Welcome Romantics and Swifties . . .

This is a blog created by students in the 2024 English Literature Capstone at Fairfield University. To begin our course, we studied Samuel Taylor Coleridge's long ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," published in 1798 and revised in 1817. We looked at it as an example of Romantic and Gothic literary conventions, then studied the ways in which literary critics have interpreted the poem from a variety of different perspectives including Formalism, New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and interdisciplinary Religious Studies. Midway through our course, Taylor Swift announced that her new album would feature a bonus track entitled "Albatross," a clear allusion to the central event of the poem, the Mariner's inexplicable killing of a sea bird. We discussed this, and noted that the song would thus continue Swift's pattern of allusions to English Romantic poetry in her lyrics that dates to at least "The Lake". So, why English Romanticism? Why Now? What are the parallels, intentional and otherwise, between Taylor's "Albatross" and Coleridge's "Rime"? These are our thoughts . . .