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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 247: Introduction to "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
01:01:22
On The Literary Life podcast this week, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks begin their newest series, this time discussing Samuel Taylor Coleridge's . First, Thomas and Angelina speak to the question of different editions of this poem, then they dive...
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- [00:19]
Angelina Stanford
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and with me as always. But I won't say that dear. The albatross hung around my neck.
- [01:39]
Thomas Banks
That's so kind. Thomas Banks, my ever generous wife.
- [01:44]
Angelina Stanford
Well, you know I can't resist. Well, today we're going to start our three episode series on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. And I'm really excited about this series. If you've been reading along with us, then you know that we just finished our series on Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must advertise. And I feel like that was very much a me pick. I, I picked that one. I did most of the talking and the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was a Mr. Banks pick. You, you picked this last year when we were putting our titles together and I thought it was perfect. We had never done a longer poem on the podcast and I know a lot of our listeners struggle with that sort of thing, so I thought it was a great idea. But we also decided, since I did most of the talking and teaching in the last series, you're going to lead me through this. I'm just gonna put myself in your capable hands as your student. Just pip and there. And letting you Pipe away, pipe away. Thank you. Let you take the reins on this one.
- [02:42]
Thomas Banks
Well, very good, very good. Shall we kick things off with some common places?
- [02:47]
Angelina Stanford
Well, before that, I want to talk a little bit about what we've got going on. So last night we had Karita Thompson's webinar, How to Read a Symphony, and it was amazing. We've been hyping it up quite a bit through the Murder Mis advertised series. And if you're thinking, oh, no, I didn't, I didn't follow along with that book. I didn't know about this webinar, it's not too late. Everything we do is recorded and so you can go to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and you can purchase the video. Yeah, she absolutely knocked it out of the park and I'm really excited about some future projects with her. So that's how to Read a Symphony where she took us through the story of Haydn Symphony number 42 in D major. That was fantastic. But we also have something great coming up in the next month, November, if you missed that one. And you just get to just get ready for this announcement.
- [03:37]
Thomas Banks
Yes.
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Angelina Stanford
This has been months in the making. Actually. She has been working on this. She's so devoted to this. She did not want to do this webinar until she had completely reread the Republic and all of Plato's work in the original Greek. That's the kind of devotion we have, that is the kind of scholarship we bring you. And that's right, folks, we are having our long awaited webinar on Plato's Republic by Dr. Ann Phillips. So this is called Imagery and Allegory, An Introduction to Plato's Republic. And here's her description. Plato's Republic stands as one of the most influential texts in the literary and philosophical tradition and many of its key ideas still capture our imaginations. In this webinar, Dr. Anne Phillips will explore the background of the republic and the flow of its argument, with a particular focus on the metaphorical and allegorical imagery that Plato uses to paint a brilliant picture of the human soul and its relationship with reality. This is going to be amazing. I am so excited. So this is going to be November 12th at 7:30 Eastern, but of course it is always recorded and you can watch live or later. I'm so excited about this webinar.
- [04:52]
Thomas Banks
CS Lewis, I believe, remarked somewhere that Plato's Republic he considered one of the most difficult of books. I mean, one of the easiest books to misread.
- [05:02]
Angelina Stanford
Absolutely.
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Thomas Banks
He said, he said, I think he said the other one in his opinion was the book of Romans.
- [05:08]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, sorry, yeah, super loud laughter there. Yeah, that's really good. Good old Jack for you. Yeah. So the Play DOH webinar has been requested for a long, long time. And yeah, As I said, Dr. Phillips has been revisiting everything, reading it all in Greek and is really excited. She gives a taste of that at summer camp last summer and yeah, super exciting. I think she's going to blow it wide open. I think we're going to discover that this is not some esoteric philosophical tome, but is actually a very easy to understand allegory, but like you said, easy to misunderstand if you don't realize it's an allegory. He's a. Well, I think you're going to discover in this webinar why it is that so many medievals grab onto Plato's ideas. Because, of course, the medievalists are the great allegorists, but even though not many.
- [05:59]
Thomas Banks
Of them had read Plato himself in the, in Western Europe anyway, which is kind of, kind of fascinating because filtered.
- [06:05]
Angelina Stanford
Through, like Plotinus and others.
- [06:07]
Thomas Banks
Boethius. Yeah. And. But yeah, it shows that there are certain master intellects in, you know, the history of thought who influence people even if they don't know them at firsthand. And I think Plato is one of those.
- [06:21]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So even if you have no intention of ever reading Plato's Republic, come and find out about these extremely influential ideas that have filtered down to you nonetheless. Okay, again, that's November 12th, and you can find Dr. Phillips webinar as well as Karita Thompson's webinar on our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com all right, well, let's kick this episode off by sharing some commonplace quotes. Do you have a quote you'd like to share with our listeners, Mr. Banks?
- [06:48]
Thomas Banks
I do. This comes from the chapter about Coleridge and Wordsworth in Andrew Lang's History of English Literature. Andrew Lang is. Andrew Lang has become in recent years, one of my favorite scholars. He was a very, very gifted historian. He wrote a four volume history of Scotland, which was his native country, and any number of literary and classical studies on authors ranging from Homer to Tennyson to Walter Scott. And he also wrote a general history of English literature and describing the sort of revolutionary climate in which Coleridge spent his youth. Coleridge is born in the early 1770s, so he would have been just about 17 when the French Revolution began. Lang writes politically there was, in connection with the French Revolution, expansion in the direction of universal brotherhood. Be my brother or I will cut your throat was the motto of extreme philanthropists. End quote.
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Angelina Stanford
Okay, so was that written about five minutes ago?
- [07:53]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I know some of these things. Some of these things could be applicable to any number of periods.
