“My Soul in Agony”: Irrationality and Christianity in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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Christopher Stokes is Assistant Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and author of Coleridge, Language and the Sublime (2011).
Footnotes
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Lucraria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:6.
2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 24–31.
3. Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge, 1970), 52.
4. Jackson, Critical Heritage, 53.
5. David Chandler, “Southey’s ‘German Sublimity’ and Coleridge’s ‘Dutch Attempt,’ ” Romanticism on the Net 32–33 (2003–4), http://www.erud1t.0rg/revue/ron/2003/v/1132–33/009257ar.html.
6. Jackson, Heritage, 439. One might argue that the polarized judgments are simply a matter of the changing historical context, in that Lockhart had the benefit of two decades of hindsight and a less hysterical political climate. However, this would be mistaken, for the Monthly Review—also in 1819—reviewed the poem in an anti-German and anti-gothic vein very reminiscent of the negative reviews from the 1790s.
7. Lawrence Kramer, “That Other Will: The Daemonic in Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Philological Quarterly 58 (1979): 306.
8. References to Coleridge’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) and are cited by line number. Initially, I shall be working from the 1798 text.
9. The Book of Common Prayer (London: John Jarvis, 1791), B6V, in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Group), CW12358033, galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO.
10. A lucid exposition can be found in Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 1–8.
11. Graham Davidson, Coleridge’s Career (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 54, 69–73.
12. For instance, David S. Miall, “Guilt and Death: The Predicament of The Ancient Mariner,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), and Leah Richards-Fisher, “Where There’s a Rime, Is There a Reason? Defining the Personae in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge Bulletin 20 (2002).
13. Raimonda Modiano, “Words and ‘Languageless’ Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977).
14. The classic one life reading is Robert Penn Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading,” in Selected Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 198–305.
15. See Warren, and G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 84–90. A Christian tradition of interpretation still continues. Graham Davidson foregrounds the themes of charity and mediation in Coleridge’s Career, 45–73. Peter Kitson considers The Rime as the representation of the inner, moral revolution, “a personal millennium” (206), that might precede a political one—see “Coleridge, the French Revolution, and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989). Thomas Dilworth argues for the poem’s moral integrity through a spatial pattern of verbal echoes that centers on the blessing of the water- snakes in “Symbolic Spatial Form in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the Problem of God,” Review of English Studies 58 (2007).
16. Edward Bostetter, “The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner,” SiR 1 (1961–62): 243.
17. Modiano, “Limits of Expression,” 41.
18. Miall, “Guilt and Death,” 635.
19. Anne Williams, “An I for an Eye: ‘Spectral Persecution’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” PMLA 108 (1993): 1125.
20. Williams, 1124.
21. Richards-Fisher, “Defining the Personae,” 63.
22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795. On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 105.
23. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1:213. Subsequent references to this text will be indicated by the abbreviation CL.
24. On Coleridge's passage from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 169...
