The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"I suppose he’s famous for two sorts of poetry, which on the face of it have almost nothing to do with each other. One is what came to be called ‘supernatural poems’: ‘ The Ancient Mariner ‘, the unfinished ‘ Christabel ’, and ‘ Kubla Khan ’ of course. They’re still fairly common currency in a general readership. They are all about the sorts of things we’ve been talking about in ‘The Ancient Mariner’, one way or another. And then a completely different category of poems, some written alongside the supernatural poems, chronologically speaking, are blank verse poems. They are poems of personal voice, reflection, memory recollection, sometimes confession. Those are poems like ‘ Frost at Midnight ’, ‘ This Lime-tree Bower my Prison ’ and ‘ Dejection: An Ode ’. Both those categories of poems are extremely innovative in all sorts of ways. Particularly the second category—which come to be known as the ‘Conversation poems’ for their particular style and conversational quality—have gone on to influence many later nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. I always think of especially ‘Dejection: An Ode’, which is an absolute landmark and in some ways the last big poem he writes, in 1802. He really gets going in 1795–96, so it’s quite a truncated period. Of course he continues to write poems of one kind or another for as long as he lives, but he writes them as someone who no longer thinks of himself primarily as a poet. They’re written with his left hand, while his right hand is writing philosophy or journalism. So ‘Dejection’, although it doesn’t mark the end of his poetic career, does mark a turning point. It’s an extraordinary poem written out of great psychological and emotional unhappiness that he associates with the death of his own imagination. That idea—that you might find in the death of your imagination a way of writing imaginatively—is an astonishing discovery, really. A load of twentieth-century writing comes from that. I think that’s right, but his emotional life is in flames pretty much all the time. Obviously, it is completely about emotional unhappiness. It’s about falling in love with a woman and not being able to love her because of various constraints, like being already married. Someone said, I can’t remember who now, ‘You could not have had a better argument for the efficacy of adultery than that poem.’ It would have been by far the easiest way of dealing with the issue. But the idea that you might find in the death of the imagination a route to the imagination is such an extraordinary thing, and it anticipates all sorts of modern writers like T S Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett. Beckett writes an extraordinary short text called Imagination Dead Imagine (1965). Well, if you wanted to summarise ‘Dejection: An Ode’ in three words, it would be that. Or, as Wallace Stevens said, ‘the absence of imagination had itself to be imagined’."