The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Historical and Literary Context

Lyrical Ballads

The first version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” appeared in a volume titled Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798. This volume resulted from a collaboration between Coleridge and his close friend William Wordsworth. To the second edition of the volume, published in 1800, Wordsworth added a preface in which he outlined the broad aim of their project. Their primary goal, he explains, was to move poetry beyond the stilted and inaccessible forms that had dominated the previous century. Instead of lifeless, alienating, formal verse, they proposed a new poetry that featured a simpler, more natural language. Such naturalistic language could infuse poetry with new vitality, particularly when used to express the emotions of a first-person speaker. These claims arguably apply more to Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads. After all, Coleridge’s poems featured deliberately archaic language that jarred against Wordsworth’s claim to naturalism. In “Rime,” however, Coleridge does center a first-person speaker, and he also stretches the traditional ballad form, rendering it flexible enough to accommodate his protagonist’s waxing and waning emotions. In doing so, Coleridge helped set the tone for the era we know as “Romanticism,” the unofficial beginning of which was marked by the publication of this landmark volume.

Romantic Supernaturalism

Coleridge belongs to a period of British literature known as Romanticism. Other key figures in this period include William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Admittedly, there’s no neat way to summarize the diversity represented by these poets. However, it is possible to note two broad trends that characterized the Romantic era. First, Romantic writers generally privileged intuition over rationality. Second, they emphasized the expression of emotion over the communication of didactic messages. For many Romantics, these two trends resulted in explorations of mysterious and occult phenomena. Blake, for instance, frequently had supernatural visions that he used as fodder for both his poetry and the remarkable engravings he made to illustrate his verse. Supernatural references also appear in Keats’s famous ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819) as well as Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness” (1816). Perhaps most famous of all is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which centers the occult science of bringing dead flesh to conscious life. Coleridge was similarly fascinated with the supernatural, which is a theme that runs through much of his poetry, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” For each of these writers, in their own way, the supernatural provided a way to plumb the depths of the intuitive imagination.