COLERIDGE

LIFE
-He was Born in Devonshire in 1772, he studied in Cambridge, but he never graduated;
He was influenced by French revolutionary ideals and after becoming disillusioned with the
French Revolution, he planned a utopian commune-like society, Pantisocracy, in
Pennsylvania. In 1797 he met Wordsworth and together published the Lyrical Ballads, which
includes his masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

-Coleridge used supernatural characters and extraordinary events; his aim was to give them
a semblance of truth; he used archaic language and his main interest was the creative
power of imagination.
IMAGINATION AND FANCY
Coleridge divided the mind into 2 faculties: imagination and fancy.
He also divided imagination into primary imagination and secondary imagination.
- primary imagination was an unconscious process: a sensory perception of reality and could
be experienced by every human being
- secondary imagination could be experienced only by the poet, who dissolves the images
linked to past experiences in order to recreate. Fancy was inferior to imagination because it
wasn’t creative. It was the poet’s technical ability to transform perceptions and words into
poetry;
COLERIDGE’S NATURE
Nature was not identified with the divine. Coleridge did not view nature as a moral guide or a
source of consolation. It represented the knowledge of the presence of the ideal in the real.
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
-PLOT
The rime of the ancient mariner is a ballad made up of seven parts and set at sea.
A mysterious old mariner stops a wedding guest to tell him his dreadful tale. The wedding
guest cannot choose but hear. He explains how he and his crew reached a terrifying
seascape in the Antarctic. Here, he inexplicably killed an innocent albatross, who is linked to
the spiritual world and misfortune followed.
A phantom ship came close to the crew. On board, Death and Life-in- Death cast dice.
Death won the crew, and Life-in-Death won the mariner’s life. All the crew died and the
mariner, now alone, began to re-establish a relationship with nature.
In the end, the mariner lets the wedding guest go after teaching him that it is important for
everyone to love all living beings
-CHARACTERS
The mariner and the crew are types rather than human beings.
Coleridge makes him a spectator and actor in the drama, so he can tell the wedding guest
about his tale with the calm of lucid retrospection.
-SUBLIME NATURE
the atmosphere of the whole poem is mysterious because of the combination of the
supernatural and nightmarish elements and the visual realism.
-INTERPRETATIONS
this poem has been interpreted as:
- a description of a dream
- an allegory of the life of the soul:from crime, through punishment, to redemption
- the poetic journey of Romanticism: the mariner is the poet and his guilt is the origin of
poetry as a regret for a state of lost innocence caused by the Industrial Revolution.