- [07:57]
Angelina Stanford
Love one another or die. Yeah, good stuff. I really struggled with picking a quote for today because Coleridge is such an extremely influential and important person, particularly to me. We'll talk about some of his influence today as we introduce this poem. I pulled out some Northrop Fry. I looked at some quotes he had about Coleridge because Coleridge is an extremely huge influence. Huge, huge influence on Fry. Perhaps the single greatest influence on Fry. I Pulled out. Oh gosh, I pulled out my grad school notes on Coleridge. I did all the things. And in the end I decided the best quote for an introductory episode was a quote from an introduction. So this is a quote from an introduction to Malcolm G's book on the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. And I thought this is a great quote to sort of tease us about the kinds of things we're going to be talking about in this series. First published in 1798, worked on and reworked until its publication, its full form with the gloss in 1817, and further slight changes even to the last edition in coleridge's lifetime in 1834, the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has never ceased to compel, baffle, intrigue and ultimately delight its readers. From the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 21st century, it has been the subject of major critical essays and reviews, and indeed of entire books. It has been seen as the central myth of the new Romantic movement, the first truly symbolist poem, a poem of pure imagination, a moral tale, an immoral tale, a farago of superstitions, a profound Christian allegory, a drug fueled nightmare, a poem of psychological disintegration, a vision of final integration, and in more recent times, a prophetic ecological warning. It would seem that each generation, as it looks into the mysterious and reflective depths of this poem, finds something telling, particular and intimate, speaking to their soul.
- [09:58]
Thomas Banks
Actually, that's a really good summary of. Yeah. What this poem has meant to different readers across the several generations of its existence.
- [10:09]
Angelina Stanford
Well, I'm excited. Before we jump in, should we first talk about the fact that there's more than one edition and because I'm already imagining the messages and emails, which edition should we use? So he originally wrote it in about 1798. That was published in the volume he did with Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, which we're going to be talking about today. And then he revised it in the 1800s. So when I asked you earlier which version you were using, you said you.
- [10:38]
Thomas Banks
Were going to be using the later version from 1800.
- [10:43]
Angelina Stanford
And that's very interesting because the volume I have is a reprint of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. This is the one I read in grad school. This is the only one I own. I've read it three times. I never have read the revised version. So I'm going to read the original one and then we'll just see as we go.
- [10:59]
Thomas Banks
I may actually read both now, now that I think about it.
- [11:02]
Angelina Stanford
So I think, don't stress whichever edition you have is fine. And when we get into the poem, I will explain why it is that I chose this one. Mainly that this one is very intentionally medieval, and he had all these medieval spelling, Anglo Saxon spellings, and he revised those out later. But so we'll be dipping into both of them, and I wouldn't stress too much about it.
- [11:24]
Thomas Banks
Very good, Very good.
- [11:25]
Angelina Stanford
All right, well, take.
- [11:26]
Thomas Banks
We begin with a discussion of the Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge and Wordsworth's literary partnership.
- [11:32]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, let's start with there.
- [11:33]
Thomas Banks
So Coleridge and Wordsworth, when they meet, are both youngish men in their 20s. Both of them have previously caught some of the revolutionary fever that is coming over the Channel from France. Wordsworth, who is slightly the older of the two poets, he had actually lived in France briefly and fallen in love with a woman there, and he had actually seen the revolution up close, had been forced to come back to England. Both of them are at the beginning of their literary careers. Each has written a few things. Each is. I don't know, each is what you would call promising, I guess, but neither is written a masterpiece or will write a masterpiece until they kind of pool their combined geniuses together and collaborate on this book, the Lyrical Ballads, the first edition of which appears in 1798. And it's one of the very few works of poetry that stands as a classic which has more than one author. Wordsworth writes, I think, about two thirds of the first edition of it. Coleridge contributes a few poems, of which this is the longest. And then a couple years later, when a second edition is published, Wordsworth supplies it with a preface, which he writes by himself. And the preface, before you start talking.
- [13:02]
Angelina Stanford
About the preface, I think it's very interesting that in the collection of the poems, none of them are attributed. Like, it doesn't say who wrote which one. And that was. As I was going through my old grad school notes, I ran across my own handwriting to say that there's a lot of scholarly debate about exactly where the collaboration was and exactly who wrote what.
- [13:25]
Thomas Banks
I think we know for the most part who wrote what. I think that has been. That has been teased out. But, yeah, I think there is at least a consensus that Wordsworth wrote more than Coleridge did.
- [13:38]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, yeah, I remember that, too.
- [13:39]
Thomas Banks
And the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, so far as Coleridge's contributions are concerned, that's really his major contribution in this particular book. But as for the preface, I think if you read the preface to Lyrical Ballads before reading the Lyrical Ballads, especially this poem, it can be kind of misleading. And this is, I think, sort of an instance where an author isn't always the best interpreter of his own work. Because Wordsworth famously, in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the second edition states that in this book we have meant to set forth a new kind of poetry or an old kind of poetry that we have sort of rediscovered and restylized, in which we are going to put forth the poetry of common life and common feeling. And that does describe some of Wordsworth's contributions, like, you know, Simon Lee and some of his, you know, shepherds and shepherd girls, you know, leading their flocks beside melancholy waters and things like that. That. So I think he. I think he does capture that objective in the preface and describe it accurately. But no one would call the rhyme of the ancient Mariner. Yeah, cursed ships and, you know, albatrosses hanging around the neck. No one would call that a poem of common life and, you know, ordinary kind of, you know, still small feeling. So. So the preface again, I mean, it is kind of a classic literary manifesto or whatever you want to call it. I don't think it necessarily serves as an accurate introduction to what the volume actually contains.
- [15:25]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, completely agree. Completely agree. So the Romantics, I think, are deeply misunderst, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. Well, not all of them. I think all of them are misunderstood.
- [15:32]
Thomas Banks
Some of them misunderstood themselves.
- [15:33]
Angelina Stanford
They did, they did. And it's very interesting because C.S. lewis, for example, is a great fan of Wordsworth's poems, but would hate the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. And what we're seeing here is that Wordsworth, when he writes the preface, is basically outlining, here's how I think poetry works. And he's completely ruffled, completely wrong. But his poems are really good. And it's very interesting because Coleridge does not write the preface. Coleridge has his own work of how he thinks. Literature works, story works, poetry works, the imagination works, and it completely contradicts Wordsworth in the preface.
- [16:10]
Thomas Banks
They thought about literature very differently. And that's another thing, though. Both men are theorists. Coleridge was a scholar who had read everything, like almost every good and bad book that you or I or anyone could mention published up to that time. Coleridge had probably at least dipped into it. Wordsworth had a lot of ideas, but they weren't founded on a. As broad a program of reading. Wordsworth, you know, he knew the English poets. He knew his Spencer and his Shakespeare and, you know, and others. Well, he loved. They both loved the Arabian Nights. That's a common factor.
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Angelina Stanford
Yes, it has been said that when the Arabian Nights were published in French, translated into French in the 1700s, that that was the birth of the Romantic movement. Yeah, I very much believe that to be true.
