Terms to Know/Explain:

• "revisionists" (4)
• "alleged timeservers" (4)
• "authentic disjointedness" (16)
• "structural flaccidity" (16)
• "Mariolatry" (17)
• "willing suspension of disbelief" (17) 
• "syncretic" (19)
• "pastiche" (19)
• "palimpset" (19)
• "epithalamium" (22)

• What is the intended audience of this introduction? Which specific passages suggest the identity of Fry's anticipated reader?

• Why, according to Fry, doesn't Coleridge consider himself "first and foremost a poet" (5)?

• Why was Coleridge considered a spy?

• What, according to Coleridge, was the originally intended design of the Lyrical Ballads collection?

• Why is the publication of Lyrical Ballads "considered one of the most important turning points in English literary history" (11)?
• How and why did Wordsworth disrespect the "Rime"?

• Explain: "Even in its earliest versions the poem is an amalgam of voices in subtle discord" (17).
• How in the "Rime" does wisdom stand "apart from the sacrament of marriage and indeed from all the forms of rooted community" (17).

• How does Coleridge's narrator deflect "interest away from himself" (18)?
• Explain:  "The oral and the literary-historical viewpoints merge with each other" (18).

• Explain: "Their joint enterprise did not encompass the antique literariness of the 'Rime'" (19).

• Explain: "At the very least, then, the Mariner must be said to have violated the spirit, the nature, of something that is larger than it appears to be" (21).
• What might the crossbow "mean" literally, symbolically, and allegorically?

• Explain: "The Mariner's moral, in other words, only makes sense as the outcome of a complex rite of passage that the conventionally landlocked imagination never undergoes" (22).

• Explain: "The constraints of the ballad genre, even loosely handled, let Coleridge down" (23).
• Explain: "It is in handling the moral, in sum, that Coleridge's astonishing ability to harmonize the literary and the oral devices of his poem, sustaining the identification of the reader with the Wedding Guest, necessarily falls short at last" (23).