Coleridge

Description

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. - Publisher.

Description

A biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 19th century British poet who wrote The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. The book examines his neuralgia, which turned him into an opium addict, and the influence this had on his writing. It follows his career in the civil service, his failed marriages and a trip to Germany where he came under the influence of German idealism, becoming its principal conduit in England.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Coleridge: early visionsPantheon Books1999-01-01
• ColeridgeOxford University Press1982-01-01
• ColeridgeHodder & Stoughton1989-01-01
• ColeridgeViking1990-01-01
• ColeridgeHardcoverViking1990-01-01
• ColeridgePantheon1998-01-01