The Coleridge Lectures 2015: Richard Holmes

The Coleridge Lectures 2015: Richard Holmes

Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Bristol and Beyond
Reception Room, Wills Memorial Building, University of Bristol
Thu 12 March 2015, 18.00-19.30

Free, but booking required. Booking opens 29 January 2015

The publication of the Lyrical Ballads in Bristol in 1798 launched the Romantic poetry movement. Richard Holmes, author of the great two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and also of The Age of Wonder, looks at the life and work of Coleridge in Bristol and the Quantock Hills at this critical moment. What originally inspired the writing of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and what has this great and mysterious poem come to mean to us now? Holmes explores its varied interpretations, the revealing history of its illustrations, and its powerful emergence as a modern eco-fable. The poem speaks urgently to our own time about our duties towards the earth and the animals, and the spiritual – not merely physical – fate that may befall us should we fail in our stewardship, “alone on a wide wide sea”.

Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was made an OBE in 1992. Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year, and Coleridge: Darker Reflections won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize and the Heinemann Award. Holmes was Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia 2001-2007. His other books include Shelley: The Pursuit, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, and two studies of Romantic biography and autobiography, Footsteps and Sidetracks. His group biography of Romantic poets and scientists The Age of Wonder won the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2009 in the UK, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction 2010 in the USA. His latest book is a highly unconventional history of Romantic ballooning: Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air.

This lecture is part of a new annual series inspired by Coleridge’s radical lectures in Bristol in 1795. The 2015 series is run in association with the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol and Bristol 2015. It is part of The Romantic Poets and Bristol programme, which celebrates the life of Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, William Wordsworth, Coleridge and others in the city, and Bristol as the place where Romanticism was born with the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads. The programme focuses especially on nature and the emotions, place and the environment, and also looks at Bristol as a city for science, philosophy, ideas and political debate at the time of Coleridge and today. The 2015 theme is Radical Green. Future themes are: Utopias (2016); Revolution (2017) and Peace (2018).

Please be ready to take your place by 17.50.

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