Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

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  Praise

  More from the reviews:

  ‘It is the great and particular strength of Darker Reflections to capture what was immediate in Coleridge as well as what was immortal – to show him arising out of the currents of history, but also borne along on them. This combination – this mixture of long views with compelling details, of big slow thoughts with little quick actions – distinguishes everything that Richard Holmes writes. His Coleridge has been a long voyage. He has come home in triumph.’

  ANDREW MOTION, Observer

  ‘What a joy to be immersed in Holmes’s Coleridge once again! And this is, indisputably, Holmes’ Coleridge…Holmes’ triumph is that he makes Coleridge explicable. He rarely attempts to excuse or conceal his flaws and remains admirably impartial even in charting the deep waters of his abandonment of his family and quarrel with Wordsworth. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Coleridge’s virtues shine forth in all their glory: his coruscating wit, his unquenchable curiosity and enthusiasm for new ideas, his poets’ eye for the perfect metaphor. His skills as multifarious as his interests: he could transform himself from poet to trusted adviser, from literary critic and lecturer to journalist and philosopher. Wordsworth’s description of Coleridge as ‘the only wonderful man I ever knew’ at last seems justified. This biography is both an outstanding study and a mesmerising read.’

  JULIET BARKER, Literary Review

  ‘One of the greatest biographies of the century. Pure joy to read, it is a shimmering portrait of the mature artist veering between brilliance and despair…A thrilling luminous voyage into the interior of a man’s mind, compelling as a thriller, evocative as an old song.’

  JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Financial Times, Books of the Year

  ‘The miracle of this biography is that, without playing down Coleridge’s many faults or taking his part against enemies, it gets you completely on his side – inside, too. Holmes has an instinctive understanding of his subject – not a matter of research (though he has put in two decades or so of that), but of inhabiting Coleridge’s mind and heart. No other biographer I know of has been there or described the look of the place so well.’

  BLAKE MORRISON, Independent

  ‘This is a biography written with love. The love is paternal and filial, not concealing faults but forgiving them, looking for the source of error and failure, not to condemn but to understand them, describing without relish but without any averting of the eyes, the serial history of weakness, collapse and self destruction, proudly trumpeting those moments when out of the despair and moral squalor the great spirit rises again, a vast and often sudden surging into the air like a whale breaching the surface of the sea beneath which everyone had assumed he had long since drowned…Holmes’ triumph is to achieve the necessary double vision. He allows you to see Coleridge from the inside and the outside simultaneously.’

  ADAM NICOLSON, Evening Standard

  ‘This must be one of the finest biographies of the century. Very rarely has a biographer shown such passion and empathy for his subject and written in such flashing, energetic prose…Holmes’ controversial contention that Coleridge achieved a great deal of lasting literary significance is proved in Darker Reflections. The excerpts from the notebooks, the lectures, journalism, prose works and later poetry are astonishing and have been unjustly neglected. This biography triumphantly rectifies the situation.’

  FRANCIS GILBERT, TES

  ‘A fine biography, serious, engaged and rewarding…An admirable feat of sustained interest, hugely impressive.’

  PHILIP HENSHER, Spectator

  ‘It is a rare biographer who brings a langauge and breadth of vision commensurate with his subject. The man and poet who emerges is alive, instinctive and formidably intelligent.’

  BRIAN MORTON, Scotland on Sunday

  ‘An outstanding work of biography, a book of subtlety, power and imagination in which not a word is out of place.’

  IAN MCINTYRE, The Times, Books of the Year

  ‘As carefully and inevitably constructed as a good poem, this wonderful book is a completely satisfying conclusion to one of the great biographical enterprises of our day and is going to rank as among the best lives of any of the English poets.’

  ROBERT NYE, Scotsman

  ‘Holmes gives us two lives. On the one hand is Coleridge’s charismatic and ebullient outward persona – sparkling, changing, intellectually overwhelming…On the other are his “darker reflections”, the self-lacerating private diary in his notebooks…With great subtlety Holmes traces and explains Coleridge’s abstruse mental voyaging, brilliantly interweaving his intellectual and imaginative life with outer day-to-day realities.’

  NICHOLAS ROE, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Heartbreaking, exasperating and as tense as a thriller.’

