Captain Cook's voyages and Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.

Abstract

This article suggests that the familiar four-step account of the ballad�s creation � that the idea arose through a suggestion to Coleridge from William Wordsworth following the relation to Coleridge of an unusual dream of his friend, John Cruikshank, and was inspired by Coleridge�s reading of the journal of George Shelvocke and the conversational influence of William Wales (an astronomer and meteorologist on board Cook�s Resolution in 1772) upon Coleridge as a schoolboy � is in fact a partial account.