J. C. C. Mays – författare

This is the first book-length study to read the "Ancient Mariner" as "poetry," in Coleridge''s own particular sense of the word. Coleridge''s complicated relationship with the "Mariner" as an experimental poem lies in its origin as a joint project with Wordsworth. J. C. C. Mays traces the changes in the several versions published in Coleridge''s lifetime and shows how Wordsworth''s troubled reaction to the poem influenced its subsequent interpretation. This is also the first book to situate the "Mariner" in the context of the entirety of Coleridge''s prose and verse, now available in the Bollingen Collected edition and Notebooks; that is, not only in relation to other poems like "The Ballad of the Dark Ladiè" and "Alice du Clós," but also to ideas in his literary criticism (especially Biographia Literaria), philosophy, and theology. Using a combination of close reading and broad historical considerations, reception theory, and book history, Mays surveys the poem''s continuing lifein illustrated editions and educational textbooks; its passage through the vicissitudes of New Criticism and critical theory; and, in a final chapter, its surprising affinities with some experimental poems of the present time. 

This book provides a critical and biographical account of the fascinating hand-made book of rector William Greswell (1848-1923), in which he assembled British and American reviews and accounts of the Romantic poet, critic, philosopher, and religious thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). J.C.C. Mays re-evaluates Coleridge’s nineteenth-century reputation through the lens provided by Greswell’s workbook. Mays demonstrates how Coleridge is one of the most complicated and influential religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose “religious musings” (most prominently as published in Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and State, but also in posthumous collections such as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) cast a long shadow over religious thinking in nineteenth-century England and America. Although Greswell was but one of Coleridge’s many readers in the nineteenth century, his engagement with Coleridge’s writings was noteworthyfor the sheer mass of the materials he assembled, and the breadth of the Coleridge he depicts. Greswell’s Coleridge is a Coleridge in whom all Coleridgeans will be interested.