  JILL PATON WALSH, Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year

  ‘Coleridge is fortunate to have Richard Holmes as his biographer. He is the poet’s acutest defender; his own scholarship is large and borderless, and he provides again and again, brilliant readings of Coleridge’s spidery enigmas. But Holmes’ defence is deeper, one feels, than intellectual justification. The power of Holmes’ portrait in both this book and its first volume seems to issue from an emotional proximity – and a special proximity to Coleridge’s metaphysical tendencies.’

  JAMES WOOD, Guardian

  ‘If there is an image of biography for Darker Reflections, it is surely that of the Brocken spectre, the weird shadow cast ahead of walkers as they climb a hill: “gliding without tread/ An image with a glory round its head”. Holmes projects his own being into the mists of time, and inevitably pursues the Coleridgean ghost he creates. Except that the portrait that emerges from these pages has the most lifelike complexity. It is as if Holmes has composed a dispassionate eulogy on a late dearly beloved friend, and as if the spectre has suddenly turned to face him.’

  NICK GROOM, TES

  ‘By now we must all of us be aware that we are living in a golden age of biography and that Richard Holmes is one of its luminaries. His Coleridge: Darker Reflections is a flight up even from previous excellence and I am sure a better biography has not been published this year’

  DORIS LESSING, TLS, Books of the Year

  ‘A great life, a warm, witty work of art in its own right and a grenade lobbed at the battalions of hack biographers.’

  STEPHEN MOSS, New Statesman, Books of the Year

  ‘The most significant biography published this year…Steeped in his subject, Holmes need only look into himself in order to find the recesses of the Coleridgean consciousness; he has caught the inflections of Coleridge’s own voice also, so at times the biography becomes a wonderful synthesis of writer and subject. Despite his fine scholarship, Holmes’ narrative moves as swiftly as any fictional narrative. He has found a wonderful character and around him has elaborated a wonderful plot.’

  PETER ACKROYD, The Times, Books of the Year

  ‘Monumental…Britain has many excellent biographers but Holmes is perhaps the best.’

  DANIEL JOHNSON, The Times

  ‘Holmes’ lively unflagging sympathy, searching and cogent…never loses sight of the hurt child inside the grown man. Whatever it was – something had wounded Coleridge irreparably. Holmes feels that, and makes us feel it. The result is a remarkable exploit of imaginative retrieval.’

  JOHN CAREY, Sunday Times

  ‘Literary biography at its finest: a masterpiece. Coleridge’s chaotic life has been the perfect subject for our best living biographer: tirelessly conversational (one acquaintance remarked that he’d heard nothing like Coleridge since leaving the Niagara Falls’), effortlessly engaging, endlessly puzzling and spiked with serious quantities of drugs. Perhaps the biography of the year.’

  ROBERT MCCRUM, Observer

  ‘Vivid, impassioned and ultimately moving.’

  Time Out

 
‘Monumental, complete and comprehensive, this volume is put together with the meticulous skill of a watchmaker…Holmes is the Hegel of biographers. It is difficult to see how such a treatment can ever be superseded.’

  FRANK MCLYNN, Irish Times

  ‘There are many intoxicating moments in this biography. Reading Holmes’s Coleridge becomes itself an addictive pleasure.’

  TIMOTHY WILSON SMITH, Tablet

  Also by Richard Holmes

  One for Sorrow (poems: 1970)

  Shelley: The Pursuit (1974)

  Gautier: My Fantoms (translations; 1976)

  Shelley on Love (1980, 1996)

  Coleridge (1982)

  Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985)

  Nerval: The Chimeras (with Peter Jay; 1985)

  Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin:

  A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs

  (Penguin Classics; 1987)

  Kipling: Something of Myself

  (with Robert Hampson: Penguin Classics; 1987)

  De Feministe en de Filosoof (1988)

  Coleridge: Early Visions (1989)

  Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (1993)

  Coleridge: Selected Poems (1996)

  Copyright

  Flamingo

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  Published in paperback by Flamingo 1999

