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
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