'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.
Winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship.
'It is remarkable that there is anything new to say about the canonical figure of Coleridge. But in this 'literary life' William Christie says it...a brilliant, even dazzling contribution to international literary criticism' - Judges' report, NSW Premier's Literary Awards
'This literary life will prove to be one of the most thoughtful, generous and entertaining books ever written on Coleridge' - Professor Deirdre Coleman, author of Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery
'Christie is an exemplary companion, both for Coleridge and his readers, maintaining throughout a cheerful indulgence, tracing the suicidally depressive depths with gentle reminders that Coleridge somehow needed to face the very worst before he could revive self-belief, and reserving a skeptical distance even in the eddies of manically sustained activity...he keeps us reading to the end, to see where the "wonderful" Coleridge had come from, and where he was to go.' – Robert White, Australian Book Review, 2007
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Chronology
Prologue: Literary Life 1815
'The Discipline of His Taste at School': Christ's Hospital and Cambridge
'The Progress of His Opinions in Religion and Politics': The Radical Years
'A Known and Familiar Landscape': Conversations
'The Poet, Described in Ideal Perfection': Annus Mirabilis
'The Toil of Thinking': Private Notes and Public Newspapers
'To Rust Away': Lost Years, 1800-1806
'The One Proteus of the Fire and the Flood': Critic for Hire
'To Preserve the Soul Steady': The Sage of Highgate
Epilogue
Notes
Further Reading
Index
WILLIAM CHRISTIE is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has taught and published extensively on Romanticism, and has published a wide range of articles on Coleridge and Wordsworth for journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Sydney Studies in English, Prose Studies and the British Journal of Aesthetics.
Description
'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.
Reviews
Winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship.
'It is remarkable that there is anything new to say about the canonical figure of Coleridge. But in this 'literary life' William Christie says it...a brilliant, even dazzling contribution to international literary criticism' - Judges' report, NSW Premier's Literary Awards
'This literary life will prove to be one of the most thoughtful, generous and entertaining books ever written on Coleridge' - Professor Deirdre Coleman, author of Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery
'Christie is an exemplary companion, both for Coleridge and his readers, maintaining throughout a cheerful indulgence, tracing the suicidally depressive depths with gentle reminders that Coleridge somehow needed to face the very worst before he could revive self-belief, and reserving a skeptical distance even in the eddies of manically sustained activity...he keeps us reading to the end, to see where the "wonderful" Coleridge had come from, and where he was to go.' – Robert White, Australian Book Review, 2007
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Chronology
Prologue: Literary Life 1815
'The Discipline of His Taste at School': Christ's Hospital and Cambridge
'The Progress of His Opinions in Religion and Politics': The Radical Years
'A Known and Familiar Landscape': Conversations
'The Poet, Described in Ideal Perfection': Annus Mirabilis
'The Toil of Thinking': Private Notes and Public Newspapers
'To Rust Away': Lost Years, 1800-1806
'The One Proteus of the Fire and the Flood': Critic for Hire
'To Preserve the Soul Steady': The Sage of Highgate
Epilogue
Notes
Further Reading
Index
Authors
WILLIAM CHRISTIE is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has taught and published extensively on Romanticism, and has published a wide range of articles on Coleridge and Wordsworth for journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Sydney Studies in English, Prose Studies and the British Journal of Aesthetics.
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