Coleridge brief biography of princess

Review

"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)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
CHILD OF NATURE

Coleridge was always fascinated by anything that promised poetical marvels or metaphysical peculiarities. The subject of his own childhood was no exception. “Before I was eight years old,” he used to begin in his hypnotic manner, “I was a character—sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth . . . were even then prominent & manifest.” And then, like the Ancient Mariner, there was no stopping him.

2
In later life he talked of boyhood and schooldays with many of his closest friends, and wrote vividly about it in his poetry, his letters, his Biographia, and his private Notebooks. In all these records, a rich mixture of tragi-comedy, he developed the self-portrait of a precocious, highly imaginative child, driven into “exile” in

DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES, Sidgwick and Jackson (Doubleday in US)

Sunday Times bestseller

&#;A splendidly readable, meticulously researched and thoughtful biography&#; Sunday Express

&#;The only author to have done a substantial amount of original investigation&#; Nicholas Coleridge, The Standard

&#;Penny Junor&#;s Diana Princess of Wales is an astonishingly good biography&#; Australian

&#;Miss Junor has succeeded in giving a detailed and fascinating account of the education of a young lady…she has written not just a portrait of a life which has been mostly privilege, innocence and niceness, but she has also given us an anthropological work&#; Oliver Pritchett, Sunday Telegraph

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes’s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain’s greatest poets.

‘Coleridge: Early Visions’ is the first part of Holmes’s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes’s Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination.

This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge’s poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject’s personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, and the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.