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The Form of Coleridge's Dejection Ode

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

A. Harris Fairbanks
A. Harris Fairbanks*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, Storrs
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Abstract

Coleridge’s “Dejection” is an ode rather than a conversation poem. It differs from the eighteenth-century ode and establishes a distinctively Romantic ode in adapting the personal voice, meditative structure, and private subject that Coleridge had developed in the conversation poems, but because Coleridge observed odic decorum it lacks the conversation poem’s controlling characteristic, an initial illusion of artlessness manifested in the pattern of thought, rhythm, syntax, and transitions. The inability of critics to agree whether the speaker of “Dejection” masters his crisis is a consequence of Coleridge’s innovation in employing the device of “simultaneous composition” in a poem of greater seriousness than any of the conversation poems. The speaker cannot plausibly resolve a crisis that affects his life at the root within the span of a single meditation, and because he is enmeshed in the experience as he articulates it, he has no perspective from which to evaluate it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , October 1975 , pp. 874 - 884
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 “Coleridge's Poetical Works,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 36 (1834), 553, 554.

2 “Coleridge's Conversation Poems,” Quarterly Review, 244(1925), 295.

3 E.g., Max F. Schulz in The Poetic Voices of Coleridge: A Study of His Desire for Spontaneity and Passion for Order (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1963) is frankly bewildered about the poem's classification: “I have included ‘Dejection: An Ode’ among the prophecy poems, but with some misgivings, for it might equally be considered a conversation or confession poem.” His hesitancy is due partly to the poem's genesis as a verse letter, and partly to his conclusion that “Coleridge carefully recast its rambling epistolary style into a formal ode” (p. 28). Schulz's remarks are weakened by the uneasy relationship between his taxonomy of “voices” and the traditional scheme of genres. Stephen F. Fogle (“The Design of Coleridge's ‘Dejection,’ ” Studies in Philology, 48, 1951, 52–53) quite properly regards the elimination of highly personal references and tone as a process of bringing style and content into conformity with the Pindaric versification, but since he does not address himself to the question of those stylistic and presentative elements in the final version that suggest an alliance with the conversation poems, he does not offer a rebuttal to Harper's position. Richard Harter Fogle (“Coleridge's Conversation Poems,” Tulane Studies in English, 5, 1955, 103–10) also refuses to classify “Dejection” as a conversation poem for two reasons: “First, that it is an irregular Pindaric ode, a form which is not precisely adapted to conversational purposes, and, two, that in its published as distinguished from its original form it is a little too good for the genre of ‘conversation poem,’ which is essentially modest and limited in its claims” (p. 103). Since this remark occurs in the context of an article devoted only to the conversation poems, it was not to his purpose to clarify or support it. The present article is an elaboration of this position.

4 In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 527–28. Like Abrams, Geoffrey H. Hartman (“Wordsworth, In-scrip ions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, pp. 389–413) posits a lyric type which he calls “Romantic nature poetry,” one of whose features is the presence of the poet in the situation he describes as he describes it. While Abrams traces the “greater Romantic lyric” to the 18th-century loco-descriptive poem via Coleridge's “The Eolian Harp,” Hartman traces the “Romantic nature poem” to the 18th-century nature inscription via another meditative poem in blank verse, Wordsworth's “Lines Left upon a Yew-tree Seat.”

5 Abraham Cowley, Poems: Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes, Davideis, Verses Written on Several Occasions, ed. Alfred Rayney Waller (Cambridge, Eng. : Univ. Press, 1905), p. 214.

6 See George Whalley, “The Bristol Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793–8,” The Library, 5th series, 4 (1949), 119, 120, and The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, i (New York: Pantheon, and London: Routledge, 1957), 36.

7 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), II, 1113–14. Quotations from all of Coleridge's verse except the verse letter to Sara Hutchinson refer to this edition. Hereafter cited as PW.

8 Note (1800) to “Tintern Abbey,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 2nd ed., H (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 517.

9 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), ii, 44,'Hereafter cited as BL.

10 “Rhetoric as Drama : An Approach to the Romantic Ode,” PMLA, 79 (1964), 70.

11 “The Dejection of Coleridge's Ode,” English Literary History, 17 (1950), 76.

12 Quotations from the verse letter to Sara Hutchinson refer to the text as printed in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, ii (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 790–98. Hereafter cited as CL.