The Ancient Mariner

Empson, William

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8705.1964.tb01250.x

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…6See Empson 1964 andChayes 1965. 7A rough count of the poem's words in terms of their derivation suggests that no less than 96 percent of its words are of Germanic-that is, Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse-origin.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crossed Lines: The Vernacular Metaphysics of theAncient Mariner

Pechey¹

2009

Christianity & Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Augustine holds that in relation to God, love has to precede knowledge. With the right direction of love, things become evident which are hidden otherwise. What is new is the modern sense of the place and power of the creative imagination. This is now an integral part of the goodness of things... (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self) 1 I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things, too. (Coleridge to William Godwin, 1800)2 Lines, whether in poetry or geometry, are living things. Or at least so thought Samuel Taylor Coleridge: lines of both kinds, we learn from him, are works of the imagination, forces put into the world; any line is "an act of length;' and even the points between which a geometric line stretches are themselves not mere positions without magnitude but acts of the same order.' When explaining his ideas he often resorts to lines, and in particular when explicating his law of polarity-"two forces of one power." the great keystone of his metaphysical edifice-he resorts to crossed lines in what appears to be a forerunner of the intersecting-dichotomy diagram which was so beloved of some twentieth-century structuralist thinkers but which here escapes the realm of mere logical possibility and overlapping binary oppositions for something altogether more dynamic and ternary. We are not surprised, then, to find that in the poem which he himself described as a work of "pure imagination' (Warren 199) and which many later commentators have agreed is dominated by the archetype of the Fall and the Redemption, crosses are manifest (or latent) at all levels of verbal expression and all dimensions of referential allusion-that, in short, cruciform signage in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner binds into a strong 51

show abstract

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crossed Lines: The Vernacular Metaphysics of theAncient Mariner

Pechey¹

2009

Christianity & Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, acknowledged masterpiece of English Romantic poetry (Empson, 1964) [10], has lent itself to a multiplicity of scholarly approaches since Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the definitive edition of The Rime in 1817 (Fry, 1999a [12]; Boulger, 1969 [1]). Especially the second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of critical studies which explored Coleridge's narrative poem from different theoretical standpoints, such as the new historicism (Fry, 1999b [13]), psychoanalytic criticism (Fry, 1999c) [14], deconstruction (Fry, 1999d) [15], reader-response criticism (Fry, 1999e) [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Romantic Quest for Identity: Re-reading the First Part of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Roccia

2016

JELL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper proposes a re-reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetic masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in an attempt to deepen the critical discussion about one of the major themes explored in the poem, that is the search for identity. In particular, this attempt will consist of a close reading of the first section of the ballad, inasmuch as it contains the fundamental pattern of the whole text. The conceptual framework underlying this analysis is based on Coleridge’s key principle of “the coincidence of opposites”, which the Author develops in his critical work Biographia Literaria. Indeed, the whole of Coleridge’s oeuvre is permeated by the idea of a dialectical tension between contrary forces, which struggle against each other so as to be joined, at last, in the dynamic unity of a superior harmony. In the light of this conception, the Romantic quest for identity takes the form of a struggle between two opposing forces: the impact of otherness with its confounding effects on the one side, and the irrepressible aspiration towards a unified self on the other. Such a conflicting dynamics appears to structure the entire ballad, starting from the incipit of the poem and involving all the characters – especially the two opposite figures of the ancient Mariner and the Wedding Guest.

show abstract