ABSTRACT
Very few of Coleridge's references to ships and seafaring can be read straightforwardly. The details of his biography, the extent of his reading of travel writing, and his profound engagement with a politics much exercised by the Navy and various forms of colonial trading, and the sheer weight of references to these things in Coleridge's work demand a reading of his oeuvre that is acutely sensitive to these concerns. In this paper I will focus on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as the major work most explicitly concerned with seafaring and exerting influence on almost all subsequent writing about the sea in English.
