Coleridge: Darker Reflections by Richard Holmes HarperCollins 622pp, £19.99 in UK
We do not expect poets to be great intellects or vice versa, but with Coleridge we get something like the textbook genius. Not only a sublime poet but a major influence on British philosophy through his introduction of the ideas of German transcendentalism, Coleridge was a man of immense erudition, wide reading and endless fertility of ideas. He was also a fine mimic with a wonderful ear for dialects and accents. His admiration for Shakespeare was based on the Bard's ability to fuse poetry and philosophy - something only Coleridge of all other English poets managed successfully. No wonder Wordsworth (who attempted something similar in The Prelude), remarked of Coleridge, with whom he first formed a famous partnership and later quarrelled bitterly, that no man ever combined so much genius with so much talent.
Yet as D.H. Lawrence famously remarked of Herman Melville, the artist was so much greater than the man. As a human being, Coleridge was a disaster, principally but not solely because of his opium addiction. Habitually penniless, improvident and chaotic, at once fiercely independent yet unable to look after himself, Coleridge lived in a succession of temporary and unsatisfactory menages.
In this second volume of the poet's unhappy life, Richard Holmes underlines the four great sadnesses in Coleridge's life: the failure of his marriage; the quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810-11; the alienation of his son Hartley; and the break-up in his relationship with "Asra" (Sara Hutchinson). Paranoid and suspicious, with an ambiguous sexual profile and attitudes, Coleridge actually thought that Wordsworth had seduced his (Coleridge's) then mistress Asra, but Coleridge was so much in thrall to opium that he was never clearly able to distinguish illusion and reality.
Coleridge was the supreme theoretician of the role of the imagination, and was famously contrasted by J.S. Mill with Bentham the fact-worshipper. Illustrating Coleridge's philosophical importance, Mill argued that Bentham's primary concern was with truth and Coleridge's with meaning. Given the massive important role of philosophy in Coleridge's poetry, Holmes has to spend a lot of much time meticulously charting Coleridge's theoretical preconceptions, both in his many public lectures and in his grammar of poetic myth, Biographia Literaria.
The nuanced treatment in this book of Coleridge's alleged plagiarism of German Romantic philosophers is an especially subtle piece of analysis. It is particularly disappointing and was perceived at the time as a body-blow by political radicals like Hazlitt, that such a fine mind should have churned out hack anti-Napoleon propaganda in 1811, in an effusion of jingoism that did his reputation permanent harm.
Part of the fascination of this monumental two-volume life of Coleridge is to observe the author's craftsmanship. Since Coleridge did little other than write and lecture, there is not much external life for the biographer to get his teeth into. Holmes solves the problem of boredom for the reader by carefully dividing up aspects of the life and then "cuts" between them, leavening the narrative with learned asides and in-jokes ("This word `obscurity' would settle on Coleridge like an albatross"). Complete and comprehensive, this volume is put together with the meticulous skill of a watchmaker. It is a cliche to say that a good literary biography sends us back to the original writings, but with Holmes's book we have no choice, since his microscopic treatment virtually forces us to read the poems pari passu with the biography. Coleridge was attracted by "holistic" notions of the universe and, appropriately enough, in Richard Holmes he has found the Hegel of biographers. It is difficult to see how such extended treatment can ever be superseded.