rational fashion. It discourages creative thought by focussing on tradition and conformity, and maintains through its members a sense of self-restraint and respect for authority. Entering into this staunched and stiflingly civil domain was the dynamic and passionate writings and ideologies of the Romantic Movement. Critics of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere from a Neo-Classical background naturally spoke very lowly of the Romantic text due to its harshly conflicting ideologies with their own. Robert Southey appears in the October 1798 Critical Review as stating:“This piece appears to us perfectly original in style as well as in story. Many of the stanzas are laboriously beautiful; but in connection they are absurd or unintelligible . . . We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyse it. It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity. Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit.”Perhaps the main contributing factor to Southey’s inability to decode the poem’s meaning, lay in the style with which he read it, a style bestowed upon him by his cultural background. Such a background rigidly opposed alternate methods of experiencing poetry, such as trying to feel it rather than to understand it. In such a way, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere represented a paradigm shift in the way poetry was interpreted; a dynamically different form of experience to what was traditionally accepted. Through this shift, and supported by his culture-breaking contemporaries, Coleridge in his writing of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was proposing a new means of experiencing and interpreting the universe; a new cultural perspective. The depth of this perspective that is available to the reader is determined by what the reader, as a culturally inscribed individual, brings to the text....
