Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203696 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
This is the concluding volume of Holmes's definitive and thrilling biography of ST Coleridge. The book reads as a brilliant evocation of the Romantic age when a rigorous literary discourse was alive in England. Coleridge sat at the helm, a mad, loveable genius whose only life-long love affair was with opium. Holmes charts STC's oscillation between narcotic oblivion and the nightmare visions of withdrawal with the skill of a novelist. STC's inability to deal with the responsibilities of parenthood and his own finances left him in a state of constant poverty and guilt. Despite these afflictions, he managed to produce some of the finest poetry and philosophical prose in history. Financially and emotionally sustained by the love and loyalty of friends, every person he met fell under the spell, as de Quincey puts it, of "the greatest man that has ever appeared." At the heart of the story lies the volatile relationship with Wordsworth who plays McCartney to Coleridge's Lennon. Wordsworth comes across as an anally retentive, vain, ambitious operator who finally betrays Coleridge's love and friendship. The book is packed with quotes, which keeps the reader constantly close to the subject, and Holmes digs out detail that animates our hero at every turn. You'll find sex, drugs and poetry and a cast of stars (Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, de Quincey, Southey, Carlyle, JS Mill) who revolve around Coleridge and his unfathomable mind. --Hannah Griffiths

Synopsis
Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge transforms our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' forever. Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of these pages as the brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking poet of genius that he was. This second volume covers the last 30 years of Coleridge's career (1804-1834) during which he travelled restlessly through the Mediterranean, returned to his old haunts in the Lake District and the West Country, and finally settled in Highgate. It was a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage broke up, his opium addiction increased, he quarrelled with Wordsworth, his own son Hartley Coleridge (a gifted poet himself) became an alcoholic. And after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge re-emerged on the literary scene as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author.

Customer Reviews

Superb biography
Richard Holmes' marvellous book is the sequel to his Coleridge: Early Visions. For fifteen years, he has been constantly engaged with Coleridge's ideas, poems, plays and philosophical writings. He traces Coleridge's lifelong dialogues with the greatest of English poets, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, and also with the finest German writers, Goethe and Schiller.

Coleridge was that rare creature, a superb poet who could also grapple with the deepest of philosophers. He could brilliantly summarise the two basic possible lines in philosophy: "The difference between Aristotle and Plato is that which will remain as long as we are men and there is any difference between man and man in point of opinion. Plato, with Pythagoras before him, had conceived that the phenomenon or outside appearance, all that we call thing or matter, is but as it were a language by which the invisible (that which is not the object of our senses) communicates its existence to our finite beings ... Aristotle, on the contrary, affirmed that all our knowledge had begun in experience, had begun through the senses, and that from the senses only we could take our notions of reality ... It was the first way in which, plainly and distinctly, two opposite systems were placed before the mind of the world."

Although Coleridge adhered to Platonism, he honestly admitted, "All these poetico-philosophical Arguments strike and shatter themselves into froth against that stubborn rock, the fact of Consciousness, or rather its dependence on the body."

Like other notable literary biographies - one thinks of Holmes' earlier one of Shelley, Richard Ellman's of Oscar Wilde, Peter Ackroyd's of Charles Dickens, Tim Hilton's of John Ruskin, E. P. Thompson's of William Morris, and Leon Edel's of Henry James - this wonderful book arouses our enthusiasm for literature. It shows us again how a great writer's work can help us both to enjoy and to make sense of the world.

Makes excellent reading even for those who aren't into poets
Richard Holmes is a wonderful biographer. He writes as if he is talking to the reader. I read this book, before reading the earlier one. Nevertheless, this book reads well by itself and makes the reader want to find out more about the man. I knew very little about Coleridge before reading this book. Apart from struggling with the Ancient Mariner as a 15 year old! After reading Holmes, I bought his earlier book, an audio-tape of poems and a selected collection of poetry. Richard Holmes opened a door for me. He can do the same for you.

Review of Holmes' Book by a Fellow Coleridge Biographer
As a spectacularly brilliant but moody young man in his twenties, Coleridge already was a first-rate writer, an erudite thinker, a dedicated diarist, an impressive scholar, a spellbinding conversationalist, a charismatic public speaker, an inspiring religious preacher, a promising dramatist, an accomplished journalist and the author of at least two masterpieces which have stood the test of time (KUBLA KHAN and THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER). But unfortunately for Coleridge (and for posterity), he also was in the process of becoming an opium-addicted, alcohol dependent manic depressive with a "fatal attraction" to William Wordsworth. Richard Holmes accurately describes that fatal attraction and peculiar attachment to Wordsworth with narrative skill in his well-written, two volume biography. But he bends over backwards not to analyze the conscious and unconscious basis of Coleridge's self-destructiveness. While such conjectural restraint may be commendable as a general principle of biography, it comes at too high a price if the subject is someone like Coleridge (or other "confessional poets" like Sylvia Plath or Ann Sexton)--who actually happens to be actively suffering from one or more major mental illnesses. Although modern psychiatric diagnostic terminology did not exist in Coleridge's day, the conditions existed. From Holmes' account, there is no doubt that many of the physicians who treated Coleridge in his later years recognized the fact that he was suffering from substance abuse and a mood disorder. As a result of his decision to avoid pathologizing his subject by playing amateur psychiatrist, Holmes also avoids engaging in any in-depth discussion of the mercurial moods and mysterious motives which could help shed light on Coleridge's otherwise baffling attachment to Wordsworth. Not only does Holmes ignore Coleridge's manic depression and its downwardly spiralling reciprocal interaction with drugs and alcohol, he also avoids examining Coleridge's latent homosexuality: the compulsive brother hunger and neurotic guilt that drove him into his downwardly spiralling friendship with Wordsworth. Richard Holmes' two volume biography is an excellent study of Coleridge's mind as reflected through the prisms of his poetry, letters and diaries. But it fails to explore Coleridge's unconscious mind and leaves us still searching for answers. Stephen M. Weissman,M.D. Author of HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER: A PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1985)