Tuesday, April 12, 2016

In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” what ideas or concepts show continuities between the Romantic Era (Romanticism) and the modern age?

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was written in the late eighteenth-century and is considered typical of the Romantic period. The next major literary period after the Romantic one was the Victorian period, lasting from 1837 until Queen Victoria's death in 1901. Although some elements of modernism in literature surfaced during the late Victorian period, in general, modernism is a movement considered to have flourished after the start of World War I in 1914.
The poem itself lacks most of the distinctive features of modernism. It is metrically traditional, consisting mainly of regular quatrains of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, rhymed ABCB. The style looks back to the traditional ballad and the genre of the poem and also follows the narrative pattern of the folk ballad. Unlike "Kubla Khan," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" shows none of the fragmentation or discontinuity of the modernist age. Some of the hallucinatory quality of the descriptions of the ship lost in the ice and the mariner's encounter with the Hermit perhaps could be said to anticipate symbolist and later forms of modernist poetry, and the albatross also functions symbolically within the poem.
Perhaps one area in which one might be able to claim that the poem anticipates modernism is that the narrator is an outcast, alienated from his community. Although the alienated narrator is common among the Romantics, it is a character that persists into the modern period.

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