The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. He was, constitutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him, and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon, by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the English mind. Hence Coleridge's thirst for the new lore of the German philosophy, which seemed to him to supply a want in the Intellectualism of his native country.
In spite of this, Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge over himself in "Dejection".
Coleridge, in choosing to follow Wordsworth to the Lake District in preference to remaining at Nether Stowey with Poole, had experienced some contrition, for Poole, after all, was a more profound appreciator of his many-sidedness and the Cervantean vein of his character than Wordsworth, who appreciated Coleridge only from that side of him which resembled himself.
Tom Poole regretted, like others, that Coleridge had no permanent calling, or could not fix upon an undertaking worthy of his powers. Poole looked upon Coleridge's devotion to journalism while he was engaged upon the "Morning Post" as a "turning aside of his powers from higher ends" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 2), and wished him to give himself up to something more "permanently" useful to society ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 3). The correspondence of Coleridge and Poole from 1800 onwards, often turns upon the subject ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 66, 68, 122, 177, 187, 205, 226, 247); and Coleridge admitted a "distracting manifoldness" in his objects and attainments ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122). "You," said Coleridge, "are nobly employed--most worthy of you. "You" are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122).