SOURCE: "The Ancient Mariner" in The Romantic Imagination, 1949. Reprint by Oxford University Press, 1961, pp. 51-75.

In the following essay, Bowra contends that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner "creates not a negative but a positive condition, a state of faith which is complete and satisfying because it is founded on realities in the living world and in the human heart."

When the first signs of the Romantic spirit appeared in the eighteenth century, the time-worn theme of the supernatural took a new character and received a new prominence. The fashionable cult of strangeness turned inevitably to this alluring world of the unknown and exploited it with a reckless carelessness. The result is that ghosts and goblins crowd the Romantic poetry of Germany, and in England the spate of "Gothick" novels spent its none too abundant resources in trying to make the flesh creep with death-pale spectres and clanking...