by Rebekah Owens   These days we think of Coleridge primarily as a poet, but when he was writing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner he had playwriting very much on his mind. After collaborating with Robert Southey on the verse drama The Fall of Robespierre, in 1797, the year before the first version of […]

by Sinéad O’Neill Melville was right when he wrote, of the Albatross, ‘that white phantom sails in all imaginations.’ It sailed then, and it sails still. Coleridge’s poem on the same subject also haunts the collective imagination. It has certainly caught my fancy, enough to make me want to create an opera. Even people unfamiliar […]

by Rebekah Owens This is not the irrelevant question you might think. Recently, a replica of a medieval ship sailed into Swansea offering tours themed around Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, including the sight of what the BBC news website referred to as ‘zombies’. Clearly, there is a subconscious association with Coleridge’s ‘ghastly crew’ […]

by Elsa Hammond ‘What has Coleridge got to do with Wales?’ This was the question most frequently posed by interested audience members, participants, walkers, and passers-by during the Coleridge in Wales events at the Hay Literary Festival this year. In June 1794 Coleridge departed Cambridge to spend the summer on a walking tour of Wales. […]