Poetic origins are often obscure, as witness the genesis of Shakespeare's sonnets or the history of Keats’ two Hyperions. Among such mysteries, the relationship between Coleridge's verse ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ (written on 4 April 1802, but first published only in 1937) and his Dejection: an Ode (published in the Morning Post, 4 October 1802, Wordsworth's wedding-day) has been a matter of considerable discussion and debate. Although it is evident that the one is a drastic revision of the other, it remains unclear what were Coleridge's poetic purposes in making the revision, and what was in his mind in publishing it on the wedding-day of his friend Wordsworth, which was also the seventh anniversary of his own unfortunate marriage to Sara Fricker.

A cogent case has been made that ‘Dejection’ has its origin as much in Coleridge's relationship with Wordsworth as in his frustrated love for Sara Hutchinson. The first four stanzas of Wordsworth's ‘Immortality Ode’, in which Wordsworth laments his loss of the ‘visionary gleam’, were written just days before Coleridge composed his verse-letter to Sara, and it was two years before Wordsworth was able to complete it. Written as they are on what appears to be a similar theme, it is difficult not to see the two poems as ‘in some sense in a dialogue with each other’.