The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Coleridge's poem of a grim voyage in which a sailor shoots an albatross and is forced to tell the story of his crime forever.
In this 900th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. He refined it for the rest of his life, and it came to define him, a foreshadowing of his opium-addicted, lonely wandering and deepening sense of guilt. The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party, where he stoppeth one of three.
The image above is from Gustave Dor茅's illustration of the mariner's shooting of the albatross, for an 1877 German language edition of the poem
With
Sir Jonathan Bate
Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University
Tom Mole
Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh
And
Rosemary Ashton
Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Last on
More episodes
Previous
LINKS AND FURTHER READING
READING LIST:
Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (John Wiley & Sons, 1996)
Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who Changed the World (William Collins, 2020)
James D. Boulger (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner: a Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1969)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed. John Beer), Poems (Everyman鈥檚 Library, 1991)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with Illustrations by Gustave Dor茅 (Dover, 1970)
Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (first published 1989; Harper Perennial, 2005)
John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (first published 1927; Dyer Press, 2007)
J.C.C. Mays, Coleridge鈥檚 Ancient Mariner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
Seamus Perry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The British Library, 2003)
Grant F. Scott, 鈥溾橳he Many Men so Beautiful鈥: Gustave Dor茅鈥檚 Illustrations to 鈥楾he Rime of the Ancient Mariner鈥欌 (Romanticism, vol. 16, 2010)
John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria (Macmillan, 1984)
RELATED LINKS:
Broadcasts
- Thu 4 Mar 2021 09:00麻豆官网首页入口 Radio 4
- Thu 4 Mar 2021 21:30麻豆官网首页入口 Radio 4
Featured in...
Romantic—In Our Time
Browse the Romantic era within the In Our Time archive.
Culture—In Our Time
Popular culture, poetry, music and visual arts and the roles they play in our society.
In Our Time podcasts
Download programmes from the huge In Our Time archive.
The In Our Time Listeners' Top 10
If you鈥檙e new to In Our Time, this is a good place to start.
Arts and Ideas podcast
Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.
Podcast
-
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.