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The Relation of Coleridge's Ode on Dejection to 'Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Fred Manning Smith
Fred Manning Smith*
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Extract

It is well known that Coleridge had Wordsworth in mind when he wrote his Ode on Dejection—the poem is addressed to Wordsworth, mentions Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, and was first published on the day of Wordsworth's wedding; but that Coleridge's Ode may have been influenced by Wordsworth's great Ode on Intimations of Immortality has been generally overlooked. If the date of Wordsworth's Ode is 1803–1806, as it is often given in the anthologies and histories, such influence is impossible, because we know Coleridge's Dejection was composed April 4, 1802. The date 1803–1806, however, is not accepted by most scholars; Professor John D. Rea emphatically states, “It is known that the date 1803 is wrong; the Ode was begun 1802.” The passage in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, written March 27, 1802, “At breakfast William wrote part of an ode,” refers, it is now believed, to the Ode: Intimations of Immortality. On March 27, 1802, Wordsworth was writing his great Ode; and a week later, on April 4, 1802, Coleridge wrote his.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 1935 , pp. 224 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 See Alfred Ainger's article in Macmillan's Magazine (June, 1887) called “Coleridge's Ode to Wordsworth.”

2 See Coleridge's letter to W. Sotheby, written July 19, 1802. This letter contains the earliest version of the Dejection Ode, but omits parts of the poem. The Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by E. H. Coleridge (Boston, 1895), i, 376–384.

3 John D. Rea, in an article “Coleridge's Intimations of Immortality from Proclus,” Mod. Phil., xxvi, 201 ff., noticing a similarity between the two poems calls them “twin odes.” Professor Rea, however, is concerned with pointing out not Wordsworth's influence upon Coleridge, but Coleridge's influence upon Wordsworth. He shows that the idealism in Wordsworth's Ode is derived from Coleridge.

4 It was printed in the Morning Post, Oct. 4, 1802, with the title, Dejection: An Ode, Written April 4, 1802.

5 George M. Harper, William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Influence (New York, 1916), p. 122; H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth: Lectures and Essays (Oxford, 1922), p. 112; Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art (Madison, 1927), p. 82; Ernest Bernbaum, Guide and Anthology of Romanticism (New York, 1930), iii, 174.

6 Op. cit.

7 Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by William Knight (London, 1897), i, 104.

8 Quotations from Coleridge's poem are from the Morning Post version of Oct. 4, 1802, the first published version. It may be found in The Poetical Works of Coleridge, ed. by J. D. Campbell (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 522–524; and in Coleridge's Poems, ed. by E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), ii, 1076–1081.

9 Compare also “This sweet May-morning” (Immortality, 45) with “this sweet primrose-month,” in the poem as sent to W. Sotheby, op. cit., p. 381.

10 D.W. Journals, i, 104.

11 Op. cit., ii, 122.

12 Op. cit., p. 113.

13 Op. cit.

14 John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, (Boston, 1927).

15 Ibid., p. 50.

16 Op. cit., p. xxxvii.

17 Lowes quotes C. V. Le Grice, one of Coleridge's fellow-students at Cambridge. According to Le Grice, Coleridge could read a book in the morning, and in the evening repeat whole pages verbatim. Op. cit., p. 45.

18 Op. cit., ii, 408.

19 Ibid., ii, 408.

20 Op. cit.

21 Intimations of Immortality, 122.

22 Dejection, 115.

23 Biographia Literaria, ch. xxii.

24 D. W. Journals, i, 132; and see Rea, op. cit.

25 Thomas Hutchinson, Wordsworth's Poetical Works (Oxford, 1904).

26 John Morley's introduction to the Works of Wordsworth (Macmillan, 1898), p. lvi.

27 For an account of Coleridge's love for Sarah Hutchinson see Thomas M. Raysor, “Coleridge and ‘Asra,‘” SP, xxvi, 305 ff.

28 D. W. Journals, i, 103.

29 Ibid., i, 103–104.

30 Ibid., i, 105.

31 Harper, op. cit., ii, 22.

32 “I think it may be said Coleridge the creative poet died about 1802.”—William Knight, The Life of William Wordsworth (Edinburgh, 1889), ii, 165.

33 As several years later, after Wordsworth had read to him The Prelude, Coleridge wrote the poem called To a Gentleman, Composed on the Night after his Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind.

34 Bracketed, to show that it is not included in the first four stanzas.

35 Lowes, op. cit., 176.

36 Both odes are irregular. The closest resemblance in structure is found in the second section of Wordsworth's ode and the third section of Coleridge's.

37 D. W. Journals, i, 110.

38 Ibid., i, 110, footnote.

39 Could the version published in the Sibylline Leaves, 1817, with its “Dear Lady” in the place of “Wordsworth,” be the “verses to Sara”?

40 Op. cit.

41 D. W. Journals, i, 116.

42 Ibid., i, 118.

43 Op. cit., 175.

44 In the Morning Post version. The line is omitted in the 1817 version.

45 Op. cit., ii, 39.

46 Op. cit., p. lxii, footnote.

48 Op. cit., ii, 39.

48 As in a letter written in 1819 to a friend about to be married, Coleridge wrote: “O! that you could appreciate by the light of other men's experience the anguish which prompted the ejaculation, Why was I made for love, yet love denied to me?” [Coleridge's poem, The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree.] See Campbell's note, op. cit., p. 633.

49 By 1807 judging from his notebook for that year Coleridge has become “jealous of Sarah's admiration and affection for Wordsworth”—Raysor, op. cit. Coleridge writes in his notebook, “He [Wordsworth] does not, he does not pretend, he does not wish to love you, as I love you.—I alone love you so devotedly, and therefore love me!”—quoted from Raysor's article.