Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1.Biography
2. Introduction to his works
2015/4/13
1
Biography





2015/4/13
Born in rural Devonshire in 1772,
Coleridge inherited his bookish
tastes from his father, a learned
(and eccentric) clergyman.
Coleridge as a boy lived almost
entirely in a world of books and
ideas.
After his father's death, he was
sent, in 1782, to a famous
charity school in London, known
as Christ's Hospital. It was in this
school that he met Charles
Lamb .
Coleridge next won a
scholarship
to
Cambridge
University, where he studied at
Jesus College .
Finding himself (through his
own imprudence) desperately in
debt, he rushed off to London
and enlisted in the Army under
the wonderful name of Silas
Tomkin Comberbach.
2
Biography


2015/4/13
He hated army life and was terrified of the cavalry
horses; so when his brothers contrived to have him
released, he gladly returned to Cambridge.
Encouraged by the success of the American War of
Independence andthe French Revolution, Coleridge
and Southey worked on a harebrained scheme
which they called “Pantisocracy.” As the name
implies, this was to be a Utopian society in which
the powers of government were to be shared by all.
The “Pantisocracy” of Coleridge and Southey came
to nothing. Throughout his life Coleridge was better
at drawing up plans than at putting them into
practice.
3
Introduction to his works

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Biographia Literaria
Kubla Khan

2015/4/13
4
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The plot of the poem




2015/4/13
The story tells of the unnecessary and wanton shooting of an albatross.
The Ancient Mariner, a chillingly mysterious figure who almost forcibly
detains a young man on his way to a wedding feast to listen to his narrative,
tells of a storm that carried his ship to the seas of the Antarctic. Terrified by
the snow and ice, utterly isolated from the world of living things, the crew is
overjoyed when an albatross appears. The Ancient Mariner kills the
albatross and first The Ancient Mariner's shipmates are angry at him
because of his rash and meaningless act. When the fog and mist lift,
however, they decide that the shooting of the bird has brought them luck
and they applaud the crime of their companion, thus becoming, as it were,
his accomplices.
Racing north toward the equator, the ship is becalmed in the sea.
Suffering from unbearable heat and from thirst, the crew is terrified by the
approach of a skeleton-ship, carrying Death and Life-in-Death. On the
skeleton-ship a grisly dice game takes place, and Life-in-Death wins. The
Mariner's shipmates all die, and he is left hopelessly alone with his physical
agony and his consciousness of guilt.
There comes a moment, however, in his terrible loneliness when the
glint of moonlight on the brightly colored creatures of the deep affects the
Ancient Mariner. So he thanks God for all living things. After his pointless
slaughter of the albatross, he is once more able to realize the sacredness of
life.
Released from the awful punishment that his crime brought about, the
5
Mariner returns to his native land. The consequences of his evil-doing,
however, cannot be ignored. It is his fate to wander, presumably for all
eternity, throughout the world, telling and retelling his frightening story.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Comment on the poem
2015/4/13
It is, perhaps, the finest “literary” ballad in English literature.
A literary ballad, in contrast to a folk ballad, is one written by a
known author in conscious imitation of the old traditional
ballads whose authorship is not known. He deliberately uses
this form to tell a simple story. But when reading it, we discover
many subtle places, and the musical effect is wonderful. The
albatross, a sea bird, is an omen of luck. A seaman for no
reason at all kills it, and for this reason the whole ship is
punished by God and the seaman is punished by his fellow
seamen. The theme is about sin and its expiation. The
language is irresistible. A guest is detained by the mariner to
listen to his tale. The reader, like the reluctant guest, is
enchanted by the tale. Here Coleridge's excellent skill at
making supernatural things appear real and true to life is fully
displayed.
It has been demonstrated that the poem reflects Coleridge's
amazingly wide reading. Materials concerning the polar regions,
the equatorial regions, guardian spirits, the Scriptural story of
Cain, legends about the Wandering Jew, all came together in
his imagination and shaped this hauntingly beautiful and
profoundly moving poem.
It should be obvious that this is not a cautionary tale about
6
being kind to animals. It is a psychologically profound study of
guilt, of remorse, of the nature of evil.
The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner
Style analysis
The story of the Ancient
Mariner is told in the style and
meter used in many traditional
ballads. Most of the stanzas are
of four lines, alternately of four
stresses and three stresses. The
rhymes also alternate, abab.
Variety
is
obtained
by
introducing occasional six-line
stanzas. One stanza is nine lines
long.
2015/4/13
7
Biographia Literaria

Most of Coleridge's ideas on literature are to be found
in his Biographia Literaria. Many of the specific critical
comments in this rambling, uneven, and frequently cloudy
book are worth attention. For example, his remarks on
Wordsworth show a perceptive understanding of that
poet's greatness. At the same time he praises
Wordsworth, and he takes issue with Wordsworth's
oversimplified views on poetic diction and he even shows
that Wordsworth does not always follow his own stated
principles.

His view on imagination
He emphasized the relationship of the imagination to
the entire process of artistic creation. He denied that the
imagination was the mere reshaping of images originally
produced by sense impressions and thus was able to
make a more profound contribution to our understanding
of artistic originality than was made by any neoclassical or
pre-Romantic theorist.
2015/4/13
8
Biographia Literaria

How to analyze a poem
Related to his ideas on the
imagination is his healthy awareness
that a poem is an organic whole. It is,
in other words, like all living things,
more than the sum of its parts. One
can, of course, analyze parts of a
poem, such as the diction, the meter,
the rhymes, and the like. But true
criticism must ultimately go beyond
analysis and examine the poem in its
totality.
2015/4/13
9