released 4/28/2025

Poet Malcolm Guite explores the dramatic and even prophetic parallels between the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of the titular character in his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Guite, author of Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder and Stoughton, 2017), aims with his book to correct an imbalance he sees in Coleridge scholarship, which over-secularizes him and ignores his religious perception. Guite argues that critics must contend with Coleridge as a philosopher and theologian, not just as a literary figure. Describing the workings of divine grace in the mariner’s story, Guite reveals the transformative effects of real metanoia — change of mind and heart — on both the mariner’s life and Coleridge’s. He observes that Coleridge was living in an age in which Reason was becoming a diminished faculty, and Creation was becoming understood in reductionistic, mechanistic, and materialistic terms. Coleridge reacted against these Enlightenment revisions and insisted that the human mind is actively engaged with reality. The mind of the Creator and the minds of God’s image-bearers share an essential correspondence, so that we can perceive the world correctly when we perceive it in light of the Logos. Guite also explains how Coleridge’s understanding of the imagination had a profound effect on George MacDonald.

59 minutes

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