Richard Holmes (1) (1945–)

"When that which drew out
the boundless deep
Turns again home."

Richard Holmes delivered a brilliantly researched and smooth flowing tale of Young Tennyson!

The entire first chapter is devoted to THE KRAKEN. This may make people feel sorry for it since
it is clearly not bothering anyone, "far far beneath the abysmal sea."

Adopted by an owl when he was a boy, Alfred kept a life long respect for all animals.

The author follows him from the Somersby Rectory through all his jaunts through show more Mablethorpe
and on into London and Europe. Haunted by the loss of his best friend, Hallam, Tennyson's
deep recurring depression guided his solitude and his eventual wondrous poetry,
as it wound from Faith through Astronomy and Geology and back again.

The accompanying photographs are truly amazing.

Still hard to understand is Tennyson's exclusion and ignoring of his good, trusted and faithful Friend, FitzGerald, from his later life, as Alfred became the renowned poet laureate. show less

Holmes examines the transition period between 1770 to 1830 with his closest focus on the period between 1800-1830 when scientific categories of study and the methodologies required begin to emerge and solidify. Most significantly -- Holmes illuminates the fact, seldom mentioned, of the interplay between the romantic poets and scientists -- how will poetic imagination and the new hyper-rational inductive methods interact and influence each other? They are not yet seen as mutually exclusive show more (which, in fact, is a false view). Coleridge, in 1819 gives a lecture on the topic at the Royal Society that epitomizes this relationship of scientific genius and poetic inspiration as necessary to one another. The two men Holmes focusses on the most involved in broadening the movement are Joseph Banks, the botanist who accompanied Cook on his first voyage and William Herschel the astronomer who created the first enormous telescopes that could penetrate the universe and then studied, theorized and put to rest any thought that the universe is anything other than unimaginably immense (unless you are a stubborn git, of course) and many other discoveries we take for granted now but were almost shattering then. As the president of the Royal Society Banks nurtured the next generation of scientists, a lively and engaging person. Herschel by revolutionizing astronomy provided an example, literally, of 'no limits' to study. Holmes examines many other aspects of the period, not the least of which is that this is when 'explainers' (my word) began to emerge to make the concepts of maths and sciences accessible. Books and public lectures become popular. Holmes also examines how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein embodies this union between imagination and science, and unites the anxieties evoked by learning about the micro and macroscopic, and spectrums of sound and vision invisible to our senses. All of the romantic poets from Wordsworth to Keats were drawing from this urge to unlock and reveal the unknown: was there any mystery that could not be dissected and explained? I had no idea of this close relationship -- this most certainly wasn't ever mentioned by any teacher or professor of mine and I had two rounds with romanticism, one in high school (and intense) and the other in college -- the separation, academically, at that time was too complete. For me it suggests a new dimension to consider of the poetry of that time. I've always been drawn to this time period and now I've been swept in deeper. ***** show less

Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage is what might be referred to as a microbiography: author Richard Holmes offers full portraits of neither title character, but rather an examination of the short period when the lives of Samuel Johnson - lexicographer, author, poet, and biographical subject extraordinaire - and Richard Savage - poet, rogue, and murderer - converged for a time. Savage, Johnson's first biographical subject himself, made Johnson's acquaintance soon after that young provincial arrived in show more London, and their companionship lasted for just about two years, until Savage departed for "retirement" in Wales.

Holmes has little to go on: while it's known that Johnson and Savage knew each other, "there are no authenticated letters between the two men, no mention of each other in private journals, not even a single surviving account from an eyewitness of seeing the two men in each other's company." And yet he's done quite a lot with what few scraps of evidence that do exist, creating an interesting web of narrative around a skeleton of knowable facts. While I am afraid that his speculatory meanderings (particularly in the realm of psychology) get the better of him at times (I felt the same about Greenblatt's recent biography of Shakespeare), Holmes generally at least informs the reader of his upcoming leaps, which is comforting if not exculpatory.

As the author notes, the Johnson we meet cavorting with Savage is not the frumpy but majestic old fellow that Boswell has left us, but a young, desperate man out to make his way in the world, captivated by this strange, conflicted, down-and-out poet. It's another side to Johnson that is interesting to find, even within Holmes' imperfect framework.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2006/09/book-review-dr-johnson-mr-savage.html show less

The cover of Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes is promising – Winner of the 1989 Whitbread prize and a hypnotic portrait of Coleridge that captures the archetypal romantic poet – large grey eyes, sensual thick lips and long dark hair. Holmes begins with an allusion to Coleridge’s preface of ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘Anyone who presumes to write about Coleridge runs the grave risk of sounding like the person on business from Porlock, a prosaic interrupter of marvels’. He outlines show more how critics have tended to concentrate on his faults – ‘his opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political apostasy, his sexual fantasies or his radiation of mystic humbug’ – and wants to empathetically portray ‘his fascination as a man and a writer’, ‘his physical presence’ and ‘to make his voice sound’.

