The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: in Seven Parts

Publisher Marketing: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's place in the canon of English poetry rests on a comparatively small body of achievement: a few poems from the late 1790s and early 1800s and his participation in the revolutionary publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1797. Unlike Wordsworth, his work cannot be understood through the lens of the 1802 preface to the second edition of that book; though it does resemble Wordsworth's in its idealization of nature and its emphasis on human joy, Coleridge's poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech. The intentional archaisms of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the hypnotic drone of "Kubla Khan" do not imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect. Further, Coleridge's poems complicate the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted: the simple unity between the child and nature and the adult's reconnection with nature through memories of childhood; in poems such as "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge indicates the fragility of the child's innocence by relating his own urban childhood. In poems such as "Dejection: An Ode" and "Nightingale," he stresses the division between his own mind and the beauty of the natural world. Finally, Coleridge often privileges weird tales and bizarre imagery over the commonplace, rustic simplicities Wordsworth advocates; the "thousand thousand slimy things" that crawl upon the rotting sea in the "Rime" would be out of place in a Wordsworth poem.