Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the
first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is
the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever
transformed our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' and his place in the
Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium
addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard
Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and
endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act
of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge's poetry
and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He
is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine
complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces
us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations
between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and
religious belief.
