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Description
Upon its publication ten years ago, the first volume of Richard Holmes's life of Coleridge was hailed by Michael Holroyd as "a modern masterpiece, a book that marks a climax in the golden age of modern biography." The romantic writer who emerges from these pages is unforgettably vivid and unexpected. Holmes gives us a true portrait of unfolding genius -- a man who learns as much from children's games as from philosophic treatises, as much from bird flight as from theology. Unavailable for the last five years, this award-winning biography is being reissued to coincide with the hardcover publication of the concluding volume. The two books represent the pinnacle of Holmes's literary achievement.
About the Author
Richard Holmes is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (both available from Vintage Books), and Shelley: The Pursuit, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize. A fellow of the British Academy, he was awarded an OBE in 1992. He lives in England.
Praise for Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804…
"Poet, journalist, letter-writer, critic, autobiographer, lecturer, folklorist, philosopher: when a man's genius is so amorphous and protean, how can any one biographer hope to encompass it? Yet, miraculously, in this first of two volumes, Richard Holmes has succeeded in doing so. . . . His masterly book leaves one feeling that, if there were a single literary giant of the past, other than Shakespeare, whom one was permitted to meet, then Coleridge would be the choice."
--Francis King, Evening Standard (London)
"The best literary biography since Ellmann's Oscar Wilde."
--John Mortimer, Sunday Times (London)
"Dazzling. . . . Here is Coleridge, attractive and repellant, with all his seductive contradictions: the young man with his mountainous aspirations, his dreaminess . . . yammering poetry, pounding the turnpikes, dominating drawing-rooms; the foaming genius, messy with metaphysical secretions and uncontrollable speculations. Holmes has not merely reinterpreted Coleridge, he has re-created him, and his biography has the aura of fiction, the shimmer of an authentic portrait. [This is] a biography like few I have ever read."
--James Wood, The Guardian (London)




