Maurice Manning: Fat Man’s Misery, or, The Mind of the Poem (January 2014)

Centering on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as well as other works, this lecture examines how “gaps”— what is not explicitly stated in a poem or a story—can have a profound impact on the reader’s experience, allowing him or her room to wonder and wander off the page into the mind of the work.