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Thomas Banks
So, I mean. And yeah, I think. I think you can see the influence of it cropping up in poems like Kubla Khan and other kind of, you know, Eastern, almost sort of exotic dream poetry, which the Romantics, Byron, Coleridge and some of the others produce a lot of. But, yeah, Wordsworth and Coleridge they collaborators, but that doesn't mean they had the same objectives always.
- [17:21]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly.
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Thomas Banks
And sometimes it seems like they almost kind of work together in spite of real or acknowledged or unacknowledged disagreements.
- [17:32]
Angelina Stanford
So if I could just like, briefly summarize the two different schools of thought and that might be helpful. Now, Wordsworth is going to put forward a lot of things, and I don't disagree with all of them. You know, he's, for example, he's going to make the case of writing poetry and dialect and things like that. But if we had to put our finger on what is the crux of what he says in Preface Lyrical to preface ballot, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, which is a very, very significant, you know, literary document. If we had to put our finger on what was he. What was the heart of what he was saying? And, you know, why does Lewis take issue with that? Why does Coleridge disagree? Basically, Wordsworth is going to say that what's happening in poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion, and it's going to be emotion recollected in tranquility. So in other words, when a poet sits down, the I in the poem is the poet, it is me, and I am just pouring out this emotion about what I feel. That is going to spin off a whole different view of art, a different view of the artist, a different relationship between the art and the artist than has ever been seen before. Like, if you've listened to our episodes we did on Aristotle's Poetics, where we talked about literature as an object, story as an object, a poem is an object separate from the artist and exists as a work of art separate from him. So Wordsworth idea is gonna. Is gonna spin off and it's gonna. A whole bunch of bad literary theory is gonna come out of that biographical fallacy. All these things that Lewis and Tolkien fought against all the time in their career as English scholars, you know, literature professors and. Yeah, I mean, when Lewis talks about his own literary theory, he says his literary theory is romantic, by which he means comes from Coleridge. And then he says he hopes to correct some of the problems that some of the Romantics had, by which he means Wordsworth. And this issue with Ought. So over against that, you have Coleridge and his work on the imagination, which don't run out and get this because it is extremely difficult, esoteric, and kind of the. Oh, gosh, almost like shapeless. Shapeless brainstorming. It's almost like, yeah, just there are.
- [19:38]
Thomas Banks
Some notes from a brilliant mind that never quite had the ability to synthesize them.
- [19:44]
Angelina Stanford
Right. And that book is Biographia Literati. So he's working out a theory of the imagination and story that is incredibly important and significant and influential. Completely different from Wordsworth. What Coleridge is responding to is in the 18th century, in the Neoclassical and slash Augustan period, there was a very, very high value put on reason with a capital R. And to nutshell it for you, they did not think that the imagination was a faculty of truth.
- [20:17]
Thomas Banks
Truth.
- [20:17]
Angelina Stanford
And so if you had to know something, you need to look at, you know, through the reason and examine facts and all these kinds of things. So what Coleridge and the Romantics are doing is one of the things they're doing is pushing back against that and saying, no, no, no, the imagination is a faculty of truth, and we need the imagine. We need to be able to imagine things, to be able to understand them. You know, think Charles Dickens in Hard Times. If you listen to the series we did on that, the. The idea of, you know, Grad Grind's version of what is truth versus Cissy Jessup's version of what is tr. She, you know, hers. Her sort of whole imaginative conception of things is more true than his, you.
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Thomas Banks
Know, sum of material properties.
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Angelina Stanford
Right, right. That. That what is true is what I can weigh and measure kind of, kind of approach. So Coleridge is pushing back on. On that. And so he ends up being a tremendous influence. And so if you're like, I want to know more about what Coleridge thought, but I don't want to go read Coleridge. The person who comes along and sort of distills Coleridge's ideas for us in a way that we can kind of understand is George McDonald's. So George McDonnell, in his series of essays in his collection A Dish of Orts, he's got two very significant essays on the imagination. He is distilling Coleridge's ideas for us. And through George McDonnell, of course, Coleridge's ideas are then going to pass to. To Ruskin, to Lewis Carroll, to Charlotte Mason, who is Thomas Carlisle. Thomas Carlisle, Charlotte Mason, tremendously influenced by Ruskin, MacDonald and Coleridge. It's really funny because when I get to the room, every year that I get to the Romantics, in the online class, I teach Early Modern Literature. Every time I get there, the students run ahead of me and say, wait, is Charlotte Mason a Romantic? Yes, she is. Absolutely. She is in the Coleridge tradition. And then, of course, Lewis and Tolkien, tremendously influenced by Coleridge. And Northrop Fry. Like I said, there's no greater influence on his theory of literature and the imagination than Coleridge. And he said that there wasn't any. There was no way. There was no way to try to have a universal theory of literature like he did, unless one really, really understood very well the. The word. The writings of Coleridge.
- [22:27]
Thomas Banks
John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher, wrote in a essay on Coleridge and another writer that Coleridge. Coleridge was one of two thinkers at the end of the 17, or, excuse me, end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, who kind of fathered a spiritually, fathered a generation of thinkers. He said. He said basically everyone born around 1800 or so in England is either a spiritual child of Coleridge on the one hand or Jeremy Bentham on the other.
- [23:04]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, man, that is hard times in a nutshell right there.
- [23:07]
Thomas Banks
Actually, kind of. Yeah.
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Angelina Stanford
Wow.
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Thomas Banks
Kind of. And actually, it's funny to return for a minute to Wordsworth's definition of poetry. You know, the. The famous spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility. It seems to me that, like, where that fails as a definition is that it takes a part and mistakes it for the whole. Because I think that is a legitimate definition of a certain type of. Especially lyric poetry. I mean, Wordsworth's own. You think of she dwelt among untrodden ways, or, you know, I wandered lonely as a cloud. I think he defines that type of lyric verse very well. I don't know if it works so well if you apply it to any number of other things.
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Angelina Stanford
Yeah, I mean, the I in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is not Coleridge.
