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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.