Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #488435 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Synopsis
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.

From the Publisher
some excerpts from the British reviews:
‘Coleridge lives and talks and loves… in these pages as never before.’ MICHAEL FOOT, Independent

‘A deeply moving life of a troubled genius. Holmes has fashioned a compelling narrative which inspires considerable affection and respect for Coleridge. This stimulating book is one of the most enjoyable biographies I have read.’ MICHAEL SHELDEN, Daily Telegraph

‘If Coleridge does not leap out of these pages – brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking – and invade your imagination (as he has done mine), then I have failed to do him justice’ Richard Holmes has pursued his subject from the archives of the British Museum to the potholes of Devon and the peaks of the Hartz Mountains. This first (Whitbread prize-winning) volume of his biography transforms our view of the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’, best friend to Wordsworth, forever. Holmes brings back to life not only Coleridge’s poetry and his encyclopaedic thought, but also all his creative energy and physical presence, the very sound of his voice, his fantastic mixture of stormy ebullience and anxious self-doubt. The Romantic writer who emerges is an unforgettably vivid and unexpected figure. Coleridge: Early Visions offers a true portrait of unfolding genius, one that will echo in your mind, long after closing the book.

‘As an act of biographical re-creation, with the ghost of Coleridge hovering over the pages it seems to me nothing short of a masterpiece.’ IAN THOMPSON, Listener

‘Beautifully written and sympathetic… Holmes’ book adds to our sense of Coleridge’s greatnes, is informed by love and humour as well as research; and rises to a climax of narrative writing in the last chapters, in which you feel he has reached into the soul of his subject as every biographer hopes to, but few actually do.’ CLAIRE TOMALIN, Observer

‘Dazzling… Holmes has not merely reinterpreted Coleridge; he has recreated him, and his biography has the aura of fiction, the shimmer of an authentic portrait… a biography like few I have ever read.’ JAMES WOOD, Guardian

‘The first volume makes one impatient for the second. Holmes writes with wry empathy and sure scholarship of his wayward hero.’ GEORGE STEINER, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

Customer Reviews

Deep and moving example of the finest kind of biography
I read this book after seeing the film Pandaemonium (which deals with a highly fictionalised account of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge) at the London Film Festival in November 2000. To find more inspiration and excitement from the facts of Coleridge's life, as Holmes excitingly lays them out, than from a film was a revelation, but that is what happened.

Holmes writes beautifully and with enormous sympathy for a man who made a fantastic first impression on everyone he met through his brilliance, his lightning way with words and the effulgence of his personality, but whose torments led him to alienate his closest companions and friends; a man who despite being a gifted poet was personally happier in 'normal' jobs-- as a soldier, a journalist, a government official-- than he ever was as an 'artist'. At the end of this first volume Coleridge is near death in his early thirties, has written almost all of his major poetry, although not the journalism and criticism of his later life which in some ways made a greater mark on the literary world, and Holmes thoughtfully speculates in an afterword, as to subsequent generations' view had he died young like his near-contemporaries Keats and Shelley. (Kind of like the contrast between how we view Dean and Brando...) This (along with its companion volume) is a beautifully written biography that will be given to many of my friends this Christmas.