Coleridge's Dejection Ode

J.C.C. Mays

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030041304
• eBook ISBN: 9783030041311
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays' analysis of Coleridge's poetry, following Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge's Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013)."Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal crisis, it reaches far back and deeply into his thinking in an attempt to find a poematic solution to ideas and problems he had mulled over for a long time. Mays reveals how the poem also marks the opening of the second half of Coleridge's career as both poet and thinker. In three central chapters Mays examines the new style that evolved in the process of writing the Ode: the technical means of metrics, rhyme and grammar; language and allusion; and symbol and structure. He recounts the complex, sometimes controversial critical history of the Ode, and suggests an editorial solution to the problem created by the Letter to Sara Hutchinson; re-evaluates the position of Wordsworth in the poem apropos the political statement it makes; clarifies the distinction between the views on Imagination expressed and those contained in Biographia Literaria; and traces the links of the concept "dejection" as it underpins Coleridge's late poems.

© The Author(s) 2019

J.C.C. MaysColeridge's Dejection OdeNineteenth-Century Major Lives and Lettershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04131-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Case to Be Made

J. C. C. Mays¹

(1)

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

J. C. C. Mays

End Abstract

1.1 The Case

“The most naked and vulnerable of his major poems, ‘Dejection’ is naturally prized more highly by the Coleridgean than by other readers.” So wrote W. Jackson Bate (107), eminent Harvard scholar, following a period when Coleridge enjoyed a wider recognition than ever before. The poem has continued to attract more than its share of specialised studies since that time. It has been the subject of journal essays and chapters in books, and cited in a raft of critical, philosophical and psychological contexts as part of other-than-literary arguments. However, the particular approval Bate alludes to was often expressed succinctly and he in turn followed the example of his peers. At the same time, the poem has shown a notable capacity to divert commentators into biographical speculation and to produce insights that leave fundamental questions unanswered. The biographical diversion gained traction from the supposition that the unpublished Letter to Sara (289) was a more complete version of the poem condensed to make the published Ode) palatable. Disagreements meanwhile accumulated over the specific references of words and phrases (“genial” line 39, “afflictions” line 82 and “My shaping spirit of Imagination” line 86); how the stanzas cohere, not least as an ode; and how the epigraph applies . They even extended to wondering whether a good poem can be written about the failure to write; assuming it should be classified alongside, for example, W. B. Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and Dylan Thomas’s “On No Work of Words.” It is odd that a poem so intelligently debated on so many fronts should remain open to fundamental questions like this: of its worth as well as meaning.

The gist of the present argument is that, while other poems may hold more attraction for those reading Coleridge for the first time, the Dejection Ode rewards attention to an equal extent, although of a different kind. It was fashioned with deliberation in a way that confirmed the direction in which its author’s ambitions were pointing, and cleared the way ahead through the second part of his career. Its sweet new style points to a vita nuova in the sense Dante gave the Italian words: a way of negotiating the mechanics of poetry —where language is at its most self-conscious—in the service of realigning human values. Coleridge’s poem occupies a liminal space, between an old world of beautiful and innocent things that can go seriously wrong, and their reconstruction, by means of multiple resources of style, towards an end directed beyond its author. The space it opened in 1802 was not comfortably filled for many years and yet it held what might be called his incipient ambitions, in verse and prose, in a single frame. The frame held firm and it set the parameters for an unconventional act of heroism: the pursuit of ideals that an often-isolated person struggled to achieve while he appeared to have failed. The poem embodies a way of working towards a victory of hope more than it states an achieved position; and I repeat that the validity of its argument rests on the quality of the verse. It makes a major statement at a crisis point in the life of Coleridge’s thoughts and feelings as they interacted. He never aligned so many ambitions and inhibitions as consciously and coherently in one place before or after; and I mean not even in the three great “Mystery Poems.” Although twentieth-century critics took his confused statement of literary principles in Biographia Literaria as central, I repeat the point. “Dejection” sets out more comprehensively and evenly than any other poem he wrote the aims of his mature verse and prose together, at the moment of discovery.

The resolution in verse is the point at issue. The medium involves a depth of involvement that road-tests ideas in difficult terrain containing hidden obstructions. The task was not to gain sympathy for difficulties faced but due recognition of what has to be done to surmount them. Such an approach requires an amount of distancing—objectification—and has been much misunderstood. The Ode is not a cleaned-up, disguised version of the Letter to Sara Hutchinson: as it were abstracted from a richer subtext. It is a separate, commanding statement and not a confession that part indulges in the sympathy it would elicit. Its relative anonymity is the guarantee of authenticity and the measure of success. In April 1925, George McLean Harper reiterated the canard of Coleridge the brilliant, sad, loveable failure, by pronouncing:

It is an ode in form only; in contents it is a conversation. It is not an address to Dejection, but to William Wordsworth. ¹

One should set another essay against this, published in a more forward-looking magazine in November of the same year, which was conceived on radically different premises. E. M. Forster does not mention the Ode by name, but he argues that

while we read The Ancient Mariner a change takes place in it. It becomes anonymous, like the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. And here is the point I would support: that all literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts us from their true significance. ²

Forster admits that the personality of a writer can become important after we have read their book and begun to study it, but points out that this is a superficial matter to a properly ambitious writer:

The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read.

