Coleridge: Early Visions

Coleridge: Early Visions is a 1989 biography of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Richard Holmes, an award-winning British biographer who specializes in the major figures of British and French Romanticism. Coleridge: Early Visions was the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year.

Holmes begins his examination of Coleridge’s life by noting that previous biographies have tended to be critical of their subject: ''Wordsworth called him 'the most wonderful man' he had ever known; but many subsequent biographers have been skeptical. It would seem possible to write an entire book on Coleridge's opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political 'apostasy,' his sexual fantasies, or his radiations of mystic humbug. And indeed, all these books have been written. But no biographer, since James Dykes Campbell in 1894, has tried to examine his entire life in a broad and sympathetic manner, and to ask the one vital question: what made Coleridge – for all his extravagant panoply of faults – such an extraordinary man, such an extraordinary mind?''

Holmes intends to remedy this situation with a sympathetic account of Coleridge as a beloved friend, brilliant conversationalist, and literary genius. He throws down a challenge to the reader (and to himself): if Coleridge ''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.''



Coleridge: Early Visions covers exactly half of the poet’s life, beginning with his birth in 1772 and ending as he sets sail to join the wartime Civil Service in Malta in 1804. Holmes devotes careful attention to Coleridge’s childhood, arguing that it contains the seeds of much of his later suffering, as well as the behavior that previous biographers have tended to criticize.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in the countryside town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, the youngest of fourteen children. He was a bookish child, taking “no pleasure in boyish sports.” His mother was emotionally distant. In later life, Coleridge remembered provoking her just to get her attention: at the age of seven, he ran away from home (an event which would feature in Coleridge’s poem “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”). Coleridge was close to his father, John, but when Samuel was eight, John Coleridge died. At around the same time, his brother Frank enlisted in the Navy, leaving Coleridge the only son still at home.

He was sent to Christ’s Hospital School, a charitable school catering to the sons of poor gentlemen, where his poetic talent first became apparent. He wrote a number of poems that foreshadow his later achievements, including “Dura Navis,” a melancholy sea-yarn which contains thematic echoes of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It was also at Christ’s Hospital that Coleridge was first prescribed opium, to which he would later become addicted.



During his school years, Coleridge developed an infatuation with Mary Evans, the sister of a friend. Holmes notes that Coleridge’s affection was as much for the Evans family as a whole as it was for Mary. The poet’s own loveless childhood had left him vulnerable to falling for happy families: Holmes suggests that this tendency would eventually cause his unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker.

At Jesus College, Cambridge, Coleridge began winning prizes for his poetry, acquired an interest in politics, and met several young men who would be influential in the Romantic movement. At the same time, he developed a heavier opium habit and began to rack up debts. Eventually, in need of income, he left the college to enlist in the Army under the pseudonym "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.” Far from a natural soldier, he traded his writing ability for help with his horse and equipment. When he left Latin graffiti on the stable wall, his identity was uncovered, and his brother paid his debts and returned him to the university.

After his return to Cambridge, Coleridge began to write poetry of the kind which would come to be called Romantic. He became close friends with the poet Robert Southey, who introduced him to Sara Fricker. Coleridge was enamored of all the Fricker sisters, and Sara may have been the least suitable bride for the young poet, but under Southey’s influence he proposed to her, and they were married.



Coleridge began collaborating with another young poet, William Wordsworth, on a collection of verse called Lyrical Ballads. At first, Coleridge took the lead in this collaboration, but when Coleridge agreed to join his friend and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy in the Lake District to finish the book, Wordsworth began to impose his vision, rejecting Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.”

Coleridge took Wordsworth’s judgment of his work to heart. For Holmes, this represents the great crisis of Coleridge’s early life. The poet returned to his unhappy marriage in a state of dejection. His addiction to opium worsened, and he began to ignore literature in favor of political and metaphysical speculation. The bulk of the work for which Coleridge is now famous was behind him by this stage. However, Holmes argues that during this period, ''One can glimpse something new stirring in that extraordinarily flexible and resourceful mind: the hope of recreating himself imaginatively out of the sense of failure itself. First, he had deserts of opium, illness, and domestic unhappiness to cross; and endless unavailing visions of escape to live through. But he would do it, he would endure, he would write.''

The first half of Holmes’s account ends as Coleridge takes ship for Malta, writing on a chair made from the cages of captive ducks.



Praised in the New York Times for its ability to win “the reader over to Coleridge’s point of view,” Holmes’s biography was universally well received by academics and lay readers alike.