TLS Looks Into Malcolm Guite's Mariner
At the Times Literary Supplement, Kelly Grovier reviews a new book by Malcolm Guite that hypothesizes the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epoch-defining poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In his book, Mariner, Guite argues that Coleridge was inspired by a vision of his own future as he wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." As Grovier suggests, "Line by line, symbol by symbol, Guite painstakingly traces the ghostly congruities between the Mariner’s ordeals and its author’s own subsequent travails." Let's dig a little deeper:
Undergirding Guite's esoteric premiss is an assertion that Coleridge makes in his pioneering work of literary criticism, Biographia Literaria, published two decades after he composed the first version of his poem. Defining what he christens the "sacred power of self-intuition", Coleridge bears witness to a kind of psychic propensity with which he is convinced some individuals are uniquely endowed – a "philosophic imagination" capable of anticipating as yet unformed contours of their identity. Such individuals, Coleridge explains, "feel in their own spirits the same instinct which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them".
Glimpsed through the lens of Guite's biography, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" constitutes, as it were, the "involucrum" of Coleridge's existential chrysalis: a chamber into which the poet's emergent self will eventually swell. Guite divides his biography into halves and sees the writing of the poem as a kind of pivot between Coleridge's precocious youth and his portended maturity – a lever that prises open heretofore locked corridors of his interior life. In the hands of another biographer, this might serve as nothing more than a whimsical narrative frame, useful for structuring a psychologically complex biography; not one intended to be taken literally. But Guite believes every mystical word of his hermetic hypothesis and offers his orphic methodology not as a disposable literary device but an urgent warning – one his readers ignore at their peril.
To the formative years of Coleridge's upbringing and the shaping of his psyche, Guite attaches the provocative title "Prelude: The growth of the poet's mind" – re-purposing that by which the long autobiographical poem by Coleridge's companion, creative rival and co-conceiver of the "Ancient Mariner", William Wordsworth, eventually came to be known. The transference to Coleridge of quintessentially Wordsworthian designations necessitates a reassessment of the nature of Coleridge's early years.
More at the TLS.