Coleridge

ST Coleridge (1772-1834) An eminent poet, critic, philosopher, lecturer. He shared with his friend Wordsworth the fame of starting the Romantic Movement in England (1798, the 1st ed of the Lyrical Ballads -1832, the deaths of Goethe and Walter Scott), even though an extended chronological spectrum permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of both R. Burns and W. Blake in England. The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions", including the American -1776- and the French -1789- revolutions. It was an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age that witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial revolution. Romanticism was a reaction against Neoclassicism and the Augustan poets in England. Romantic poets cultivated individualism, idealism, reverence for the natural world, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural. Imagination was considered the supreme faculty of the mind. It was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings. The Romantics also asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric. They created their own literary types of characters (the hero-artist; the heaven-storming types: Prometheus, captain Ahab; the outcasts: Cain, the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne; the stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius unable to attain his ideals). In style, the Romantics preferred free experimentation over the rules of composition and genre. They promoted maximum suggestiveness over the classical ideal of clarity. Coleridge was a man of unusual intellectual power, influenced by the transcendentalism of Kant. To him, poetry and philosophy were inseparably connected. He gave a rather unorganized exposition of his views on both poetry and philosophy in his "Biographia Literaria" (1817). "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a poem of crime and punishment, guilt and redemption, spiritual death and rebirth, presented in terms of a broken but reestablished contact with the world of nature. The form is that of medieval ballad into which the author introduced a few variations. It is written in loose, short stanzas (usually 4 or 6 lines long). It is unique in its intentionally archaic language, its length, its bizzare moral narrative, its thematic ambiguity. It has little in common with other Romantic forms, it is quite atypical for its era. We find in "The Rime" interesting readings, from Christian parable to political allegory. The ballad-form is suitable for Coleridge to present the unreal as real. It contains a mixture of precision and vagueness, of concentration and suggestion. Certain incidents are given in full detail while the rest of the story is left to the reader's imagination. Ar mai putea fi spuse si alte lucruri. Ce il deosebeste de Wordsworth de ex: Wordsworth was the poet of nature, of purity of childhood, of memory. Coleridge the poet of imagination, his natural bent was towards the strange, the exotic, and the mysterious. Wordsworth was a prolific poet, he wrote numerous poems during his life, while Coleridge wrote few poems during a very brief period. M-am intins un pic, dar sper ca va e de folos! Si va rog sa veniti cu completari.

Symbols were very important in this poem. Without the symbols, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" would be simply a poem about an old mariner who is telling a story about killing a bird to a guest at a wedding. Of course, anyone who reads the poem can see that there is more to it than just a simple telling of a story. The first symbol in the poem is the wedding that the guest and the Mariner are at. This is a highly significant detail, because Coleridge could have made the story telling take place at any setting, but he chose a wedding. Why? A wedding is a very religious, very happy occasion. Weddings in and of themselves symbolize new beginnings and happiness. The reason that Coleridge decided to have this horrid tale told at a wedding could be for any number of reasons. I feel that the setting was chosen because of the new beginnings implied. As the Mariner tells his tale, the guest is held captive and when the story is done, the guest becomes essentially a new man and goes off to live the rest of his life. Had the tale taken place at a funeral, the heavy feeling of ending would have destroy The sections pertaining to Death and Life-In-Death are very symbolic. The ship that they arrive in is nothing but a "naked hulk," (ln.195) with the skeleton of the ship showing through. This is symbolic of death itself. As death decomposes, so the ship that it arrives in is decomposed. The two, Death and Life-In-Death play a game for the lives of the people on the ship, which is symbolic of the gamble that the Mariner took when he shot the albatross. The Mariner took a gamble with his religion, and now the pair is taking a gamble for his life. Life-In-Death ultimately wins over Death in the game, and the Mariner's shipmates die at his feet, yet he lives on. The penance that the mariner serves is symbolic in itself. He must go to see a Hermit, for this Hermit is the only person who can grant the penance for the Mariner. The Hermit takes the Mariner onto a skiff, which they take across a lake to a ship. This ship is the ship that the Mariner came in on, though he does not know it. As they near the ship, it takes in water, and eventually, the bay is split by something underneath the water, and the ship sinks. This is the beginning of the Mariner's penance in that the ship was the place that the evil of killing the albatross came to be. When this disappears, so does some of the guilt that is on the Mariner. But his penance is to last for the rest of the Mariner's life. As the Hermit talks to him, the Mariner feels a burning compulsion to tell his tale to some person that needs the lesson in his life. To this man, the Mariner has a valuable lesson to be learned from his mistakes