Imagining naming shaping

stanza VI of "Dejection"

pp. 135-147

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

John Spencer Hill finds compelling reasons for believing that July–September 1802 "were crucial months in the shaping of the theory of the Imagination" for Coleridge, a period straddled by the "Letter to Sara Hutchinson" in April and the Ode's publication in October.¹ The material of stanza VI remains relatively stable between the two versions, though subject to some transposition within the overall scheme of the poem, and only condensed to one stanza in the later text. Both versions reflect Coleridge's concern with the nature of imagination he was in process of exploring beyond the borders of his Ode, though that concern is as much in evidence, if more problematically, within the poem itself. The question of how the different modes of Coleridge's writing (poetic or theoretical) relate to each other is bound up with their author's sense of personal vocation: with how an authorial voice distributes itself between overtly critical, poetic or philosophic texts. From the perspective of the "Dejection" Ode, Coleridge appears preoccupied with the problem of which "voice" might best name imagination. Which voice names most essentially? Is this the same voice that best authorizes a description of names? What relation exists between the voices of critic, poet, or philosopher, and is one voice above another responsible for supervising that relation?²