Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 (ISBN 0679438475)

Amazon.com Review:
Richard Holmes concluded his first, magisterial volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge with an image of his hero--a not-yet-ancient mariner--departing for the Continent on the Speedwell. The poet was, at this point, an unhappy man. In 1804 his marriage was in a shambles, his deeply Romantic rapport with William Wordsworth was on the wane, and he seemed no closer to shaking off his devastating opium addiction. Settling into his cramped berth with his books, lemons, shaving gear, and portable inkstand, he must have hoped for smoother sailing, in every sense of the phrase. But it's clear from the very beginning of Coleridge: Darker Reflections that English literature's greatest polymath had a turbulent time ahead of him. After an unlikely interval as a Maltese civil servant, Coleridge returned to England in 1806. He was in the latest phase of a rather flamboyant depression, which Holmes describes with typical acuity: He was living out what many people experience, in the dark disorder of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface and with astonishing even alarming candour that many of his friends found unendurable or simply ludicrous. Moreover he continued to write about it, to witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the understanding of these struggles, not (like Wordsworth perhaps) in their solution. Certainly Coleridge never suffered from a shortage of struggles. On the heels of his return he had an (initially) happy reunion with Wordsworth, helping his comrade-in-arms to knock The Prelude into shape. Yet this dicey ménage--which also included Coleridge's supreme love object, Sara Hutchinson--soon fell to pieces again. (By 1812 he would be denouncing Wordsworth in print as his "bitterest Calumniator.") Now the poet veered off into publishing his own newspaper, The Friend, followed by a stint as a formidable public lecturer. In all of these ventures, he displayed his peculiar, rapid-fire brilliance. Still, just about every episode in Holmes's vast chronicle seems to end with a similar dying fall: "Coleridge took a deep breath, opened his laudanum decanter, and collapsed." Crisis follows upon crisis, opium binge upon opium binge--and by the time the poet begins his massive Biographia Literaria in 1815, you wonder at the fact that he's still alive and kicking. The capstone of Coleridge's later years, the Biographia functioned as a confessional, autobiography, and omnium-gatherum of everything he had thought about in the preceding decades. "In all this," Holmes writes, "the Biographia has an acute psychological interest, and its shape-shifting and paradoxes, its intimacy and disguises, its frankness and its fraudulence, make up a genuine literary self-portrait. Anything less complicated, less fascinating and less maddening, would really not be Coleridge at all." The same might be said of Darker Reflections itself (minus the fraudulence, of course). The author has crammed an unbelievable amount of detail into his magnificent, double-barreled portrait, and expertly mimicked the dizzy, stop-and-start rhythms of his subject's life. But anything less complicated--and less endowed with authorial sympathy and tact--would really not be Richard Holmes at all. --James Marcus

A troubled genius:
While the story of "the man from Porlock" disturbing the opium reverie which fueled Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is one of the best known pieces of literary historico-mythology, Richard Holmes plugs significant gaps in his fine biography. He covers the man's small but radiant poetical opus marvelously and, as the title suggests, does not shy away from dealing with the dark side of the drug-addicted genius. Coleridge's de Quinceyesque appetite for opium was problematic to say the least: it seems that the brawl with Charles Lamb in a Gottingen bierkellar in 1805 may have had less to do with a disagreement over interpretation of German Romantic aesthetics (as Dr Nattarajan suggests in her biography) and more to do with Coleridge's stash going missing. Holmes provides an intriguing insight into the context of the composition of "Dejection: An Ode" - by 1802 Coleridge was pimping a stable of 15 prostitutes in order to feed his habit, and was heartbroken when close friend and fellow leading-light in English Romanticism, William Wordsworth, poached 2 of his top-earning girls. At times a certain naivete of approach is evident, such as when Holmes attributes the poet's 1811 armed robbery of an alehouse in Putney to "a work of epiphenomena, or particular emanations, of a singular mind of visionary genius and the development of a then completely new and 'organic' form of creativity" rather than seeing the act as the cold-turkey induced stick-up it most surely was. But otherwise, this is a work of solid scholarship and penetrating insight.

What Samuel Johnson Said:
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.

The Human Side Of Genius:
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!

Superb biography:
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.

In-depth analysis:
Few people know that Coleridge followed the great achievement of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" with a cookbook describing his experiences and adventures in backyard barbecuing that was equally brilliant, entitled "The Rind of the Ancient Marinator." Coleridge also includes his famous recipes on Yorkshire pudding, haggis, and steak and kidney pie. Today unfortunately out of print, it's worth finding by all backyard barbecue enthusiasts who want the inside scoop on the lost art of British barbecue.