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by JC Acevedo on February 15th, 2005

JC Acevedo

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What can you infer about Coleridge's feelings for the sinister and supernatural from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

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  • by astarte59 on September 6th, 2007

    astarte59

    In Coleridge's book _Biographia Literaria_, he talks about how he and William Wordsworth were going to collaborate on a book of poems called _Lyrical Ballads_. They were particularly interested in the imagination. They divided up the types of poems such: 1) Wordsworth would write poems about ordinary life, but in such a way that your imagination sees ordinary people and events in a new way; in many poems we get the perspective of a child for instance. 2) Coleridge, on the other hand, was going to write poems about the supernatural, giving his imagination full rein, but the challenge was to make the characters' actions and reactions true to human nature--or at least human nature when a person believes him or herself to be in the presence of something supernatural. B/c it doesn't matter if it IS real; if the person believes it's real, that's all that matters. And the Mariner tells the wedding guest a story so powerful that the wedding guest is permanently changed by it; he wakes up the next day "a sadder and a wiser man."

    I'm not going to psychoanalyze STC, but he wasn't a happy dude. He had health problems for which he took laudanum (opium mixed w/ alcohol), to which one can get easily addicted. He says that "Kubla Khan" began out of an opium dream; some people think he made up that whole story he tells of having this dream and being interrupted and then forgetting most of it and that "Kubla Khan" is a complete poem about the failure of imagination.

    Mostly I think for him supernatural events and images, even grotesque ones, are keys to awakening the imagination of the reader so vividly that he/she suspends his/her disbelief and gets totally involved in the imaginary world the writer has created.

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