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musicdeepdive's review
4.75
I'm knocked out by the writing in these books, not gonna lie. This volume has the unenviable challenge of making Coleridge's later years palatable and enjoyable, given his personal and public struggles during those years, but Holmes rises to the challenge without going to absurd lengths to paint Coleridge as a tragic figure. He's only as tragic as the reader wants him to be, and that allowance for discretion is a beautiful choice.
patrickkanouse's review
5.0
When one speaks of magisterial works, Richard Holmes's two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is what I think of. I just completed volume II, Darker Reflections, and it is amazing. Just amazing.
The second volume begins as Coleridge leaves England for Malta. Coleridge's opium addiction is well documented, and Holmes is able to move Coleridge's addiction beyond the sparkling creativity of "Kubla Khan" to the often desperate, agonizing, embarrassing, and hellish addiction it was. All the signs we think of regarding modern addiction are there: the dissembling, the hiding, the borrowing, the broken promises, the desire to escape the addiction but caught in its throes. Holmes makes no case that the addiction hindered Coleridge's later career, but one can infer that.
We learn a great deal about Coleridge's lectures, about the break with Wordsworth (who comes off as cold and holier-than-thou), and his generosity despite his own hardships. Holmes gives us all the familiar stories (the meeting with John Keats) and much else. Holmes is also a careful reader of the notes, letters, fragments, and lectures. He never pushes their interpretation, but he skillfully quotes them to be a part of the narrative.
What does this all amount to though? A good biography gives the reader a good narrative with excellent detail. We see the subject of the biography from the perspective of a movie. Roderick Beaton's George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel is such a biography. This is not a criticism of Beaton's biography, which I found expertly done, well written, and with valuable insights to Seferis (one of my favorite poets). Additionally, Beaton's biography places Seferis in context to his time, his culture, his world. But I said earlier that Holme's biography of Coleridge is not just amazing but magisterial. What sets it apart from nearly every biography I have read is that we don't see Coleridge from the perspective of a movie, but we feel as if we're next to him, eavesdropping on conversations.
Coleridge is one of those that if you could go back in time and have dinner with would be on my list. I knew he was a great talker, but Holmes makes him into an amazing talker and able to enchant us in a paradoxically fluid but disjointed tale that touches on German metaphyics, elucidations of Shakespeare, the politics of power, and so on.
What a read this biography is.
The second volume begins as Coleridge leaves England for Malta. Coleridge's opium addiction is well documented, and Holmes is able to move Coleridge's addiction beyond the sparkling creativity of "Kubla Khan" to the often desperate, agonizing, embarrassing, and hellish addiction it was. All the signs we think of regarding modern addiction are there: the dissembling, the hiding, the borrowing, the broken promises, the desire to escape the addiction but caught in its throes. Holmes makes no case that the addiction hindered Coleridge's later career, but one can infer that.
We learn a great deal about Coleridge's lectures, about the break with Wordsworth (who comes off as cold and holier-than-thou), and his generosity despite his own hardships. Holmes gives us all the familiar stories (the meeting with John Keats) and much else. Holmes is also a careful reader of the notes, letters, fragments, and lectures. He never pushes their interpretation, but he skillfully quotes them to be a part of the narrative.
What does this all amount to though? A good biography gives the reader a good narrative with excellent detail. We see the subject of the biography from the perspective of a movie. Roderick Beaton's George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel is such a biography. This is not a criticism of Beaton's biography, which I found expertly done, well written, and with valuable insights to Seferis (one of my favorite poets). Additionally, Beaton's biography places Seferis in context to his time, his culture, his world. But I said earlier that Holme's biography of Coleridge is not just amazing but magisterial. What sets it apart from nearly every biography I have read is that we don't see Coleridge from the perspective of a movie, but we feel as if we're next to him, eavesdropping on conversations.
Coleridge is one of those that if you could go back in time and have dinner with would be on my list. I knew he was a great talker, but Holmes makes him into an amazing talker and able to enchant us in a paradoxically fluid but disjointed tale that touches on German metaphyics, elucidations of Shakespeare, the politics of power, and so on.
What a read this biography is.
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