In Psychology's Shadow

...Early Visions, the first volume (published in the United States in 1990), left the Romantic fleeing England for Malta—to escape from chronic health problems...

...Nobody went to greater lengths to remain an enigma than T. S. Eliot, yet his interpreters have done rather well...

...Holmes does not spare us the painful side effects of opium overuse, including blocked bowels that required Draconian and humiliating treatments...

...Critical methods suggesting that who he or she is doesn't matter, that only the work counts, have not diminished our appetites for the lives of creative geniuses...

...At first, Will Frost's braggadocio seems a peculiar prelude for the career of his meditative son...

...Parini tries to recreate Frost by keeping track of actions and gestures...

...Even worse than the loss of Wordsworth as intellectual companion was the alienation of his circle, the entire Grasmere clan, including Asra, and their insistence that mutual friends understand how unreliable and unstable Coleridge was...

...for, meet him when or where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied the mistress of the world, its living streams seemed especially to flow for every classical ruin which we wandered...

...Walt Whitman boasted, "I contain multitudes," and it is true that after reading each new book about him we come away feeling we know the Good Gray Poet a little better, even though we had thought we already knew everything about him...

...With chilling detail, he built up a portrait of a selfish monster who wrecked the lives of those closest to him while posing as a kindly, white-haired New England sage...

...We recognize our own human frailty in his struggles, and we feel a warmer connection with our mysterious world, which he spent a whole lifetime trying to comprehend and describe...

...At the same time, there was that wonderful talk, together with an ability to give as well as receive love...

...Many in the literary community of the 1970s found this a refreshing corrective to the sentimental popular image of Frost, canonized in Time, Life and Newsweek...

...Reading Darker Reflections, we come to empathize with Coleridge...

...But on top of this there was the guilt of not being able to break free of the habit...

...This has nothing to do with lifespan: Hopkins outlived John Keats by a decade, yet Keats presents no such conundrums...

...perpetual debt...

...The event was traumatic, and had far-reaching consequences in estranging the two men and setting Coleridge emotionally adrift...

...But numerous writers who knew Frost well cried foul, and there followed a wave of memoirs meant to counter Thompson's malign picture...

...Fortunately, Coleridge possessed a considerable gift for friendship...

...The folk hero image fostered by the popular press had also encouraged a misreading of his verse, hurting the poet's serious reputation...

...He also needed to make new friends—not easy for a middle-aged invalid with limited financial resources...

...an incompatible marriage...

...He demanded a great deal, and could be the houseguest from hell...

...New landscapes, new friends, and a temporary respite from his cares produced a burst of intellectual energy...

...Frost's own authorized biographer, Lawrance Thompson, came to loathe the man he chose to write about...

...Yet as Panni shrewdly notes, the ability to absorb a role was passed from father to child...

...Whether one attributes his rapid addiction to the insidious properties of the drug or to a susceptible personality, the sad fact is that what we today understand as an illness in itself, Coleridge, together with his contemporaries, saw as a moral weakness...

...Unfortunately, after its vivid beginning, the book bogs down in retelling the overly familiar narrative of Frost's struggles with farming, with poverty, with depression, with family tragedy, with marching to a different drummer—until, eventually, it all paid off and he was hailed as the great American poet...

...Nevertheless, in 1996 Jeffrey Meyers produced an even less flattering biography, one that recast every ambiguous act in the worst possible light...

...Darker Reflections picks up with Coleridge's arrival and psychic rebirth in the sunny Mediterranean...

...Before Holmes, though, the full extent of the habit wasn't clear...

...His is a fair and worthy account of an important figure, but the definitive work on Robert Frost remains to be written...

...Indeed, his father, who packed a pistol and kept a j ar of pickled bull's testicles on his desk, emerges as a character familiar to the readers of Westerns: the madcap Eastern reporter, reveling in the freedom of the frontier...

...His diaries record the physical and mental anguish in heartwringing detail...

...Holmes spends much time on a mysterious and pivotal episode in every biography of either man—Coleridge's claim that he stumbled upon his friend in bed with Asra...

...Coleridge had periodically wrestled with a number of debilitating maladies...

