The themes of dejection in the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Everyone encounters dejection in his or her life, and various people have various different ways to combat the feelings of gloom, depression, and hopelessness. Some choose to pursue through music, art, poetry, or television, while others choose food, talking about it, or perhaps just holding all of the feelings inside. The fact of the matter is that dejection is a mysterious thing and everyone has varying perspectives of it. In Romanticism, dejection is a topic that is considered very deeply, especially by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although their views are sometimes dramatically different, each poet has very intriguing thoughts on the matter of dejection and has different views on dealing with it. While it is to Wordsworth's belief that depression can be conquered by memories of an immortal state, triggered by nature, Coleridge believes that depression is internal and can not be changed, but rather one must wait for depression to run its course.

Some people believe that depression can be relieved using remedies. Wordsworth also held this opinion. He believed that when one is born, he leaves a natural state of immortality to reside on Earth for a while before returning to immortality. Wordsworth states that from "trailing clouds of glory do we come/ from God, who is our home." This is supported by his comparison of Earth to a "homely nurse" and man to its "foster child" in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." To Wordsworth, man is a guest of the Earth, only to stay for a short time. He believes that birth is just "sleep and forgetting;" a forgetting of the immortal state of happiness that was once experienced. Wordsworth continues to say that dejection is able to be defeated by memories of immortality that are never truly forgotten, just pushed to the back of the human mind from time to time. To access this vault of memories, Wordsworth regards nature as the key. Wordsworth begins this chain