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.