Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Paul H. Fry Introduction
Terms to Know/Explain:
-
"revisionists" (4)
-
"alleged timeservers" (4)
-
"authentic disjointedness" (16)
-
"structural flaccidity" (16)
-
"Mariolatry" (17)
-
"willing suspension of disbelief" (17)
-
"syncretic" (19)
-
"pastiche" (19)
-
"palimpsest" (19)
-
"epithalamium" (22)
Homework Questions:
-
What is the intended audience of this introduction? Which
specific passages
suggest the identity of Fry's anticipated reader?
5:
-
Why, according to Fry, doesn't Coleridge consider himself
"first and
foremost a poet" (5)?
6:
-
Why was Coleridge considered a spy?
10:
-
What, according to Coleridge, was the originally intended
design of
the Lyrical Ballads collection?
11:
-
Why is the publication of Lyrical Ballads "considered
one of
the most important turning points in English literary history"
(11)?
-
How and why did Wordsworth disrespect the "Rime"?
17:
-
Explain: "Even in its earliest versions the poem is an
amalgam of voices
in subtle discord" (17).
-
How in the "Rime" does wisdom stand "apart from the sacrament
of marriage
and indeed from all the forms of rooted community" (17).
18:
-
How does Coleridge's narrator deflect "interest away from
himself" (18)?
-
Explain: "The oral and the literary-historical
viewpoints merge
with each other" (18).
19:
-
Explain: "Their joint enterprise did not encompass the
antique literariness
of the 'Rime'" (19).
21:
-
Explain: "At the very least, then, the Mariner must be said
to have
violated the spirit, the nature, of something that is larger
than it appears
to be" (21).
-
What might the crossbow "mean" literally, symbolically, and
allegorically?
22:
-
Explain: "The Mariner's moral, in other words, only makes
sense as the
outcome of a complex rite of passage that the conventionally
landlocked
imagination never undergoes" (22).
23:
-
Explain: "The constraints of the ballad genre, even loosely
handled,
let Coleridge down" (23).
-
Explain: "It is in handling the moral, in sum, that
Coleridge's astonishing
ability to harmonize the literary and the oral devices of his
poem, sustaining
the identification of the reader with the Wedding Guest,
necessarily falls
short at last" (23).
In this idea originated
the
plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my
endeavours
should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at
least
romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human
interest
and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows
of imagination
that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which
constitutes
poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to
himself
as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every
day, and
to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening
the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the
loveliness
and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible
treasure, but
for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish
solicitude
we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that
neither
feel nor understand. (STC, Biographia Literaria,
ch. 14)