The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Part 1) | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | English Poetry

Описание: The immensely gifted Coleridge spent much of his life battling problems—his neuroses, drug addiction, and unhappy marriage— that blocked his creativity. As a result, many of his most promising pieces remain in fragmentary form. The high point of his life as a poet came through his friendship with William Wordsworth. In 1797-98 the two poets collaborated on their groundbreaking volume Lyrical Ballads, which included as its longest selection Coleridge’s masterpiece “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” His best-known poems date largely from the same brief period.

Although Coleridge produced relatively few major poems, he was a great poetic innovator. In the “Ancient Mariner” he adapted the medieval folk ballad, introducing a dream-like psychology and a sophisticated use of symbolism. In the pieces commonly known as his “conversation poems,” such as “Frost at Midnight,” he worked by an associative process evolved from fleeting, ordinary moments in his own life. In these instances, as well as in other poems such as “Kubla Khan,” he created. new influential poetic modes, notable at once for their vivid imagery and for their richly suggestive psychological density. Coleridge particularly excels at conveying the pain of despair, anxiety, and mental sterility. But he also suggests in such poems as “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” and, implicitly, in “Dejection: An Ode” that by turning away from self-preoccupation we can unlock the healing powers of the imagination and spontaneous love and become part of the “One Life” of the world. That Coleridge often expresses his inability to complete this process makes him a tragic figure within his own poetry, but the poems themselves succeed. In their eloquence and wisdom they endure, not as documents of personal failure, but as products of sure creative mastery.