Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Published anonymously in 1798, this was meant to be perceived as a manuscript recently uncovered from an earlier age. It purposefully contains a variety of archaic spelling and syntax. Later editions in 1800 and 1817 modernized some of the archaisms. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's place in the canon of English poetry rests on a comparatively small body of achievement: a few poems from the late 1790s and early 1800s and his participation in the revolutionary publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1797. Unlike Wordsworth, his work cannot be understood through the lens of the 1802 preface to the second edition of that book; though it does resemble Wordsworth's in its idealization of nature and its emphasis on human joy, Coleridge's poems often favor musical effects over the plainness of common speech. The intentional archaisms of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the hypnotic drone of "Kubla Khan" do not imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect. Further,