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Thomas Banks
Yeah, but. Yeah, it. It's. Yeah, Wordsworth, though. It's. It's kind of interesting. Again, I mean, and it shows that, you know, even if you have not read the preface to Lyrical Ballads or even the Lyrical Ballads yourself. You mean, we do have kind of an idea of a poet as a different kind of man or. Or woman, you know, amongst, amongst or even apart from humanity. And he is a part, or she is a part of, you know, whatever imaginative landscape he or she creates. And I think That's a legacy of. Of Wordsworth. It's one that, like, I have my kind of issues with, but nonetheless, it shows that Wordsworth is one of those figures in English literature that you can't ignore.
- [24:40]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, exactly. Exactly. And I think where it gets confusing for a modern reader who wants to visit old books is that there's no question that Wordsworth's view of poetry has deeply influenced a lot of 20th century poetry. Like the whole confessional school of poetry. People are just. They're just ranting about, you know, whatever.
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Thomas Banks
Ranting well, or ranting poorly.
- [25:00]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. But the I is definitely them. I call it the diary entry Poetry. What happens is we start to think all poetry works like that. And so then you flip back to something really old, even. Even something not terribly old, like Shakespeare's sonnets. And then you presume the I in there is William Shakespeare. And you don't realize. No, no, no, no. Life before Wordsworth. That is not how people viewed poetry. And the I is a narrative voice. I mean, just like, you know, when. When you read Huckleberry Finn, it says I this and I that. That's not Mark Twain, that's Huckleberry Finn. So it's a character, it's a narrator, It's a narrative voice in those older poems. So people freak themselves out trying to figure out things like, who's Shakespeare's dark lady? No one. That's just how you wrote a sonnet. It's not him. It's not him. Right. It's not. He's not expressing his love feelings for some woman. He's just writing a love song. And so he's putting himself in the imaginative role of the lover. But it's not. It's not personal.
- [25:55]
Thomas Banks
It reminds me. There's a story about T.S. eliot giving a reading somewhere, and a young man came up to him and said, that, Mr. Elliot, I would like to be a poet. Where do I begin? And T.S. eliot had a. With a sort of bemused look on his face, said, I can understand wanting to write poems, but I don't know quite what you mean about wanting to be a poet.
- [26:16]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, that's great. He was a beatnik, no doubt. Probably he wanted the whole life and the fresh beret. Very interesting. Yeah. So. So that'll be the first thing. We will not view the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner as, you know, the spontaneous overflow of emotion, of powerful emotion. For Coleridge, that's not what he's. That's not what he's trying to do at all.
- [26:38]
Thomas Banks
And it's I think also we have. And this also is sort of retrojecting a certain. Well, a certain cultural moment closer to ourselves that we also tend to think of the Romantics as hippies before the hippies kind of. And I mean there are, I mean, you know, like there. Some of the languages commonly like return to nature and some of the, you know, sort of stock phrases you might associate with both. But yeah, Coleridge and Wordsworth, that they were both kind of anti establishment men at the time they're writing. They. They're not characters who would fit well into any part of the 20th century. Any either right, left or other wing cultural moment of 20th century experience. Yeah.
- [27:29]
Angelina Stanford
Anyway, that's at the same time the stereotype of the. Of the Romantics as being completely bohemian. Bohemian and revolutionary is also not completely true. Some of the later Romantics, you could say that about Shelley and Byron, but Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keith are all committed Christians. You know, there's no.
- [27:49]
Thomas Banks
You can kind of quote Wordsworth and Coleridge on both sides of that because Coleridge, he had an interesting. Yeah, I guess you could say confessional life. I mean he. After reading Voltaire, he basically had a crisis of faith when he was a teenager. Later recovered his faith. But yeah, he went through a time where he was kind of in the Sturm and drum.
- [28:16]
Angelina Stanford
Well, a lot of people did. But then, you know, like when Wordsworth came back from France having seen. No, he, like a lot of people were very excited about what was going on. The French Revolution.
- [28:25]
Thomas Banks
Oh, very much.
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Angelina Stanford
Initially. Initially before the bloodbaths, a lot of. A lot of Americans were. Thomas Jefferson wanted to send troops over there to help and said, hey, you know, it's American Revolution happening in France. A lot of people were excited about that and thought, oh, liberty is just split, you know, spreading all over the planet. But then he saw the direction things turn, you know, the Robespierre years, and he comes back to England and is completely disillusioned with all of that revolutionary stuff. Yeah, I mean, settles down to become the poet laureate and you know, just quite the conservative old man. So I don't think it's fair.
- [29:01]
Thomas Banks
Which disappointed a lot of people.
- [29:03]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, it's. Yeah, disappointed a lot of people. Exactly, exactly. Something else I'd like to bring about the Romantics. This doesn't necessarily pertain a ton to call. Well, no, it does. It will pertain to some things because I already said he's trying to sound medieval. So I want to talk for just a second about why we call them the Romantics. And I think that this is something. This is what is most fascinating to me about the Romantics. And I don't think it gets enough attention. Like I said, I think we tend to focus on the Romantic poets as revolutionaries. That's the 20th century narrative, right? That they're the pre beatniks, they're counterculture, they're revolutionary, they're blowing up the past. That's not what they were doing. That is. That is a bad reading of them. So the reason that they're called the Romantics is because of the medieval word romance. And a medieval romance is a knight on a quest story. The name romance got associated with that because back in the day when epics were being written, they were written in classical languages like Greek and Latin. As time goes on, a couple of things happen. One, you start to see people writing in their vulgar language. So not Latin, but Italian or Spanish or French or Portuguese. And those, of course, are the Romance languages, Romance, because they come from the Roman language, Latin. And as time went on and those stories were getting written in the common tongue, the type of story was changing. And instead of epics and, you know, gods and goddesses and, you know, out there fighting, laying siege to lands and conquering people, the type of story changed. And you have much more stories about knights on a quest, dragons to be slain, things like that. And so those stories, because they were written in the romance languages, began to be called romances. And that name stuck even once it crosses the channel and gets to England. Obviously, English is not a romance language, but they were writing stories that were known by that point as romances. So what was happening was the Romantics were correctly perceiving that we had taken all of the wonder and imagination out of the world and that we were suffering as a result of that. I mean, we're talking about a time when Christianity is dominated by Deism. So Christianity that without the miracles, Christianity without anything, you know, embarrassingly supernatural, everything is just very rational. And what is real is what I can touch and taste and see. And that obviously has serious flaws to it because there's a whole reality, a whole transcendent reality of the supernatural realm that cannot be explained in those terms. And so the Romantics are trying to call us back to that. And it's one of those situations. I think there's a lot of similarity to sort of the same stuff that's going on right now, even with House of Humane Letters, where we understand that we have lost something valuable in the past and we want to get it back. But it's so lost. We can only sort of pick it up in bits and pieces. And we're trying really hard to make sense of it. We're trying to make it fit in some kind of, you know, whole way. But it's very challenging. But we keep doing it. We keep doing it, bits and pieces. And maybe we don't always get it right, but we keep looking to the past to help make sense of, you know, the state we find ourselves in. That's very much what the Romantics are doing. So one of the things that they do is they have lots of things that are throwback to things that seem quote, unquote, medieval to them. So you will see, especially in the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, a lot of deliberate archaic language. They're trying to make things sound medieval. Lots of allegorical meaning and mysterious meaning because again, allegory was the form of the Middle Ages, but also because in the 18th century the poetry was so straightforward. Clarity, simplicity, that was.
