Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a literary life

'Never saw I his likeness', wrote a bereft Charles Lamb on the death of his friend Coleridge, 'nor probably the world can see again'. For William Wordsworth, Coleridge was 'the only wonderful man I ever knew', for William Hazlitt, the only person 'who answered to the idea of a man of genius'.

This literary life of the best-known and best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own 'literary life' - his famous Biographia Literaria - as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. Tracing the long and tortuous journey from Coleridge's intellectually precocious childhood and the annus mirabilis that gave us 'Kubla Khan', The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and 'Frost at Midnight', through his opium addiction and paralyzing sense of failure, to the literary criticism of rare insight and compelling beauty, William Christie offers a comprehensive and immensely readable account of Coleridge's life and works, including detailed discussion of the major poems and criticism.