Coleridge Early Visions - Softcover

Holmes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006548415 ISBN 13: 9780006548416

Publisher: Flamingo, 1999

Synopsis

The first volume (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year) of Richard Holmes's two-volume Coleridge biography which transforms our view of this greatest of Romantic poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of a major new biography of Coleridge which will transform 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 the poetry, Coleridge's 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.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the ten New York Times' Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0006548415
• ISBN 13: 9780006548416
• Binding: Paperback