Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804

Coleridge #1

by Richard Holmes

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.

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.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, History, Romanticism, Literature, Philosophy

448 pages, Paperback

First published May 23, 1990

About the author

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Biographer Richard Holmes was born in London, England on 5 November 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge. His first book, Shelley:The Pursuit, was published in 1974 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. The first volume of his biography of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, was published in 1989 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993), an account of Johnson's undocumented friendship with the notorious poet Richard Savage, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) in 1993. The second volume of his study of Coleridge, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, was published in 1998. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Heinemann Award and was shortlisted for the first Samuel Johnson Prize awarded in 1999.

Richard Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), continues the exploration of his own highly original biographical method that he first wrote about in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985). He is also editor of a new series of editions of classic English biographies that includes work by Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and William Godwin.

His latest book, The Age of Wonder (2008), is an examination of the life and work of the scientists of the Romantic age who laid the foundations of modern science. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was awarded an honorary Litt.D. in 2000 by the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed Professor of Biographical Studies in September 2001.

Reviews

[Geoff]

Holmes wrote what I consider to be possibly the greatest literary bio ever written, Shelley The Pursuit* (which should certainly, without a doubt be a member of your list of "100 books to eat and defecate before you lie in the grave for dark eternity" or whathaveyoulist, in other words READ IT NOW, so a .2. part bio of Coleridge, that laudanum and opium ingesting mystic poetry maker is hard to resist, for readers suchlike myself...



*do I need, once again, to reiterate the magical triptych? Holmes' Shelley, Boyd's Nabokov (vls. Un & Deux), Ellmann's Joyce.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me nearly three months to finish but I loved every minute. Lyrical, insightful, balanced and masterly, it unfolds the character of the extraordinary writer. It also explains the myth of Coleridge, his character and larger than life personality, his potential. The range of sources from correspondence to notebooks to journalism is huge, but perfectly used. The best literary biography I’ve read.

[Brian Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

One day in 2001, I wandered into the used bookshop in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, to search for a book to read to divert me from my MA thesis. I found this book and immediately clutched it. While I may have been reading, watching, and writing about Shakespeare, I could easily have been doing the same for the English Romantics. I hadn't really re-engaged with them for a few years, but I knew that I could easily plunge into a biography of Coleridge. They had obsessed me since Sophomore year of high school.

I have now read this book three times in those 17 years. It turned me onto Richard Holmes, who is my favorite literary biographer of all time, but it also retrained my mind to reconsider the depths of Coleridge.

Wordsworth had long held the reputation as the "sole" founder of Romanticism, which is a nice tidy lie perfectly cloaked in the self-mystifying and individualistic mythos of Romanticism, but that's like one of the Beatles claiming they wrote all the songs. Wordsworth and Coleridge worked very closely between 1797-1798 to create Lyrical Ballads, so much so that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" should actually read "Story by WW" and "Script by STC". Wordsworth had many of the plot points, but Coleridge wrote all the words. When it comes to the famous definition that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...recollected in tranquility", Coleridge encapsulated that phrase for the duo even though it is always assumed it was Wordsworth. It's like WW and STC are the Lennon/McCartney of poetry, where they can't even remember who wrote some of the best lines sometimes. And yes, there was a Yoko, but that's why you have to read the book.

This working relationship encapsulates Coleridge in a nutshell: great when inspired but never good at the organizing. His best poetry was (more or less) published, and most of it early. Due to his descent into harrowing opium addiction, his work was always tenuous or impossible to complete. He can be a maddening, frustrating subject for biography, hence why most go for Wordsworth or a seedier story between the Shelleys and Byron, or the tragedy of Keats.

Coleridge's tragedy, as Holmes points out in his Postscript, is that he lived too long. Yet, ironically, he was always like a child, full of open eyed and mouthed wonder (literally), looking at the world in all its tiny detail. But his notebooks and letters are the great unpublished treasures of literature and reveal a man that the public never knew: constantly fascinating, often frustrating, always flawed, occasionally bursting into brilliance. I don't want to spoil too much, but his family life - both childhood and marital - were very complicated but your heart will melt when you read of his relationship with his son Hartley.

