I have today announced on our social media outlets the ending of the Coleridge Memorial Trust’s activities and existence as an organisation.

I will include the wording of the announcement at the end of this post. The farewell is a celebration of our work and, on a personal level, a fond goodbye to my management of our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I am adding to that fondness and celebration here by posting a TextArt sequence based on STC’s famous comment on poetry, taken from the whole quote:

Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.

For those familiar with the working of Text Art, and certainly the approach through which I explore found poetry/text, using the phrase ‘the best words in the best order’ has an extra significance in being transitioned through a sequence,

Thank You and Farewell

The Coleridge Memorial Project began life in 2009 as a working party of the Ottery St Mary Heritage Society designed to raise local and wider appreciation of the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially the fact he was a native of our town Ottery St Mary, Devon, UK, and a pupil at the original King’s School. The Coleridge Memorial Project – now CM Trust – was incorporated as a separate not-for-profit body in April 2010.

Our lifelong project to create a Samuel Taylor Coleridge Memorial Statue was unveiled on the 21st of October, 2022 – the anniversary of STC’s 250th birthday – at St Mary’s Church in Ottery St Mary, the town of his birth.

At yesterday’s CMT meeting, it was agreed that having achieved the Trust’s main objective to bring a STC memorial statue to Ottery, we would conclude our business as stated in the following resolution:

This meeting, called under the provisions set out in section 12 of the Coleridge Memorial Trust’s current constitution, agrees to wind up the affairs of the Trust with immediate effect. Any excess funds and other assets of the Trust remaining after all accounts have been settled, will be transferred to the Ottery St Mary Heritage Society, on condition that any funds will be ring fenced for future use in support of Coleridge memorial work in Ottery St Mary.

This note is to convey that resolution but also thank all of those who have supported our work over the years, especially during our fundraising campaigns for the memorial statue, and including those for the Coleridge Poetry Stones at the Land of Canaan, OSM.

I have managed the social media side of promoting the work of the CMT, contributing information related to this over the years, but also more generally about the life and work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

On behalf of the CMT I also then want to thank all of those who have followed us here, liked and commented on our posts, and offered encouragement and insights. This especially goes out to those who supported and promoted our Crowdfunder campaign, and all of those who made donations.

The response in particular to the realisation of our memorial statue project was wonderful!

The Crowdfunder campaign was personally a delightful learning curve, my posting a wide range of STC related images and commentaries, but especially quotes from my reading of  ANIMA POETÆ from the unpublished note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. What a Romantic genius!

~ Mike Ferguson