Volume 46, Number 10 · June 10, 1999
Dreamer
By Rosemary Dinnage
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
by Richard Holmes
Pantheon, 622 pp., $32.00
'How Coleridge does rise up, as it were, almost from the dead!' wrote Dorothy Wordsworth in 1808. It was only two years since he had returned from the extended travels in the Mediterranean that were intended to cure all his ailments, physical and mental. He was thirty-six, and since the return, looking stout and—they all thought—altered for the worse, he had been reunited with his children and, reluctantly, with his wife; found himself ever more in love with Wordsworth's sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson; had some kind of difficult confrontation with Wordsworth himself; struggled with his dire finances; written a little poetry; and, of course, taken opium, in the form of easily obtained laudanum. Wordsworth and his circle, after the deep friendship of their early years, had already begun the process of writing him off as hopelessly irresponsible—hence Dorothy's surprise that Coleridge was to give a well-subscribed course of lectures in London.
Review, 3235 words
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