Essential for all interested in the Romantics and Coleridge and Wordsworth or all at once. You will find the book hard to put down, like the mystical stream Coleridge always pictured in his head. Holmes reads like a travel guide, which is what he does, because his practice is to travel to all the major areas where the poet traveled. It shows. You feel you are there from Ottery to Bristol to Nethew Stowey to Great Hall to all of the remainder of his wanderings. But you also feel like you are in his mind due to the generous use of private writing to supplement all of the research. One of the treasures of my library.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It might have helped my enjoyment of Richard Holmes’s book if I were a great lover of Coleridge’s poetry. Some of it I like well enough, but most poetry I don’t care for as a general rule. Coleridge’s prose (from his Biographia Literaria and his correspondence) is wonderful, however, and there’s plenty of that in here to satisfy. The writing of letters in the 18th and 19th century was a true art form.

I know I should have more to say here, but I don’t just now. Frankly, I was exhausted by this book. I don’t know that I’ll get to the second volume anytime soon. Holmes, as always, does a terrific job of putting you there, as they say, but this is by no means light reading and it rather confirms my fogeyish opinion that no books should be longer than 300 pages, if it can possibly be helped.

[Fran]

themes:
*cheese
*coleridge shitting himself
*emotional terrorism
*misogyny (to cope)
*commie to smug heterodox liberal pipeline
*nature
*opium

tl;dr I knew Coleridge's personal life was fucked up but wow. His transformation into average Reddit poet hit me like a stack of bricks halfway through this. He just became a horrible person like. overnight! what the fuck! i miss when he just got sad because his cheese got taken away ; _ ;

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Holmes has written several of my favorite biographies - and I've read hundreds. Holmes has a remarkable gift for conveying another's, particularly a writer's, experience of himself in the world he inhabited, his effort to know and fashion himself and the world, to become the writer he felt destined to become. I'm dazzled by the clarity of the design of his books, his selection of just the right biographical detail, the presentation of context at just the right level of detail, the clarity, even beauty of his prose.

His biography of Shelly (Shelly: The Pursuit) initiated my passion for great literary biography, and his study of Coleridge only convinces me that we live in an "age of great biography" and that Holmes counts among the luminaries of the age - to borrow from Doris Lessing.

[Jae · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has taken me a time to read but I have enjoyed every minute. Holmes brought Coleridge to life for me. It is thoroughly researched and Holmes uses Coleridge's writings so well. But I never lost sight of the man! As Virginia Woolf wrote :"he seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended."

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm doing a deep dive into Coleridge right now, and have come to the two volumes of the Holmes biography. What a gift. I had read Holmes book on the Romantics' discovery of science when it first came out, and enjoyed it, so bought these two books.

Holmes has great sympathy for his subject, although Coleridge was a difficult person. People loved him passionately, and then turned against him. He did extraordinary work, then had long periods of laziness. Even inanition brought on by his opium addiction. This volume takes him half way through his life, when he has written most of his famous poems (I've noticed that the next volume is 75% longer! Wow. what will be in it?).

And Holmes does a great reading of the poems. I have read the big ones -- "The Ancient Mariner," of course, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Frost at MIdnight," etc., but had probably missed the fundamental weirdness of them all. For instance, here's a sentence in the context of Holmes's discussion about the differences between Coleridge and Wordsworth -- "... these psychic visions [in C's poems], with their temendous summonings of traditional folklore and Romantic psychopathology, would certainly have unbalanced the rural plain-style to which Wordsworth had committed ..." And here on the sexual tension in "Christabel," "though action is constantly threatened, the only true movement is purely thematic: the awakening of sexual feelings, the arrival of spring, the daemonic forces of the green forest entering the dark, oppressive castle ..." That's wonderful! And puts words to my unformed feelings about the poem! Geraldine is the heart of the forest, Christabel's true mother, and she rises out of the tree to make love with Christabel, even to tempt her father. But we're not sure she's good or bad! If Coleridge had finished the poem, maybe we'd know. But, as Holmes makes clear, he couldn't finish the poem because he didn't know himself. Damn, but this is great stuff!

Now Holmes still hasn't brought me around to Coleridge as metaphysician, Christian philosopher, but I will certainly go along for the next volume to see if some of that difficult stuff opens up for me.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intricate and sympathetic account of Coleridge's life and the prevailing social conditions, Holmes in both his Coleridge biographies paints a captivating portrait of the Sage of Highgate through everything from earlier biographies, primary documentation, to even anecdotes recorded in the notebooks of Coleridge and his friends.

