Coleridge's Literary and Dramatic Criticism

A cursory glance through Coleridge's literary and dramatic criticism vividly illustrates that he valorizes the imaginative aesthetic faculty, much preferring it to constructing drama and poetry according to literary convention, still less rules of literary composition.

But that does not mean that Coleridge denigrates the necessity of craft. Indeed, "Christabel" and Rime of the Ancient Mariner owe much to Coleridge's commitment to the careful craftsmanship that results in obviously artificial evocation. Moreover, Coleridge's literary criticism is also at pains to distinguish between the terms poem and poetry, the former referring to any of a variety of versification conventions and the latter to a much more complex process of composition and versification whereby aesthetic pleasure may be derived:

A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part (Coleridge 324).

The relevance of this definition, which may be compared to Aristotle's definition of the parts of tragedy, to the present research is that it implies the need for conscious and careful artistic method to accomplish its object. Thus from Coleridge's point of view, a competent poet will assume control over each component used

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leave[s] it to the reader vaguely to invent something, and make him leave it at the back of his mind" (23) while proceeding through the text. The "detail" of motivation (or absence thereof) in Rime of the Ancient Mariner is both deliberate and decisive. The whole of the text that follows the murder of the albatross explores the dire consequences of the killing and extends so far as to reach the main behavioral impact on the mariner, which is that, for the rest of his life, he is obliged to make periodic confession of his sin and seek moral absolution at the "uncertain hour" when the "agony returns; / And till my ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns." But that does not reach discourse of the original motivation for the death of the albatross. The fact that the mariner's fate, characterized by his highly consequential confessional mode of life, has been interpreted as life experienced as "abjection" (May), as a parable of existential guilt and angst (Gill), and as a mechanism of resolution of the universal identity crisis (Waldoff) indicates the extent to which ambiguity informs the pattern of ideas in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The rime itself has been characterized as the wedding guest's nightmare (Stockholder 30f

Category: Literature - C