John Keats: Odes, Objects and Oblivion
Two hundred years after John Keats penned his “great odes”, we present a special guest post by Dr Katherine Fender who explores how reading John Keats's 1819 compositions can help us to understand his broader poetic corpus.
John Keats: Odes, Objects and Oblivion
John Keats is commonly regarded as one of the most successful poets of what we now call the “Romantic period”: an age of innovation, reinvention, revolution, imagination and feeling. Keats’ esteemed posthumous status is particularly impressive given that his life, and literary career, were exceedingly short. Born in London on 31 October 1795, Keats died in Italy on 23 February 1821 at the age of only twenty-five years old. Keats had been ill for many months beforehand; the deterioration of his health was such that he had been forced to stop writing altogether in July 1820. Like his mother, brother and uncle before him, Keats had succumbed to tuberculosis: the disease that was, at that time, known as “consumption”. Tragically, Keats would have been all-too aware of the symptoms of his illness; until December 1817, Keats had earned his living not as a poet, but as an apothecary-surgeon. His true passion, though, was poetry. However, Keats’ career change from medicine to poetry was not an easy one. In 1818, Keats was the subject of ridicule in literary reviews. Critics made fun of his low social standing and his short stature – Keats was just over five feet tall – as well as his poetic ambitions. In spite of critics’ cruel comments, Keats persevered, producing his “great odes” the next year.
1819: A “Difficult but Fertile” Year
1819 was – in the words of the great biographer, Walter Jackson Bate – a “difficult but fertile year” (p. 487) for John Keats. Indeed, Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger go as far as to claim that: “In this period of turmoil, Keats achieved the culmination of his brief poetic career” (p. 902). Detailing some of Keats’ literary triumphs of 1819, Lynch and Stillinger enthuse that:
Between January and September of 1819, masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession: The Eve of St. Agnes, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, all of the “great odes”, Lamia, and a…number of fine sonnets…All of these poems possess the distinctive qualities of the work of Keats’s maturity: a slow-paced, gracious movement; a concreteness of description in which all the senses – tactile, gustatory, kinetic, visceral, as well as visual and auditory – combine to give the total apprehension of an experience; a delight at the sheer existence of things outside himself, the poet seeming to lose his own identity in a total identification with the object he contemplates (p. 902)
Such sensory richness of language is exemplified by Keats’ six odes: “Ode to Psyche” (April 1819); “Ode to a Nightingale” (May 1819); “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819); “Ode on Melancholy (1819); “Ode on Indolence” (Spring 1819); and “To Autumn” (September 1819). “To Autumn” is arguably the most well-known of Keats’ odes – The Guardian described it in (fittingly, September) 2013 as “the most anthologised English poem”. Many of us have seen Renée Zellweger, as the eponymous heroine of the Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) film adaptation, theatrically reciting “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as she rows a boat – to which Hugh Grant’s ne’er-do-well character, Daniel Cleaver, comically responds by proudly professing his love of Keats, cigarette in mouth, before promptly falling into the river.
However, if one wishes to find a “way in” to Keats’ poetic corpus – not only the odes, but also his other poetry – then reading one of his earlier odes, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, affords us with a helpful premise for understanding Keats’ broader poetry and poetics: his poetic philosophy.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”: An Ekphrastic Poem
In order to understand Keats’ odes, we must first consider what an ode actually is. Odes are typically regarded as elaborate lyrical poems which are addressed to a person, a thing or an abstraction: someone or something which has the power to transcend the mortal world and the difficulties of life. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that Keats, having already encountered both personal and professional difficulties in his own life, should have elected to compose a number of poems using the technical form of the ode. Moreover, this particular ode is notable for its use of ekphrasis: a Greek word which describes a technique by which a writer verbally depicts a visual work of art. In essence, ekphrasis may be understood as the literary representation of visual art.
In Keats’ ode, the pronounced, titular subject of the poem is a “Grecian Urn”: a visual work of art which acts as the impetus for the text’s five stanzas or verses. The speaker of the poem praises the almost utopian realm of the world depicted in the urn’s imagery. I use the word “utopia” very deliberately, here, for its double meaning in accordance with its Greek origins. The word “utopia” – describing an imagined, ideal place – has been linked to both εὖτόπος or eu (“good”) topos (“place”) andοὐτόπος or ou (“not”) topos (“place”). A utopian scene, like that captured by the urn in Keats’ poem, is thus one that is both unsurpassable and impossible. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the speaker celebrates the “quietness”, “silence”, “slow time”, “flowery tale”, “happy, happy boughs!” and “happy, happy love!” that the urn represents, evokes and depicts. The second stanza begins with the assertion that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” – for what could surpass the melodies conjured by the mind? The “happy, happy boughs!” belong to trees that “cannot shed / Your leaves”, for “nor ever can those trees be bare”. The melodist is “For ever panting, and for ever young”. While Keats’ last ode, “To Autumn”, charts the flux and motion of just a single season, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” represents fixity: the stasis of the scene and the familiarity of form. The latter is marked by Keats’ adherence to the conventions of the ode as a form, not least in terms of theme, as well as by the traditional images of the pastoral genre (“Sylvan”, “Arcady” and “pipes”).
