SOURCE: The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927, pp. 240-307.
The Road to Xanadu is considered the foundation of serious modern study of Coleridge's poetry. In the following excerpt, the critic confirms the poet's own assessment of "The Ancient Mariner" as a "work of pure imagination." Lowes regards the moral of the poem not as an intentional, didactic message but as one element in a work unified by Coleridge's "constructive imagination. "
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