Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most famous British Romantic poets, along with William Wordsworth. Coleridge’s poems are some of the most epic and beautiful written in modern history, but the man himself suffered debilitating bouts of depression throughout his life. Medicated with laudanum, an opium sleeping substance, Coleridge was an opium addict for most of his adult life.

Coleridge held different views about imagination and perceiving the world than did most of his contemporaries. He believed imagination was each individual’s reformatting and reconfiguring his unique view of the world. In terms of sensory perception, Coleridge believed that the mind filtered what it perceived and that every man viewed the world differently.

Coleridge says the poet “brings the whole soul of man…with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.” This quote seems to refer to Coleridge’s belief each man’s mind filtered his perception of the world. The poet can capture in his poem how each character would think and view the world based on what would be the most important to him in creating his own worldview. He also speaks about imagination in the quote about how the poet “blends, and (as it were) fuses… to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.” This part of the quote speaks about Coleridge’s belief imagination was the blending and recreation of the perception one perceives.

In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge tells stories about lives “in the days that are past,” but also are innovative in his writing style and thinking. Rather than using backwards intellect, he revolutionized poetry both in language and in subject matter to make it more accessible to all readers. Coleridge uses an ancient tale to illustrate the universality of the Mariner’s message, but is innovative in his description of the supernatural.

Coleridge also uses Mariner’s tale of the past, but he also innovates with his supernatural tale. The Mariner is forced to re-tell his tale forever or his “ghastly agony returns.” This re-telling of a historical tale emphasizes universality and the never-ending nature of the Mariner’s tale. But Coleridge also innovates with supernatural elements such as with “the naked hulk” of the ghost ship. These innovative elements make the story more readable for modern readers. Like Wordsworth’s and his use of history combined with innovative elements, Coleridge makes his poetry accessible for his civilized audience and most isn’t a semi-barbarian.