S. T. Coleridge’s “The rime of the Ancient Mariner”: a poem on poet and poetry?

The article makes a pioneering attempt to study “«The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”» as a programme romantic poem about the poet and poetry. The author correlates the content of the poem with the history of its interpretation in Anglo-American literary studies and points out the insufficient attention of researchers to the figure of the lyrical narrator. Having thoroughly analysed the narrative structure of the poem, V. M. Tolmatchoff concludes that it is the narrator who transforms prose (the “«tale”» of the Mariner) into “«rimes”». As a poet, he both identifies himself with the hero (the loner, the exile, the criminal), the terrible dream, and the demonic-dionysian beginning of poetry, and separates himself from them, outlining the parameters of poetic sublimation, of that maximally clear poetic language that is capable of expressing the inexpressible. The solution of this poetic task, correlated in the article with Coleridge’'s biography, is projected onto the peculiarities of the compositional construction (from “«the other I”», “«I”» to “«he”»), the development of the motifs of “«killing the beloved”», the desexualisation of creativity, and giving the poet the status of a special God-seeker. The symbolism of the voyage, the ship, the church, holiness, and the temple of poetry were examined from this angle, which allowed V. M. Tolmachev to come to a generalisation about the discursive dimension of all major Romantic and post-Romantic texts. Whatever is asserted in them in the form of theme, plot, and imagery, they are always no less about the problematic nature of the narrator, narrative, the contradictory relationship between author and narrator, and the super-objectives of creativity.