Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

1. Life
• Born in Devonshire in 1772;
Christ’s Hospital School.

• studied at Christ’s Hospital School in London, and then in

Cambridge, but never graduated;

• influenced by French revolutionary ideals;

• after becoming disillusioned with the French Revolution, he

planned a utopian commune-like society, Pantisocracy, in
Pennsylvania. This project came to an end;

• fruitful artistic collaboration with the poet and friend William

Wordsworth in the 1797-1799 period.
2. Main works
1798 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
the first poem of the collection
Lyrical Ballads;

1816 the dreamlike poem Kubla Khan,

composed under the influence of
opium;

1817 Biographia Literaria, a classic

text of literary criticism and
Hand-written page from autobiography.
Kubla Khan.
3. Coleridge and Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s poetry Coleridge’s poetry

•Content: subjects from ordinary •content: supernatural characters

life; and extraordinary events;

•aim: to give these ordinary things •aim: to give them a semblance

the charm of novelty; of truth;

•style: the language of common •style: archaic language rich in

men purified by the poet; sound devices;

•main interest: relationship •main interest: the creative power

between man and nature;
imagination as a means of of imagination.
knowledge.
4. Coleridge’s imagination
Imagination
Primary Secondary

• unconscious process; • experienced only by the poet;

• sensory perception of reality;
• experienced by every human being;
• a mode of memory since it
manifests itself through images
which recall relevant past
sensorial experiences.
• he dissolves the images linked to
past experiences in order to
recreate;
• the result of this process is the
‘new world’ of the poem created
by the poet himself.

Fancy

It is not creative inferior to imagination.

It is the poet’s technical ability to transform perceptions and words into poetry.
It is the poet’s ability to use linguistic devices in order to apply colour to reality.
 5. Coleridge’s nature
It represented the awareness of the
presence of the ideal in the real.

Unlike Wordsworth, It was not

Coleridge did not view Nature identified with
nature as a moral guide or the divine.
a source of consolation.

The images he used for nature The presence of unnatural

depend on supernatural, sublime elements in a natural
elements, sea monsters, spirits, dimension cause a sense of
boundless sky and immense sea. uneasiness in the reader.

Compact Performer Shaping Ideas

6. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The plot

The story of a mariner who commits an act against nature by

killing an albatross.

• At the beginning of the poem the mariner stops a wedding

guest: he ‘cannot choose but hear’ a sad, mysterious
story about the burden of the
mariner’s guilt;

• the mariner expiates his sin by

travelling around and telling the
people he meets his story: to
teach them the importance for
everyone to love all living creatures.
Gustave Doré, The killing of the Albatross, 1877.
6. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The setting

•Mysterious, dream-like atmosphere:

because of the combination of the
supernatural / nightmarish elements
and visual realism;

•nature itself seems to be a character,

based on the way it interacts with the
Ancient Mariner;
Gustave Doré, The mariner is left alone
on the ship.

•the Albatross = the spiritual world: the Ancient Mariner's

punishment begins through nature itself.
6. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• The characters: types rather than
human beings;

• their agonies: universally human;

• the mariner: he is unnaturally old,

with skinny hands and ‘glittering eyes’;

• sailors: ill-fated members of the ship

carrying the mariner;
Gustave Doré, The mariner is left alone
on the ship.

• wedding guest: one of three people on their way to a

wedding reception. After the Ancient Mariner’s story, he
becomes both ‘sadder and... wiser’.
6. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The characters

• Death: embodied in a hulking form on the ghost

ship. He plays dice with Life-in-Death and wins the
lives of the sailors;

• Life-in-Death: embodied by a beautiful,

ghostly woman. She wins the Ancient
Mariner’s soul playing dice and
condemns him to a limbo-like
living death.

The atmosphere is mysterious and

dream-like.

Gustave Doré, Life-in-Death.

7. The Rime and medieval ballads
The Rime Medieval ballads

mostly written in four-line written in four-line

stanzas; stanzas;
Structure
a mixture of dialogue and a mixture of dialogue and
narration narration

Content a dramatic story in verse a dramatic story in verse

archaic; realistic in details and
Language archaic
imagery
frequent examples of
use of repetition, refrain,
Style repetition, refrain, alliteration
alliteration
and internal rhyme
travel and wandering; the magic, love, domestic
Theme
supernatural tragedies
Aim didactic no didactic aim
8. The Rime: interpretations
This poem has been interpreted in different ways:

• 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 = the poet
- his guilt = the origin of poetry
Gustave Doré, The Mariner is gone.

regret for a state of lost innocence

caused by the Industrial Revolution.