Of the distinction so much insisted on by later analysts of the true popular ballad--its communal origin, its impersonality, its freedom from adornment, its lack of conscious art--the Englishman of Coleridge's time took no account.
"The Ancient Mariner" is not a ballad in the sense in which "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Young Waters" is a ballad.

It is in the highest degree a work of conscious and individual art.

It is rather to be classed, like "Christabel," as a romance.

But it was conceived and written under the influence of the "ballad revival," and bears many marks of that influence both in its general structure and in its details of workmanship.
Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions.

But the archaisms, the "unpoetical" diction, and especially the disregard of tense coherence in the poem as we now have it, contribute greatly to the atmosphere of romance--as of a story removed alike from the commonplace experience of every day and from familiar literary conventions--which it was Coleridge's intention to produce.