Open AccessColeridge and Melancholy: The Case of the Wedding-guest1
Author(s) -
Michael John Kooy
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
e-rea
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1638-1718
DOI - 10.4000/erea.264
Subject(s) - art , aesthetics , psychology
It is an infinite merit to be able to despair. (Kierkegaard Sickness Unto Death 45)Most readers of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) agree that the poem’s pre-modern character — its gothic setting, archaic spelling, supernatural machinery and pre-Reformation religious imagery — is an ironic contrast to the Mariner’s modern existential condition, that of inhabiting a world in which meaning is not objectively given but subjectively projected. Nowhere is this latter more sharply..