"My Soul in Agony": Irrationality and Christianity in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Critical Essay)

As FAMOUSLY DESCRIBED IN BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, SAMUEL TAYLOR Coleridge's remit in the Lyrical Ballads was to bring a naturalistic edge to the supernatural: However, if The Rime brings supernatural terrors into a convincing naturalistic setting, then this "dramatic truth" is a troubling mixture. Insofar as its weird events seem to overrule the rational order associated with naturalism, then we can identify the poem as part of a Todorovian fantastic, suspended between explicable and inexplicable causality. (2) This suspension, putting its reader in an interpretative hiatus, does not seem to be one that critics have appreciated: the piece has been dismissed frequently as deranged and incoherent.