Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Comments & Themes
- What are the main characteristics of the Romantic hero and his drama? Compare "The Ancient Mariner, Child Harold with heroes of Elizabethan or Jacobean drama.
- Is the "Ancient Mariner" a story of passage from innocence to experience to imagination?
- Is it a story of supernatural possession or a legendary tale with allegorical significance?
- Trace the key allegorical events.
- Has the Mariner purged himself of his sin or does he remain in the grip of his demonic possession?
- The last lines of the poem concern the wedding guest "A sadder and a wiser man/ He rose the morrow morn". Has he in turn been contaminated by the mariner by the strange need to re-rell the story?
- Analyze the effect of the marginal gloss which Coleridge attached to "The Ancient Mariner" in 1817
- Analyze the structure and pattern of "The Ancient Mariner".
- Analyze the symbolic and allegorical dimension of "The Ancient Mariner".
- Is Kubla Khan a fragment without design as Coleridge claims or a highly organized work of imagination?
- The Romantic hero: Kubla Khan's hybris and the poet. The manmade paradise and the poetic imagination.