Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage Of Opium
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Yellowed/tanning. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good.
Few literary lives are as haunted and contradictory as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — a man of towering genius whose masterworks, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, were born from a mind simultaneously illuminated and imprisoned by opium addiction. Molly Lefebure's Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium chronicles the poet's decades-long enslavement to laudanum with unflinching clarity, tracing how a brilliant Romantic visionary descended into dependency, self-deception, and creative paralysis, even as he continued to produce some of the most celebrated verse and criticism in the English language. Lefebure, drawing on exhaustive archival research, presents a biography that is as much a medical and psychological portrait as it is a literary one, arguing that Coleridge's addiction cannot be separated from his art or his relationships. Written with authority and compassion, the work illuminates the tragic gap between Coleridge's vast intellectual ambitions and his diminishing capacity to realise them — leaving the reader to wonder whether the opium that destroyed him also, in some terrible paradox, made him immortal.
Author: Molly Lefebure
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Yellowed/tanning. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good.
Few literary lives are as haunted and contradictory as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — a man of towering genius whose masterworks, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, were born from a mind simultaneously illuminated and imprisoned by opium addiction. Molly Lefebure's Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium chronicles the poet's decades-long enslavement to laudanum with unflinching clarity, tracing how a brilliant Romantic visionary descended into dependency, self-deception, and creative paralysis, even as he continued to produce some of the most celebrated verse and criticism in the English language. Lefebure, drawing on exhaustive archival research, presents a biography that is as much a medical and psychological portrait as it is a literary one, arguing that Coleridge's addiction cannot be separated from his art or his relationships. Written with authority and compassion, the work illuminates the tragic gap between Coleridge's vast intellectual ambitions and his diminishing capacity to realise them — leaving the reader to wonder whether the opium that destroyed him also, in some terrible paradox, made him immortal.