Essay about Role of the Imagination for Romantic Poets

11. A poet can work its magic on the reader by “choice of images, music of the language, idea content, and cleverness of wordplay” (Foster 17).

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it was written in the late 1700s. The poem’s setting starts during a wedding, an old mariner stops one of the wedding guests from going into the party to tell him a story. The mariner’s story takes place in a ship where he killed an albatross and everything started to go wrong for him and his crew. When the mariner’s story is ending he says that he has a pain to tell people about his story, this is why he stopped the wedding guest to tell him his story. The wedding guest decides not to go to the party because he became upset, he is now a “sadder” but “wiser” man. Coleridge uses many literary elements to make the story come together such as similes, personification, symbolism

He thought poetry was an art of association, it inspires readers' imagination with symbolism rather than direct imitation of life, and hold the reader's feelings and arouse them to act with passion. His style throughout the 19th century formed the mainstream of American poetry”(1).

The poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a truly imaginative work utilizing the familiar yet timeless themes of good fortune, the power of Mother Nature, and adventurous voyages over the sea. The Mariner relates the bone-chilling tale of his adventure to a guest at a wedding in his native country. Although the guest succumbs to the Mariner’s tale, he is eager to get to the wedding, which is about to start. Coleridge chose this occasion for the poem as a form of irony, by providing a stark contrast between the two atmospheres and situations in his poem. The moods of weddings are usually joyful and jubilant, emphasizing love and the union between

A significant theme in Samuel Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is Christianity, which is portrayed through the Mariner’s epic journey. This text is set between the physical world and the metaphysical (spiritual world), similar to religious teachings found in the Bible. With the use of vivid descriptions and strong language in this ballad, moral lessons appear that connect both man and God in order to discover an innate bond and understanding. Though this tale is overwhelmingly bizarre and dark, the moral lessons taught are in line with central aspects of both the romantic period and the Christian religion. In Coleridge's ballad, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," many Christian ideals are represented throughout the treacherous

At the end of chapter 20 in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes his own experience with poetry and its effect on others’ imagination from an outsiders point of view:

It’s easy to tell that the ocean is a mysterious and isolating place from all of the tragic tales we hear from sailors both real and fictional. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and an anonymous author’s “The Seafarer” are quite similar in that they both revolve around said tragic tales told by sailors. However, there seem to be more commonalities between their themes, tones, and messages rather than their seaward-bound settings. But before we can discuss these similar settings and deeper themes, we have to tackle their origins.

Lastly, the Romantic Era blended human emotions with nature. The interfacing of emotion and nature was emblematic of Romantic poetry, whether it engrossed the idea of bequeathing human emotions to an innate article like a river or connecting the scenery to the temperament of the writer. (James, 491) This kind of beauty that is

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge writes of a sailor bringing a tale to life as he speaks to a wedding guest. An ancient Mariner tells of his brutal journey through the Pacific Ocean to the South Pole. Coleridge suffers from loneliness, because of his lifelong need for love and livelihood; similarly, during the Mariner’s tale, his loneliness shows when he becomes alone at sea, because of the loss of his crew. Having a disastrous dependence to opium and laudanum, Coleridge, in partnership with Wordsworth, writes this complicated, difficult to understand, yet appealing poem, which becomes the first poem in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The Mariner’s frame of mind flip-flops throughout the literary ballad, a

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a complex tale of an old seafarer, was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in 1798. According to the Longman Anthology of British Literature, the work first appeared in “Lyrical Ballads”, a publication co-authored with William Wordsworth (557). The ancient mariner’s journey provides for such a supernatural tale, that all who must hear it, specifically the wedding guest in the poem, are enthralled. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the mariner’s tale is the obvious themes of sin and redemption. By using the story-within-a-story method, Coleridge gives the audience a tale that resembles a very Christian-like voyage from one theme, sin, to the final theme, redemption. Throughout his poem,

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a parable of a seaman's crime against nature (pointlessly killing an albatross) and his repentance by blessing the lowly water-snakes.  Setting the poem in the Middle Ages in the then-unknown seas near Antarctica, the poet is able to make his narrative credible and give the reader what is called 'the willing suspension of disbelief.'  "

Coleridge stated that poetry “gives us most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood”. He preferred to consider The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere a work of “pure imagination” rather than a textual construction representing a particular cultural ideology. However, his writing of the text as a Romantic poet, espousing all ideologies that the Romantic Movement represented, conditioned his work to be one of passion, mystery and imagination. Due to this, his “purely imaginative” work fosters the dominant discourse of a Romantic outlook on the universe; the protagonists of the text

In his essay, Imagination as Value, Stevens reminds us that “the imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things […] it is the source not of a single value but of as many values as can reside in the possibilities of things” (136). With these words in mind and from what we have already noted in “Men Made Out of Words,” we can assert that the “possibilities of things,” mentioned in the essay, are the same as the reveries, poems, and myths, hinted at in the poem; however, one needs to clarify the difference between the ‘possibilities of things’ and the ‘things’ themselves. For Stevens, the imagination is ‘metaphysical’ or something which resides in the abstract but at the time it serves as “the only clue to reality [i.e. things]” (137); therefore it is through the imagination that reality derives its possibilities i.e. its myths, reveries, and poems. In Stevens argument, the imagination is the liberator

The major writers in Romanticism are Percy Shelly, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I will be examining two second generation Romantic poets Lord Byron, Percy Shelly, I have chosen to examine the poems; She walks in beauty, and A Lament based on the ideas most valued by Romantic poets; Love and beauty, and youth and inevitable death.

Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a bright example of the transforming power imagination has. The poet’s usage of diction and allegories transform this poem into a symbol for imagination. It is said that it was written after Coleridge’s encounter with the sublime while still being under the effect of opium, and when he went to record it, he was disrupted by a visitor and the remaining of the poem was lost even to him. In the poem he shows how possibilities are limitless as long as our imaginations are; Coleridge uses “caverns measureless to man” as a