Coleridge: Early Visions,1772-(ISBN=9780375705403)

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.
    "The best literary biography since Ellmann's Oscar Wilde."
    "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."

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.

Illustrations
Maps
Preface
1 Child of Nature
2 Orphan of the Storm
3 Prodigal Son
4 Pantisocrat
5 Watchman
6 Prodigal Father
7 Kubla Coleridge
8 Mariner
9 Der Wanderer
10 Journeyman
11 Laker
12 Lover
13 Metaphysieal Mountaineer
14 Exile
Postscript
Coleridge's Circle
Bibliography and References
Acknowledgements
Index