'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere' tops the running order in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798. Two years later a revised 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' was relegated to obscurity, its flaws mercilessly exposed by Wordsworth in his Preface. What explains the troubled relationship between the most famous poem of English Romanticism and the period’s most famous collection of poems?

The gothic supernatural held little interest for Wordsworth, who believed that the essence of humanity’s relationship with the environment was best understood closer to home, in the changing landscape of England and humble ways of life under threat. Pondering these different approaches tell us something about the Rime’s particular power, informing our own attempts to find ways of giving meaningful expression to an environmental emergency, now felt on a local and a global scale.

Dafydd Moore