1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
A leading figure in the early British Romantic movement, he was one of the Lake Poets.
He was a poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian.
Suffered from depression and anxiety.
His literary break came in 1798 with his collaboration with William Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads.

3. The Classic Romantic Life??
He fell in love with the love of his life, Mary Evans, at an early age. But she rejected him. There were rumours that he was severly depressed and may have had a breakdown as a result of the rejection. Though he later married twice and had 14 children, he never forgot her.
Financial problems plagued him his whole life.
He developed an opium addiction at the height of his literary success.
For many, he was the greatest living writer of his age on the demonic.

4. Discuss
Based on his life, what kind of themes do you expect to see in his poetry?

5. His influence
His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age.
He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice.
His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind.

6. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The wedding-guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood in different parts of the poem.

7. Structure and Form
short ballad stanzas usually either four or six lines long but, occasionally, as many as nine lines long.
generally tetrameter, while even lines are generally trimeter*.
rhymes generally alternate in an ABAB or ABABAB scheme*
Many stanzas include couplets in this way—five-line stanzas, for example, are rhymed ABCCB, often with an internal rhyme in the first line, or ABAAB, without the internal rhyme.
*there are exceptions to this throughout

8. Techniques Repetition Supernatural imagery Natural imagery Symbolism
Personification
Simile
Alliteration
Assonance
Cossonance
Onomatopoeia

9. Interpretations What do you think works best?
A cautionary tale against the destruction of nature.
The pyschological effects of violating nature
A strange moral lesson
An autobiographical portrait of loneliness
A salvation story
The cruelty of man is nothing in the face of the hostility of nature/universe’s vengence and power.
Nature is innocent, man is not.

10. What Coleridge said of the poem
In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge wrote:
‘…subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life...In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. ... With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner'.’

11. What Wordsworth said of the poem
‘The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature, a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. It therefore appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems.’