Sara Coleridge the "Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge", and the Introduction to the "Biographia Literaria". In 1850, Coleridge discovered a lump in her breast. Her physician decided not to operate, prescribing cod liver oil and opium. Knowing there was no cure, she waited for the disease to take its course. "I live in constant fear," Coleridge wrote, "like the Ancient Mariner with the Albatross hung about his neck, I have a weight always upon me." Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing." The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". The term itself was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem" (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well. The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge's finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, "With "Dejection", "The Ancient Mariner", and "Kubla Khan", "Frost at Midnight" shows Coleridge at his most impressive." They are also among his most influential poems, as