Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

      Coleridge

      Early Visions

      Richard Holmes

      

       Copyright

      Harper Perennial

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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      www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

      First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton 1989

      Copyright © Richard Holmes 1989

      

      Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      

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      Source ISBN: 9780007204571

      Ebook Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007378838 Version: 2014-09-15

      To Vicki

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

Copyright

       Dedication

Preface

ONE Child Of Nature

TWO Orphan Of The Storm

THREE Prodigal Son

FOUR Pantisocrat

FIVE Watchman

       SIX Prodigal Father

       SEVEN Kubla Coleridge

       EIGHT Mariner

       NINE Der Wanderer

       TEN Journeyman

       ELEVEN Laker

       TWELVE Lover

       THIRTEEN Metaphysical Mountaineer

       FOURTEEN Exile

       Postscript

       Keep Reading

       Coleridge’s Circle

       Bibliography And References

       Bibliography

       References

       Reference Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Praise

       Also By Richard Holmes

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

      Anyone who presumes to write about Coleridge runs the grave risk of sounding like the person on business from Porlock, a prosaic interrupter of marvels.

      But some years ago, I suggested (anonymously) in The Oxford Companion to English Literature that Coleridge’s best work, “both poetry and prose, has the inescapable glow of the authentic visionary”. This biography has become my attempt to substantiate that wild claim, and to show what sort of visionary Coleridge really was, and why – among all the English Romantics – he is worth rediscovering today.

      Wordsworth called him “the most wonderful man” he had ever known; but many subsequent biographers have been sceptical. It would seem possible to write an entire book on Coleridge’s opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political “apostasy”, his sexual fantasies, or his radiations of mystic humbug. And indeed, all these books have been written.¹ But no biographer, since James Dykes Campbell in 1894, has tried to examine his entire life in a broad and sympathetic manner, and to ask the one vital question: what made Coleridge – for all his extravagant panoply of faults – such an extraordinary man,