ABSTRACT
This chapter presents that Coleridge is of a mind with readers like Stephens and Perry in his puzzlement at the instances of injustice and suffering he depicts. Since John Livingston Lowes's Road to Xanadu traced Coleridge's reading on the powerful order in the hierarchy of being' in the works of such scholars as Burton and Michael Psellus, the supernatural entity that is the daemon has been a salient concept in studies of Coleridge. Hence, in addition to the gruesome spectres and angelic visions that surround the Mariner and give rise to the poem's celebrated imagery, there are unseen daemonic forces at work in the Ancient Mariner' and in many of Coleridge's poems. He persists in his attempts to locate purposes for hamartia and anguish within systems of Necessity. Coleridge's philosophical need to explain torment evokes Schiller's claim, in his essay On the Pathetic', that suffering should not be portrayed merely as purposeless.
