The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

In this 900th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. He refined it for the rest of his life, and it came to define him, a foreshadowing of his opium-addicted, lonely wandering and deepening sense of guilt. The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party, where he stoppeth one of three.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Sir Jonathan Bate 16 episodes
  Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University
• Tom Mole No other episodes
  Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh
• Rosemary Ashton 10 episodes
  Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London

Reading list

• The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography
  Rosemary Ashton (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) Google Books →
• Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who Changed the World
  Jonathan Bate (William Collins, 2020) Google Books →
• Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner: a Collection of Critical Essays
  James D. Boulger (ed.) (Prentice-Hall, 1969) Google Books →
• Poems
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed. John Beer) (Everyman's Library, 1991) Google Books →
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with Illustrations by Gustave Dore
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Dover, 1970) Google Books →
• Coleridge: Early Visions
  Richard Holmes (Harper Perennial, 2005) Google Books →
• The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
  John Livingston Lowes (Dyer Press, 2007) Google Books →
• Coleridge's Ancient Mariner
  J.C.C. Mays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Google Books →
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  Seamus Perry (The British Library, 2003) Google Books →
• 'The Many Men so Beautiful': Gustave Dore's Illustrations to 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'
  Grant F. Scott (Romanticism, vol. 16, 2010)
• A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria
  John Spencer Hill (Macmillan, 1984) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m000srdx

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000srdx

Auto-category: 821.7 (English poetry of the Romantic period)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement and one of the most loved.