Book Review: Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite

I’m pleased to publish this guest review by Dr. Mischa Willett.

Let’s get one thing straight: there is nothing wrong with shooting an albatross. As even casual readers in the history of English literature will know, a sailor’s shooting the great sea-bird is the central action in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and as one can probably deduce, that poem is the subject of Malcom Guite’s new book Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder and Stoughton, 2017).