In this plan it was agreed that Coleridge’s endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic. In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballada’. The characters and the incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. For the second kinds of poems, that were mainly to be presented by Wordsworth were such poems in which the subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life.

Coleridge chose such series of poems in which the incidents and agents were to be, in part at supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interest of affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real.

In this respect both the poets agreed to present two different kinds of poems. These two poets felt that English poetry needed first that romance should be saved and ennobled by the presence and the power of truth-truth moral and psychological, and secondly that naturalism (realism) without losing any of its fidelity to fact, should be saved and ennobled by the presence and power of imagination _ the light that never was, on sea or land. This joint adventure was taken by Wordsworth and Coleridge to find out a balance between the two extremes the tendency to realism and the tendency to romance in their extreme forms. “Lyrical Ballads” published in 1798 is a joint venture of Wordsworth and Coleridge which is a key to understand all the poetry of the Romantic Age including that of Coleridge. The plan of “The Ancient Mariner’ can be traced in the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads the study of which is of great help to understand the plan of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ which is briefly as follows:

Keeping in view the way he dissolved, diffused and dissipated his objects of contemplation, it can be safely admitted that he fused and reshaped a variety of sources and gave them a unique unity through his fiery imagination. It has different origins and sources yet it is a poem of ‘pure imagination’, as Coleridge called it himself. Critical Appreciation of “The Ancient Mariner”Īmong the great poems of Coleridge, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the only complete one.

The ancient mariner by st coleridge