Coleridge

"By the age of thirty, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written much of the poetry for which he is now remembered - but the consequence of reaching such artistic heights so early in his career was to cast a shadow over the last three decades of his life. In this portrait of a troubled genius falling to earth, we feel Coleridge's hopeless heartache, his disappointments, his addiction to opium, his elated highs and catastrophic lows, and experience his visits to the darkest depths of the abyss. But we also witness an act of extraordinary biographical reclamation, as Richard Holmes convinces us of the astonishing breadth of the vision and poetic power which remained with Coleridge to the end."--BOOK JACKET.