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Coleridge
Early Visions
Richard Holmes
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith
London W6 8JB
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton 1989
Copyright © Richard Holmes 1989
Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007204571
Ebook Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007378838 Version: 2014-09-15
To Vicki
Table of Contents
THIRTEEN Metaphysical Mountaineer
Anyone who presumes to write about Coleridge runs the grave risk of sounding like the person on business from Porlock, a prosaic interrupter of marvels.
But some years ago, I suggested (anonymously) in The Oxford Companion to English Literature that Coleridge’s best work, “both poetry and prose, has the inescapable glow of the authentic visionary”. This biography has become my attempt to substantiate that wild claim, and to show what sort of visionary Coleridge really was, and why – among all the English Romantics – he is worth rediscovering today.
Wordsworth called him “the most wonderful man” he had ever known; but many subsequent biographers have been sceptical. It would seem possible to write an entire book on Coleridge’s opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political “apostasy”, his sexual fantasies, or his radiations of mystic humbug. And indeed, all these books have been written.1 But no biographer, since James Dykes Campbell in 1894, has tried to examine his entire life in a broad and sympathetic manner, and to ask the one vital question: what made Coleridge – for all his extravagant panoply of faults – such an extraordinary man,