Coleridge Unbound

...Not so—the biographer aims at something altogether more revisionary...

...All of Coleridge's writings, the biographer explains, were spun out of psychological material: "Failure, prostration, imaginative crisis itself, became something on which he, as a writer, could exercise brilliant lines of poetic inquiry and self-dramatization...

...Charles Lamb compared him to an archangel...

...Like other Romantic writers, he understood that our failures, rather than our heroism, make us seem sympathetic and human...

...No, insists Holmes...

...The great "Dejection" ode purports to describe the erosion of creativity, but what it truly represents is the triumph of "the passion and the life, whose fountains are within...

...He walks free, unchained from the rock of his self-professed neuroses...

...Of course...

...The author suggests that we might well have considered him an innovator who was cut down in his prime, a proto-Shelley...

...The talk of loss and failure is constantly contradicted by the excitement and spontaneity of the leading rhythms and metaphors...

...We simply have become so fixated on Coleridge's psychological quirks that we have lost a full appreciation of the genius...

...Entries in the Notebooks sometimes capture him imitating his Ancient Mariner: "Mind shipwrecked by storms of doubt, nowmastless, rudderless, shattered—pulling in the dead swell of a dark and windless sea...

...upon the intruder's departure, the poet's ideas "had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast...

...Publishers' catalogs and periodicals continually announced forthcoming tomes and epics from the man's pen, only to leave the public disappointed again and again...

...On the contrary, his work would be seen as astonishingly ranging, confident and assured: frustrated only by the marital anxieties and ill health of his last months in the Lake District...

...His ill-starred love affair helped him discover a new pose: the authority of failure...

...Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and...

...It is difficult to think that the shadows of failure, plagiarism, apostasy, or even opium addiction would mark his reputation in any significant way," writes Holmes...

...Coleridge envisioned himself a Promethean martyr chained to the rocks of his character faults...

...Yet Coleridge seems to have found these tribulations fruitful, even enjoyable...

...Medicines were drugs, whose withdrawal produced nightmares: Fantastic passions...

...And in the instance of "Kubla Khan," Coleridge's introduction, with its fanciful tale about Porlock, may make it out to be a fragment, but the poem had been carefully polished for years before it saw print...

...He would be recalled as a poet of boundless promise (with Wordsworth merely his aptest pupil), the man who imported the theories of A.W...

...In this first of a two-volume life, Holmes demonstrates what superhuman energy Coleridge possessed...

...were even then prominent and manifest...

...This has become the most famous excuse in all literature...

...Coleridge's many-sided genius, his enthralling talk and fabulous images shimmer through every chapter...

...Schlegel and Kant to England, and the translator of Schiller's plays...

...Coleridge printed "Kubla Khan" with an introduction describing the poem as an opiuminspired dream fragment, left unfinished because a "Person from Porlock" came along to interrupt its transcription...

...Although believing one has made such a tragic marital mistake is usually a self-serving delusion, it remains true that many of Coleridge's intimates deplored Sara Coleridge and agreed that Sara Hutchinson seemed better fitted to appreciate his thoughts...

...Then came the gothic romances— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and the unfinished "Christabel" (begun in 1797, finally abandoned in 1801)— and the hallucinatory "Kubla Khan" (1798...

...Ironically, the familiar stereotype of Coleridge the wasteful dreamer was invented by the poet himself...

...this seems to be a case of unheard melodies sounding sweeter...

...HOLMES chides readers and biographers alike for swallowing Coleridge's mesmerizing anecdotes and then being moved to pity by the fictionalized portrait...

...These perspectives undeniably find support in the details of his life, Holmes concedes, but there remains the question of why Coleridge was so charismatic to those around him...

...argues Richard Holmes in Coleridge: Early Visions (Viking, 409 pp., $19.95...

...It all began with his "conversation" poems, best represented by "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (1797) and "Frost at Midnight" (1798...

...Though these powerful images seduce us into empathizing with a putative mood of despondency, Holmes argues that they betray "not depression, but delight...