A Promise of Posterity and “Negative Capability”
What the urn offers – above anything else – is a promise of posterity. Look at the final stanza:
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. [ll. 41-50]
“Attic” or “Attica” refers to a region of Greece: the very area in which Athens is located. Invoking the classical past throughout the poem imbues the speaker’s words with a certain power or authority. Even so many years into the future, the figures “cannot fade”. When the speaker’s generation succumbs to “old age”, the urn, and its artwork, and its message, shall live on. Its message is, though, a simple one: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. Rather than compelling the reader, or listener, to meditate on life’s great meaning, the speaker tells us that this short assertion is “all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”. We are not encouraged to think, or to feel, more deeply beyond such a sentiment. For Keats, as he expressed in a letter to George and Thomas Keats in December 1817, one of the most valuable attributes that an individual could possess was what he termed “Negative Capability, that is [,] when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. In the same letter, Keats writes that “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration”. Beauty, truth, brings peace.
Thus, if the beauty of a work of visual art is such that it may, in turn, invite literary preservation in the form of a poem, the artwork – or its legacy – is guaranteed a long lifetime. For someone like Keats, who would have encountered the reality of mortality in his medical profession, in addition to his own devastating family losses and his own premature and eventually fatal illness, the notion of something which could outlive the mortal in such a way would have been greatly intriguing and irresistibly appealing. A preoccupation with mortality is evident in many of Keats’ poems. Think, for instance, of other poems composed in 1819 such as “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” and “This living hand, now warm and capable” (1819), or the slightly earlier “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (1818). It is incredibly poignant that Keats had penned all of these poems before he knew that he himself was dying, little knowing that he would be dead within just a few years. In the end, even Keats’ self-selected epitaph betrayed his fixation with transcience: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Perhaps due to a fear that his may have been a name which, once “writ on water”, would soon dissipate, many of Keats’ poems are anchored in particular images, symbols, motifs or objects. Even before the odes of 1819, Keats had written another ekphrastic poem: “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817). The sonnet tells of how “My spirit is too weak – mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep”. This theme is continued throughout his odes. In “Ode to a Nightingale”, the speaker laments “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”. The speaker of “Ode on Melancholy” implores the listener not to “let the beetle, nor the death-moth be / Your mournful Psyche”, saddened that melancholy “dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die”. “Psyche”, meaning “mind” or “soul”, is foregrounded as a source of “pleasant pain” in “Ode to Psyche” – “all soft delight / That shadowy thought can win”. Sorrow and transcience give rise to beauty in their own way, as captured in “To Autumn” with the inevitable decay of the “soft-dying day”. “Ode on Indolence” is pervaded by “shadows”, “ghosts”, “phantoms”, “visions”, “dim dreams” and “faded figures”; it is unsurprising that the opening stanza is dominated by imagery of something concrete, tangible – yet another “marble urn”, to be exact.
The most fitting image of all in Keats’ works is, I argue, that of the nightingale: a Romantic symbol of both poetry and melancholy. If, as Lynch’s and Stillinger’s words suggested at the beginning of this article, Keats seems to “lose his own identity in a total identification with the object he contemplates”, let us hope that such self-effacement is in fact an act of self-assertion or, at the very least, of consolation in Keats’ verse. After such a tragic end to a promising young life, there is comfort in the idea that – as Keats’ contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote in A Defence of Poetry (written 1821) – “A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds: his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
Find Out More: Keats House
Objects were not only significant in terms of the content of Keats’ poems, but also in terms of context. Looking at objects and spaces of importance to Keats can offer us fruitful insights into his life and works. Keats House in London is both a museum and a modern literary centre, which provides lots of information, resources and activities related to Keats’ words and works.
Dr Anna Mercer of Keats House says: “2018-19 marks an exciting bicentenary period in the history of Keats’s life and the House itself. In December 1818 Keats arrived at the House, then called Wentworth Place, following the illness and tragic death of his brother Tom. In 1819 Keats would write some of his greatest poems and at the museum we are planning an exciting events and exhibitions programme to celebrate 200 years since Keats’s great outpouring of brilliant poetry, under the banner of Keats200.”
Find out more on the Keats House website, and view and book upcoming events here.
You can also visit Twitter @KeatsHouse or find @KeatsHouseMuseum on Facebook and Instagram.
Many thanks to Dr Anna Mercer, Linda Carey and Clive Jones for generously sharing their time, knowledge and expertise with me at Keats House as well as giving me a full tour.
References and Further Reading
Bate, Walter Jackson, John Keats, (Cambridge, MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Oxford University Press, 1964).
Everest, K., “John Keats (1795–1821)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Available online, accessed on 06/06/18.
Lynch, Deidre Shauna and Jack Stillinger (eds), The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period (Volume D), (New York; London: W.W.Norton & Company, 2012).
Shelley, Percy Bysshe A Defence of Poetry, (1840).
Stillinger (ed.), Jack The Poems of John Keats, (London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1978).
Author Biography
Dr Katherine Fender recently completed her doctoral studies in English Literature at St John’s College, University of Oxford. She has taught Romantic literature at several Oxford colleges as well as at the University of Warwick for several years. Alongside her academic research, she works with state schools and sixth-form colleges in order to facilitate academic enrichment and super-curricular activities as well as to encourage access and outreach to higher education.