Coleridge: Early Visions

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful biography - long-awaited sequel
Review: 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."

Rating:
Summary: How does Richard Holmes do it?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Well-researched, tasteful modern biography
Review: The general reader and the scholar should enjoy this book. Holmes does set Coleridge talking.

Don't miss Owen Barfield's WHAT COLERIDGE THOUGHT if you want to explore the matephysician.