Poetry and Politics: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Jesus College

Open from 11am to 4pm daily, a new exhibition examines the time that Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent at Jesus College.

Coleridge was a poet and philosopher, critic and visionary, and one of Jesus's most famous students. He arrived at Jesus in 1791, and left three years later without receiving a degree. Those three years, though, were a foundation for his poetry, his thinking, and his often complicated utopian politics.

Coleridge is deeply involved with the College's legacies of slavery. While at Jesus, he was awarded the University's Browne Medal for a Greek poem denouncing the translatlantic slave system; he was also the recipient of a Rustat Scholarship, and later in life would come to endorse some of the pseudo-scientific racist ideas of his day.

This exhibition explores the intellectual and common life of the College during Coleridge's time here, and the traces that his undergraduate studies left on his later life (and afterlives).