Coleridge

Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmess seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britains greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmess 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 Holmess 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 Coleridges 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 subjects personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, and the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.