Forster’s argument is entirely Coleridgean. Just as he argues that “Literature tries to be unsigned,” so Coleridge argues in Chapter 15 of Biographia Literaria

that where the subject is taken immediately from the author’s personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. (BL 2:20)

And Coleridge goes on to argue that the author’s highest aim should be not to express his surface-personality but to place

the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic fervor of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting, what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. (BL 2:21)

Two points arise from this quality of anonymity or, as Coleridge puts it, “the utter aloofness of the poet’s own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst” (BL 2:22). Both of them are connected to what he is attempting in the Ode and how common prejudices have misconstrued it. First, the example of poetic power he takes in the Biographia is Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis : it is surprising because the tale of jealousy and infatuation was in his time considered indecent . Coleridge’s point is that, unlike Ariosto and Wieland , Shakespeare converts “degrading and deforming passion ” into a positive experience:

though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. (BL 2:22)

The point of interest here is that, when Coleridge wrote to William Sotheby on 13 and 19 July 1802, he not only introduced the word “dejection” into his correspondence for the first time (CL 2:809, 814) and brought forward elements of the final Ode: in both letters, he revealed himself highly critical of Gessner’s Der erste Schiffer (1789), the translation of which he was supposed to be working on (295.X1; PW 2:900–1). No trace of the Gessner project has survived—none of it may have been written down—but his criticisms are very close to the way he describes Ariosto and Wieland contra Shakespeare, converting “the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence” (BL 2:22). He deprecates “the God of the winds exceedingly disquieted with animal Love ” in comparison with Shakespeare’s ability to “to send ourselves out of ourselves, … hoc labor, hoc opus” (CL 2:810):

the Conceptions, as they recede from distinctness of Idea, approximate to the nature of Feeling , & gain thereby a closer & more immediate affinity with the appetites. (CL 2:814; and see also CL 3:313)

It is as if Coleridge —here writing of the Gessner translation he abandoned—had been driven to do so by the high ideals in vitro as he perfected his Ode; and was also reflecting on both the negative tendencies of what he had written in his Letter and the new aesthetic that was evolving—as it happens, at the same time he began to suspect that his moral and literary position differed from Wordsworth’s.

The second point to arise can be described more briefly and returns to where the Ode rests on the table, not to be confused with the Letter. Coleridge emphasised “the utter aloofness ” of the poet’s most privileged task, and Herbert Read quoted the same phrase and made an argument on behalf of the Ode with respect to the ideals stated in the Biographia similar to mine above. ³ He was consequently castigated for “using the poem to prove a theoretical point” by Paul Doheny , who advised readers to “read and engage the poem rather than the critics.” ⁴ However, the alternative reading Doheny offers is based upon “the first, unpublished version of the poem” which, of course, is not the Ode Read was celebrating. Indeed, Read went out of his way to pronounce (as I argue correctly) that

nearly all the specifically poetic lines in the poem [viz. Letter] are in the final version; the lines that have been sacrificed are almost without exception rhetorical or prosaic. It seems as though the poetic spirit in Coleridge soars aloft whenever he ceases to address Sara in person and descends to become sentimental in her presence.

The episode encapsulates the several aspects of the point at issue: (a) a quality of detachment or anonymity is integral to the highest poetry and it is sentimental to suppose otherwise; (b) one should not confuse Coleridge’s Ode with his Letter, although better critics than Doheny have done so; and (c), if the Letter is to be introduced into a discussion of the Ode at all, it serves best as a kind of writing the Ode is writing against.

I spent a good part of Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics elaborating this idea of objectification: how it accommodates—not refuses—emotion; how it can be misconstrued—or not even seen—by a reader looking for feeling in the bargain-basement. Anonymity as a concept of style, distinct from a matter of social or political convenience, is not widespread in our time and was not in Coleridge’s . A few have promoted it since Forster and Read —for instance, Allen Grossman ⁵ —but without much success: to conceive of a poem as a contrived fiction, freighted with resonances in a form that does not reduce them to their effects or causes, may appear weird or too challenging. Perhaps, therefore, the observations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Case to Be Made
• 2. How We Got Where We Are as We Cease to Be There
• 3. Editorial Excursion
• 4. The Sweet New Style
• 5. Language and Allusion
• 6. Shape into Form
• 7. Understanding Feeling
• 8. Testing the Pulse
• 9. Beyond the Poem
• Back Matter