...Her brother eulogized him as "The rapt One of the godlike forehead, /The heaven-eyed creature...

...On Poetry COLERIDGE UNBOUND BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL WOULD we regard Samuel Taylor Coleridge differently if he had not lived until 1834, but had perished instead three decades earlier on his second trip to Europe...

...And shame and terror over all...

...These free-verse vignettes of the poet's observations of nature on rambles with friends and family inspired Wordsworth's poetic breakthrough into the same kind of lyric...

...Prone to allergies and hypochondria, he developed alarming symptoms on occasion: swollen joints, neuralgia, eye infections that lasted for weeks, mono-likeexhaustion...

...Like Shelley (the subject of an earlier Holmes biography), the youthful Coleridge espoused radical politics, dabbled in continental philosophy, and consciously surrounded himself with other notable literary figures...

...Discontent with his failure to accomplish half the schemes he mapped out led him to produce self-deprecating caricatures of an idle woolgatherer...

...Were these remarkable people all suckers for mere charm...

...Nor should it be forgotten that he was at times laid low by physical infirmities, which often drove him to opiates...

...These he blamed on a hostile mother, and on his rashly marrying an unsympathetic wife, only to discover a more understanding beloved too late...

...He needn't worry...

...Holmes says that if his subject "does not leap out of these pages—brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking—and invade your imagination (as he has done mine), then I have failed to do him justice...

...Dorothy Wordsworth reported to her future sister-in-law that "his conversation teems with soul, mind and spirit...

...As Holmes describes many of these "short bursts of extreme imaginative intensity," it is not surprising that they sometimes ended in collapse...

...He loved to tell rapt listeners, "Before I was eight years old, I was already a character—sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth...

...Had Coleridge died in 1804, he would now be classified as a member of the doomed generation of Romantic poets from Thomas Chatterton to John Keats (and extending into our own times in such examples as Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath...

...Over aperiod of five years he revolutionized English poetry, creating several entirely new genres...

...Often, while thus describing himself in letters, the real man would be dashing off sensational stories for the popular press, or running an entire magazine without help, or translating works from a language he had recently taught himself...

...In a letter to William Godwin he wrote: "I once was a volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy—but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat & square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element...

...Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame...

...He notes in his Introduction that for the last 200 years scholars have pegged Coleridge as an irresponsible husband (either Peter Pan or latent homosexual, according to taste), a lazy writer afraid to fall short of his brilliant schemes, a political turncoat frightened by the French "Terror" into conservatism, and a drug fiend—in short, the very paradigm of the neurotic artist...

...Had Coleridge given up the ghost at the pinnacle of these wonder years, Holmes suspects that "we might be tempted to think of him, paradoxically, as greater than the man he eventually became...

...This is a story that, like the Ancient Mariner's, "you cannot choose but hear...

...The last of the great poems of this period was "Dejection: An Ode" (1802), a cautionary response to Wordsworth's lofty "Intimations of Immortality...

...By the timeof his actual death at age62, the world knew Coleridge as a philosopher and fascinating talker —yes, but also as a drug-user, a failed husband, and a champion procrastinator who had accumulated a lifetime's worth of uncompleted (sometimes unstarted) projects...

...His friends spoke of him as a superior being...

...Kafka would have comprehended, and claimed him as a brother...

...He also prefigured the Shelleyan pattern of zigzagging from sexual experimentation to an imprudent marriage, then on to Platonic infatuation with a woman who was neither wife nor mistress, but amanuensis and Muse...

...interests himself so much about every little trifle...

...Maddening brawl...

...Oneof his ballads notes the propensity to "best love the songs which make [us] grieve...

...This is not to deny that Coleridge had some familiarity with depression...

...Moreover, it is scarcely fair to detract from such achievements as the Biographia Literaria by judging them against dream-books like the never-written opus on the Divine Logos, or the unrealized epic poem "The Origins of Evil...

...Reading this, one might guess that Holmes' plan is to lay the foundation in this volume for showing in volume two what went awry during the second half of the poet's allotted span...