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An I for an Eye: “Spectral Persecution” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Anne Williams
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Abstract

Coleridge's theory of “creative Imagination” and his description of The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination” have usually encouraged critics to search for the work's unity. This endeavor represses the text's manifest disjunctions of form and content, as well as slighting Coleridge's use of Gothic conventions. Freudian commentary, while addressing The Rime's irrational, dreamlike qualities, cannot account for the poem's emphasis on linguistic inadequacy or for the horror of the female that pervades the Mariner's tale and his identity. Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and of how the subject “abjects” the maternal in attaining the symbolic suggest that The Rime narrates the unspeakable process through which the symbolic is reached. From this perspective The Rime describes the creation of imagination.

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1114 - 1127
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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