This biography considers Coleridge as a man apart from his writings. Holmes' objective is to give an impression of what the poet was like in person and as a conversationalist. Holmes reveals him to be disorganized, slothful, neurotically anxious and overly dependent on others. The book won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. The author has also written Shelley: The Persuit , which won the Somerset Maugham Award and a novel Footsteps .
Coleridge Reihe
Diese Serie taucht tief in das Leben und Werk eines der bedeutendsten britischen Dichter ein. Sie untersucht seine wichtigsten poetischen Errungenschaften und verortet sie im breiteren literarischen Kontext seiner Zeit. Leser erhalten wertvolle Einblicke in seine Beiträge zur Literatur, was sie zu einer unverzichtbaren Lektüre für alle macht, die sich für Poesie und Literaturgeschichte interessieren.
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Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge transforms our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' forever. Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of these pages as the brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking poet of genius that he was. This second volume covers the last 30 years of Coleridge's career (1804-1834) during which he travelled restlessly through the Mediterranean, returned to his old haunts in the Lake District and the West Country, and finally settled in Highgate. It was a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage broke up, his opium addiction increased, he quarrelled with Wordsworth, his own son Hartley Coleridge (a gifted poet himself) became an alcoholic. And after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge re-emerged on the literary scene as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author.