In a large format edition, this first edition illustrated by Gustave Doré, contains 39 engravings by one of the most renowned masters of this art. His illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner stand out among his best works in a true portrait of the sublime and the terrible that only finds its match in the depiction of Dante's Inferno. The red editorial binding features the French title, La Chanson du Veaux Marin. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written between 1797 and 1798 by the British poet Samuel Coleridge and published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. An old sailor intercepts a man on his way to a wedding to tell him of his troubled adventures at sea. Sin, guilt and redemption are some of the topics dealt with in a vertigo of feelings oscillating between terror and fascination. This poem is commonly interpreted as a milestone in the change from modern poetry to the dawn of the English literature of the Romantic period, of which Coleridge, together with William Wordsworth, is one of the precursors and leading representatives.