The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the mariner is the devil, and cries, "The Devil knows how to row". As penance for shooting the albatross, the mariner, driven by guilt, is forced to wander the earth, telling his story over and over, and teaching a lesson to those he meets: After relaying the story, the mariner leaves, and the wedding guest returns home, and wakes the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man". The poem received mixed reviews from critics, and Coleridge was once told by the publisher that most of the book's sales were
Samuel Taylor Coleridge of a "Person from Porlock" – an event that has been embellished upon in such varied contexts as science fiction and Nabokov's "Lolita". During this period, he also produced his much-praised "conversation poems" "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison", "Frost at Midnight", and "". In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, "Lyrical Ballads", which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems, but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's first version of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". It was the longest work and drew more