The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The power of the imagination plays a special role in the poem and is a central tenet of Romantic-era poetry and art. Somewhat similarly to how postmodernism is defined by what it isn’t (first and foremost, not being modernist), Romantic-era poets’ championing of the imagination arrives as a counterweight to Neoclassicism’s assertion of the imperialism of scientific reason. There is no scientific reason, nor any real logical stance, for the Mariner to kill the albatross; nonetheless, the Mariner does exactly this. He doesn’t fare well from this decision, as he has gone against the order of the natural world, and the Lake Poets (a group of which Coleridge and Wordsworth, among others, were a part) regaled the natural world.

The sailors employ a scientific approach to life and therefore misconstrue many of the spiritual events, and their consequences. When the Mariner kills the albatross, and the ship begins to drift through the fog, he says, “all averr’d, I had kill’d the Bird / That made the Breeze to blow” (5). This action can be seen as extension of the imagination, even if a largely-dubious one: the Mariner kills the albatross because he can.