Context

• Coleridge - physically unhealthy, treated with laudanum causing life long opium addiction- viewed imagination as supreme poetic quality
• Romantics = newfound interest in human unconscious, dreams, visions and supernatural
• Coleridge refined poem over 40 years
• Inspired by wanderings of cain
• Initially used archaic terms - not well recieved
• Long wingspan of albatross = looks like angel
• Repetition gives poem incantatory quality - whole poem about how words can cast a spell
• laudanum caused oppressive guilt (leaving family and not making enough money = very good at self reflection
• Revolutionary age in romanticism - American and French revolutions = age of upheavals in political, social and economic tradition
• Bringing together of opposites central idea to romantics.
• Coleridge believed ‘general Illumination should precede Revolution’
• Shelley believed ‘Poets are the un acknowledged legislatures of the world’ - romantic belief that their creative talents would spiritually regenerate mankind
• Coleridge became a minister for a short time whilst writing the poem.