The Ancient Mariner: Modern Literary Criticism
Adair, Patricia M., The Waking Dream: A Study of Coleridge's Poetry (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968). Adair noted that Coleridge's treatment of nature in Part II of the poem "shows that he was quite aware of the danger of linking the natural with the moral world. It is a pantheistic error into which many of his critics have fallen" (p. 60).
Angus, Douglas, "The Theme of Love and Guilt in Coleridge's Three Major Poems," Journal of English and German Philology 59 (October 1960):655-68;
Beer, John, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 145-46;
Beres, David, "A Dream, a Vision, and a Poem: A Psycho-Analytic Study of the Origins of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 32 (1951):97-1 16;
Bostetter, Edward E., "The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner," in Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 65-77;
"The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner," p. 75.
Brisman, Leslie, "Coleridge and the Supernatural," Studies in Romanticism 21 (Summer 1982): 123-59. Brisman, from a different perspective, sees the Mariner's appeal to his "kind saints" as a conceptualization that detracts from the truth of his condition.
Davidson, Arnold, in "The Concluding Moral in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," PQ 60 (Winter 1981): 87-94. Davidson would reinstate the moral as an expression of the Mariner's sin of rejection. It is directed to the Wedding Guest who is in danger of committing a similar sin. I argue more specifically that the Mariner's crime is a failure of love.
Dyck, Sara, "Perspective in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'," Studies in English Literature 13 (Autumn 1973): 603. Dyck makes a similar point: the Mariner "has had some vital experience, the implication of which he can neither understand nor communicate in any other than the terms of conventional piety."
Ferguson, Frances, "Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Georgia Review 31 (Fall l 977): 617- 35;
The following points about the Argument and Gloss were made by Ferguson, but I believe that she has misread Coleridge's intention regarding the Burnet epigraph.
Ferguson, p.620.
Fruman, Norman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971), pp. 405-406;
Harding, D. W., "The Theme of 'The Ancient Mariner'," Experience into Words (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 59. Harding noticed this -- "The essence of the poem is a private sense of guilt, intense out of all proportion to public rational standards" -- but declined to resort to biographical speculation to explain it.
Knight, G. Wilson, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 84-88;
Lefebure, Molly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (London: Quartet Books, 1977).
McFarland, Thomas, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 116-19.
McGann, Jerome J., "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner," Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981):35-67. McGann argues for the unity of the poem in terms of its promulgation of Coleridge's One Life, or Christian redemptive view, but insists that we view it with skepticism as historically conditioned. McGann underplays the history of the poem's development, however, and claims for the Coleridge of 1797-1798 a conscious purpose in writing the poem consistent with the Coleridge who produced the 1817 version. I argue a different view below.
To put it another way, the unified ideological meaning seen by McGann, in "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner," is undercut by some irreducible experiential dilemma; the latter is as a-historical as such matters can be. My discussion of guilt and death below suggests how Coleridge transcended his historical conditions in writing at least these aspects of the poem.
Miall, David S., "The Meaning of Dreams: Coleridge's Ambivalence," Studies in Romanticism 21 (Spring 1982):57-71. I discuss the question at more length in this paper.
Modiano, Raimonda, "Words and 'Languageless' Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Modern Language Quarterly 38 (March 1977):40-6l;
Modiano, pp. 41, 52.
Perkins, David, ed., English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 405.
Piaget, Jean, Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, l971), p. 40.
Sitterson, Jr, Joseph C., "'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and Freudian Dream Theory," PLL 18 (Winter 1982): 17-35. Sitterson offers a useful critical review of the psychoanalytic literature on the poem.
Stallknecht, Newton P., Strange Seas of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958), ch. 5;
Twitchell, James B., The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, N. C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1981). Oddly enough, Twitchell's discussion of The Ancient Mariner does not notice this aspect of the poem.
Waldoff, Leon, "The Quest for Father and Identity in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'," Psychoanalytic Review 58 (1971-1972):439-53. Waldoff attributes the meaning of the poem to the absent Father, seeing the Oedipus complex behind the account of the Mariner's journey. My discussion is dependent less on psychoanalytic theory of this kind than on empirical clinical research, which in this instance seems to offer more fruitful lines of inquiry.
Warren, Robert Penn, "A Poem of Pure Imagination," Kenyon Review 8 (Summer 1946):39l-427, rpt. in Selected Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 233-50.
Warren, Selected Essays, p. 227.
Warren, p. 215.
Whalley, George, "The Mariner and the Albatross," in K. Coburn, ed., Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1967), pp. 32- 50;
Wheeler, K. M., The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1980). Wheeler shows in detail that the Gloss is narrower and more specific than the poem itself: it "streamlines" the narration and, like the l800 Argument, shows a "tone of moral over-determination" (pp. 52, 50).
Wheeler also notes Freud's account of the repetition syndrome, but without relating its appearance in the Mariner to his traumatic experience of death. See Wheeler, p. 178, n. 8.