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Drawing from letters and notebooks, and from the works of contemporaries, Weissman paints a lively portrait of the politics, people, places and events of Coleridge's life. The biographer concentrates on Coleridge the man, in his external doings, his recorded feelings, his dreams; he speculates on the psychological meanings of these and on their influence upon the major poems. Details of Coleridge's childhood are set out with dramatic intensity and the author shows how they comprise patterns of feeling and relating which are repeated again and again in the life. The title's figure 'His Brother's Keeper' introduces Weissman's central concern: the nature of Coleridge's relationship with Wordsworth and its influence on the great poems.
The childhood episode Weissman takes as the crucial one for the Coleridge-Wordsworth relationship is recorded in one of the autobiographical letters to Poole, Coleridge's friend and mentor. When he was 7, Sam's coveted piece of cheese, specially set out by his mother, was deliberately 'crumbled' by his 9-year-old brother Frank. The angry Sam struck his brother who fell to the floor and feigned serious injury. Sam was hovering over him terrified, when Frank leapt up with a yell and smacked him. Sam, now enraged, grabbed a kitchen knife and went after Frank, only to be restrained by his mother. He ran from home and stayed out all night in the rain and cold, scared of punishment and thinking how miserable his mother would be. The guilt and self-punishment already vivid in the act, and in the life-long physical residues, suggest in Weissman's view that the Cain and Abel theme dominates Coleridge's unconscious and is the underlying motif of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
As we follow Coleridge's brother-poet loves which culminate in his love for, and idealization of, Wordsworth, we are confronted with a clear pattern. Coleridge fell in love with one of a pair of sisters four times, and each time was deeply attached to a 'brother' in