Keats' Odes

Keats and the Spring Odes

• After Tom's death from tuberculosis, Keats lived with a friend in Hampstead.
• He fell in love with Thaneev Braun after they met in November 1818.
• Experienced creative inspiration, leading to the "spring odes" of 1819.
• In the summer of 1820, he went to Italy for a warmer climate but never returned.

Themes in Keats' Odes

• Quintessentially Romantic concerns:
  • Beauty of nature
  • Relation between imagination and creativity
  • Response to beauty and suffering
  • Transience of life and time
• Employ sumptuous sensory language.
• Reflect Romantic ideals.
• Each ode can stand alone, but they are also complementary.
• No unifying plot or recurring characters, but the odes interrelate.

Exploration and Development in the Odes

• Explore similar themes.
• Use similar images.
• Reveal a psychological development.
• Critics debate whether the odes are spoken by a single person or different personas.
• The consciousness at work is unmistakably Keats'.
• Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Ode on Melancholy (all written in May 1819) grew out of a persistent experience.
• Each is a unique experience, but also a facet of a larger experience.

Larger Experience: Joy and Pain

• Intense awareness of both the joy and pain, happiness and sorrow of human life.
• Awareness becomes thought, a brooding contemplation of the human condition.
• Human beings must satisfy their desire for happiness in a world where joy and pain are tied together.
• This union of joy and pain is a fundamental fact of human experience, observed and accepted by Keats.

Ode as a Poetic Form

• Most exalted form of lyrical poetry.
• Elevated in tone.
• Expresses personal reflections and profound themes.
• Comes from the Greek word "to sing" or "to chant."
• Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: the most formal, ceremonious, and complexly organized form of lyric poetry, usually of considerable length.

Keats' Turn to the Ode

• Reflected dissatisfaction with the rigidity of the sonnet form (Petrarchan and Shakespearean).
• After writing Ode to Psyche, Keats explained his new ode form to his brother.
• The legitimate Petrarchan sonnet does not suit the language overwhelmed from the pouncing rhymes.
• The Shakespearean sonnet appears allegiac, and the couplet at the end has a displeasing effect.

Development of the Ode in English Poetry

• Developed after Shakespeare with Ben Johnson and Milton.
• Keats read romantic examples, including Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode and Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality.

Keats' Approach to the Ode

• When Keats entitled a poem an ode, he had a passionate reverence for it, adopting a lofty and musical tone.
• Subjects that stimulated Keats included:
  • Apollo (god of poetry)
  • Poetry and poetic immortality
  • Vanny Braun

Themes in Keats' Odes

• Beauty and permanence of art.
• The comparative ephemerality of life and joy.
• Time.
• The ideal of love, which is necessarily melancholic.
• Knowledge and uncertainty.
• Pain, sorrow, and joy.

Keats' Innovation with the Ode Form

• Invented his own type of ode, adapted from the sonnet form.
• Took the opening quatrain of the Shakespearean sonnet (ABAB).
• Added a Petrarchan sestet (CDECDE).
• Used iambic pentameter.
• Transfigured the sonnet form.
• Allowed development of thought while retaining a lofty, elevated, dignified tone.
• Each stanza doesn't feel like an individual poem.

Ode to Psyche

• Believed to be the first ode composed.
• More irregular than the remaining odes.
• Language is simpler than earlier Keats.
• Use of consonantal clusters, assonance, and alliteration.
• Originally begun as a sonnet, which explains its curious structure.
• No alteration in the original manuscript until the thirteenth and fourteenth lines.
• Keats seemed to have decided to alter the structure of the work at that point.
• Originally titled To Psyche, he added Ode later.
• Marked the beginning of a sequence of the great spring odes of 1819.