Coleridge and Melancholy: The Case of the Wedding-guest

It is an infinite merit to be able to despair. (Kierkegaard Sickness Unto Death 45) Most readers of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) agree that the poem’s pre-modern character — its gothic setting, archaic spelling, supernatural machinery and pre-Reformation religious imagery — is an ironic contrast to the Mariner’s modern existential condition, that of inhabiting a world in which meaning is not objectively given but subjectively projected. Nowhere is this latter more sharpl...