...His reputation was badly damaged, and he was forced to rebuild it with such mammoth achievements as his Biographia Literaria...

...Intent on refuting the prejudiced interpretations of Thompson and Meyers, Panni never quite manages to show us a believable man behind that charade and often sounds more convincing when analyzing a stanza he particularly admires than when he is parsing Frost's motives...

...there is no stopping his sound, his voice, his ideas, his poetry, his pains, his puns...

...Panni writes well, and his readings of the poems are astute, if not earthshaking...

...Jay Panni's Robert Frost: A Life (Holt, 514 pp., $35.00) is, among other things, intended as a corrective to several particularly nasty portraits of its subject...

...and perhaps most of all, a growing disillusionment with the weaknesses he perceived in his own character...

...Most schoolchildren learn that "Kubla Khan" was inspired by a laudanum dream...

...The dark side of Coleridge's travels in the South showed itself in his growing addiction to opiates...

...After all, opium derivatives were the ubiquitous medicine of the times, prescribed for a wide spectrum of ailments—from toothache and stomach upset to arthritis and low spirits...

...The opening chapters are fresh and gripping...

...Some authors, of whom Frost is a notable example, simply seem to resist being understood as people—by their admirers as well as their detractors...

...As a biographer, Richard Holmes knows how to create the illusion of getting inside a subject's skin...

...Openness of character doesn't necessarily matter either...

...Coleridge frequently infected his hearers with a similar sense of enchantment and connectedness to the very springs of philosophy...

...Parini tells us in an Afterword that he hopes his effort will reclaim Frost's personal integrity, while also showing him to have been one of the truly great poets of our century...

...That Coleridge himself later repudiated the vision as too unrealistic to credit has led many to put it down to a kind of Oedipal opium delirium, though Kenneth Johnston's 1998 volume, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, wasn't so sure...

...Helen Vendler characterized the book's style and tone as reading "like newspaper précis of the plots of soap operas...

...We are reminded that New England's poet laureate was, in fact, born in California...

...We are enough in the shadow of psychology to believe at some level that knowing more about a writer will help us better understand his output...

...Gerard Manley Hopkins illustrates the opposite quality...

...They were inexpensive and available over the counter at any pharmacy...

...Coleridge's sense of unworthiness was further exacerbated once he returned to England...

...His domestic life seemed less satisfactory than ever...

...Holmes isn't either, but as he sensibly observes, the point is not really what happened, it is what Coleridge genuinely believed at the time...

...his hopeless love for Wordsworth's sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson...

...Two long-awaited books, recently published with much fanfare, both claim to probe what made their subjects tick...

...By the time he was acknowledged as amajor writer, Frost seemed to have retreated into playing a role...

...Holmes gets us thinking like Coleridge, seeing the world through his large, sympathetic eyes...

...I have often wondered why certain writers' lives seem particularly amenable to repeated examination...

...And when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I once listened to Plato, in the groves of the academy...

...That gives us some insight into why and how the poet created his own elaborate and effective mask in later years...

...Again and again poor Coleridge vowed to stop, only to break down once more...

...still, the result is not enough to make us feel we have been exposed to any new insights other than the one about the poet's father...

...Somehow, the figure encountered in his biographies seems too pallid and unfocused to have written such passionate verse...

...Although there have been at least 10 previous accounts of the career of this wily American icon, he continues to be an elusive, contradictory figure...

...Darker Reflections, 1804-1834 (Pantheon, 623 pp., $32.00), the second installment of Richard Holmes' two-volume study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, treats the sadder part of an initially promising life later clouded by depression and addiction...

...Worse, he soon fell out with his closest friend, William Wordsworth, over Sara Hutchinson, or "Asra" as Coleridge called her (presumably to distinguish her from his wife and daughter, who were both Saras...

...Parini's book ought to provide a timely reappraisal...

...One of his new acquaintances, the American painter Washington Allston, later wrote: "He used to call Rome the silent city, but I could never think of it as such while with him...

...Holmes refers to Goethe saying that "posthumous productivity" is one proof of genius, then adds, "Once you have heard Coleridge...