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.-Coleridge: 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
