The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that the poem may have been inspired by the voyage of Thomas James into the Arctic. According to William Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, "A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea" (1726) by Captain George Shelvocke. In the book, a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shoots a black albatross: As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark social views with the advocacy of individual subjective experience influenced writers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wollstonecraft's "incarnational theory of the creative imagination" paved the way for Wordsworth's thorough treatment of the imagination and its relation to the self in Book V of "The Prelude" (1805; 1850). Her book also had a significant influence on Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1797–99) and Percy Shelley's "Alastor" (1815); their depictions of "quest[s] for a settled home" strongly resemble Wollstonecraft's. The most striking homage to Wollstonecraft's work, however, is in Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan" (1797; 1816). Not only