Dejection: an Ode: Imagination

Question 1

Coleridge’s theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria

Answer 1

The primary IMAGINATION is the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception

Question 2

Quality of Dejection

Answer 2

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Depression and Opium addiction

Question 3

Wants to be moved by nature

Answer 3

the gust were swelling,
And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast!
Those sounds which oft have raised me,…
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!

Question 4

Fails to be moved by nature

Critic x2

Answer 4

Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;

Shurr: nature in the poem is “It is the Nature usually associated with the romantic poets.”
Ilhwan Yoon re­ marks that it is unusual and disturbing to find a Romantic ut­terly unaffected by nature – it is unusual to be Non-vatic only COL and Byron

Question 5

Non-vatic theory: inspired from within–links to Biographia.

Answer 5

” It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.”

“we receive but what we give”

Question 6

Use of old forms to avoid outright inspiration. he can
mimick

Critic who is wrong

Answer 6

Pindaric Ode: ode as a vehicle of formal celebration. Coleridge mirrors the iambic metre and structural variations of a Pindaric Ode
Starts with ideas from Patrick Spence and in response to Wordsworth’s Ode: imitations of immortality

Nguyen: Although Co­leridge spends much time lamenting the loss of his imagina­tion, it is active.

Question 7

This dejection is a dream:

Answer 7

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,

Reality’s dark dream!

Question 8

used to be tough but no depression

Answer 8

There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:

Question 9

lost imaginative powers

Answer 9

… each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.

Question 10

solution unsolved at end

Answer 10

What the wind sounds like:

A tale of less affright, / And tempered with delight, …

all bad and then goes back to his Lady: unresolved

Curren: State of paralysis