Study Note of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

        “The sage of highgate”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is not only one of a poet in the romantic period but a collaborator with Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads. He has many identifications like a innovative poet, a eminent critic, and a frontier of 20^th new criticism. His subject is supernature, so his later work “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is talking about ecological and bring some mystical elements. Coleridge also publishes a well-known collection of critical Biographia Literarie which explicates his critical theory.

        “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad and also a representative supernatural poem in the works of Coleridge. The narrator, an old man in the poem is a soldier who kills the innocent creature Albatross, then the nature punish he and his workers. Than the whole world suddenly stop for their dying:

              Day after day,

              We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

The old man realizes that his cruel activity bring about the counterblow of nature so he take out the necklace with Albatross’ head, and the world forgive him then relieve the curse:

               The selfsame moment I could pray;

               And from my neck so free

               The Albatross fell off, and sank

               Like lead into the sea

The central idea in this poem is to respect the nature, Coleridge use the nature thinking for the nature power that human being can’t neglect.

        Coleridge’s poetry criticism involves in his Biographia Literarie which also content autobiography and philosophy, he detects “a radical different in our theoretical opinion respecting poetry.” And he thinks the dissolve, diffuses and dissipates is the essential to recreate a new idea, reading likes a long journey, we should contect the world as more as we can.

        Affected by William Bartram, Coleridge also influent a new generation of writers who had mastered every important work of literature, and as the same time he gave many outstanding public lectures, too.