- [32:54]
Thomas Banks
The allegory was shunned and shunned. There's a funny story, it's about painting, not poetry. But Samuel Johnson was once asked what he thought of allegorical representations in the visual arts. And he thought for a minute and he said, sir, I would much rather stare at a picture of a dog I know than all the allegorical paintings in the world. So yeah, it's not, not commonsensical, it's not hard headed. It's, you know, it tends to, I don't know, otherworldliness. It tends to, you know, kind of allegory. Yeah, it's, you know, cousin to the mystical. And that's. Those are not 18th century, those are.
- [33:35]
Angelina Stanford
Not 18th century qualities. So for the 18th century, things need to be clear and they need to be easily understood. So you know, you have, and I like Alexander Pope, but you have lines of poetry. Like a little learning is a dangerous thing. Okay, that's not hard to figure out what that means. That that basically sounds like prose. It's hard to even make the case to me. I mean that it's a poem. The, the Alexander's, Pope's poems are all called things like Essay on Man, essay on, you know, this and that. So it's just a very hyper rational view. And the Romantics start to say, you know what though? Not everything in the world is easily understood and clear and simple. There's a lot of things that are mysterious about the world that we don't understand. And we are suffering because we pretend like everything is easily understood. So they start writing deliberately archaic poetry.
- [34:24]
Thomas Banks
Deliberately seeking out subjects among the not easily fathomed.
- [34:29]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. And over sending the message with their poetry. Life is not any more easy to discern as this line of poetry is. You're going to have to struggle and fight and leave yourself open to trying to understand things. And some things you can't understand. So this is why you'll see any number of medieval topics in, in the paintings of that time. Think the pre Raphaelites of all their King Arthur style, you know, paintings. You see the resurgence of Shakespeare, who had very much fallen out of fashion in the 18th century. They all thought Shakespeare was a hack.
- [35:01]
Thomas Banks
A new fashion for the ballad, which Also in the 18th century, ballads are not among the refined types of balladry that are in fashion.
- [35:09]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. You'll see medieval spellings. I mean, you'll see things like Keats writing poems about, you know, wandering knights are just traipsing through the forest and then something weird happens. So just a real deliberate attempt to try to get back to something medieval. This is also why you see at the same time the rise of the Gothic novel where again, mysterious things that you don't understand.
- [35:30]
Thomas Banks
Dark poetic ruins and.
- [35:32]
Angelina Stanford
But it's almost like a haunted monasteries. Yeah, they're in a castle, in a dungeon. It's just all, you know, knights of suits of armor in the, in the hall. So just trappings of medievalism.
- [35:42]
Thomas Banks
One book that none of us read anymore, but was actually kind of important in sort of a precursor to this is one called Percy's Relics. And this was a. Not an original book, but a collection of old ballads that, you know, no one knows who wrote them. You know, like, you know, the Battle of Audubon or, or something like that. And you know, some of them go back to the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries. It's produced in the 1760s, which is not really the time when it's going to become a bestseller, but a few people read it. It's one of those books that finds its way into the hands of a Coleridge or of a Walter Scott. And it's actually kind of interesting that Samuel Johnson, as little interest as he had in most of the cultural experience of the Middle Ages, he actually encouraged the publication of this particular book. So, yeah, Percy's Relics of Antique Poetry I think is the full title. That was one of those books which slowly kind of contributed to this. At first quiet and then very loud revolution in literature and you know, just in the creative arts generally.
- [36:52]
Angelina Stanford
So a lot of what happens when you study the Romantics is you'll see them talking about, I'm Doing something new. But really it's as you said earlier, they're doing something new by bringing back something old. I mean, even trying to capture dialect and the way people sound is a kind of old, an old thing to do. But I'll give you an example of what we're talking about. The 1798 title of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is spelled R I M E rhyme. And then ancient is a N, C Y E N T and mariners M A R I N E, R e. So he's deliberately trying to give you these Anglo Saxon looking spellings. In fact, he uses the Anglo Saxon word R I m e, which is not the same word from Latin with the rhyme, with the h. It's actually a completely different type. We Learned this in Mrs. Rogers Anglo Saxon class that the late, when you get to the 18th century, of course they want everything to be Latin and they're like, oh, well, let's just change rhyme R I m e to R H y m e. Because that's. They, they thought, oh, that's just the Latin spelling. It's not, it's a completely different concept. So the rh rhyme means like, you know, in rhyme, you know, like big and pig rhyme. But R I M E for Anglo Saxon poetry is a reference to the rhythm, the rhythm of the poetry. Okay, not, not that, you know, there's an in rhyme on the line. And Anglo Saxon poetry is very much supposed to sound like stomping.
- [38:23]
Thomas Banks
This is perhaps a simplistic question, but is there any Old English, any Anglo Saxon poetry that rhymes at all?
- [38:30]
Angelina Stanford
No, they don't.
- [38:31]
Thomas Banks
Not in our sense.
- [38:32]
Angelina Stanford
They don't rhyme in our sense.
- [38:33]
Thomas Banks
Right.
- [38:33]
Angelina Stanford
No, no. So, yeah. So right out of the, right out of the gate, he's signaling that this is some ancient, you know, story from the past.
- [38:45]
Thomas Banks
Almost some mysterious. Almost more something I recovered than something I created.
- [38:49]
Angelina Stanford
Yes. And okay, now, okay.
- [38:50]
Thomas Banks
It does have that air about it.
