The Poet:
"He was the only wonderful man I ever met," said Wordsworth, who more than any other knew the quickening stimulus of Coleridge's genius. Yet his towering and incessantly active intellect left only scattered fragments of its performance. For Coleridge was irresolute in character and incapable of integrating the extraordinary powers within him. The history of his life was largely unfulfilled. He drifted from speculation to speculation, squandering his time in vague reverie over vast works never begun. Chronic ill health, domestic unhappiness, and self-distrust early impaired his genius. He turned to opium first as a relief from physical pain; then as awareness of continued failure weighed upon him, he he began to use the drug to allay his sense of weakness. Opium soon paralysed his intellect and his well, confirmed his indolence, undermind his self-respect, and made him by the time he was thirty incapable of sustained creative effort. The waste of Coleridge's talents is greatly to be regretted. He was endowed with an "acute susceptibility to sense impressions, a tenacious memory, and a unique kind of detached and delicate visionariness..."
During one short season, from June 1797 through September 1798, Coleridge was supreme as a lyric poet. This "wonder year", as it has been called, was a time for him not only of exciting mental activity but one as well of almost unbroken personal happiness. The presence of Wordsworth exalted his conception of the role of poetry. He was facinated, moreover, by the passionof observing the minute goings-on of Nature. Reflecting this new delight, Coleridge's verse of the great year abounds in precise descriptions clearly from an immediate contact with the object: The Lime Tree Bower, Frost at Midnight, Fears of Solitude, and The Nightingale. The rarest magic of the wonder year is to be found in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, the three poems sufficient in themselves to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets.
His Poetry:
The longest and most famous of the three, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the exact and exquisite recording of the intricacies of Nature, which distinguished from the conversational pieces, remains a chief ingredient but with a difference. The emphasis is on the mystic and shadowy in nature, the unique and wonderful - upon lightening and thunder-fit, tropical calm, journeying moon, a "thousand slimy things" and "a hundred fire 'flag sheen'. Animistic beliefs and supernatural fancies belong to remote times, pervade the narrative. The mariner, in the words of Coledridge's marginal gloss, "heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element." Many of these features of strangeness and wonder were drawn from the poet's memory, abundantly stocked with all manner of miraculous things gathered from his omnivorous reading. Although the role of opium is minimal in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it was the stimulant to Coleridge's imagination in the creation of Kubla Khan. Kubla Khan by Coleridge's own account is an opium dream. The Ancient Mariner is a kind of waking dream: Coleridge gave it at one time the subtitle A Poet's Reverie. We are transported to a region of enchantment, a wonder world of dream-reality. The rime is "a triumph of enchantment made real." It is an allegory of such psychological states, moral values, or illusions that we have experienced in our own actions or dreams. The simplest matters of heart and head are blended with the strangest visions of the senses without losing credence for either. On the artistic side, the narrative is a marvel of construction. The central figure, the mariner, draws the complex pattern of the story to him and brings the most divergeny elements into a seemingly simple whole. He tells his story, but meanwhile a wedding is going on; and there si the wedding guest, who in spite of himelf becomes involved in the moral lesson of salvation.
For the speed and directness of his narrative, Coleridge owed a debt to the folk ballad. He fell heir to the simple ballad style and stanza, which were becoming popular at the time, and imitated the rude traditional four-line stanza to five, six, even nine lines, and he often enriched the lines with inner rhyme, alliteration and assonance. Although his narrative is several times longer than the average folk ballad, none of the swiftness and force of the old charm and stray beauties of the antique ballad diction are retained; while to these Coleridge added new magic in strong and luminous colours and in "the shooting lights of far-off scenery." The moral lesson of salvation for the slayer of the albatross through a love for all living things is not, as some have argues, intrusive. The moral is embedded in the poem. Without it the narrative would have lacked articulation and values of charity, pity and remorse. That Coleridge would successfully amalgamate the moral reality of men with the world of fantasy is part of the miracle. But it is only a part. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been called "the most sustained piece of imaginative writing in English poetry." For gorgeous meter and colour and rhythmical harmony there surely had been "nothing like it for one hundred years, nothing as new"
Noyes R., ed. English Romantic Poetry and Prose. reprint 1956. New York: Oxford University Press. 1966