Coleridge, the French Revolution, and 'The Ancient Mariner': Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation

Abstract

S. T. Coleridge's 'The Rime of Ancient Mariner' was written against the background of the collapse of the poet's hopes for the improvement of mankind by political action, the ultimate failure of the French Revolution to distinguish itself from its oppressive Bourbon predecessors. The contribution of Coleridge's political beliefs to this poem has never been fully appreciated. Certainly 'The Ancient Mariner' has none of the political allusions which stud the contemporaneous 'France: an Ode' or 'Fears in Solitude' and this has led most critics to concur with E. M. W. Tillyard that the poem exhibits 'a total lack of politics'.' Yet given the circumstances which gave rise to 'The Ancient Mariner', this very absence of political content is itself political. As Carl Woodring puts it, if Coleridge's supernatural poems are poems of escape, 'politics form a large part of what they escaped from'.2 The importance of the French Revolution to 'The Ancient Mariner' can be seen in Coleridge's obsession with that other poet and disillusioned supporter of revolution, John Milton. During 1795-96 he fills the Gutch memorandum notebook with allusions and references to Toland's edition of Milton's prose works of 1698.3 Coleridge had Milton's career very much in mind when writing 'The Ancient Mariner'. Like himself, the poet of Paradise Lost had witnessed the complete wreck of his own hopes for a regenerated nation. In March 1819 Coleridge delivered a lecture on Milton and Paradise Lost which tells us a great deal about his own state of mind. Milton was: '. as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal'.4 Although ultimately Coleridge hoped that his own vengeance would be