents were of simple West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery St.Mary.Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for rearing his large family.

Coleridge tells us that his father "had so little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born at Ottery St.Mary, October 21, 1772.
The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early childhood.