Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge transforms our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' forever. Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of these pages as the brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking poet of genius that he was. This second volume covers the last 30 years of Coleridge's career (1804-1834) during which he travelled restlessly through the...
Let me just add my voice to the chorus of yea-sayers for both the first and second volumes of this wonderful biography. Holmes does a fantastic job fleshing out the human side of Coleridge's genius and of giving the low-down on his masochistic relationship with the inferior (and rather creepy) William and Dorothy Wordsworth. We find that Coleridge could have been a stellar performer in matters of British colonialism in Malta,...
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Richard Holmes' marvellous book is the sequel to his Coleridge: Early Visions. For fifteen years, he has been constantly engaged with Coleridge's ideas, poems, plays and philosophical writings. He traces Coleridge's lifelong dialogues with the greatest of English poets, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, and also with the finest German writers, Goethe and Schiller. Coleridge was that rare creature, a superb poet who could...
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While the story of "the man from Porlock" disturbing the opium reverie which fueled Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is one of the best known pieces of literary historico-mythology, Richard Holmes plugs significant gaps in his fine biography. He covers the man's small but radiant poetical opus marvelously and, as the title suggests, does not shy away from dealing with the dark side of the drug-addicted genius. Coleridge's de Quinceyesque...
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A masterpiece--really fine, fine writing. I am not a Coleridge scholar (an interested amateur though) so I am unable to comment on the accuracy, balance, or whatnot of Holmes' scholarship. I do know this though: Biography is not like fiction--the biographer, particularly one who intends to earn a living by selling their books, constantly faces the question of what to include and what to leave out, and in this case these...
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Long awaited but worth the time spent by author,Richard Holmes, who has crowned a lifetime of biograhical writing with what the Observer has rightly labelled a masterwork. The second half of Coeridge's life has traditionally be seen as no more than a coda to the "Early Visions" Not so, what Holmes has achieved is the chronicling of the continued growth and march of genius, albeit in many sometimes wayward directions -...
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