Rime of the Ancient Mariner
This masterpiece of eighteenth-century English poetry tells the epic tale of a sailor who endures a fate worse than death for killing an albatross.
After callously shooting an albatross with his crossbow, a sailor is doomed to a nightmarish voyage from the Antarctic to the Equator before returning home as the sole survivor of the journey. When the haunting figure Life-in-Death wins his soul in a game of dice, the sailor is doomed to forever roam the Earth, compelled by guilt to repeat his story time and again.
First published in the volume
Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is considered the first major work of English Romantic poetry, and one of the great masterpieces of Western literature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridgewas an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, along with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England. Coleridge was born in 1772 in the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England. He was the youngest of ten by Rev. John Coleridge’s second wife, Anne Bowden. From 1791–1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge, though he never graduated. In 1795, Coleridge married Sara Fricker in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, but their marriage was unhappy. Following the birth of their fourth child, he eventually separated from her. In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English Romantic Age. Coleridge died in 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium.
