Table Of ContentNINETEENTH-CENTURY MAJOR LIVES AND LETTERS
IMAGE
COLERIDGE’S
DEJECTION ODE
J. C. C. MAYS
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor
Marilyn Gaul
Editorial Institute
Boston University
Boston, MA, USA
This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly s tudies
of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America,
and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achieve-
ments, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals who reflected
and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The
topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book his-
tory, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art,
architecture, science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy,
aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life, popu-
lar culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses, or
contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the
nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scien-
tists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles
Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and their contemporaries.
The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA.
She has taught at William and Mary, Temple University, New York
University, and is Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston
University. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle and
the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, and editions,
essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British
Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publish-
ing procedures, and history of science.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15032
J. C. C. Mays
Coleridge’s Dejection
Ode
J. C. C. Mays
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
ISBN 978-3-030-04130-4 ISBN 978-3-030-04131-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04131-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962897
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover design by Oscar Spigolon
Cover photo by the author
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
I. M.
Christopher Koenig, 1948–2016
“pivotal”
P
reface
This book was more difficult to write than my two earlier monographs on
Coleridge’s poems, whose argument in one sense it completes. “Dejection:
An Ode” stands alone in Coleridge’s oeuvre in the way it reaches so far
back and deeply into his thinking about himself. The “Ancient Mariner”
brought a good deal to the surface, but accidentally, and that poem,
despite fundamental revisions, left many troubling thoughts unresolved.
“Dejection” by contrast was an attempt to range more deeply and at the
same time more widely and, most important of all at a time when personal
circumstances had reached a critical stage, to work through to a poematic
solution. The word “poematic” is crucial here. The solution rests on it
because, in Coleridge’s understanding, the test had to be fundamental and
all-encompassing: a test of whether deep, barely understood instincts, and
his thinking about them, were self-deceiving or rang true. The Ode, then,
is not only a poem of discovery but also a test of veracity. It stands with
little modification behind the remainder of Coleridge’s writing, in prose
as well as verse. It underwrites what came afterwards as well as before,
and in many ways occupies the same position in the development of his
career as “Lycidas” at the beginning of Milton’s. Of course, Coleridge did
not go on to write epics: he happily left that task to Wordsworth. But at a
moment of similar personal crisis, the Ode took stock of what there was to
do and his ability to do it. He, like Milton, invented new technical means
and expanded—exploded—the literary form he inherited. Both poems are
enormously complex and searching: perhaps excessively for poems rela-
tively short in length.
vii
viii PREFACE
The present book also took longer to write because Dejection Ode
is, more than most of Coleridge’s poems, an inseparable whole. Its parts
were mulled over in his head for up to a year, maybe longer, waiting
for the spark that would unite them in the way he wanted. To discuss
matters like metrics or language or structure, one must take them sepa-
rately, but why any one of these is as it is involves the others. This poem
whose parts interact so nicely and are balanced with such finesse con-
tains its own kind of obscurity. Its argument includes uncertain lines of
enquiry that took many more years to clarify and complete, which is a
trap for readers who know the whole story and interpret the beginning
in light of the end. I refer in particular to the themes of perception and
Imagination, where too much hindsight can blind one to the way diverse
preliminary thoughts could productively coexist. I repeat the point:
while one can learn from what came before and after the poem—on the
one hand, from the Letter to Sara, on the other hand, from what the
Biographia Literaria says about Imagination—one can also be seriously
misled by it. In terms of an adage used by Yeats, if Coleridge’s poem is
like a bowl that does not contain all the wine poured into it, it is no less
a bowl for that. Indeed, such is the bowl and such the wine, one would
have it no other way.
To be specific, stanza VI is absolutely central to the structural balance
achieved by the Ode and yet it leaves behind unfinished business—as
Coleridge was well aware. I choose to discuss such “business” in terms of
feelings (“I see, not feel” etc.) in relation to the Ode and other poems.
I might have instead chosen the word nature, which is repeated six times
in different forms (half of them in stanza VI). Its meanings range from
an overall “Romantic” animating spirit (as in stanzas IV and V), to innate
as opposed to acquired, and physical as opposed to spiritual. In addition,
natural does not exist for Coleridge separately from super-natural, or
from his awkward awareness of the power of the un-natural. In short, the
range of subjective meanings encompassed by the word “feel” is played
out in objective terms by the word “nature”; and a deep instability in the
verbal spectrum is both a distraction and the deep life of the poem.
I am obliged to many previous commentators on Coleridge, not
least to those I disagree with. The argument has been shaped most of
all by a number of contemporary writers in Ireland, America and the
United Kingdom who have shown that poetry, though always chang-
ing the rules, is at its best when it is after the same old thing. Among
others, I am particularly lucky to have enjoyed the friendship of Peter
PREFACE ix
Cheyne, Graham Davidson, James Engell and Gerald Janzen at the time
I was sorting out my thoughts. Marianne Mays read several drafts, made
many corrections and suggested many improvements, for all of which I
am most grateful. Marilyn Gaull accepted the book in her groundbreak-
ing series on Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters and at every
stage gave further welcome advice. And once again, I thank the team
led by Allie Troyanos at Palgrave New York for producing another such
good-looking book.
County Wicklow, Ireland J. C. C. Mays
c
ontents
1 The Case to Be Made 1
1.1 The Case 1
1.2 Obstacles 7
1.3 The Heart of the Matter 12
1.4 Values 17
2 How We Got Where We Are as We Cease to Be There 25
2.1 Lame Start 25
2.2 Lopsided Recovery 32
2.3 In Our Time 38
3 Editorial Excursion 47
3.1 A Question of Filiation 47
3.2 Comparable Instance 51
3.3 The Fruits of Error 54
3.4 The Letter Done with 59
3.5 Stumbling Block 62
3.6 Recursion 65
4 The Sweet New Style 71
4.1 Befitting an Ode 71
4.2 Metric 74
xi
Description: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 reache