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Bannon, Brad

English

2008

MA

After tracing through the symbolic structures of literary criticism of The Ancient Mariner, this thesis argues first for a notion of Coleridge's poetry as philosophical before suggesting that The Ancient Mariner is best viewed alongside Kubla Khan as a collection of philosophical coordinates whose allusive dialogue reveals Coleridge's extended meditations on the structure of knowing. In the metaphysical vision of these poems, there are instances of spontaneous suspension in which the subject experiences absolute knowledge in the synthesis of subject and object, knower and known. This unpredictable and inimitable spontaneity is suggested most strikingly by Coleridge's characterization, or suspicion, of what is unknown, or invisible, as exemplified by the Thomas Burnet epigraph that is included in the final revision of The Ancient Mariner. Ultimately, I argue, both poems speculate in most colorful detail on moving beyond the boundaries of what is empirically knowable and intuitively locating a groupd for the type of absolute and unified knowledge that Kant describes as "the field of the supersensible."