SOURCE: "Coleridge's 'Dejection': Imagination, Joy, and the Power of Love," in Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, Nicholas Roe, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 179–92.

Barth is an American Catholic priest, professor of English, and critic who specializes in religious symbolism in Romantic literature. He is the author of Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (1969). In the following essay, he interprets "Dejection: An Ode" to be about "love, … imagination and joy—for the three are inextricably bound together—and the power of art."

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...