Coleridge's Submerged Politics: 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Robinson Crusoe'

Abstract

This study explores Coleridge's response to several crucial issues of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary age: the rise and suppression of English radicalism during the decade of the French Revolution and the tragic questions of slavery and the slave trade. It consists of two distinct, but intimately related parts. Based on Coleridge's annotations to Robinson Crusoe, Part I attempts to link Defoe's novel and the slave-trading of its hero, with the spectre-bark of Ancient Mariner, which earlier critics had considered an abolitionist's allusion to the horrors of a slave ship. Keane discusses the numerous similarities between these two texts: their intertwined motifs of sea, sin, and existential solitude, of transgressions, punishment, and at least partial redemption. More important, however, is Keane's treatment of the transfigured by recognisable politics in and beneath the text of Coleridge's poem. Part II argues that imagery and plot developments in Ancient Mariner reflect political events between November 1797 and March 1798, the months when Coleridge was writing and revising his poem and contributing anti-Pittite verses and essays to the widely read opposition newspaper, the Morning Star. Keane steers a balanced course, insisting on the significance of the poem's sociopolitical context without reducing it to a token of its genesis. The book is part of the increasingly widespread movement to reinstate historical context as a ground of literary interpretation. Keane does not claim that Ancient Mariner says one thing and means another - or is really about Western guilt regarding the slave trade. By treating Ancient Mariner as neither political allegory nor an evasion of politics, the author allows readers to see the poem with an eye that is neither antihistorically aesthetic nor necessarily ideological.

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