The purpose of this research is to examine various critical interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The plan of the research will be to set forth the bench-mark works of contemporary criticism that identify the major aspects of the work and the principal points of view that critics hold of it, and then to discuss the milieu of the poem with detailed refer-ence to its imagery.
The power of a poem to affect those with the ability to read or listen or understand is an important aspect of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, if Coleridge's background as a man of letters is taken into account in an analysis of the poem. Coleridge appears to have considered the creation of extraordinary imagery as a funda-mental element of poetry, as well as the singular aspect of poetry that distinguishes it as the primary and most durable form of art.
I defined poetry to be the art, or whatever better term our language may afford, of representing external nature and human thoughts, both relatively to human affections, so as to cause the production of as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible with the largest possible Sum of pleasure on the whole . . . I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo Buonarotti--yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them . . . that their having been painted in fresco was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a distant capital, and that the same caprice, which made the Neapolitan soldiery destroy all the exquisite masterpieces on the walls of the church of the Trinitado Monte . . . might as easily made vanish the rooms and open gallery of Raphael . . . How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakespeare, are not subjected to similar contingencies . . . secured even from a second irruption of Goths and Vand...