SOURCE: "Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798," in Poetry and Its Background, Illustrated by Five Poems, 1470-1870, Chatto & Windus, 1970, pp. 66-86.

In the following excerpt, Tillyard discusses how The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is characteristic of Romanticism generally, and particularly "of the diversity of the Ancient Mariner, of the multiple layers of meaning, of the different uses to which nature is put."

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First let me explain that I shall not try to criticise [The Rime of the Ancient Mariner] in the sense of conveying something of the total effect. It is a rich and complicated poem, and to put in words the total effect issuing from this complication would be at once surpassingly difficult and unnecessary for the humbler objects I have in view. All I seek to do is to enumerate some of the layers of significance that go to make up the whole...