Coleridge is one of the most under-read and misunderstood poets of the Romantic era. Known primarily for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," his struggle with the rise of Wordsworthian poetics, the disastrous result of the French Revolution, and his worsening opium addiction are all accurately and dutifully handled by Holmes in both this book and its companion volume. A recommended read, to be sure, Holmes' style is characteristic of the recent changes in biography, especially when dealing with prominent (or not so prominent!) literary or historical figures; his style and flow are complimentary to all readers. Though the two volumes together amount to about 1,000 pages, the read is quick and fun. Great for those who wish to bulk up on their literary figures, and their influences.

[Marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful biography of a poet I thought I knew. Holmes' scholarly and sensitive account of Coleridge's life up to its halfway point --32--covers his stormy early life, his erratic youth and his important friendships with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and many others. Holmes is very good on the development of Coleridge as a poet,but his insights on Coleridge as journalist, radical and political commentator were a revelation. He is a sympathetic biographer with a sense of humor. His love of his subject shines through, yet he isn't blind to Coleridge's many personal failings, notably his failure as a husband and his weakness for drugs. I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever read a poem by Coleridge and imagined they understood it. Holmes has sent me back to the poems--and to the autobiographical writings--which I am reading with fresh eyes.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The two volumes of Holmes's biography of Coleridge run to nearly 1,000 well-filled pages, not counting the copious notes. It's an enchanting journey for the reader interested in grasping the mind and life of this protean genius.

I extract a quote from Kathleen Coburn's Experience into Thought: Perspectives in the Coleridge Notebooks that succinctly outlines the scope of this vast intellectual and artistic project, driven by unbridled curiosity, extraordinary powers of observation and a profound respect for the intelligence of life.

There are therefore many Coleridges. (...) First the poet (but known chiefly for only three miraculous poems and about three others); then the literary critic, without whom the history of English literary criticism as we know it is inconceivable; the critic of science, the ‘so-so chemist’ as he called himself, whose rôle in sharing the struggle of Davy and others over the concepts and terminology of modern chemistry and biology is just beginning to be appreciated; the logician, whose hitherto unpublished Logic, edited by Professor Robin Jackson, is in the hands of the printers; the journalist, the top leader-writer of his day in the Morning Post and the Courier, whose three volumes of newspaper contributions will reappear any day now; the social and political critic, who wrote the first analysis in English of a post-war economic depression at the close of the Napoleonic wars, a work admired by Maynard Keynes; the psychologist, who grasped the notion of a subconscious mental life and of varying levels of consciousness, who coined the words psycho-analytical and psycho-somatic (as well as hundreds of other words now in our dictionaries), who anticipated the twentieth century on dreams; the educationist, who believed in cultivating the initiative in children and attacked the conventional negative controls by punishment; in theology the ‘higher critic,’ who ploughed methodically through dozens of the heavy German volumes of Eichhorn, Michaelis, and their ilk, and advocated an historical approach to Judaism and Christianity, denouncing what he called the ‘superstitious’ reading of the Scriptures; and one of the most influential of all Coleridges, the analyst of the church as both a spiritual and a temporal society, and of the obligations of both church and state to the national culture; and there is Coleridge the Englishman who was a determined ‘cosmopolite’ (to use another word he coined), who drew up a plan for a league of nations (admittedly with a proviso – although the Napoleonic wars were over–that no Frenchman be allowed to settle outside France or her colonies). And I see I had almost forgotten the philosopher! Yet he delivered possibly the first course of public lectures by an Englishman on the history of that subject – for money (not much money)."

Holmes succeeds where many other biographers fail. (I am thinking here of Rüdiger Safranski's deadpan portrait of Coleridge's contemporary Friedrich Hölderlin). The panoramic vision, the granular chronology, the extensive quotations from Coleridge's notebooks and letters make for an unusually vivid portrait that inspires enthusiasm and love for a brilliant and fallible man.

[Catherine Clarke]

