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Coleridge's The rime of the ancient mariner
Coleridge's The rime of the ancient mariner Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTABEL AND KUBLA KHAN Christabel Composition and Publication.—The First Part of Christabel was written in 1797, in Coleridge's great c... more »reative year. The Second Part was composed in 1800, after a lapse of several years, in which he had visited Germany with the Wordsworths. It was intended for publication in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge found himself unable to complete the poem, after composing the Second Part. It remains, like most of Coleridge's work, a fragment. It was circulated in manuscript form for some years. Scott heard it in 1808, Byron in 1811. Finally, on Byron's recommendation, it was published, in its unfinished state. In the preface Coleridge wrote: " But, as in my very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness no less than the liveliness of a vision, I trust that I shall be able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come in the course of the present year." Later he said, " I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were I in the ad libitum hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing Christabel, is not that I don't know how to do it—for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one."1 Mr. Gillman has preserved a projected completion of the 1 Table Talk, July 6, 1833. tale, explained to him by Coleridge.2 Regarding this projected completion, however, the report of Coleridge's nephew as to what was said to him by Wordsworth, in 1836, sho...« less