The Unconscious in Coleridge

In the Romantic era, the concept of the Self changes its meaning. There is a shift from the traditional Cartesian consciousness towards perception of the Self as a complex structure including the unconscious. Conceiving of the Self anew struck not only philosophy but thinking about poetry and poetry as well. The thesis focuses on Samuel T. Coleridge, who is considered a major romantic poet and theoretician on the British Isles, and it illustrates the conceptual shift on two of his poems: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan". At the same time, the thesis attempts at an explication of two complex philosophical problems that widely influenced the debates around the concept of the Self, i.e. the problem of the unity of subject and object, and the epistemological problem of the means of knowledge acquisition. Foreshadowing of the philosophical context allows us to situate the chosen poems in the process of the aforementioned conceptual modification. Key words: S. T. Coleridge, the Self, imagination, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Kubla Khan