Coleridge: riassunto

Coleridge: riassunto

Friend with William Wordsworth, together him, he wrote an anthology of their work called Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems which marked the beginning of English romanticism

His masterpiece was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: it tells the story of a mariner who is punished, with his shipmates,  for killing and albatross. He's destined to live his adventure again and again through telling it endlessly. Coleridge starts from ordinary experiences to create supernatural events, experiences, sights, feelings, mysteries.

There's a precise difference between Coleridge and Wordsworth; the one wrote poems concerned with supernatural, so concerned with which feelings supernatural and sublime could arise in the reader. Coleridge's aim was that of starting from an ordinary situation and make it supernatural, extraordinary, mysterious, so it was that to evocate feelings making supernatural things like real ones.

This was possible by means of making usual beliefs suspended. Wordsworth, instead, wanted to write novels concerned with real life, concerned with ordinary life, with the real nature like it is, concerned with what could arise strong feelings for what it really is. So Wordsworth wanted to evocate feelings by making usual and ordinary things special, uncommon, seen under a different point of view that could make them extraordinary.

For Coleridge, supernatural could become credible by means of evocative language and reality. In his poems there's a mixture of reality and supernatural. So if the travel of the mariner was, at the beginning, a real one, in the end it becomes symbolical.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Rime is a particular poem because of it tells a story which, though real, seems to be unreal, fantastic, supernatural, like a dream. Everything conveys strong feelings to the reader, from the symbolic images to the strange thing which the mariner sees (the storm, the mist and the snow, the ocean as a living being). So natural elements are described with symbolical meanings: the sun is symbol of divine justice, thus it is present when the shipmates accuses the mariner for what he's done and it's hidden in the mist when they justify the crime, the rotting sea is symbol of the mariner's troubled soul. Besides, the albatross itself is symbol of God, of a Christian soul.

The dominant atmosphere is worrying, magical, mysterious, supernatural, and It is described in every detail. The poem, besides, is full of sound effects and imagery (metaphors, alliterations, repetitions, onomatopeas, personifications).