The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. Introduction by Edmund Blunden.

Item Number: 132933

New York: Cheshire House, 1931.

First Cheshire House illustrated edition of Coleridge’s timeless masterpiece. Octavo, original pictorial boards, illustrated by Charles Tomlinson. One of twelve hundred numbered copies printed by Richard W. Ellis for Cheshire House Inc., this is number 1183. In near fine condition. Housed in the original custom slipcase which is lacking the bottom panel.

Written in 1797 and first published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner remains one of the finest examples of the poet's revolutionary style which essentially modernized English poetry and ushered in the beginning of British Romantic literature. According to Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, that described a privateering voyage in 1719 during which a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shot a black albatross. The poem's structure is multi-layered text based on Coleridge's interest in higher criticism. "Like the Iliad or Paradise Lost or any great historical product, the Rime is a work of trans-historical rather than so-called universal significance. This verbal distinction is important because it calls attention to a real one. Like The Divine Comedy or any other poem, the Rime is not valued or used always or everywhere or by everyone in the same way or for the same reasons."