The Poet Laureate of Failure : COLERIDGE Early Visions <i> by Richard Holmes (Viking: $19.95; 409 pp., illustrated; 0-670-804444-4) </i>

Reading Richard Holmes’ award-winning biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt something like meeting face-to-face a person with whom I have worked long-distance for years. Here he is, with all of his faults and all of his wit, all of his astounding intellectual power, and above all with his richly engaging personality: Coleridge--the great Romantic poet and literary critic, the theologian, the political theorist.

Holmes plays his hand openly: He has written a courageous and tough-minded book. As he points out, “No biographer, since James Dyke Campbell in 1894, has tried to examine (Coleridge’s) entire life in a broad and sympathetic manner, and to ask the one vital question: What made Coleridge--for all his extravagant panoply of faults-- such an extraordinary man, such an extraordinary mind? The most radical thing about the present book--the first of two volumes--is simply that it is a defence of Coleridge in these terms.”

Offhand, that may not seem so radical, but in our times as in his own, Coleridge has provoked both hyperbolic praise and bitter condemnation. In this context, Holmes’ work is indeed radical because he does not blink at Coleridge’s faults, and yet he values both Coleridge’s character and his achievements fairly.

To do so, Holmes has had to bridge gulfs of several sorts. Because Coleridge’s interests and achievements were so broad, “Coleridgeans” easily divide into hostile camps: the literary theorists, the critics, the epistemologists, the theologians, the political theorists. Coleridge’s personal life also invites sharply divided opinion: Lies, debts, drugs, plagiarism must be balanced against wit, generosity, genius and suffering. Given this situation, intelligent moderation can be a daring act--and one that also requires considerable scholarship. I came away warmly impressed both with Holmes’ personal integrity and with his scholarly judgment.

Holmes’ balanced yet sympathetic portrait rests upon a consistent narrative unity. He does not use biography as an excuse to string together analyses of major works. Nor is he trying to psychoanalyze Coleridge. I particularly admired the balance and insight of his accounts of Coleridge’s early experiences because the primary documentary evidence often is so contradictory. For instance, all his life Coleridge elicited extravagant praise; in particular, he made an incredible first impression on others. Too often, this exaggerated praise collapsed into an equally exaggerated censure. Coleridge’s discerning empathy, his verbal wit, his capacity for self-parody and, above all, his prodigious intelligence ought to have impressed anyone.

Yet Coleridge was always eager for approval; he was centrally, agonizingly insecure--a pair of problems that he himself linked to the early death of his fond, approving father and to his mother’s remarkable coldness. Having elicited the attention and approval he needed, Coleridge then had to cope with meeting expectations that would have intimidated far more confident men.

Holmes maps out this pattern in well-documented detail but never uses depth psychology to explain it away. Instead, he uses the pattern to generate a lively dramatic tension: How talented is this chap anyhow? Will he make anything of himself? And if so, what? Is he going to make it as a poet? Or should he stick with the political journalism that has been so well-received? And is this German stuff yet another escape, or will it lead to something?

The only personal or dramatic balance that Holmes misses, it seems to me, concerns Coleridge’s opium use. Although duly noting Coleridge’s arthritis and his recurrent bouts with rheumatic fever (in which severe joint pain is the most prominent symptom), Holmes at first seems to dismiss Coleridge’s subsequent malaise in damp winter weather as some version of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Holmes does not point out that Coleridge’s pattern of opium use more nearly matches that found in people who take narcotics for legitimate reasons: When his symptoms subsided with warmer and dryer weather, he could decrease his dose with far fewer consequences than true addicts experience. Especially when rheumatic valve damage turned to congestive heart failure, Coleridge’s mix of physical and psychological motives for taking opium became extraordinarily complex: the use of the word addict oversimplifies. Holmes does not explore these motives with the subtlety that I admire at other points in this book.

Yet Holmes is bold and discerning in his portrait of Coleridge’s work, including the plagiarism problem. In the disappointments of 1799, Holmes can “glimpse something new stirring in that extraordinarily flexible and resourceful mind: the hope of creating himself imaginatively out of the sense of failure itself.” He contends that, for Coleridge, “the subject of failure, of lost imaginative power, could itself produce great poetry, vividly imagined and metaphysically argued.”

This very central argument probably will have a parallel in the next volume of this two-volume biography: that the failure of Coleridge’s formal philosophic ambitions itself produced a philosophic theology and a literary criticism of extraordinary power and influence. Holmes’ argument about Coleridge’s significance is radical because Coleridge has been damned for his “inability” to propose an old-fashioned, closed, strictly logical philosophical system. Or, just as obtusely, Coleridge’s philosophic and theological work has been written off as a disaster that smothered a fine poet. Holmes adeptly transcends these usual categories.

Holmes’ work thus complements the massive re-evaluation that has slowly been built upon new or modern editions of Coleridge’s writings--especially the “Notebooks.” This biography promises to integrate Coleridge’s career as nothing else ever has, and thus to provide one basis for interrelating Coleridge’s work in diverse disciplines.

“Coleridge: Early Visions” will prove widely influential because Holmes’ portrait is so accurate, so fully imagined, so wonderfully engaging in its own right. I’m ordering copies of this volume as gifts for friends who have heard me tell Coleridge stories for 20 years. Here: Someone for you to meet.