ABSTRACT
Wordsworth did not think much of “The Ancient Mariner.” In a letter to Joseph Cottle, the publisher of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, he dismissed Coleridge's poem as an “injury to the volume” and claimed that its eccentricity and antiquated vocabulary had kept the collection from attaining commercial success. Were a second edition to be published, he added in the business spirit of a literary entrepreneur, the poem should be replaced by “some little things” that are more palatable to public taste. 1 When the second, two-volume edition appeared in 1800, Coleridge's ballad was still there, but Wordsworth had demoted it to an inconspicuous penultimate position in the first volume. The new, second volume, however, opened with a poem by Wordsworth that with suspicious precision followed the narrative and moral trajectory of Coleridge's ballad, as though Wordsworth had tried to deliver his own, more commercially oriented version of “The Ancient Mariner.” That poem, “Hart-Leap Well,” probed the same themes of animal abuse, environmental apocalypse and organic recovery, but it downplayed the influence of the supernatural and instead put nature's redemptive power to the forefront.