- [38:51]
Angelina Stanford
I'm so glad you brought that, that up. That's another one of my exciting things that I like about the Romantics and the medieval. So if you go back to the ancients, right, you have the, the muse giving the story to the poet. Right. Sing O Goddess, the wrath of Achilles. The idea there is that the poet is not the originator of the story, but the story has been given to him. And this, this is a very different way to think about it because now, of course, we have the cult of the artist, which largely comes from that Wordsworth line of thinking where we see the poet, you know, inextricably entwined with the work. And. And of course, he says, I am the originator of this work. This is original work. We praise originality as if that means anything, as if it's a virtue. I always say in my classes, if there's, you know, at this point in history, if there is something no one has ever done before, it's probably a very good reason why no one has ever done it before. So with the ancient poet, the bard, who receives the story from the muse, once you get into the Middle Ages, they are also the story. Typically they say, this is a story I found somewhere. I read this somewhere. But always the emphasis is taking the source of the story off of the author and putting it outside of him. I am just. I am. This is coming through me. I am not the originator of this. Well, this continues to be the way really, you know, until the Romantics, until the novel, when we. When we think, you know, I created these characters. This is my original work. And the way that we think about. About the artist and the art fundamentally changes. But Coleridge and the Romantics, coming out of his line are very much trying to get back to that old way. Like you said, this is something I found. And, and interestingly enough, too, you'll see this. You can tell who the Romantic writers of. Are of that century are, because they all do that thing. So, for example, somebody like Alexander Dumas, who's a French Romantic writer, all of his books are found manuscripts. Right. Like I. I found this, and I.
- [40:53]
Thomas Banks
Choose Walter SC Pulls that trick a couple of times, too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does give it. Yeah. Kind of an air of moldy authenticity.
- [41:02]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, I like that. Yeah, exactly.
- [41:03]
Thomas Banks
So.
- [41:04]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. So you don't have to take my word for it. This exists outside of me. And so that's important. I think when you start to get into conversations like, about where does truth come from, where does art come from? Those are two very, very different perspectives. Does. Does art come outside of me? Does the spark of creativity come from, you know, know the gods? You know, John Milton in Paradise Lost says that the muse is the Holy Spirit. That that's. That's the spark of creativity is coming to me. But all of them have in common that it came. It was given to me. I am not the source of it. And of course, the other view of art is I am the source of it. This is about me. It's. It's, you know, who I am as an artist is fundamentally tied to the art.
- [41:51]
Thomas Banks
Yes, yes. No, I think that's. That's A very good summary. And Wordsworth and Coleridge. Actually, let me concentrate on Coleridge for a second. One sort of warning I tend to give my students when I am introducing them to Coleridge is that Coleridge is much, much more important as himself, I think, kind of an inspiration and an intellectual influence than he is as an original writer. Because if you look at the collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and you think maybe I'll set about reading a good chunk of this. I have to say there's not a great deal of his poetry that necessarily stands up today as being of the first rate. There's the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, there's Christabel, which he never finished. There's Kubla Khan, which is also kind of a odd visionary fragment, but a brilliant one. But yeah, very, very odd. There's the Ode to France, which is his renunciation of, you know, sort of revolutionary ideals. There's a handful of others, the Frost at Midnight. But Coleridge didn't produce a really thick body of, you know.
- [43:06]
Angelina Stanford
No, his body of work writing about the imagination, it's far.
- [43:09]
Thomas Banks
Really, really Coleridge the, the aesthetic theorist that is important more than Coleridge the poet, which isn't to belittle him again. I mean, how many people write even one first rate poem? But yeah, Coleridge is one of those authors, I think in small doses may be better appreciated than large ones. And also his life was always just kind of a mess and I don't think he was ever really in a position to be fully on top of his material either as a creative or a critical writer.
- [43:41]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, Coleridge, unfortunately, like a lot of people of his day, was given, you know, prescription laudanum, which is quite, quite addictive. And we now, it's very much like somebody who's given a prescription of an opiate and doesn't understand, you know, how addictive it is and ends up all these problems. So he ends up with, you know, a drug addiction, which is the sort.
- [44:01]
Thomas Banks
The famous source of Kubla Khan, his eastern visionary imagination, where he fights against.
- [44:07]
Angelina Stanford
It his whole life.
- [44:07]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I mean, I, it's, you know, the, the, the other example of almost exact contemporary I use is a William Wilberforce. Wilberforce had a, he had some kind of chronic bowel disease. I, I don't remember the name of it, but his doctor prescribed him again laudanum, which he became increasingly addicted to over the years and found he, you know, had a hard time living without it. So, yeah, it's, you know, it's just both tragic cases but, you know, that's. That's the result of the wrong kind of medical theory, I guess, being applied to. To practical medicine. And Coleridge also. This is another important thing that, once again, not. Not so much something he wrote as something he was. He very much was interested and aware of new literary goings on across the channel in Germany. He translated some of the German Romantic writers, like Friedrich Schiller. He translated at least one of his plays. He translated Wallenstein into English. And I think he also had a good working knowledge of the Schlegels and Fichte. I'm probably saying that name wrong. And guys like ETA Hoffman. So creating a fashion for German literature and English England was. I mean, that doesn't necessarily catch our interest so much, but that was a very big deal because, again, in the 18th century, no one in England read anything by any German. I mean, not any recent German author. Certainly. Coleridge, I think, opened up some doors between nations, and that's always a very important thing in the history of literary development.
- [45:55]
Angelina Stanford
And just, you know, here's a fun story about Coleridge. He was, of course, godfather to Mary Shelley. He was very close to. Yes, I had no idea.
- [46:06]
Thomas Banks
I did not know that.
- [46:07]
Angelina Stanford
So he was very close to William Godwin and used to go to their house a lot. And Mary Shelley, who had a very difficult childhood because, of course, her mother died, you know, when she was like, nine days old of an infection. But Samuel Coleridge was just like a teddy bear to her. The way she talked about him, you know, riding on his back and him just being very playful and kind. And so he ends up here. You're gonna get a free little tease of how to read Frankenstein. Frankenstein's another book that's deeply misunderstood because this is a book about Romanticism, and it is a book about good romanticism and bad Romanticism, which you will see those two lines going all the way through the 19th and 20th century. And the one character that I thought.
- [46:49]
Thomas Banks
It was a Promethean worship of science and hatred of God. It's not those things.
