FAMOUS POET WAS FAILED CIVIL SERVANT.

The deft hand of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in compiling famous prose was not apparent when it came to his role as a civil servant.In fact, Coleridge, from Ottery St Mary, and one of the nation's most-revered poets, was a devious and incompetent administrator during his spell as a civil servant in Malta, shortly before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, it has been disclosed.

The revelation follows two years of painstaking work, helped by archives from the period by university professor Barry Hough to mark the 235th anniversary of the poet's birth.

He set out to make public the little-known fact that while in Malta in the post as the British Government's Public Servant, Coleridge's time there was blighted by incompetence and ineffectiveness. In 1804-5 his ability to run things in the far-off Mediterranean has been called into question.

Professor Hough and colleagues discovered the archives, hitherto thought to have been destroyed in the 1870s, which painted an illuminating picture of the poet's time there.