num_pages: 448
description: Winner of the 1989 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. 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, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.
language: English
title: Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804
titlecomplete: Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804
characters: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Literature, Poetry, History, 19th Century, Romanticism, Biography Memoir, British Literature, Biography
ratings_count: 389
series: Coleridge
awards: awardedAt: 599644800000
name: Whitbread Award
category: Biography and Book of the Year
publisher: Pantheon