SOURCE: "The Problem of the Imagination: Coleridge," in On Being Creative and Other Essays, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932, pp. 97-133.

In the following essay, Babbitt claims that, especially in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge overemphasizes the natural self ignoring a higher will in favor of a subrational animalistic self

James Stephens (1945) on the Ancient Mariner's Stature in English Literature:

Coleridge is one of the strangest men and one of the strangest poets that ever lived. If one tried to elicit Coleridge from his prose writings one would never guess that he could write The Ancient Mariner or any other poem. The virtuosity of this poem is extreme, its fantasy is extreme, its knowledge of music and colour and pace is extreme. There is no poem like it in any language, but in my opinion that does not make it the best poem in the language, or even...