The cover of Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes is promising Winner of the 1989 Whitbread prize and a hypnotic portrait of Coleridge that captures the archetypal romantic poet - large grey eyes, sensual thick lips and long dark hair. Holmes begins with an allusion to Coleridge's preface of Kubla Khan: "Anyone who presumes to write about Coleridge runs the grave risk of sounding like the person on business from Porlock, a prosaic interrupter of marvels." He outlines how critics have tended to concentrate on his faults: his opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political apostasy, his sexual fantasies or his radiation of mystic humbug and wants to empathetically portray his fascination as a man and a writer, his physical presence and to make his voice sound. The book covers the first thirty-one years of Coleridge's life (1772-1804), when he wrote his most memorable poetry. There is a further volume entitled Coleridge: Darker Reflections covering the second half of his life and Holmes draws on material from his Biographia Literaria written in 1814-15 and the writings of his circle of friends and acquaintances such as Hazlitt, Lamb, Southey, Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Holmes follows a traditional sequence what Holroyd terms the prison of chronology "through Coleridge's childhood, schooling at Christ's Hospital and Cambridge University, his time as a radical Pantisocrat and journalist, marriage to Sara Fricker, collaboration with Wordsworth, travel and study in Germany, relationship with Sara Hutchinson and ends with his departure for Malta. Holmes brings to light a number of recurring themes that give coherence to Coleridge's life story. He was a character of complexity and contradiction: a precocious child prodigy, a voracious reader and articulate conversationalist but insecure, plagued by self-doubt and anxiety. His chaotic approach to life follows patterns of exuberant, impetuous behaviour then remorseful, self-deprecating apologies until the next enthusiasm. Holmes likens him to a comet leaving a trail of unfinished projects among the brilliance with "dreamlike ascents, and whirling descents into the abyss." He conveys his movement and energy, relating anecdotes recorded by the Wordsworths of Coleridge walking forty miles, leaping over a gate and bounding down through a field of corn to meet them. Coleridge's letters and notebooks show his self-mocking humour: Holmes quotes from a note sent with the manuscript of The Nightingale to Wordsworth, (a ditty that perhaps parallels Coleridge's career):
In stale blank verse a subject stale
I send per post my Nightingale
And like an honest bard, dear Wordsworth,
You'll tell me what you think, my Bird's worth.
My own opinion's briefly this:
His bill he opens not amiss;
And when he has sung a stave or so,
His breast, & some small space below,
So throbs & swells, that you might swear
No vulgar music's working there.
So far, so good; but then, God rot him!
There's something falls off at his bottom!
To his wife he outlines his travel plans: Cornwall perhaps, - Ireland perhaps - perhaps Cumberland - possibly, Naples, or Madeira, or Teneriffe. I don't see any likelihood of our going to the Moon, or to either of the Planets, or fixed Stars - & that is all I can say.
Holmes also shares this disparaging style - Coleridge's father was appointed vicar of Ottery St Mary's "on the death of the incumbent, the Rev. Richard Holmes MA (a man who left no significant trace)." Coleridge often used images of birds and flight in his letters and notebooks - he describes himself as a "library-cormorant" and "I lay too many eggs in the hot sands -with ostrich carelessness." Holmes also uses these metaphors to describe his fluctuating schemes as a "flock of starlings" expanding and contracting at will and his "cuckoo-like invasion of other people's households."
Although the biography is structured around the chronological bones, the heart of the story is the evolution of Coleridge's poetry and Holmes shows how "the life of the writer is part of the text of his work", without diverting into critical analysis. He includes a series of stimulating footnotes that give another perspective or speculation which he likens to the marginal gloss of The Ancient Mariner. Despite Coleridge's lack of maritime experience, images of solitary, perilous sea-voyages or dreams and hallucinations recur frequently in his letters and notebooks. In 1801 during an imaginative crisis he describes his "Mind shipwrecked by storms of doubt, now mastless, rudderless, shattered - pulling in the dead swell of a dark and windless Sea." The origin of the much debated Kubla Khan and its fascinating preface is the central chapter. Although it wasn't published until 1816, Holmes suggests it was "one of his wonderful enchantments, known by heart, and chanted in private company", and shows how the geographical imagery of the poem lies in the topography of the Quantock Hills of Somerset - a hidden stream, and a thick wooded chasm that runs down to the sea. He alludes to this imagery in describing Coleridge as "a huge river; while Wordsworth was a mighty rock."
Hazlitt described Kubla Khan as "not a poem, but a musical composition", and Holroyd says letters and notebooks are "faint score sheets scripted by the dead from which the biographer tries to conjure sounds, rekindle life." Holmes allows Coleridge's voice to soar and sing from the pages "brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking." His enthusiasm for his subject is neither adulation nor denigration but an understanding of his life that gives meaning and sense to his writing. Holmes immerses himself in following "his journey through the world" to the extent of climbing on to the roof at Greta Hall, Keswick as Coleridge had done. Kipling described biography as "a higher form of cannibalism" but Holmes sensitively balances the private and public persona and does not fabricate possible hidden aspects of character. He gives the impression of a posthumous dialogue with his subject, "a handshake across time", that has not "added a new terror to death" but rather lets him live again.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughoughly researched, engagingly written biography. This is the first volume of a 2-volume work. So yeah, it goes pretty deep and detailed. Coleridge had so much influence beyond his writings, which is why I wanted to read more about him, and this biography does not disappoint. His friends and acquaintances are a veritable Who's Who of thought leaders in Britain. The author includes an extraordinarily useful list of "Coleridge's Circle" in the back of the volume, with mini biographies of people mentioned throughout the book. I wish more biographies included such lists.

