This is the first book-length study to read the Ancient Mariner as poetry in Coleridge's own
particular sense of the word. Coleridge's complicated relationship with the Mariner as an
experimental poem lies in its origin as a joint project with Wordsworth. J. C. C. Mays traces
the changes in the several versions published in Coleridge's lifetime and shows how
Wordsworth's troubled reaction to the poem influenced its subsequent interpretation. This is
also the first book to situate the Mariner in the context of the entirety of Coleridge's prose
and verse now available in the Bollingen Collected edition and Notebooks that is not only in
relation to other poems like The Ballad of the Dark Ladiè and Alice du Clós but also to ideas
in his literary criticism (especially Biographia Literaria) philosophy and theology. Using a
combination of close reading and broad historical considerations reception theory and book
history Mays surveys the poem's continuing life in illustrated editions and educational
textbooks its passage through the vicissitudes of New Criticism and critical theory and in a
final chapter its surprising affinities with some experimental poems of the present time.
