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Beres 1951
Bostetter 1962
Brisman 1982
Cooke 1976
Davidson 1990
Ferguson 1977
Fulford 1991
Haven 1972
Kitson 1989
Kitson looks at the political element of The Mariner, his basic premise
being that even an absence of political content is political. He reads
The Mariner as "an early attempt to enrich the world with a
transcendent ideal forged, like Paradise Lost, from the wreck of his
political aspirations." Specifically, his argument is that Coleridge no
longer has faith in the ability of political action to effect significant
improvement; he has internalized and naturalized his notions of
change, crediting the imagination with restorative powers and
perceiving not a political paradise but something like Milton's
"paradise within." In Kitson's view, The Mariner depicts one man's
moral revolution. Kitson argues that Coleridge's political
disillusionment is specifically the result of his observations of the
French Revolution. Though Coleridge was an early and lasting
supporter of the Revolution, he argued as early as 1795 that a moral
revolution needed to precede successful political revolutions, a notion
similar to Milton's that outward freedom depends on inner virtue.
Coleridge believed at this time that the preaching of the Gospel and
political action could bring about change. In his early reflection on the
French Revolution, he regrets its excesses, but sees them as
"unavoidable conditions of the establishment of the 'blest future
state.'" However, a poem like "Ode to the Departing Year" belies the
fragility of his optimism and feelings of guilt about the terrors of the
Revolution. Here the guilt is perceived as national, England's shared
responsibility for its crimes against France. Kitson argues that by 1798
Coleridge had abandoned his hopes for improvement through political
action, beginning to develop instead "an inward process of redemption
achieved through the contemplation of the divine presence in nature."
Kitson finds this change expressed in "France: An Ode," "Fears in
Solitude" and in The Mariner and argues that Coleridge specifically has
Milton in mind in developing this notion that "freedom is a state of the
virtuous mind." Viewing The Mariner as expressing Coleridge's change
of heart about political reform, Kitson states that the significant
elements of the poem are redemption and guilt but he undertakes
almost no direct analysis of the poem. He asserts that The Mariner
demonstrates "the progress from motiveless sin to individual
redemption achieved through the agency of natural forces
'impregnated' with the divine."
Knight 1971
Magnuson 1974
McGann 1981
Miall 1984
Miall, David S., "Guilt and Death: The Predicament of the Ancient
Mariner," Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), 633-653.
Modiano 1977
Modiano argues that The Mariner generates its dramatic action from
the Mariner's effort "to reconstruct a painful episode of his past."
Coleridge, she says, seems to be exploring "the discrepancy between
actual experience and the recounting of experience by a character
with a 'most believing mind.'" Modiano uses post-structural
assumptions about language to examine this discrepancy, paying
particular attention to the way in which the Wedding Guest influences
the Mariner's retelling and the effect of that influence on the Mariner's
attempts to understand his experience. She is fundamentally arguing
two points: first, that the Mariner is attempting to put into words an
unspeakable experience; and second, that he is attempting to put it
into words comprehensible to his auditor. On the first point she argues
that language itself "finally binds [the Mariner] to an inaccurate view
of [his experience]." The paradox of the Mariner's situation is that he
is compelled to retell his story in spite of the fact that the events
which make up that story had deprived him of words when he first
experienced them. In this retelling, he inevitably "endows his past
with a coherence and meaning which it did not originally possess."