I will read the second volume soon, and am looking forward to it.

[Alex Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Describes the first half of Coleridge's life, up to his Mediterranean trip of 1804 that many didn't think he would survive. Such was the intensity of his personality, and his severe struggles as a result. Holmes describes him sympathetically but fairly, and the weaving in and out of poetic quotes is gorgeous writing. Excited for part 2.

[Cliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Holmes has a way with telling the story of a person's life. You can't stop reading. This was part one, I've ordered part two to find out the exciting conclusion. I suppose the bad part of biographies is they all end the same way.

[Derek Sculthorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great biography of a complex and endlessly fascinating man. In two parts.

[Doris Raines · Rating 3 out of 5]

NICE BOOK.

[Vishvapani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coleridge can speak for himself. Holmes is a master.

[Kate]

Mentioned in Tristimania

[Antenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first volume in a mesmerising two-part biography, Richard Holmes provides a fascinating psychological portrait of Coleridge (STC) and an exploration of the Romantic movement which enabled me to see beyond its often cloying sentimentality, all set in the context of the looming threat of the French Revolution, and the growing divisions in Britain over the need for political and social reform.

A young man of remarkable mental and physical energy, making a name for himself as a poet, political journalist, lecturer, preacher and budding philosopher, Coleridge’s charisma and eloquence gained him many admirers and staunch friends, only too often later alienated by his unreliable, extreme behaviour. Part of the problem was that his evident ability brought too many offers of work for him to handle. Combined with a tendency to be continually distracted by his own projects, STC was at times overwhelmed into inaction, increasingly fuelled by opium and alcohol, the list of unfinished work becoming a tragi-comedy even to him.

In his defence, STC still managed to produce an impressive quantity of poetry and prose. Opium was the main painkiller available to a man who seemed to suffer more than his fair share of ill health, plus it probably enhanced STC’s creative abilities except when overdoses proved catastrophic. Even without opium, he displayed classic symptoms of bi-polarity: mood swings, acute self-absorption, tendency to be easily distracted into a new project when he should have been doing something else, problems with sleep and organising his affairs, uninhibited displays of emotion, and a “grandiosity” over each new scheme, generally conceived on too ambitious a scale to be feasible in reasonable time.

The neglect of his wife Sara is often shocking, as when he left her pregnant with a small child to undertake what turned out to be almost a year spent in Germany, learning the language and studying the literature. Even news of his newly born son’s death did not bring him home. Having insisted on marrying Sara even after his need for a wife to help him sustain a utopian community in America had fallen through, he found living with her intolerable. Perhaps he was running away from the guilt of being unable to provide a steady income (having at one point turned down part-ownership of a newspaper which would have secured his wealth) plus he felt a compulsive need to wander at night through the moonlit Quantocks with the Wordsworths, travel to some exotic foreign land, or the stimulus of London gatherings. His attempted escape to live with the Wordsworths in the Lake District could not prove the idyll of self-sufficiency or “pantisocracy” of which he had dreamed as a young man, for his obsessive passion for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law “Asra” was a source of destructive tension. STC’s long periods spent apart from the children he professed to love is also disturbing evidence of the selfishness so evident alongside his intense sensitivity: again, he may have been evading the painful knowledge that they were being supported largely by his brother-in-law, the poet Southey.

Despite his obvious faults, his verbal magic and self-deprecating wit still leap from the page to win us over. Also, he could be generous, as when he set aside his own work to edit publications for Wordsworth. The latter is portrayed as a controlling egoist, who did not flinch from removing STC’s poem “Christabel” from a joint work, thus establishing dominance in their working relationship, which STC for humbly accepted for too long.

Part 1 ends with Coleridge still in his thirties, sailing off to Malta under the protection of a naval convoy, convinced he would die abroad, his honour saved by the life insurance taken out to benefit his wife. Had he perished at that point, he would have been remembered as a talented poet, author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Ancient Mariner”, his reputation less tarnished than was to prove the case, although a large body of his work would never have been written.

