The poetics of space, the mind, and the supernatural in S. T. Coleridge

Abstract

While Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered as a Romantic poet, much of his best and most influential writing-from his poems The Ancient Mariner and Christabel to his Biographia Literaria-participates heavily in the Gothic tradition. Moreover, these texts represent a significant innovation, helping to initiate the Gothic's turn towards the inner spaces of the mind and the unconscious that would characterise Gothic from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This chapter argues that the reasons for both Coleridge's engagement with and innovative impact upon the Gothic involve his unique conceptions of proto-higher-dimensional space in which liminal states of consciousness like dreams and the imagination overlap with the supernatural world.