- [46:53]
Angelina Stanford
It is not those things. It's not those things at all. The monster that is set out in the world is bad ideas. But so she is contrasting. She would know she was right in the heart of the Romantic movement. And. But without giving you my whole explication of Frankenstein, Henry Clerval, who's clearly the good character in the book and is wonderful. He's Samuel Coleridge.
- [47:15]
Thomas Banks
Oh, my gosh.
- [47:16]
Angelina Stanford
Huh?
- [47:17]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. And Coleridge was. He was one of those guys. I've read one or two studies of him. I can't remember who wrote the biography of him in the English Men of Letters series. But anyway, he was one of those characters. I think if you met him when he was five years old, he probably, you would have said he's going to be a future poet and might make kind of a mess of his life because he was like one of those dreamy absent minded kids. And there's a story that, that once he was wandering through these streets. He's walking in a busy street and he has his arms outstretched in front of him making these kind of swimming motions with his hands and he's not paying attention to what's in front of him and his hand dips into the overcoat pocket of a gentleman who's passing by and the gentleman thinks of course that he's. Yeah, he's artful dodgering me right here. So he grabs Coleridge by the roof wrist and he's about to report him to the, you know, relevant authorities and he asked him what he thought he was doing and Coleridge said, I was pretending I was Leander swimming across the Hellespont.
- [48:20]
Angelina Stanford
I like him so much.
- [48:22]
Thomas Banks
And the old. And the man was impressed by this and he gave him money to buy books. Oh yeah. So it ended happily. Not that I'm recommending this. Children don't pretend to pick people's pockets in the hope that they'll give you money. But yeah, also tell me that he.
- [48:35]
Angelina Stanford
Couldn'T sleep as a boy because he was having nights.
- [48:37]
Thomas Banks
So yeah, he loved reading the Arabian Nights but they gave, gave him nightmares and he slept poorly and he would do things like when he went for a swim, he would neglect to take his street clothes off first. So he would be waterlogged the whole day and then would be suffering from a cough for a month. You kind of wonder how he survived to adulthood. He had a sort of a crisis. He had sort of a crisis. He was very excitable and I don't know, I guess doesn't. What do you say? Yeah, just not an orderly man in any way. The kind of guy who couldn't probably arrange his own sock drawer. He, he thought at one time when he was at Cambridge about running off and joining the, joining the army, specifically the, the cavalry. And I think he signed the enlistment papers but was rejected because it turned out that to write, to join the cavalry you have to know how to ride a horse. And he was absolutely impossible at riding a horse and can't. Kept falling off. So they basically gave him his discharge papers and told him to go make a living elsewhere. So, yeah, I think he seems to have been one of those guys with a kind of a genius for friendship. I think people really did like him, in spite of the fact that if, you know Coleridge, you're probably going to have to bail him out of some kind of trouble at some point. But, yeah, he was certainly a. Certainly a man of genius.
- [50:02]
Angelina Stanford
Well, let's talk just a little bit about some things that might be helpful for readers if this is their first time approaching this story.
- [50:09]
Thomas Banks
So having an annotated edition, probably like, you know, a Penguin Classics and Oxford Worlds Classics or something like that. What do you have right here? This is. This is an Oxford edition reprint of.
- [50:19]
Angelina Stanford
The 1798 Lyrical Ballads. It's not. I don't believe it's annotated.
- [50:25]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [50:25]
Angelina Stanford
It is not annotated. And I'm listening to you thinking, wait, I should get an annotated copy. No, mine's not annotated.
- [50:30]
Thomas Banks
You know, it's something I think that's good to have. I'm not saying it's an absolute necessity, but yet knowing. Knowing the background of Coleridge's, you know, his. Where he wrote this poem, because it's a poem that, to us, it might just seem kind of like a dusty artifact, but when he writes this, this is one of those things that seems really, really new because it's been old and unfashionable. Ballads are not something that. If you. If you were a product of the literary atmosphere of the 18th century, ballads are. That's something your grandparents might have, like, narrative poem.
- [51:04]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [51:04]
Thomas Banks
And written in kind of a folksy, simple, metrical style. Yeah. So, yeah, A ballad has to tell a story. Usually it will be a story set in kind of a remote location. Often there will be danger, unexpected turns of plot, hair breadth escapes, supernatural intrusions of various kinds.
- [51:26]
Angelina Stanford
Okay, well, let's put this in the context as well of what other people are writing at this time. So, you know, to us, it's just going to seem like, oh, this is like a fantasy novel. And it is. But at the time, that would have been quite shocking that the fantasy novel had not yet been invented and people are writing realistic novels. Right. Like, just this is the age of.
- [51:45]
Thomas Banks
Richardson and Fielding, or, I mean, slightly after Fielding and Richardson, But, I mean, Samuel Johnson had just died 13, 14 years before the Lyrical Ballads appears. He dies in 1784, Boswell's great life of him. And. And Samuel Johnson is kind of like the literary pope of neoclassicism, but this.
- [52:03]
Angelina Stanford
Is realistic stuff, heavy on the preachiness.
- [52:07]
Thomas Banks
Tends to be neoclassical literature, I guess, if I can generalize, tends to be an urban literature. It's not a literature that's going to take much notice of peasants in remote parts of the countryside going about their lives on the one hand, or witches and fairies and goblins.
- [52:26]
Angelina Stanford
Definitely not. So no kind of fairy stuff at all. Very hyper realistic. Not to say that those stories are not enjoyable, but they didn't have any room for anything fantastical at all.
- [52:37]
Thomas Banks
If you want to know a neoclassical novel of a really good kind, Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding. Really funny, very witty. Also just a great portrait of 18th century manners. But, yeah, it's not the stuff of otherworldly visions.
- [52:57]
Angelina Stanford
No, not at all. So the fantasy novel, not surprisingly, is going to be invented by George MacDonald. And if you listen to our series we did on Fantastes, you can learn all about that. But he's pushing back again against this hyper moralism, this didactic, realistic literature that's popular at the time of George McDonald's writing. And so he writes Fantastes, which is a there and back again story. The character starts in this world and travels into another world and comes back and. And he invents that, of course, as a great influence on Lewis and Tolkien, who are going to write those kinds of stories in the 20th century. But really, you know, George MacDonald would not have written that if Coleridge had not written Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And.
