Coleridge

Richard Holmes is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (both available from Vintage Books), and Shelley: The Pursuit, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize. A fellow of the British Academy, he was awarded an OBE in 1992. He lives in England.

"Poet, journalist, letter-writer, critic, autobiographer, lecturer, folklorist, philosopher: when a man's genius is so amorphous and protean, how can any one biographer hope to encompass it? Yet, miraculously, in this first of two volumes, Richard Holmes has succeeded in doing so . . . His masterly book leaves one feeling that, if there were a single literary giant of the past, other than Shakespeare, whom one was permitted to meet, then Coleridge would be the choice."
—Francis King, Evening Standard (London)

"The best literary biography since Ellmann's Oscar Wilde."
—John Mortimer, Sunday Times (London)

"Dazzling . . . Here is Coleridge, attractive and repellant, with all his seductive contradictions: the young man with his mountainous aspirations, his dreaminess . . . yammering poetry, pounding the turnpikes, dominating drawing-rooms; the foaming genius, messy with metaphysical secretions and uncontrollable speculations. 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. [This is] a biography like few I have ever read."
—James Wood, The Guardian (London)

Illustrations ix
Maps xi
Preface xiii

1 Child of Nature 1
2 Orphan of the Storm 21
3 Prodigal Son 39
4 Pantisocrat 59
5 Watchman 89
6 Prodigal Father 117
7 Kubla Coleridge 135
8 Mariner 169
9 Der Wanderer 205
10 Journeyman 238
11 Laker 273
12 Lover 297
13 Metaphysical Mountaineer 321
14 Exile 342

Postscript 362
Coleridge Circle 365
Bibliography and References 372
Acknowledgements 389
Index 391