The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a salvation story. The poem's structure is multi-layered text based on Coleridge's interest in Higher Criticism. "Like the Iliad or Paradise Lost or any great historical product, the "Rime" is a work of transhistorical rather than so-called universal significance. This verbal distinction is important because it calls attention to a real one. Like The Divine Comedy or any other poem, the "Rime" is not valued or used always or everywhere or by everyone in the same way or for the same reasons." George Whalley, in his 1946–47 essay, "The Mariner and the Albatross", suggests that the Ancient Mariner is an
Nautical fiction identified "the sea as an archetype of the Sublime in nature: 'of all the objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination as much as the sea or ocean' ". Later in this century Samuel Taylor Coleridge's narrative poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), developed the idea of the ocean as "realm of unspoiled nature and a refuge from the perceived threats of civilization". However, it is Byron "who has taken most of the credit for inventing the nineteenth-century sea, in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1812-16): A distinct sea novel genre, which focuses on representing