Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner Animated: A Classic Version Narrated by Orson Welles; A Modern One Narrated by Many — openculture.com

Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—poet, critic, opium addict—wrote his Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798, a time when long poems still began with a short synopsis called the “Argument.” I have always loved Coleridge’s weird poem, with its archaic language recalling medieval travel stories, and its globetrotting narrative reaching back to Odysseus and the recent tales of Captain Cook, and forward to the imperial age to come. In subsequent editions, Coleridge would edit out some of the antique language, bowing to pressure from adherents of his friend and colleague William Wordsworth, who promised the world a people’s poetry in the preface to Coleridge and Wordsworth’s seminal Romantic collection Lyrical Ballads.

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