Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the most influential and intellectual of the early English Romantic writers. His poetry along with fellow writer William Wordsworth helped to usher in the Romantic Age with their book Lyrical Ballads, in the process changing the current of thought in English poetry from characteristic eighteenth to characteristically nineteenth century ways. The spiritual struggle of Coleridge bore a great significance to his creative process, thus on nineteenth century literature. Unlike Wordsworth, who left more pieces of literature and a more lasting influence, Coleridge, responsive to the world around him, registered the rapidly changing spirit of the age in his writings.

Coleridge’s outlook on life was always religious. Born the youngest child of a parish vicar, Coleridge attended religious schools where he rapidly excelled. After a stint with the Dragoons, in which he quit school and ran away from home, a failed attempt at a Pantisocracy with Robert Southey, and a loveless marriage with Sara Fricker, Coleridge earned his living as a Unitarian preacher before really starting his writing career (Caine). The spiritual history of Coleridge can be divided in

There are several reasons as to why. Rheumatism and the and the use of opium explain his failure. More subtlety Coleridge had become too abstract, losing his power to “impassion himself about intellectual conceptions,” meaning he was missing the joy and hope that characterized his best efforts at writing. This change in thought process came about after Coleridge abandoned his religion in favor of the study of German metaphysics. His new motto, “we receive but what we give,” destroyed the poet in him, critics claim. Coleridge himself felt these failings and expressed them in Dejection: An Ode, written in 1802. The poet is possessed with a feeling of dull pain, the sky and stars hold no sway over his spirit. Although his capacity for thinking remains unimpaired, the sources of his feelings are dried up. Had Coleridge felt, like Poe, that sorrow births the best poetry, he would have created many more great works of literature in his life, but he thought that only joy and beauty could inspire the emotions necessary to create poetry. Having never regained said joy, Coleridge opted to remain and silent, and managed to do so for the rest of his career. His late works embody the religious ideal of Transcendentalism, one that says that redemption cannot be found merely in moral perfection but in a special revealing and redeeming agency (Barth). Coleridge summed up his new school of thought in that Christianity is merely a religion, it took Christ, acting as the redeeming agency, to really save man, “I believe Moses, I believe Paul, but I believe in Christ.” This transcendent ideal represents the final stage in Coleridge’s religious development. It is illustrated in My Baptismal Birth-day (1833), “Father! In Christ we love, and Christ in Thee--Eternal Thou and everlasting we. The heir of heaven, henceforth I fear not death; In Christ I live! In Christ I draw the breath of the true life!” (Coleridge)

to two parts, separated by his visit to Germany with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. In the former stage Coleridge was a Necessitarian, a firm believer in predestination, while in the later a Transcendentalist, leaning more toward free-will. Each of his writings that touch on religion fall into place with his spiritual development. His early writings, from 1794 to 1798, illustrate that the poet is controlled by the concept that God is at the center of everything and predetermines all life into universal harmony or unity.

Another winning quality of the mariner is his childlike simplicity. Though he is old and weather-beaten, he throws himself with the absolute faith of a child into his tale. This trait is seen by the killing of the albatross by the mariner. Although the act would have been considered by the ethics of the day as trivial, when his fellow mariners attribute their fate and the fate of their ship with the death of the albatross, it is seen as a crime. The mariner accepts their verdict without question and the killing instantly becomes monstrous and overwhelming, and Coleridge is able to fully express the agony that follows the unintentional committal of a crime by an otherwise innocent person. “I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; but or ever a prayer had gusht, a wicked whisper came, and made my heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids, and kept them close, and the balls like pulses beat; for the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky lay like a load on my weary eye, and the dead were at my feet.” In reality, the suffering of the mariner are totally out of proportion to his crime. He is pursued by a dark and sinister fate, and in his childlikeness he conceives the objects of nature as avenging forces meant to punish him. The wind that drives the ship southward is the Storm Blast, tyrannous and strong, and the bloody and glorious Sun seems a living being, now seen like a broad and burning face, “like God’s own head.” The only thing left for the mariner to do is p

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