The book covers the first thirty-one years of Coleridge’s life (1772-1804), when he wrote his most memorable poetry. There is a further volume entitled Coleridge: Darker Reflections covering the second half of his life and Holmes draws on material from his Biographia Literaria written in 1814-15 and the writings of his circle of friends and acquaintances such as Hazlitt, Lamb, Southey, Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Holmes follows a traditional sequence – what Holroyd terms ‘the prison of chronology’ – through Coleridge’s childhood, schooling at Christ’s Hospital and Cambridge University, his time as a radical Pantisocrat and journalist, marriage to Sara Fricker, collaboration with Wordsworth, travel and study in Germany, relationship with Sara Hutchinson and ends with his departure for Malta.

Holmes brings to light a number of recurring themes that give coherence to Coleridge’s life story. He was a character of complexity and contradiction – a precocious child prodigy, a voracious reader and articulate conversationalist but insecure, plagued by self-doubt and anxiety. His chaotic approach to life follows patterns of exuberant, impetuous behaviour then remorseful, self-deprecating apologies until the next enthusiasm. Holmes likens him to a comet leaving a trail of unfinished projects among the brilliance with ‘dreamlike ascents, and whirling descents into the abyss’. He conveys his movement and energy, relating anecdotes recorded by the Wordsworths of Coleridge walking forty miles, leaping over a gate and bounding down through a field of corn to meet them.

Coleridge’s letters and notebooks show his self-mocking humour – Holmes quotes from a note sent with the manuscript of ‘The Nightingale’ to Wordsworth, (a ditty that perhaps parallels Coleridge’s career):

In stale blank verse a subject stale
I send per post my Nightingale
And like an honest bard, dear Wordsworth,
You’ll tell me what you think, my Bird’s worth.
My own opinion’s briefly this –
His bill he opens not amiss;
And when he has sung a stave or so,
His breast, & some small space below,
So throbs & swells, that you might swear
No vulgar music’s working there.
So far, so good; but then, ’od rot him!
There’s something falls off at his bottom…

To his wife he outlines his travel plans ‘Cornwall perhaps, - Ireland perhaps – perhaps Cumberland – possibly, Naples, or Madeira, or Teneriffe. I don’t see any likelihood of our going to the Moon, or to either of the Planets, or fixed Stars - & that is all I can say’. Holmes also shares this disparaging style – Coleridge’s father was appointed vicar of Ottery St Mary’s ‘on the death of the incumbent, the Rev. Richard Holmes MA (a man who left no significant trace)’. Coleridge often used images of birds and flight in his letters and notebooks – he describes himself as a ‘library-cormorant’ and ‘I lay too many eggs in the hot sands…with ostrich carelessness’. Holmes also uses these metaphors to describe his fluctuating schemes as a ‘flock of starlings’ expanding and contracting at will and his ‘cuckoo-like invasion of other people’s households’.

Although the biography is structured around the chronological bones, the heart of the story is the evolution of Coleridge’s poetry and Holmes shows how ‘the life of the writer is part of the text of his work’, without diverting into critical analysis. He includes a series of stimulating footnotes that give another perspective or speculation which he likens to the marginal gloss of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Despite Coleridge’s lack of maritime experience, images of solitary, perilous sea-voyages or dreams and hallucinations recur frequently in his letters and notebooks. In 1801 during an imaginative crisis he describes his ‘Mind shipwrecked by storms of doubt, now mastless, rudderless, shattered – pulling in the dead swell of a dark and windless Sea’. The origin of the much debated ‘Kubla Khan’ and its fascinating preface is the central chapter. Although it wasn’t published until 1816, Holmes suggests it was ‘one of his wonderful enchantments, known by heart, and chanted in private company’, and shows how the geographical imagery of the poem lies in the topography of the Quantock Hills of Somerset – a hidden stream, and a thick wooded chasm that runs down to the sea. He alludes to this imagery in describing Coleridge as ‘a huge river; while Wordsworth was a mighty rock’.

Hazlitt described ‘Kubla Khan’ as ‘not a poem, but a musical composition’, and Holroyd says letters and notebooks are ‘faint score sheets scripted by the dead from which the biographer tries to conjure sounds, rekindle life’. Holmes allows Coleridge’s voice to soar and sing from the pages – ‘brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking’. His enthusiasm for his subject is neither adulation nor denigration but an understanding of his life that gives meaning and sense to his writing. Holmes immerses himself in following ‘his journey through the world’ to the extent of climbing on to the roof at Greta Hall, Keswick as Coleridge had done. Kipling described biography as ‘a higher form of cannibalism’ but Holmes sensitively balances the private and public persona and does not fabricate possible hidden aspects of character. He gives the impression of a posthumous dialogue with his subject, ‘a handshake across time’, that has not ‘added a new terror to death’ but rather lets him live again. show less