"Coleridge: Early Visions" by Richard Holmes

This is the first of a two-volume biography of the 'father of romanticism' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of classic poetry such as Xanadu, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Christabel. It covers his life from his birth in 1772 in St Mary Ottery in Devon and childhood as one of many brothers, growing up in a rural parsonage, and his subsequent schooling at Christ's Hospital and Cambridge after his father had died, to 1804 when he travelled to Sicily during the Napoleonic Wars.

It is an extremely well-written book, easy to read (the chapters aren't very long and they are further divided into beautifully short sections), and comprehensive without being exhaustive. There is a very good cast list at the back ("Coleridge's Circle"). I particularly liked the fact that Holmes touched upon literary theory although in my opinion he did not go far enough. It seems to me, from what Holmes does say, that Coleridge was an avant garde young Turk rebelling against the literary establishment which means that he presumably had ideas about what was good and what was bad; Holmes tells us that Coleridge reinvented the traditional ballad form but I wanted to know the details of this. (This is one of those moments when I acknowledge that my tastes are probably as far from mainstream as you can get; despite this cavil the biography is still a damn fine book).

Coleridge knew everyone, including the young poet and chemist Humphrey Davy, who appears in The Age of Wonder, an even more brilliant book by Richard Holmes

He was a 'bit of a lad' at Cambridge, getting drunk and whoring and getting into debt; he left by joining the army but was discharged 'insane' (he must have been totally unsuited to military life; he could not even ride a horse without repeatedly falling off); it sounds as if he was manic-depressive. He then became a political radical (he and Wordsworth were tracked by a government spy (brilliantly called Nozy!) who was very concerned that the notes the poets were making about the countryside were designed to be sold to Napoleon). He made several plans to start artistic communities in the wilderness, believing implicitly in Rousseau's 'Noble Savage'. He was an avidly read and very astute political journalist. He adored long (often 20 miles or more each day for several days) country walks and began both Kubla Khan and Ancient Mariner whilst walking in Devon (I have just spent a week in Watchet where they claim that Ancient Mariner was inspired by a visit to their harbour).

There were so many quotable moments in the book (mostly by Coleridge but still quite a few by Holmes):
Holmes:

• In literary life "'success' and respectability are delusive concepts" (Ch 1.4) - I love 'delusive'!!!
• Coleridge was "uncertain whether he was the Benjamin or a black sheep" (Ch 1.4)
• Coleridge developed a "plain style, expressing emotion in run-on lines, musical alliterations, and bold monosyllabic statements of personal feeling" (Ch 2.6)
• Coleridge used "suspended rhythmic devices with brilliant effect in his ballads" (Ch 6.6)
• Xanadu is a "myth of creativity" (Ch 7.10)
• Coleridge "plunged like a Red Indian ... into the woods" (Ch 8.10)
• Coleridge in Germany was delighted that kids got presents from "a mysterious forerunner of the modern Father Christmas" (and that older kids kept the secret from their younger siblings) (Ch 9.4)
• "No animal but man appears ever to be struck by wonder" (Ch 9.9, quoting Carlyon)
• "With his fatal genius for being all things to all men, for trying to please everyone at once, and for trying to fulfil expectations on every hand, he fell into a pattern of prevarication and fragmentation in much of his work. He dreamed more than he planned, he planned more than he could execute, leaping from one brilliant conception to the next, never still or concentrated for more than a few weeks at a time." (Ch 10.3)
• He laid out political debate in two columns "so that the closed, mirror-thinking of both sides was effectively demonstrated" (Ch 10.8)

Coleridge:

• "Chasing chance-started friendships" (Ch 1.2)
• "Love is a local Anguish" (Ch 4.4)
• "When a Man is unhappy, he writes damn bad Poetry, I find." (Ch 4.8)
• "soul-gelding Ugliness" (Ch 5.8)
• He was unable to write when he was depressed below the "writing-point in the thermometer of mind" (Ch 5.11)
• He described the habit of philosophers of demanding that every concept be exactly defined as "Barricading the road to truth ... setting up a turn-pike at every step we took". (Ch 8.4)
• A fisherman explained why he and others had risked their lives in a vain attempt to rescue a drowning boy as "we have a nature towards one another." (Ch 8.10)
• "No one can leap over his Shadow" (Ch 12.8)

"And the Devil thought of his old Friend

Death in the Revelations" (Ch 10.1)

A beautifully written book. I just wanted more! (Yes, I am aware there is a second volume. I will get it.)

