Vol. 1 originally published: London : Hodder and Stoughton, 1989; v. 2 originally published: London : HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

v. 1. Early visions, 1772-1804 -- v. 2. Darker reflections, 1804 to 1834. Adrift in the Mediterranean -- The sense of home -- The lecture shirt -- The friend in need -- In the dark chamber -- Hamlet in Fleet Street -- Phantom purposes -- True confessions -- Climbing Highgate Hill -- Magic children -- Glide, rich streams, away! -- Afterword.

V. 1 : Early visions. 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 sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief. - Publisher.

V. 2 : Darker reflections. Richard Holmes's Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the long-awaited second volume, chronicles the last 30 years of his career (1804-1834), a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage foundered, his opium addiction increased, he quarreled bitterly with Wordsworth, and his son, Hartley (a gifted poet himself), became an alcoholic. But after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge reemerged as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author, a great and daring poet, and a lecturer of genius. Holmes traces the development of Coleridge into a legend among the younger generation of Romantic writers -- the "hooded eagle amongst blinking owls"--And the influence he had on Hazlitt, De Qunicey, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Carlyle, and J.S. Mill, among others. And he rediscovers Coleridge's power as a conversationalist and a ceaseless generator of ideas. As Charles Lamb noted, "his face when he repeats his versus half its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged." Although Coleridge's later life was not a happy one, it is continually fascinating. As Holmes brings it vividly to life in these pages, we feel his hopeless heart aches, his moments of elation, his electrifying creativity and boundless energy, his unfailing ability to rescue himself from the darkest of this. The result is a brilliantly animated, superbly detailed, wondrously provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist and an even more extraordinary human being. - Jacket flap.