Coleridge: Darker Reflections 1804-1834 by Richard Holmes

A biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 19th century British poet who wrote The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. The book examines his neuralgia, which turned him into an opium addict, and the influence this had on his writing. It follows his career in the civil service, his failed marriages and a trip to Germany where he came under the influence of German idealism, becoming its principal conduit in England. Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections is the long-awaited second volume. Dismissed by many as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and a mystic charlatan, the older Coleridge comes storming back to claim our hearts in this volume which covers the last thirty years of his career (1804-1834), during which time 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. Holmes traces the development of Coleridge into a legend amongst the younger generation of Romantic writers - the 'hooded eagle amongst blinking owls' - and the influence he had on Hazlitt, de Quincey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Carlyle, Sterling, J.S. Mill, F.D. Maurice and others. We rediscover Coleridge's power as a conversationalist and a ceaseless generator of ideas. Coleridge lives again in these pages so that we can feel 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. This 1999 Flamingo Paperback is in good condition. Inscription from author; tanned pages and age spots.

ISBN: 9780006548423 SKU: 1523457 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.

SKU: 1523457
Location: Biography