Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804 [Paperback]

Richard Holmes (Author)

Book Description

Series: Coleridge | Publication Date: March 23, 1999

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge's poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (March 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375705406
• ISBN-13: 978-0375705403
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #642,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Holmes is Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia. His is a Fellow of the British Academy, has honorary doctorates from UEA and the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded an OBE in 1992. His first book, 'Shelley: The Pursuit', won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974. 'Coleridge: Early Visions' won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and 'Dr Johnson & Mr Savage' won the James Tait Black Prize. 'Coleridge: Darker Reflections' won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. He has published two studies of European biography, 'Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer' in 1985, and 'Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer' in 2000.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful biography - long-awaited sequel, October 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804 (Paperback)

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."

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, but, September 14, 2006

By 

James Hercules Sutton (Des Moines, IA (USA)) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804 (Paperback)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bringing Coleridge to Life, March 12, 2005

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G. Messersmith "calliopemuse" (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coleridge: Early Visions (Hardcover)

This is the Coleridge I thought I knew through his poetry. Holmes brings him to life in this first volume of Coleridge's early years. The book makes you wish you had known Coleridge personally and shared in his life. His life is complex and challenging and so it must have been for Holmes to research and write Coleridge's life. In fact, Holmes seems to have a special knowledge into the life of one of the greatest poets of the English language. This book gave me insights into Coleridge's works I had not had before. If you want to learn more about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his life and his works, this is the book to read.