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kastrel 's review for:
The Ancient Mariner & Other Poems & Prose of S. T. Coleridge
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
adventurous
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
This was a strange little edition from about 1920 that belonged to my grandparents - a combination of some of Coleridge's most famous poems, some of his short prose pieces, and then some commentaries on his life and works. I actually found the whole book fascinating, because I could barely have told you anything about Coleridge and could only remember having read Kubla Khan as a child.
First, the poetry - I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this. I haven't read any poetry for over ten years, and have never been really into it. I feel like school taught me how to do basic analysis, but I struggled after that to intuitively connect with poems. I think I read quite quickly and have a tendency to skip over poetry too fast and miss a lot of it. Anyway, I enjoyed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a lot - and, like reading Shakespeare, it was exciting to find familiar phrases that I knew separately from the poem: "Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink" and "As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean" stand out for me. I was also struck by how variable the rhyme schemes and metres were throughout the poems - generally in pairs or triples of stressed and unstressed syllables, but with different numbers of lines in a verse and different ways of rhyming, and sometimes different numbers of total syllables per line within the same poems. It was freer than I was expecting 18th-century poetry to be. Christabel was completely new to me, and was a sort of folklore/mystical story, a bit like an Arthurian legend or a folk song.
Then there was some commentary on Coleridge's life which I knew nothing about - for instance I didn't know he was a close friend of Wordsworth, and that they both lived in the Lake district very close to each other. I definitely didn't know that Coleridge and some other poets planned to form a utopian society in America called the Pantisocracy, and three of them married sisters, but it never really got started.
First, the poetry - I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this. I haven't read any poetry for over ten years, and have never been really into it. I feel like school taught me how to do basic analysis, but I struggled after that to intuitively connect with poems. I think I read quite quickly and have a tendency to skip over poetry too fast and miss a lot of it. Anyway, I enjoyed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a lot - and, like reading Shakespeare, it was exciting to find familiar phrases that I knew separately from the poem: "Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink" and "As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean" stand out for me. I was also struck by how variable the rhyme schemes and metres were throughout the poems - generally in pairs or triples of stressed and unstressed syllables, but with different numbers of lines in a verse and different ways of rhyming, and sometimes different numbers of total syllables per line within the same poems. It was freer than I was expecting 18th-century poetry to be. Christabel was completely new to me, and was a sort of folklore/mystical story, a bit like an Arthurian legend or a folk song.
Then there was some commentary on Coleridge's life which I knew nothing about - for instance I didn't know he was a close friend of Wordsworth, and that they both lived in the Lake district very close to each other. I definitely didn't know that Coleridge and some other poets planned to form a utopian society in America called the Pantisocracy, and three of them married sisters, but it never really got started.