Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834

Let me just add my voice to the chorus of yea-sayers for both the first and second volumes of this wonderful biography. Holmes does a fantastic job fleshing out the human side of Coleridge's genius and of giving the low-down on his masochistic relationship with the inferior (and rather creepy) William and Dorothy Wordsworth. We find that Coleridge could have been a stellar performer in matters of British colonialism in Malta, had he only chosen to. We find that he was in love with Sarah Hutchinson (his beloved Asra) and that he had a fling with a beautiful opera singer, while penning poems to Asra all the while. And above all, we're given a key to Coleridge's bouts of dejection and depression: his near-constant humiliation because of his inability to move his bowels, brought on by his opium habit. Many of these items I'd heard of, or divined from the standard texts I'd read before--but that last item was a real revelation to me! This book is packed full of such revelations! Coleridge steps forth from the pages in all his grubbiness and all his glory! We must finally scratch our heads and admire such a rare creature that once roamed the fields of the lake district and the streets of London and environs. Read it!

Richard Holmes' marvellous book is the sequel to his Coleridge: Early Visions. For fifteen years, he has been constantly engaged with Coleridge's ideas, poems, plays and philosophical writings. He traces Coleridge's lifelong dialogues with the greatest of English poets, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, and also with the finest German writers, Goethe and Schiller. Coleridge was that rare creature, a superb poet who could also grapple with the deepest of philosophers. He could brilliantly summarise the two basic possible lines in philosophy: "The difference between Aristotle and Plato is that which will remain as long as we are men and there is any difference between man and man in point of opinion. Plato, with Pythagoras before him, had conceived that the phenomenon or outside appearance, all that we call thing or matter, is but as it were a language by which the invisible (that which is not the object of our senses) communicates its existence to our finite beings ... Aristotle, on the contrary, affirmed that all our knowledge had begun in experience, had begun through the senses, and that from the senses only we could take our notions of reality ... It was the first way in which, plainly and distinctly, two opposite systems were placed before the mind of the world." Although Coleridge adhered to Platonism, he honestly admitted, "All these poetico-philosophical Arguments strike and shatter themselves into froth against that stubborn rock, the fact of Consciousness, or rather its dependence on the body."Like other notable literary biographies - one thinks of Holmes' earlier one of Shelley, Richard Ellman's of Oscar Wilde, Peter Ackroyd's of Charles Dickens, Tim Hilton's of John Ruskin, E. P. Thompson's of William Morris, and Leon Edel's of Henry James - this wonderful book arouses our enthusiasm for literature. It shows us again how a great writer's work can help us both to enjoy and to make sense of the world.

While the story of "the man from Porlock" disturbing the opium reverie which fueled Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is one of the best known pieces of literary historico-mythology, Richard Holmes plugs significant gaps in his fine biography. He covers the man's small but radiant poetical opus marvelously and, as the title suggests, does not shy away from dealing with the dark side of the drug-addicted genius. Coleridge's de Quinceyesque appetite for opium was problematic to say the least: it seems that the brawl with Charles Lamb in a Gottingen bierkellar in 1805 may have had less to do with a disagreement over interpretation of German Romantic aesthetics (as Dr Nattarajan suggests in her biography) and more to do with Coleridge's stash going missing. Holmes provides an intriguing insight into the context of the composition of "Dejection: An Ode" - by 1802 Coleridge was pimping a stable of 15 prostitutes in order to feed his habit, and was heartbroken when close friend and fellow leading-light in English Romanticism, William Wordsworth, poached 2 of his top-earning girls. At times a certain naivete of approach is evident, such as when Holmes attributes the poet's 1811 armed robbery of an alehouse in Putney to "a work of epiphenomena, or particular emanations, of a singular mind of visionary genius and the development of a then completely new and 'organic' form of creativity" rather than seeing the act as the cold-turkey induced stick-up it most surely was. But otherwise, this is a work of solid scholarship and penetrating insight.

A masterpiece--really fine, fine writing. I am not a Coleridge scholar (an interested amateur though) so I am unable to comment on the accuracy, balance, or whatnot of Holmes' scholarship. I do know this though: Biography is not like fiction--the biographer, particularly one who intends to earn a living by selling their books, constantly faces the question of what to include and what to leave out, and in this case these decisions are all the more difficult since Coleridge left behind an ocean of jornals, letters and other unpublished writings (not to mention what he did publish), as well as a huge body of scholarship about the man and his writings. But Holmes seems to have gotten it just right--the text clicks along at 10,000 feet, just enough to make out the terrain, then quickly nosedives in for a closer look and then before you can get lost in the detail, back up again. The detail seemed always seems relevant and entertaining--never tedious. For instance, when Coleridge set sail for Malta from the U.K. in 1804, Holmes discussed in detail Coleridge's accomodations, his travelling companions (two other people and some farm animals in the same little "cabin") as well as a little scene (initially of course recorded by Coleridge himself in his notebooks) in which Coleridge becomes constipated due to massive doses of opium. A surgeon from a nearby vessel had to come on board and administered an enema to Mr. Coleridge--all described by Coleridge and faitufully reiterated by Holmes. Aside from the very serious point that to Coleridge this condition was an ugly metaphor for the intellectual block he felt at the time (also, Coleridge believed, caused by opium), Holmes told the story with extraordinary and unexpected humor (kind of dry British wit). Other topics handled with astonishing skill and grace: his complicated, co-dependent relationship with Wordsworth, his marriage, the effect of opium on his writing, and plagiarism. Coleridge was an extraordinary man and this is an extraordinary book--you will not regret having read it.

Long awaited but worth the time spent by author,Richard Holmes, who has crowned a lifetime of biograhical writing with what the Observer has rightly labelled a masterwork. The second half of Coeridge's life has traditionally be seen as no more than a coda to the "Early Visions" Not so, what Holmes has achieved is the chronicling of the continued growth and march of genius, albeit in many sometimes wayward directions - oftimes painfully fuelled by the opium addiction which despite what was for the time a progressive treatment regime, Coleridge never quite conquered. The volume explores in sometimes disturbing detail Coleridges relationships with his supporters,antagonists and family - the latter occasionally falling into both camps! The quarrel with Wordsworth is covered in full and led to a breach between the two great Lake poets for many years. However relationships were fortunately restored to the extent that they revisited Germany together on a rather uncomfortable trip in later life. By that stage Coleridge had become the sage of Highgate whose later life this sagacious labour of love records to perfection.