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Title: Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 by Richard Holmes ISBN: 0-375-70838-3 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.64 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Human Side Of Genius
Comment: 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!
Rating: 5
Summary: Dazzling dialectics
Comment: Coleridge: Darker Reflections, by Richard Holmes, HarperCollins, 1998. Hardback. 622 pages. ISBN 000 255577 8
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.
Rating: 4
Summary: What Samuel Johnson Said
Comment: Here are some things you probably don't know about London's Royal Institution, whose 14 Doric columns dominate the north end of Albermale Street: virtually from its founding in 1799, its programs of lectures "achieved international status." The lecture hall "held up to 500 people in a hemisphere of steeply tiered seats, with a gallery above and a circle of gas lamps ... the attention of the audience was sustained by various creature comforts: green cushioned seating, green baize floor coverings, and the latest in central heating systems using copper pipes." Indeed "the popularity of the Institution's lectures so often jammed Albermale Street with carriages that it eventually became the first one-way thoroughfare in London."
Some will find that this rich texture of detail adds substance and conviction to Holmes' account of Coleridge's later years. Others will find it a bit over the top. It's a matter of taste, but if you like this sort of thing, then you will get your fill of it in this biography.
Holmes makes his choices as to detail, of course. He has less choice with the character of his subject. Coleridge seems to have made at least three capital contributions to the history of English literature. First, he crafted a number of weirdly unforgettable lyrics, notably "The Ancient Mariner," and "Christobel" and "Kubla Khan." Second, he introduced German idealistic philosophy (Kant, and particularly Schelling) to an untutored island race. And third, he produced a body of criticism, shrewd and insightful in itself, but also the first (in England, at least) ever based on an explicit intellectual framework. Maybe a fourth: he is the architect of a conservative critique of modernity that probably continues to deserve a place in the conservative intellectual tradition.
But, but, but, but - what a dreadful human being! Not dreadful in the sense of mean, spiteful, combatitive. No: dreadful in the sense of lachrymose, self-pitying and an epic-proportions sponge. It is that last that takes one's breath away. Blanche DuBois had the good grace to depend on the kindness of strangers. Coleridge cheerfully victimizes his nearest and dearest, and even makes friends out of those he is newly victimizing.
The amazing part is, of course, that they put up with it - his wife Sara (who refused to divorce him even when he asked her to); his poetical companion, William Wordsworth, and any of half a dozen less easily identified but no less important benefactors. Over and over, they report that they were dazzled by his presence, not least in his conversation. Indeed on the testimony of these friends, he must have been one of the world's all-time great conversationalists. And here Holmes has another problem not of his own making: conversation is the most ephemeral of arts (even more so than cooking). And while we have any number of testimonials to his conversational ability, we have little or no direct evidence of what he actually said.
Having archly complained about the excess of detail in this book, I suppose it may seem inconsistent of me to ask for more. Yet I will do so: Coleridge lived in turbulent times and he becomes involved, at least as a "commenting intellectual," in that turbulence. Holmes adverts to the social and political background. It might have helped had he applied his considerable powers of description and analysis to sketching out more thoroughly the political landscape in which he lived.
Samuel Johnson said of Milton's "Paradise Lost" that none have ever wished it longer. I guess I can see why this remark comes to mind while reading Holmes on Coleridge. I was happy to pick it up, and happy to read it. And happy to put it down.
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Title: Shelley: The Pursuit (New York Review Books) by Richard Holmes ISBN: 1590170377 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions (Collected Works of Samuel Taylor) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge ISBN: 0691018618 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1985 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford Lives S.) by Stephen Gill ISBN: 0192827472 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1990 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems (PENGUIN CLASSICS) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Holmes ISBN: 0140424296 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 31 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, H. J. Jackson ISBN: 0192840436 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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