Coleridge: Darker Reflections

Coleridge: Darker Reflections

by RichardHolmes (Author)

Synopsis

Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge aims to transform the view of the poet of "Kubla Khan" and his place in the romantic movement. Dismissed by many as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Holmes's Coleridge is shown 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 Mediterranean, returned to his old haunts in the Lake District and the West Country, and finally settled in Highgate. It was a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage broke up, his opium addiction increased, he quarrelled with Wordsworth, his own son Hartley Coleridge (a gifted poet himself) became an alcoholic. And after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge re-emerged on the literary scene as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 512
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 19 Oct 1998

ISBN 10: 0002555778
ISBN 13: 9780002555777
Prizes: Winner of Authors' Club Marsh Biography Award 1999 and Marsh Biography Award 1999 and Duff Cooper Prize 1999. Shortlisted for Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 1999.

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.