However, when Lyrical Ballads was reprinted, Wordsworth included it despite Coleridge's objections, writing: If the volume should come to a second Edition I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste. Wordsworth wrote to Joseph Cottle in 1799:įrom what I can gather it seems that the Ancient Mariner has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it – it was improbable, and had no moral. With this view I wrote the Ancient Mariner. 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. 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, 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. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge wrote: Herriot of Penicuik, Scotland, was unveiled at Watchet harbour. In September 2003, a commemorative statue, by Alan B. It is argued that the harbour at Watchet in Somerset was the primary inspiration for the poem, although some time before, John Cruikshank, a local acquaintance of Coleridge's, had related a dream about a skeleton ship crewed by spectral sailors. Lewis' The Monk (a 1796 novel Coleridge reviewed), and the legend of the Flying Dutchman. The poem may also have been inspired by the legends of the Wandering Jew, who was forced to wander the earth until Judgement Day for a terrible crime, found in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, M. About my neck was hung." : lines 139–142Īs they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffered the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference to tutelary spirits: "Suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." By the time the trio finished their walk, the poem had taken shape.īernard Martin argues in The Ancient Mariner and the Authentic Narrative that Coleridge was also influenced by the life of Anglican clergyman John Newton, who had a near-death experience aboard a slave ship.
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