Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Marinerwas the first poem in his and William Wordsworth’s celebrated volume,
Lyrical Ballads, published anonymously in September 1798. Like the conversation poems Coleridge was writing at the time — “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “The Nightingale”, “Frost at Midnight” —
The Rime of the Ancient Marinerhas a basic plot of transgression, isolation, and redemption, and is obsessed with love, belonging, and alienation. Both the conversation poems and the
Ancient Marinertake isolation to be a kind of psycho-spiritual disease (dis-ease or “unquiet”) to be overcome by a mind working in concert with God and nature.
The Rime, however, looks at these issues from the dark side, sliding effortlessly into the bizarre and…
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Citation: Christie, William Henry. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 April 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23051, accessed 23 November 2024.]
