Buy essay on What ideas are presented and what do the poems depict in each in the essence of gothic romanticism. “Ancient mariner” by Coleridge and “Darkness” by Byron

English literature at the turn of XVIII-XIX centuries was flourishing. It was period of Romanticism, that was not only one of the biggest trends in the literature of the time, but also a broad ideological and artistic movement, a sort of cultural shift that affected all spheres of social consciousness and change the perception of people in the turn of the centuries. In the language of literature images romantists sought to convey the philosophical quest of that time, to identify common patterns of contemporary spiritual development.
Already in the 60s of the XVIII century there was a new theory of art, cleared the way for the romantic genre of lyric-epic poem, revived the interest in Shakespeare, English Renaissance writers, to folk poetry, beautifully developed later by romantics -Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Southey, Scott.
That period was also time of birth of gothic literature. Somewhere at the end of XVIII century Gothic motifs here and there in Romantic literature, and soon Gothic style became widely used by romantics.
Gothic is closely related to Romanism. Romantic literature is filled with emotions, imagination, melancholy, and the same terms can be used to the gothic literature.
The authors of gothic poetry were representatives of the so-called Lake Poets – Southey, Wadsworth, Coleridge. Each of them left its own image: Southey – an “old woman from Berkeley,” Wadsworth – a “Lucy Gray”, Coleridge – an “ancient mariner” and “Christabel”.
Above all, gothic genre make riders start to see the great emotions that writers evoke, awake the readers imagination; it has elements of darkness and mystery, it is sensional and dramatic. All this characteristics we can see in the works of significant romantics Coleridge and Byron, their poems “Darkness” and “The ancient mariner” truly present the ideas of gothic literature.

 
“The ancient mariner”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a prominent representative of the Romanticism in the English literature, and author of the famous ballad “The Ancient Mariner”. Coleridge firstly published his ballad in a poetry collection “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798, that is a masterpiece made together with his colleague William Wordsworth. Later in the 1817 Coleridge published an edited version of his poem in a “Sibylline Leaves”, and added marginal notes, which gave explanations of meaning of the poetry. These remarks were written in an archaic language and amplified the allegorical feel of the poem, established a nostalgic and historical mood. But nevertheless, this poem is referred to the gothic style, that is evident.
It is worth mentioning, that Coleridge’s “mystery” poems are based on dreams. For example, “Kubla Khan” is the poem of an attractive phantom-world, “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner” are nightmare poems, being perhaps Coleridge’s most celebrated nightmares.
First of all, Coleridge used the gothic as the mean of showing the things which he felt. Concretely, he did not bear the light of day: as “lightness” often implicates clarity and sim-plicity, “darkness” is used to implicate complexity and unknowability. Coleridge’s deep-set anxiety and fears found poetic expression in the gothic.
Among the romantic poets, it is Coleridge who fully went away from the ordinary world of conscious experience to the gothic, which means the world of the unconscious.( Davidson,47)
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” differentiated from Romantic stylistic tendencies.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is unique among Coleridge’s works — it is unique in its archaic language, its length, it’s moral narrative, it’s thematic ambiguity. (Davidson, 32)
These peculiarities were quite atypical of that period, they differ this poetry from another Romantic works. The examples are evident. At that time Romantic poets emphasized the natural world’s majesty, they diminished humans in comparison to nature. As for Coleridge, he places his hero, the ancient Mariner, in the open ocean, that made him very small and weak in comparison to the forces of nature. The Romantic authors used to emphasize spiritual life and nature, that was against the common trend of religious institutions of that time. Coleridge in his turn didn’t support criticizing the Church, he definitely supported praying. But in the poem “the Ancient Mariner” he showed his belief that the true path to God lies through unity of human with nature.
A distinctive feature of the poem is an organic combination of real images, almost physically perceived and tangible, with the fantastic one. And precisely because it is absolutely fantastic images coexist with real, taken from reality, the poem makes a very strong impression.
So the leading idea of Coleridge’s poem – is a permanent presence in the life of agony, mysterious, that is so difficult to understand.