  SECOND EDITION

  First published in hardback by HarperCollins 1998

  Copyright © Richard Holmes, 1998

  Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-37882-1

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  *Coleridge had been reliant on opium since the winter of 1801. He drank it in the form of laudanum, that is tincture of opium diluted in wine or brandy. Opium was also available in powdered form, and in many popular patent medicines such as Kendal Black Drop, Dover’s Powder and Godfrey’s Cordial. The drug was easily obtainable from pharmacists, druggists and physicians as an analgesic and antispasmodic, cheaply and without prescription. There was no medical concept of “addiction” (physical dependency), and the most advanced laboratory research at Edinburgh University and Göttingen (injecting dogs and frogs) had yet to agree if it was a stimulant, a hallucinogen, or a depressant. (See Andreas-Holhger Maehle, “Pharmacological Experimentation with Opium in the Eighteenth Century”, in Drugs and Narcotics in History, edited Roy Porter, CUP 1995) In fact Papaver somniferum (the opium poppy) has all these properties, since it contains Nature’s richest cocktail of drugs, from which nineteenth-century chemists would eventually derive morphine, heroin, nepenthe and codeine. Evidence for the strength, frequency and cost of Coleridge’s habit will emerge later in my story. (For fellow-addicts, including Crabbe, Wilberforce, De Quincey, Poe, and Wilkie Collins see Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, 1968.) It is remarkable that nowhere in Coleridge’s later Notebooks are there descriptions of the “pleasures” of opium, only of the agonizing physical and psychological effects of “withdrawal”. His addiction can also be considered an emotional state which throws light on his extraordinary imaginative “dependency” on certain close, human relationships such as those with Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson (Asra), and even more strangely, on their substitutes. Love and Opium are sometimes interchangeable substances in Coleridge’s mind and body.

  *Coleridge’s intuition of the whole world as a single organic system (like a tree) ascending towards some kind of spiritual unity becomes one of his most importants beliefs, derived from his beautiful letters on “the one Life” in 1802. (See Early Visions, pp. 324–7.) It reflects both a homely Burkean view of “organic” human society, and the remote metaphysics of German Naturphilosophie propounding an “Absolute” unity and a “World Soul” (Geist) developed in the dialectical philosophy of Schelling, Fichte and later Hegel. (See Alan White, “The System of Identity” in Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, 1983.) This intuition, with its characteristic use of organic metaphors and its emphasis on spiritual “Hope”, regularly recurs in modern scientific-mystical speculation, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1959) and, with an environmentalist appeal, in James Lovelock’s Gaia (1991): “the Earth might in certain ways be alive – not as the ancients saw her, a sentient goddess with purpose and foresight – more like a tree. A tree that exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil.”

  *Coleridge’s surprisingly prudent handling of his finances give another indication of his half-formed plan to remain in the Mediterranean. He had earned £150 as Ball’s Private Secretary by December 1804, and a further £325 as Acting Public Secretary by the end of August 1805, giving him a total salary of £525, the most he had ever earned. Of this, he managed to send £160 to his wife (£50 in December 1804, and a further £110 in August 1805) and also repaid borrowings of £75 to Stoddart before leaving Malta. He managed to put aside £120 for his journey through Italy, but his expenses evidently increased in Rome, as he had effectively spent all his remaining savings in the six months to June 1806, and did not even have the price of a sea-passage home. There is a clear suggestion that he only finally left Italy because he was penniless, and had found no other work. (See Donald Sultana, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy, 1969.)

  *This whole passage points towards Wittgenstein’s famous aside that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. (Philosophical Investigations, 1953, p. 223.) Coleridge believed that the human language-world depends upon an entire structure of perceptions, which is generated by human social experience and ultimately by religious beliefs. So language, like the soul, was a unique form of unifying human consciousness and collectivity which animals could not share. In what sense it had “evolved” from Nature, or was a gift of God (“the Logos”), or perhaps both, constantly shifted in Coleridge’s thinking and was often expressed differently in his poetry and his philosophic prose. On the whole he wsa most orthodox in his letters of co
nsolation to others, as here; and most speculative in his private Notebooks. (See Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle, 1994.)

  *Coleridge often dated and located his most important entries in this very precise way. The phrase “half a mile from Coleorton Church” also curiously resembles the way he located the composition of “Kubla Khan”, which was written at the farmhouse “a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church”. He frequently visited Coleorton and Ashby churchyards, and copied down the tomb inscriptions there. One includes this verse on the death of a child: “The Babe was sucking at the Breast,/When God did call him to his Rest.” On this particular morning of emotional revelation he may have gone to the churchyard first, and then hurried on over the fields to the Queen’s Head inn to write in his Notebook. Dorothy later noted his habit of disappearing into “pot houses” when upset, at Penrith in 1809–10.