Narrative Poems: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was the origin of the opening poem of the ’Lyrical Ballads’, published the following year – the book often seen as marking the beginning of Romanticism.
In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the strange hallucinatory power of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Coleridge’s search for a meter that could capture the…
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