SOURCE: The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927, pp. 240-307.

The Road to Xanadu is considered the foundation of serious modern study of Coleridge's poetry. In the following excerpt, the critic confirms the poet's own assessment of "The Ancient Mariner" as a "work of pure imagination." Lowes regards the moral of the poem not as an intentional, didactic message but as one element in a work unified by Coleridge's "constructive imagination. "

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is 'a work of pure imagination,' and Coleridge himself has so referred to it. And this study, far from undermining that declaration, is lending it confirmation at every turn. For a work of pure imagination is not something fabricated by a tour de force from nothing, and suspended, without anchorage in fact, in the impalpable ether of a visionary world. No conception...