inglese

1. Coleridge’s life and poetics
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the most important Romantic poets.
He was born in Devonshire in 1772. He was influenced by French
Revolutionary ideals but after the disillusionment of the Revolution he
planned to establish a utopian community called “Pantisocracy” where
private property would not exist but his project failed. He started an
important collaboration with William Wordsworth and they published
together the collection Lyrical Ballads which includes one of his most
important works “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. He died in 1834.
For what concern Coleridge’s poetics, it is essential the role of
imagination, the most important creative power, that he distinguished
between primary and secondary imagination. He described the first one
as a fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce
images. He described the second one as the poetic faculty which is able to
build new worlds.
For what concern Coleridge’s view of nature, it was really different from
Wordsworth’s view of nature. He saw nature and the material world as
the projection of the real world of ideas on the flux of time, he believed
that natural images carried abstract meaning and he used them in his
poems. His strong Christian faith did not allow him to identify nature with
the divine.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a Romantic ballad written in 1798 and
included in the collection Lyrical Ballads, divided in seven parts and
introduced by an Argument that contains a short summary of the poem.
The protagonist is the Ancient Mariner that, at the beginning of the
poem, was telling a story about his voyage. During that voyage, he and his
fellows met an albatross which showed them the right route but then
they killed it and nature punished them with rain, sun and wind. At the
end the crew met two characters: Death and Life-in-Death who were

2. playing dice. The first one won the fellows’ lives and the second one won
the life of the Mariner, he has to wander through the Earth and tell
eternally his story.
The main themes of the poem are travel, wandering and supernatural
elements and the atmosphere is mysterious because of the combination
of the supernatural and the real. The setting is a revolting ocean. Nature
seems to be a character because it interacts with the protagonist and the
albatross, that like all natural things, is linked to the spiritual world, so the
Mariner received a punishment when he kills it. There are many
references to Astronomy, for example the sun and the moon are
mentioned and they have relevant meanings. The linguistic features of
this poem are the same of a ballad: the combination of dialogue and
narration, the four-line stanza, archaic language, alliterations, repetitions
and onomatopoeia.