[Anton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holmes is a first-rate writer, as well as a first-rate biographer, and is able to sustain a dramatic narrative through a densely detailed account of a very manic and brilliant life. Even more important for his subject, the precision and poetry of Holmes's own language allows him to capture the many emotional nuances of Coleridge's character, which very literally embodied the great themes of Romanticism: limitless aspiration, inevitable failure, and the struggle to establish an individual self (a struggle which in Coleridge's case was frequently desperate). In this regard he reads Coleridge's letters to friends and family extremely well, illuminating the poet's tumultuous relationships with Southey, his wife Sara, and Wordsworth among others. Refusing to simplify Coleridge's contradictions, Holmes reveals Coleridge as a husband and father as devoted as he was absent, as a writer whose monumental successes continue to be dwarfed only by what he himself and readers then and now expected he was further capable of, and as an impulsive individual whose passionate transgressions in life and art could be liberating, guilt-inducing, delusional, or brilliant, or all at the same time. Most impressive for me, Holmes maintains a sympathetic and psychologically insightful point of view without falling into speculation or hagiography.

[John Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but not as much as the literary establishment, which gave it a Whitbread Book of the Year award, apparently did.

The book describes the many political, philosophic, and social passions of Coleridge's youth, and shows him flitting from one to another in bursts of frenetic energy. So far as I know, this is an accurate depiction of Coleridge during his younger years.

However, the book does not really live up to its subtitle of "Early Visions." the visions of Coleridge's that were important were his poetic visions. The book does not really show how Coleridge developed his poetic vision, or link his developing body of work to events in his life.

The author ably describes the many distractions and temporary passions in Coleridge's life. (Despite these distractions, Coleridge was able to complete some of the greatest poems in the English language, thereby giving hope to those of us who cannot help detouring when something interesting comes up, rather than staying on a straight and narrow path toward a pre-determined version of "success.") However, he fell somewhat short of the mark in linking Coleridge's poetic mind to those events.

[Paul Blaney · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exemplary, thought-provoking biography of Coleridge, this first volume takes him up to age 31 and leaves him on board a ship to Malta. Terrific insights into the poetry, the metaphysics and psychology of this errant genius. As a writer, I was particularly interested in how he tried (failed) to organize his family and work life in such a way as to allow him to write. As this volume ends, the still young Coleridge is struggling with an unhappy marriage, opium addiction and the difficulty of marshaling his many talents (poetic, journalistic) to productive ends. I shall certainly find time for volume two. All else aside, it's a great study of the early Romantic period.

[Jeffrey Greggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the best biography I have yet laid eyes on. Holmes carries the book off with a stunning, perfectly judicious blend of primary source material, critical appraisal, and biographical judgment. He also clearly identifies with the younger men so often inspired by the "gentleman poet and philosopher, in a mist," and it is in this spirit—one that leans more toward Lamb than Hazlitt—that he raises STC from the dead.

[J.R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an extraordinary man, perhaps the most visionary of the English romantic poets. If that were not enough, he was also a political activist, journalist and translator, Unitarian preacher, lecturer, philosopher and energetic wanderer.

Anyone interested in the man and the period will find this a worthwhile read.

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holmes is a wonderful biographer. It doesn't hurt that his subject is a person as perplexingly fascinating as Coleridge, but dull or delightful is very much in the hands of the writer when it comes to documenting a life-story, and Holmes provides an engaging mixture of detail, narrative, speculation, and literary analysis grounded in illuminating historical context. Now for part two!

[Helen Damnation · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Holmes has done a wonderful job not only in his research, but also in his re-creating the person Coleridge.

He rounds him as a person capable of the most wonderful highs and the most awful lows.

A wonderful read, from the point of content, and also execution.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A succinct, well-paced biography with a nice mix of excerpts from Coleridge's prose and poetry. Good coverage of his relationships with other writers and philosophical underpinnings of his work. Fascinating footnotes.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive and beautifully written. At times I felt the author really forced a sympathetic portrayal, but from the outset he states that was his intention, so, well, well done. Will take a break before tackling Vol. 2.

[Simon Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Holmes acheived his stated intention - he convinced me, a sceptic, that Coleridge was a fine, fascinating if deeply flawed man.

An awkward start but it builds and builds and concludes wonderfully.