Coleridge - Darker Reflections - Softcover

Holmes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006548423 ISBN 13: 9780006548423

Publisher: Flamingo, 1999

Synopsis

The first volume of Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions, won the 1989 Whitbread Prize for book of the year. Coleridge: Darker Reflections is the long-awaited second volume.

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 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.

From the reviews:
’One of the greatest biographies of the century. Pure joy to read, it is a shimmering portrait of the mature artist veering between brilliance and despair.’ Financial Times

’This – and I can’t remember ever thinking this before so strongly – is a biography to grow old with.’ MIRANDA SEYMOUR, Independent

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

Dismissed by many as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, the older Coleridge comes storming back to claim our hearts in this volume which covers the last thirty years of his career. Coleridge's later life was not a happy, but its darker tone is a measure of its challenge and the spiritual impact which Holmes recreates so intensely. Coleridge lives again in these pages so that we can fell his hopeless heartache, his disappointments, his addictions to both Asra and opium, his elated highs and catastrophic lows, his electrifying creativity and boundless energy, and his never-failing ability to rescue himself from the darkest abyss.

“Holmes' Coleridge is one of the greatest literary biographies ever written.”
NICHOLAS ROE, 'Daily Telegraph'

“An unforgettable account of troubled genius failing to earth . . . It is exquisitely written, lyrical, funny and poignant by turns. The comic and the sublime, humanity and the immorality of art, are rarely dovetailed as seamlessly as in this wonderful book.”
JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, 'Financial Times'

“Magnificent . . . Somehow Coleridge's rapt, unselfconscious stare is worth all the debt-bilking, the laudanum and absolute determination to please himself. The jetsam of the Romantic literary life recedes, leaving only the spectacle of a brilliant mind ceaselessly uncoiling in the heat of its own invention.”
D J TAYLOR, 'Mail on Sunday'

“Holmes has succeeded brilliantly. This, and I can't remember thinking this before so strongly, is a biography to grow old with.”
MIRANDA SEYMOUR, 'Independent'

“Irradiated by brilliant insights and arresting phrases . . . Here is the measure of the man – resilient and hopeful to the end.”
PETER ACKROYD, 'The Times'

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0006548423
• ISBN 13: 9780006548423
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512