June 2016; 371 pages

"The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes

Despite the title, the bulk of this book is about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Lowes seeks to explain where each element of the story came from before it percolated in what he calls the "deep well" of Coleridge's imagination to emerge as classic poetry. This book is a brilliant feat of scholarship: he leaves no stone unturned and every image (so it seems) is traced to its source (and often multiple sources). It is an extraordinarily impressive work, although obsessive, exhaustive but sometimes a little exhausting.

I was interested initially because of my work on liminality but well before the end I was determined to read more of Coleridge, his biography, his criticism, and of course his great poems. This man was so much better than Wordsworth!

Mariner is all book work: he had never been to sea before he write the work. He seems to have been a voracious reader with a prodigious memory: he talks about ocular images which suggest that he had a photographic memory. He was also extreme when he talked: he seems to have subjected his listeners to a stream of consciousness that ranged from subject to subject demonstrating an incredible breadth of knowledge and understanding: he was interested in everything. He would have been an amazing person to have met (but perhaps a bit of a bore and certainly a monopoliser of conversations).

For example, the Ancient Mariner experiences:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green and blue, and white

and Lowes finds the sliminess is a description of Captain Cook, which Coleridge read; the oiliness from voyages of Father Bourzes; the burning from Purchas; the witches from Macbeth (and they go "about, about"); the death-fires from Priestley's Opticks when he describes light from putrescence and Will o' the Wisps in burial grounds; and the crawling things from Frederick Martens accounts of a voyage to Greenland and Spitzbergen!

In another example the poem talks of "snowy clifts" and Lowes tracks down travelogues which talk of cliffs or clefts or even clifts until he finds a Captain Wood who writes of 'snowy clifts'.

Lowe also speculates about the famous Albatross. This, he suggests, is not the huge white bird most people know but the rather smaller black 'albitross' which is mentioned in another travelogue and is of a size where it might be possible to be hung around someone's neck.

Far from being a fantasy, the Ancient Mariner has science woven deep into its fabric. The very journey could be traced on a map; he sails down into the South Atlantic, rounds the Horn, is becalmed in the Doldrums near the Equator, crosses the line twice and circumnavigates the globe.

The Ancient Mariner himself, Lowe shows to be partly based on The Wandering Jew ("the deathless stranger passes still, like night, from land to land") , an old myth and a key part in The Monk which was a best seller as Coleridge was writing the Mariner (pp 225 - 228). But Coleridge also knew the Sicilian's Tale, in which a Franciscan monk holds the guests at a wedding spell-bound (p 229) and mesmerism was in fashion (p 231) and he tried writing with Wordsworth a poem about the Death of Abel and of course Cain is a killer doomed to wander the earth (pp 233 - 235). Don't forget the Flying Dutchman (p 253). All of these influences merged together in Coleridge's mind. There is the scary bit in the poem where male and female demons, Death and Life-in=Death, play dice for the soul of the Mariner and Life-in-Death wins: "For the Mariner's fate at the fall of the dice is the fate of the Wandering Jew - the doom of the undying among the dead." (p 256) Finally, of course, the Mariner is Ulysses (p 262).

Coleridge read and read and read.

Lowes describes the imagination as an "incongruous, chaotic and variegated jumble" (p 4) which waits for "the informing spirit which broods over chaos ... the formlessness out of which eventually form was wrought." (pp 6 - 7); "Chaos precedes cosmos ... surging and potent chaos" (p 12). What Coleridge called the hooks-and-eyes of the memory "will lead us to the very alembic of the creative energy." (p 41). This then is a journey through "chartless tracts" (p 51) which "assumes the existence of what Coleridge called 'the twilight realms of consciousness' [in Biographia Literaria 2: 120]" (p 51); to find the origins we need to disengage "the strands of an extremely complex web" (p 51). "The web of creation, like the skein of life, is of a mingled yarn" (p 60): we separate the threads and lose the integrity of the whole (p 60) And Coleridge talked of the streamy nature of association , which thinking curbs and rudders [Anima Poetae, p46]. But "the difference between art, in whatever sphere, and the chaotic welter of the stream of consciousness lies not in their constituents, but in the presence or absence of imaginative control." (p 85)

Most true it is that I have look'd on truth

Askance and strangely.

