Ancient Mariner, Pilot's Boy—A Note on the Creativity of Samuel Coleridge

In looking at objects of nature … at yonder moon dim glimmering through the dewy window pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that forever and already exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as if that new phenomenon were a dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature.
—COLERIDGE AS QUOTED BY CLARK (1981, P. 11)

But I do not think "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was for Coleridge an escape from reality: I think it was reality, I think he was on the ship and made the voyage and felt and knew it all.
—WOLFE (1932, P. 322)

WHEN COLERIDGE DIED IN 1834 CHARLES LAMB REMARKED, "NEVER saw I his likeness nor probably the world can see again." And a few years later, John Stuart Mill said of him, "The class of thinkers has scarcely yet arisen by whom he is to be judged." This is high praise indeed for a man who lived most of his life in misery, was addicted to opium, suffered from loneliness, depression, and sleeplessness most of his life, and who wrote of