This small display of manuscripts and illustrated books marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, recounts the experiences of a mariner whose ship becomes trapped in ice during a long voyage.

Many artists have been drawn to the creative force and supernatural imagery of The Ancient Mariner. This display brings together Coleridge’s own manuscript poems and notebooks and later visual representations of the poem.

Image: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, manuscript revision of lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in Notebook No. 11, 1806, Add MS 47508, f. 5r