- [53:33]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, and the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, again is. The story itself that it describes is not really a horribly complex one. But thematically, if you're trying to weigh the poem's implications and things like that, it's a little bit more difficult. And some of the original readers of the poem didn't really know what to do with it. Wordsworth thought it was a work of genius, but just oddly distorted. And he wasn't actually sure, I think, that they should necessarily include it. I don't think Wordsworth.
- [54:04]
Angelina Stanford
It doesn't fit with the words.
- [54:05]
Thomas Banks
Wordsworth thought it was like a kind of a risky poem, maybe kind of striking, a discordant note. Only this sort of thing a genius can write. Because, you know, Wordsworth had a very high regard for Coleridge's abilities. But, yeah, it's weird. It's maybe not. Maybe not right for this album man. And some.
- [54:22]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly.
- [54:23]
Thomas Banks
Some other woman in Coleridge's circle of acquaintance read it and she said she was carried away with it. But at the end, she said, I felt this poem, Mr. Coleridge had no moral.
- [54:34]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, okay.
- [54:35]
Thomas Banks
And that's classic, but I mean, again, if you're an 18th century, you know, man or woman of any. Any kind of formal education, you might. Might that. You might kind of anticipate that a.
- [54:46]
Angelina Stanford
Poem like this would have had a.
- [54:47]
Thomas Banks
Tiny little moral episode, something like that. Yeah, that's not. That's not.
- [54:51]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah, very much so. This might also help to explain a very famous Coleridge phrase that I'm sure many of our readers have heard that he said, you have to read with a willing suspension of disbelief. And that, of course, is going to be helpful to understanding what's going on with this poem. This is what he's talking about, because he's going to be giving us some supernatural things. You're going to be entering the world of fairies. And he's telling these very 19th century neoclassical readers, like this woman, you have to be willing to set what you believe to be true aside. You have to be willing to believe the things you know are not true, like, you know, ghosts and all these other kinds of things. You.
- [55:29]
Thomas Banks
That nature itself might be an intelligent being who avenges sins against it. Yes, kind of.
- [55:36]
Angelina Stanford
Right, right. It's the same sort of battle most fantasy writers have had, had to deal with. I mean, even Edmund Spencer and the fairy queen before him, Sir Philip Sidney, you know, they had to fight back against people who thought that this is frivolous.
- [55:48]
Thomas Banks
And there are. There are better expenditures of our literary.
- [55:52]
Angelina Stanford
Talent, best frivolous, at worst, indulging in lies. Yeah, because fairies are not true. And, you know, we as good puritans, should be only, you know, thinking about things that are true. And so why would we. Why would we willfully read lies? So there's always been sort of those two strains. You know, I call it that puritanical strain, which is very, very suspicious of works of the imagination, preferring realistic, didactic things, moralizing things. And the other strain, which is constantly trying to remind the other strain you need the imagination. The imagination is a faculty of truth. It helps you to be able to bridge, you know, the things seen and the things unseen. That's a. That requires a work of the imagination, because there is a world of things unseen, and that world is real. And we need to learn how to bridge the world we see and the world we do not see, but that we know exists. So Coleridge is right on the forefront of this whole conversation, and I think. I think it'll be interesting to read that poem in that light that he's giving us supernatural things. This is why we chose October to do this, so, you know, kind of our Halloween spookiness here. And he's telling you you have to be able to suspend your disbelief. You have to be able to go on this adventure into the, you know, the world of fairy, the world of supernatural things and just, you know, let the story play out as an imaginative exercise.
- [57:15]
Thomas Banks
No, that's a. That's a very good way of putting it. Yeah.
- [57:18]
Angelina Stanford
Do you have any final thoughts before we not go off to read?
- [57:22]
Thomas Banks
Not really, no. I.
- [57:24]
Angelina Stanford
But no, I myself an annotated copy.
- [57:26]
Thomas Banks
Now, I think that this is. If you were to put together a short anthology of, you know, maybe 150 or 200 pages of essential readings in English Romantic literature, I think this poem would have to be a part of it. I think it's an essential poem for understanding what the Romantic just this burst of creative vitality in English letters is and the. The, you know, early 1800s and why it is, why it changes. Just. Yeah, the whole. The whole face. The whole, you know, fashion and really introduces all matter of news, you know, all kinds of new subject matter to English prose and poetry writers.
- [58:07]
Angelina Stanford
Well, very good. I'm eager to revisit this. I think it was maybe two years ago the last time I read it. I read it for the reading challenge.
- [58:15]
Thomas Banks
Okay.
- [58:16]
Angelina Stanford
Because I read through the whole Lyrical Ballads collection again.
- [58:19]
Thomas Banks
It's been a number of years for me.
- [58:21]
Angelina Stanford
I'm looking forward to it. I think you're going to be interested listeners as you. As you read the book to see, you might be reminded of a lot of other stories. You know, let's just put it that way because this is a very influential poem and you may be reading things and say, wait, wait, I know another book that has this little thing or I saw a movie that does this. This is where it came from.
- [58:41]
Thomas Banks
Also the stalk, expression and albatross around one's neck. If you've ever heard that and thought that made no sense at all, this will clarify that.
- [58:48]
Angelina Stanford
This will clarify that. Correct. All right. Well, I'm eager. Thank you for this introduction. I hope that you guys listening learn some things today and give you a context for that. I love teaching the Romantics. I don't teach the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner because it's very long and it doesn't fit in my syllabus. But we do talk a lot about co rent. I've had a lot of students ask me for a mini class on the Romantics and it's on my list of to do things that grows ever, ever long. But I'm excited to talk about this poem with you guys. I'm excited for you to lead me through this poem.
- [59:18]
Thomas Banks
Well, I think this is going to be fun.
- [59:20]
Angelina Stanford
It will be. All right, well, join us back next week for the first half of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Just just because I don't know what edition you're on. Just read about halfway through the story and we'll talk about that next time. Again, you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to purchase Corita Thompson's how to Read a symphony webinar, our Dr. Anne Phillips Plato's Republic webinar, and we'll see you back here next time. Stay tuned till the very end of this podcast because Mr. Banks will read a very special poem for you. All right, well, goodbye. And until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy@morningtimeformoms.com Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poetry, Thomas Banks.
- [60:54]
Thomas Banks
Epitaph on an Infant by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Its balmy lips the infant blest, Relaxing from its mother's breast, how sweet it heaves the happy sigh of innocent satiety. And such my infant's latest sigh. O tell Rudestone the passerby, that here the pretty babe doth lie. Death sang to sleep with lullaby.