Modiano argues that Coleridge uses the gloss to illustrate "what can
happen to a work if clarity and secure moral explanations [replace] its
vastly nebulous universe." As such it duplicates a central part of the
poem's action: the Mariner attempts to retell his experience to a
"conventionally-minded auditor" and the glossator tries to shape these
same data for a reader with biases similar to the Guest's. The Mariner
needs the Guest and this dependency will shape the telling of the
tale. Modiano finds two modes of discourse in the Mariner's tale: "the
language of self" which she describes as a concrete and primarily
sensorial mode of description and "the language of social discourse"
which does not simply record sensations "but assigns them meanings
dependent upon a system of shared mythology." Modiano finds in the
Mariner's recounting of the tale an initial move from the second mode
toward the first; that is, as he moves away from land "his tale
gradually empties itself of metaphors which link him to the safe public
world he has left behind." After the Guest's interruption in Part IV,
however, which resensitizes the Mariner to his audience, he begins to
use the second, public mode again, assigning meanings, specifically
Christian meanings, to his experience. While making his tale
accessible to the Guest and holding his attention, these meanings also
begin to shape his telling -- shape, that is, and limit his attempt to
understand his experience. Modiano describes this shift between
modes of discourse in detail, arguing that "the Mariner erects orthodox
structures out of unorthodox experience," to restate the point. She
concludes by claiming that "the search for an adequate medium of
expression that could accommodate the deepest demands of self
without sacrificing either the authenticity or the intelligibility of the
artistic product" is one of Coleridge's life-long concerns. Throughout
his writings one finds his belief in the power of language, in words as
"the wheels of intellect," tempered by his "gloomy awareness of the
abstractness of words and their power to chain, distort, and
impoverish the experiences of the self."
Prickett 1973
Sitterson 1982
Sitterson, Joseph C., Jr., "'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and
Freudian Dream Theory," Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal
for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 18 (1982), 17-35
Twitchell 1975
Twitchell, James B., "The World Above The Ancient Mariner," Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 17 (1975), 103-117
Watkins 1988
In his new historicist reading of The Mariner, Watkins argues that "the
narrative is a symbolic formulation of the contradictions and struggles
within history, and that these historical pressures are antecedent to,
and indeed are the primary source of meaning behind, all plot-level
representations." He argues that "the Christian structures of authority
governing the Mariner's world . . . are in vital conflict with
antagonistic and apparently demonic forces which refuse to remain in
the obscurity into which they have been cast." These demonic forces
undermine "the idealized and uncritical assumptions of love, God,
family, and community that prevail in the Mariner's world." Watkins
argues that this conflict is best explained in historical or political
rather than psychological terms since "it is produced in the very forms
and relations . . . of social reality itself." The Mariner embodies this
demonic force, "steadily follow[ing] a course that . . . subtly and
brilliantly co-opts the vocabulary of Christian value for the sake of
undermining and redefining that value." His destructiveness is evident
in the three interactions the poem depicts: between the Mariner and
the albatross, the Hermit and company, and the Wedding Guest. He
destroys the Guest and the Hermit and company by means of his story-
telling just as he has destroyed the albatross by means of his impulsive
action. Watkins sees this process of destruction as the Mariner's
defining quality. The hearers of his tale are doomed precisely because
they think that it "can be placed safely within the scheme of things as
set down by Christianity." Watkins sees the demonic in the Mariner in
the reaction of the Pilot's boy ("'The Devil knows how to row'"), in the
poem's images of death, rot, slime, etc., and in his sucking his own
blood. His blessing of the watersnakes is also a demonic "redefinition
of Christian vocabulary and of Christian ritual." The blessing is
motivated by the same carelessness and impulsiveness that drove him
to shoot the albatross. Furthermore, the blessing is of a creature
associated with the biblical serpent. On this reading, Watkins does not
have to explain how the symbolic significance of sun and moon reverse
after the blessing as Warren must. Rather, he thinks that the images of
night and dark following the blessing reinforce the fact that the
Mariner has converted to a demonic system of power. He sees in the
Mariner's affirmation of Christian and traditional values at the end of
the poem evidence of his demonic role. Watkins considers this
demonism to be an expression of Coleridge's reaction to the social
change and political changes at the end of the eighteenth century.
The poem incorporates, he thinks, aspects of social and political
realities which Coleridge found threatening. His desire to believe in a
benevolent God who leads society toward goodness had to meet the
ideological shifts of his own time. Watkins sees Coleridge's
conservativism as a response to his unsettled historical situation:
Coleridge had to "address the various elements of that situation, to
explain them and, if possible, to defuse them by integrating them into
a larger and more palatable scheme." He therefore could not deny
history, so history remains present, undermining his vision of "ideal
Christian goodness." Watkins attributes the power of Coleridge's poetry
to the disjunction between his attempt "to create a world picture that
is larger than mere history" and the unavoidable "presence of
historical change" which conflicts with that vision.
Wheeler 1981
The Argument