John Livingston Lowes:
The size of the albatross ... has long been a stone of stumbling to matter-of-fact souls, who protest that Coleridge has strained verisimilitude to the breaking point through his patent misconception of the albatross's size. For he has suspended about a sailor's neck a bird the sweep of whose regal wings was twice a tall man's height, and, in the poem as it originally stood, has fed the Brobdingnagian creature "biscuit worms," as if it had the tastes and the dimensions of a wren... One may admit at once the piquant incongruity of the biscuit worms, which were promptly banished from the poem. As for the rest, Coleridge was intent upon poetic truth, not ornithological fact. But even a poet may be presumed to know that size is a matter of species and age, and the sooty albatross, which is much the smaller bird, might readily enough, as I know from experiment, have been carried suspended from a sailor's neck.I often return to this 1927 study of the making of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," though I'm not sure that I've ever read it cover-to-cover. My Vintage Books paperback copy is now in pieces crudely taped together, but I haven't gotten around to replacing it. Lowes is such an engaging and enthusiastic writer (not to mention such an erudite scholar), that one can just open the book anywhere and start reading, as in the passage above, which inescapably creates a mental image of Professor Lowes in some dusty back room in a natural history museum trying on a taxidermied albatross for size.
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (emphasis added)
