„We were a ghastly crew“: Gespenstige Schiffe und ruheloses Schreiben bei Samuel Taylor Coleridge und Arthur Rimbaud

Abstract

AbstractEven though Coleridge’s fantastic romantic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and Rimbaud’s hallucinatory symbolist poem “Le bateau ivre” (1871) use very different procedures, both of them show, each in their own way, a ghostly movement of the ship: a movement that seems to lead into the vastness of the globe but finds itself confined to the narrowness of one’s own self. Both of these sea poems draw a route that in the end is aimless in its bouncing and circular movement. The haunted ghost ship as a wooden skeleton without crew flies over water in Coleridge’s ballad, or falls into unattainable depths in Rimbaud’s long poem. Can these poetic travel narratives be described as forms of a “haunted globalization,” in which leaving the known for the unknown turns out to mean always moving around the same – the self, the known, the own writing process? Even if in the self, there will always be found the other, the foreign, too.