Product Description

This biography considers Coleridge as a man apart from his writings. Holmes' objective is to give an impression of what the poet was like in person and as a conversationalist. Holmes reveals him to be disorganized, slothful, neurotically anxious and overly dependent on others. The book won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. The author has also written "Shelley: The Persuit", which won the Somerset Maugham Award and a novel "Footsteps".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267305 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-23
• Released on: 1999-03-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"O God save meAfrom myself," wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1813, lying penniless in a sweat-soaked bed in a Bath inn, poisoned by opium, his literary career and personal life in shambles. It was one of the many dark nights of the soul that ColeridgeARomantic poet, critic, philosopher and one of the greatest conversationalists in the history of the English languageAwas to endure during his wayward, opium-enveloped later years, a period that Holmes meticulously traces in this long-anticipated follow-up to Coleridge: Early Visons 1772-1804, which appeared in 1989. Opening as Coleridge sets out for Malta in 1804 to join the wartime Civil Service and closing as the poet "slips into the dark" in the Highgate estate of his final caretaker, the physician James Gillman, the book carefully traces the peregrinations, small triumphs and major tragedies that defined the second half of Coleridge's life: these included a bitter break with his oldest friend and collaborator, William Wordsworth, and the disintegration of both his marriage and his longstanding affair with Wordsworth's sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson. Dogged by addiction, poverty and despair, accused of plagiarism, vilified by his former proteg?, William Hazlitt, and damned in the public press, Coleridge nevertheless remained prolific to the end, his reputation salvaged, in part, by Shelley, Keats and Byron, who saw him as the flawed father of Romanticism. Through generous quotations and ingenious analyses of Coleridge's writing, Holmes conveys not just the minutiae of the poet's life and writing but the tone and texture of even his most informal table talk, which de Quincey once likened to "some great river... traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive." In Holmes's majesterial chronicle, that river of words and ideas is virtually audible. 16 pages of b&w illustrations. (Apr.) FYI: Pantheon is simultaneously reprinting Coleridge: Early Visons 1772-1804 ($17 paper 432p ISBN 0-375-70540-6).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A winner of the Whitbread Prize for biography, this first of what will be a two-volume biography of Coleridge is superb. Holmes ( Footsteps, LJ 9/15/85; Shelly, LJ 5/15/75) has indeed "taken Coleridge into the open air." By brushing aside the givens of critical opinion without dismissing them and making extensive use of the letters and notebooks, a fresher Coleridge emerges. It is still the Coleridge with drug and financial problems, a tendency toward plagiarism and murky thought, the dreaming schemer, but he somehow comes out of this account more a fascinating character than a literary relic. The British rave-ish reviews are well deserved, as this work promises to become a standard. The one thing Holmes tends to gloss over is Coleridge's philosophical background, but this background is well covered elswhere, and Holmes hints that he may do more in Volume 2. Definitely buy this title over Stephen Weissman's His Brother's Keeper: A Psychobiography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( LJ 1/90).
- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Poet, journalist, letter-writer, critic, autobiographer, lecturer, folklorist, philosopher: when a man's genius is so amorphous and protean, how can any one biographer hope to encompass it? Yet, miraculously, in this first of two volumes, Richard Holmes has succeeded in doing so. . . . His masterly book leaves one feeling that, if there were a single literary giant of the past, other than Shakespeare, whom one was permitted to meet, then Coleridge would be the choice."
--Francis King, Evening Standard (London)

"The best literary biography since Ellmann's Oscar Wilde."
--John Mortimer, Sunday Times (London)

"Dazzling. . . . Here is Coleridge, attractive and repellant, with all his seductive contradictions: the young man with his mountainous aspirations, his dreaminess . . . yammering poetry, pounding the turnpikes, dominating drawing-rooms; the foaming genius, messy with metaphysical secretions and uncontrollable speculations. Holmes has not merely reinterpreted Coleridge, he has re-created him, and his biography has the aura of fiction, the shimmer of an authentic portrait. [This is] a biography like few I have ever read."
--James Wood, The Guardian (London) -- Review

Customer Reviews

A wonderful biography - long-awaited sequel
If you think Coleridge was finished by 1804, think again. True, all his great poems had been written but an astonishing life of triumph and tragi-comedy lay ahead. "Coleridge, Darker Reflections" is the long-awaited second half of this award-winning biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It covers the period 1804-1834 - a time when, according to popular belief, Coleridge's fertile imagination had dried up and he faced a slippery slide to an opium-induced decline. But not according to the author Richard Holmes, described as "Our best post-war biographer". He is a superb story teller and unlike so many biographers before him, deeply in touch with his subject. His first volume, "Coleridge Early Visions" introduced the poet to a new generation of admirers (including myself who was fired into writing a play for children about the poet's early magical years). This wonderful book will surely establish STC as a troubled but gigantic genius of the 19th century. Holme's own genius is to show us Coleridge the man. "Always on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy" said Holmes at the London book launch this week (21st October 1998) Holmes has worked assiduously through STC's vast notebooks. Like his namesake, Sherlock, the author clearly enjoys the detection element of biography. His is a personal search for the man, his millieu and his place. Holmes retraces STC's footsteps around England - echoing the desperate perambulations of the wandering poet. Holmes tells this astonishing story at a cracking pace - he has the thriller-writer's gift for making you turn the page. We follow STC through his Malta years - a wonderful evocation of Coleridge's chaotic life. The years of tragic opium decline in London are brought to life (I challenge you not to cry) - and yet there are so many triumphs - the marvellous late poems that Holmes has championed in an earlier collection, the seminal lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge the thinker and radical, Coleridge the father (not a very good one), the years of relative happiness in Highgate where we find Coleridge the guru. Above all is Coleridge the man. Holmes as only the greatest biographers can, brings his subject completely to life and shows us why Coleridge was such a tour de force in the Romantic movement and why Byron called Wordsworth "a fixed star" but Coleridge "a meteor". There is so much to love in this book - it is hard to know what to recommend. If you have never read a biography before, make this your first. If you think you are familiar with the life of STC, this book, so full of new discoveries and insights, will make you reassess the poet. Holmes is clearly enamoured of his subject. It is a book that will make you laugh out loud in places. You will see exactly why Charles Lamb said of his great friend "He is an archangel, damaged."

Excellent, but
This treatment of Coleridge's early life is excellent in scope & detail; in fact, it won a prize. But its strength-- objectivity-- is its weakness. Holmes expresses no imaginitive sympathy for his subject. He writes about Romanticism with the detatchment of an entymologist examining a butterfly. And while he treats Coleridge's pathology in an overtly psychological manner, he fails to identify the pathologies he describes -- like a doctor who collects symptoms without making a diagnosis.

The result is an outstanding example of conventional literary biography, but one that is insensitive to growth, imagination, and mind in the act of making the mind -- or why Coleridge was passionate about them. Those interested in these must seek elsewhere, but this volume remains a good place to learn the facts of Coleridge's life, despite its dry prose.

How does Richard Holmes do it?
Somehow Holmes produces scholarly biographies that make compulsive reading. He never fictionalizes or puts thoughts in his subjects' heads that he has no authority for - and yet he keeps us turning those pages. Is it the subjects he choses? Shelley and Coleridge both had strongly "plotted" lives. Coleridge married the sister of Southey's wife and fell in love with the sister of Wordsworth's wife. I liked his comment on Coleridge's father's predecessor in the the benefice of St Mary's Ottery.