Coleridge : Early Visions

Used
Hardcover
1998
$4.18

This biography should transform our view of the writer 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, Holmes sees Coleridge as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.

Synopsis

This biography should transform our view of the writer 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, Holmes sees Coleridge as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 432
Edition: First Edition, First Impression
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 19 Oct 1998
ISBN 10: 000255576X
ISBN 13: 9780002555760
Prizes: Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Book of the Year 1989.

Media Reviews

`Dazzling... Holmes has not merely reinterpreted Coleridge; he has re-created him, and his biography has the aura of fiction, the shimmer of an authentic portrait... a biography like few I have ever read.'
James Wood, Guardian

`A deeply moving life of a troubled genius. From a great mountain of research, Holmes has fashioned a compelling narrative which inspires considerable affection and respect for Coleridge. This stimulating book is one of the most enjoyable biographies I have read.'
Michael Sheldon, Daily Telegraph

`Coleridge lives, and talks and loves... in these pages as never before.'
Michael Foot, Independent

Author Bio

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.