Shakespeare Sonnet 110

"The imagination is an assimilating energy. It pierces through dissimilarity to some underlying oneness in which qualities the most remote cohere." (p 105)

"Not only on the fascinating fringes of early maps, but universally, the advancing territory of the known is rimmed and bounded by a dubious borderland in which the unfamiliar and the strange hold momentary sway." (p 105)

"The borderland between the unknown and the known keeps merging on its hither edge with the familiar, at the same that its outer edge is pushing on into the unexplored." (pp 105 - 106)

A dead dog at a distance is said to smell like musk [so scandal viewed from afar isn't too bad; Coleridge's Notebooks]

That which is firme doth flit and fall away,

And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

Spenser Ruines of Rome 3

There are two forces in life: the deliberate and the chance: Epictetus says that one should carefully and skillfully make use of what is thrown ... Outward things are not in my power. To Will is in my power.
Epictetus  The Encheiridion Book 2 Chapter 2

He mentions Setebos, a demon first described by Magellan. In further reading (Coleridge was always looking up his sources!) I have discovered that Setebos, who is also mentioned by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Robert Browning in Caliban Upon Setebos, was one of twelve demons who appeared when a Patagonian 'giant' died.

It seems that every image in the Ancient Mariner has been traced to its source material. Then he does the same with Xanadu, a much shorter poem and one avowedly based on a dream. We learn about the Old Man of the Mountains who allegedly gave his followers hashish and transported them while asleep into a pleasure garden and when they awoke convinced them they had been in Paradise so they would go and murder anyone he asked even at the expense of their own lives and that is why we get the word assassin from hashish. He explains why the damsel with a dulcimer came from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, where the Nile (a sacred river) was supposed to be sourced near a kingdom called Amhara which might have melded into Mount Abora. And the man with floating hair is taken from a memoir of Speke about an Ethiopian Ras on the warpath.

And Lowe more or less debunks the idea that Coleridge wrote poetry under the influence of opium. The meticulous research that lies behind each of the images of the Mariner (perhaps not so much Xanadu) suggests a tightness of control that drug addicts can rarely achieve. The essence of creativity is the remixing of ideas. We all do it. The difference with a genius is the obsessive research, the intense control and, perhaps, the ability to select the word that encapsulates all the ideas in one extraordinarily vivid image.

This is a superb book. May 2016; 397 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes is well known (though not by me)  for his biographies of Shelley and Coleridge and here he moves from the romantic poets to the scientists of the romantic era. He endeavours to trace the ancestry of our modern image of "the scientist": he examines the point at which the natural philosopher at home with both the arts and the sciences (eg Herschel, musician turned astronomer; Davy, poet turned chemist; Coleridge, dilettante scientist turned poet) was replaced by the two persons of Snow's Two Cultures; he describes the genesis of the myth of the mad scientist in Victor Frankenstein; and he charts the growing atheism inherent in the discoveries that made a Creator more and more remote.

But best of all the book has vivid stories and personalities which Holmes brilliantly brings to life (even though he quotes far too much from Davy's poetry!)

He starts with Joseph Banks with Captain Cook savouring the delights of that Pacific paradise, Tahiti. We then move onto the story of William Herschel and his discovery of Uranus. Ballooning comes next, then Mungo Park explores Africa; Sir Humphrey Davy invesitigates Laughing Gas; Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein; Davy invents the Safety Lamp and then falls out with everyone including his wife and Michael Faraday and finally the era closes with Charles Babbage and young Sir John Herschel leading towards Charles Darwin.

Here is a selection of my favourite bits which I marked.

p83: In 1772, William Herschel, having decided to grind his own lenses to make a reflecting telescope in Bath (where he conducts concerts in the Pump Rooms) buys grinding and polishing tools from John Michel, "a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas - such as the existence of 'black holes' in space from which light itself could not escape".

p94: Perhaps there is room for a History of Scientific Error which could show that mistakes in Science are at least as influential to the progress of right ideas as the triumphs. In a footnote, Holmes points out that Romantic Science created three myths: the lone scientific genius, the Eureka moment and the Frankenstein nightmare.

