Amazon.com Review
Richard Holmes concluded his
first, magisterial volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge with an image of his hero--a not-yet-ancient mariner--departing for the Continent on the
Speedwell. The poet was, at this point, an unhappy man. In 1804 his marriage was in a shambles, his deeply Romantic rapport with William Wordsworth was on the wane, and he seemed no closer to shaking off his devastating opium addiction. Settling into his cramped berth with his books, lemons, shaving gear, and portable inkstand, he must have hoped for smoother sailing, in every sense of the phrase. But it's clear from the very beginning of
Coleridge: Darker Reflections that English literature's greatest polymath had a turbulent time ahead of him. After an unlikely interval as a Maltese civil servant, Coleridge returned to England in 1806. He was in the latest phase of a rather flamboyant depression, which Holmes describes with typical acuity:
He was living out what many people experience, in the dark disorder of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface and with astonishing even alarming candour that many of his friends found unendurable or simply ludicrous. Moreover he continued to write about it, to witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the understanding of these struggles, not (like Wordsworth perhaps) in their solution.
Certainly Coleridge never suffered from a shortage of struggles. On the heels of his return he had an (initially) happy reunion with Wordsworth, helping his comrade-in-arms to knock
The Prelude into shape. Yet this dicey ménage--which also included Coleridge's supreme love object, Sara Hutchinson--soon fell to pieces again. (By 1812 he would be denouncing Wordsworth in print as his "bitterest Calumniator.")
Now the poet veered off into publishing his own newspaper, The Friend, followed by a stint as a formidable public lecturer. In all of these ventures, he displayed his peculiar, rapid-fire brilliance. Still, just about every episode in Holmes's vast chronicle seems to end with a similar dying fall: "Coleridge took a deep breath, opened his laudanum decanter, and collapsed." Crisis follows upon crisis, opium binge upon opium binge--and by the time the poet begins his massive Biographia Literaria in 1815, you wonder at the fact that he's still alive and kicking.
The capstone of Coleridge's later years, the Biographia functioned as a confessional, autobiography, and omnium-gatherum of everything he had thought about in the preceding decades. "In all this," Holmes writes, "the Biographia has an acute psychological interest, and its shape-shifting and paradoxes, its intimacy and disguises, its frankness and its fraudulence, make up a genuine literary self-portrait. Anything less complicated, less fascinating and less maddening, would really not be Coleridge at all." The same might be said of Darker Reflections itself (minus the fraudulence, of course). The author has crammed an unbelievable amount of detail into his magnificent, double-barreled portrait, and expertly mimicked the dizzy, stop-and-start rhythms of his subject's life. But anything less complicated--and less endowed with authorial sympathy and tact--would really not be Richard Holmes at all. --James Marcus
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).
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