Voyaging into the ‘Vast’: ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the Jinni and the Universe of The Arabian Nights

Abstract

The original reception of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was one of bafflement on the part of Coleridge's readers. The poem was said to hover between ‘a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence’ and a ‘strange’ ballad which contained ‘poetic passages of an exquisite kind’ (Dr. Burney in the Monthly Review).This essay will attempt to show that what was regarded as the poem's ‘inchoate’ impression in its historical relations with its readers derives from Coleridge's fusion of a Christian world which betokens the presence of benevolent spirit with the uncanny, arbitrary Oriental world of the Arabian Nights which possessed him as a child. This aspect of the poem will be explored in the light of Coleridge's comment on his poem in his reply to Anna Letitia Barbauld's remark that the poem ‘had no moral’. The essay will also focus on the bizarre, ‘Oriental’ extravagance of the poem.