Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Marie in 1772. His life was characterized by the dark period that he went through. In fact his unhappy marriage and his addiction to opium took him under the supervision of a doctor, who followed him until his death. The last 18 years of his life were dedicated to lecture, philosophical essay and literary criticism, which will make him a brilliant conversationalist.

But the most important event in Coleridge’s life was the collaboration with Wordsworth, which marked the beginning of the Romantic era in England. However the Lyrical Ballads doesn’t really represent all the ideas of C., which exalted the supernatural more than the ordinary and the nature, like W. did.

Coleridge meant the poet must have the ability to make his narrative credible and to led the reader into a world of strange but wonderful visions. This is what he called the “suspension of disbelief / incredulity”.

This fascination is especially present in “The rime of the ancient mariner”, which is apparently a ballad because of its sophisticated form. The poem begins with the arrive of a mariner to a wedding, where he persuades a wedding-guest to listen his story. So he describes a voyage, during what he killed an albatross without a reason, condemning his crew to death and committing a symbolic sin. This act represents, in fact, a crime against nature and also the crime of the imagination, without which the man becomes alienated.

There are also other symbolic relevance, like the sun (order and reason), the wind (creative energy) and the moon (connected with love). Also the end, that sees the mariner eternally wandering from land to land to repeat his tale, in order to redeem himself, is a symbolic way to represent the sin and the redemption, the death and the rebirth. In this way the figure of the mariner becomes the image of the poet, who has, like him, the power to fascinate with words.