the rime of the ancient mariner by samuel taylor coleridge

Wordsworth also has recorded an account of the inception of the poem: ' The Ancient Mariner was founded on a strange dream, which a friend of Coleridge had, who fancied he saw a skeleton ship, with figures in it. With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner, and was preparing among other poems, The Dark Ladie, and the Christabel in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt.' Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, and hearts that neither feel or understand. 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. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least supernatural and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. XIV), gave an account of the occasion of the poem: 'During the first year that Mr. Almost twenty years later Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria (chap. 1] First published in Lyrical Ballads, 1798.

The rime of the ancient mariner by samuel taylor coleridge