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Coleridge

Darker Reflections

Richard Holmes

This is the second volume of Richard Holmes’s classic biographies of Coleridge, the poet of Kubla Khan. This volume covers the last 30 years of Coleridge’s career (1804 to 1834) during which he travelled through the Mediterranean, returned to his old haunts in the Lake District and the West Country, and finally settled in Highgate. It was a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage broke up, his opium addiction increased, he quarrelled with Wordsworth, his own son Hartley Coleridge (a gifted poet himself) became an alcoholic. And after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge re-emerged on the literary scene as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author.

First published:
1999
Published by:
HarperCollins
Length:
Hardcover 622 pages

About the author

Richard Holmes OBE is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. Educated at Churchill College, Cambridge, he is currently a member of The Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001–2007 and has honorary doctorates from the University of East London, University of Kingston and the Tavistock Institute. In 1992 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. He lives in London and Norfolk with his wife, British novelist Rose Tremain.