Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772–1834 · England
“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
The lineage through Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Drew From(2)
who shaped Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The Mariner is a sea-going Cain — and that's no accident
- Coleridge had been trying to retell Genesis 4 directly in The Wanderings of Cain; when that collapsed ("broke up in a laugh"), The Rime was written in its place
- The whole machinery — innocent blood shed, the mark of guilt, the curse of endless wandering — comes straight out of Cain's exile in Genesis
via Paradise Lost
- Coleridge was steeped in Milton as he wrote — lecturing on Paradise Lost, analyzing its Satan — and the Rime carries a Miltonic spine
- Read Milton first and the Mariner's arc reveals itself as a fall-and-curse story, with the "paradise within" reached only through suffering
- That spectral Death and Life-in-Death pair is Coleridge answering Milton's Sin and Death — the lineage runs straight back to Paradise Lost
Inspired(1)
who Samuel Taylor Coleridge shaped
via Frankenstein
- Mary Shelley wove the Rime straight into Frankenstein — Walton sails for "the land of mist and snow" but vows he "shall kill no albatross," naming Coleridge as "the most imaginative of modern poets"
- Shelley heard Coleridge himself recite the poem as a child in her father's house — this is influence by living voice, not just the page
- The Mariner's compulsion to confess his haunted tale to a stranger is the frame Shelley hands to her own doomed wanderers
Famous Quotes
“Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.”
“It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three.”
“Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.”
“Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea!”
About Samuel Taylor Coleridge
English Romantic poet, literary critic, and philosopher. His poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are among the most famous in English, blending supernatural imagination with philosophical depth. Along with Wordsworth, he launched the Romantic movement in English poetry with their joint Lyrical Ballads (1798).