The rime of the ancient mariner - 1900 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: III. THE COMPOSITION OF THE POEM In the curiously multiform experience of Coleridge, the flowering time of his poetic genius is limited to a single brief peri... more »od. This period students of his poetry find it possible to detach from the circumstances of his life, and they are able to consider it apart, as constituting a kind of distinct and special epoch. It was his annus mirabilis, his "poetic prime"; it was the period which produced Tlie Ancient Mariner. And it was, also, the period of Coleridge's association with Wordsworth. During the last year of his residence at Cambridge, where Wordsworth had taken his degree two years before Coleridge entered, the younger poet had recognized in the Descriptive Sketches, with its "words and images all aglow," and in spite of all its defects and unevenness, a poem of exceptional power and import. "Seldom, if ever," he wrote, " was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." In his twenty-fourth year, he met Wordsworth personally.1 To Coleridge's removal to Nether Stowey in 1796, however, was due that intimacy and communion which proved in the result so immensely significant. At that time Wordsworth was living, with his sister Dorothy, at Racedown, some thirty miles from Nether Stowey. Here, in June, 1797, Coleridge paid the Wordsworths a visit. "The first thing personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair; and you have some faint idea of Coleridge. He is a kind good soul, full of religion and affection and poetry and animal magnetism. His cardinal sin is that he wants will."— Thomas Carlyle, 1195-1835, by J. A. Froude, Volume I., p. 179. ...« less