This essay is concerned with the relations between praise and aesthetic freedom exemplified by the practice of making odes. The ritual, economic, and agonistic functions of Pindaric odes and the mastering of subjective enthusiasm and objectification of value that Hegel found at work in such poems are compared with the belated, self-transforming expression of emotion characterizing Coleridge's composition of his “Dejection: An Ode” of 1802.