p101: In 1781, Herschel having discovered Uranus he went to London to meet "wealthy Deptford astronomer Alexander Aubert" and to dine with Sir Joseph Banks at the "Mitre Club, a tavern much favoured by Dr Johnson." NB: Herschel used lenses made by Dollond whose company, founded in the 1750s, later grew into Dollond and Aitchison!

p106: The publisher Joseph Johnson of St Paul's Churchyard not only published an influential History of Astronomy by Bonnycraft but also published William Blake, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

p111: On 31st July 1782 the Herschel's went to live in Datchet. Later they moved to Slough.

p113: In 1811 Keats won A History of Astronomy by Bonnycraft as a school prize; he then went on to compose On looking into Chapman's Homer in 1816 in which he describes Herschel's discovery of Uranus: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken"

p132 On 1st December 1783 (ten days after the Montgolfier hot air balloon) the first hydrogen ballon was launched by Dr Charles from the Tuileries in front of a crowd estimated at 400,000; Benjamin Franklin, US ambassador in Paris watched it and was asked what use it was: he replied: "What's the use of a newborn baby?" I previousl;y believed this to be something Faraday said.

p152: Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the first man to cross the English Channel by balloon in 1785, later founded a "Balloon Academy on the Stockwell Road in Vauxhall".

p156: Napoleon took 4 balloons with him to Egypt in 1798 but they were destroyed by Nelson at the Battle of Aboukir.

p198 Pierre Laplace who, in 1799, used Herschel's nebula theory of star formation to explain the formation of the solar system, was asked by Napoleon where God was in his work and replied "Citizen First Consul, I have no need of that hypothesis."

p199: Herschel also discovered infra-red light in 1800.

p250: In 1797 Gregory Watt, son of James, lodged with Grace Davy, mother of Humphrey. Later Gregory would pass Humphrey's name on to his dad who i n turn recommended him to Dr Thomas Beddoes of Cliftonm near Bristol who then employed Humphrey as lab assistant at his (slightly quackish) pneumatic hospital in which Humphrey investigated the treatment of diseases using gases including Carbon Monoxide (which nearly killed Davy) and Laughing Gas (which made his reputation).

p291:  By 1803 Davy had moved to London and was giving incredibl;y popular science lectures at the Royal Institution (one included the concept of the carbon cycle). These were so popular that Albemarle Street became the first One-Way street to control carriage congestion.

p295: Humphrey Davy gave 5 Bakerian lectures at the Royal Society between 1806 and 1810. These lectures had been founded in 1775 by Daniel Defoe's son-in-law. In the first lecture Davy argued that the different forms of electricity (in Leyden jars, and generated by Voltaic piles, stormclouds, electric eels, and by friction) were all the same and were a form of bipolar (postive and negative) energy.

p308: surgeon John Hunter dissected bodies in Great Windmill Street in Soho.

p328-330: Victor Frankenstein may have been based on Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776 - 1810) who invented the dry-cell storage battery and discovered ultra-violet light in 1803 worked at Jena using huge Voltaic piles to galvanise animal corpses. He then moved to Munich to continue experiments that were described as "most convincing" and "disgusting"; abandoned his wife and three children and died penniless and insane in 1810 aged 33.

p338: Humphrey Davy married Jane Apreece who, during her lonely 1st marriage, went to Geneva and made friends with Madame de Stael becoming the heroine of Corinne.

p383: Greenland pack-ice melted in 1815 and was believed to be a precursor of climate change.

p420: Andrew Crosse, who lived at Fyne Court in the Quantocks, had installed in his ballroom an "'extensive philosophic apparatus' with which he later claimed to have generated spontaneous life forms .... It contained large, gleaming electrical condensers, which were linked to a network of copper wires strung through the trees .... designed to pick up massive charges of static or 'atmospheric' electricity. The largest condenser was marked with a blasphemous warning notice: Noli Me Tangere - that is,m 'Do not Touch Me' .... the risen Christ's first words to Mary Magdalene".  So he could have been the original of Dr Frankenstein.

p441: Sir John Herschel wrote a philosophy of natural science in which he reckoned the scientific method to be tripartite: the inductive gathering of facts, the emergence of a general hypothesis and the testing of that hypothesis.

p448: Coleridge, aged 60, attended the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge in 1833.

p460: David Brewster, more famous for his work on polarisation, invented the kaleidoscope.

A brilliant book.

Januray 2010; 469 pages.

I have now read Holmes' biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: also worth a read!

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God