When Coleridge took on the Enlightenment

Mariner
by Malcolm Guite, Hodder, £25

For Malcolm Guite, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a “unique and always generative visionary work”. It’s easy to be deceived by the antique balladic style, the medieval setting or the spooky Gothic imagery, and to forget just how revolutionary the poem was. Guite sees it as part of Coleridge’s challenge to Enlightenment divisions between reason and imagination, and the “deadening effect of a falsely rationalistic and materialist philosophy”.

Guite also makes a fascinating case for the work’s “prescient nature”. Though written when Coleridge was just 25, the poem is “full of intuitive foresight”, and much of Guite’s study traces how events and themes in the Ancient Mariner were paralleled in Coleridge’s later life: the travels, the spiritual highs and lows, the journey from despair to visionary experience and the hope of redemption. Guite is not suggesting that something weirdly magical was going on, but relishes the notion that “the poetic imagination can hold open for us a shape or a space we have yet to grow into”.