Sam White 24 April 2013 Keats’ 1819 Odes

This week we will discuss five of the odes John Keats wrote in 1819. We will take them in roughly chronological order, following the structure of Helen Vendler’s overarching analysis, close reading them all and tracking the evolution of some images and themes Keats repeated throughout the odes. Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a

Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn were all written between March and

September of 1819. In them we can see Keats’ thinking evolve from ode to ode as he returns to different themes, images, and forms. The classical and mythological characters, images of slumber, the emphasis on beauty and its troubling connection to death, and song as an analogy for poetics—these are just some of the recurrent images or themes that stuck out to me. It might be productive to think of the Ode to Psyche as setting out some problems that then get treated thematically and stylistically in the later odes: Helen Vendler argues for such an evolution by reading To Autumn as the climactic ending to the odes.

Though we will close read all five odes in seminar, we might want to focus our discussion on several key passages. The invocation of Psyche, the late Olympian goddess of the Soul, and how Keats treats her as a Muse before his command to “let me be thy choir, and make a moan upon the midnight hours” make for a sexually charged interchange between poet and Muse. But then the Muse seems to be within the poet’s brain (“In some untrodden region of my mind”), so what exactly happens here that ultimately leads the poet to internalize Psyche? In Ode to a Nightingale we get Keats’ treatment of the lyrical bird, which the bard oddly describes in images of death and loss. We also get the confusion

of dreams and waking states that we saw in The Fall of Hyperion, and which permeate Keats’ earlier 1818 sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” In Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats more directly treats an aesthetic object and its last two lines, enclosed in apostrophes, confront us with their own sincerity. Are we to trust the urn as a “friend to man” or do you read its proclamation as undercut by Keats? Ode on Melancholy seems to begin in the middle of a conversation (“No, no!”) but Keats actually redacted a first, surprisingly Gothic stanza that the Wu Anthology includes in its footnotes. Its erasure undoubtedly changes the tone of the poem, though we will debate how this change reads with the ending “trophies.”

Finally, To Autumn’s female nature figure slumbers around the farm, seeming to delay the arrival of winter and the “songs of spring” that then get written over in the concluding stanza’s autumnal music. The immediacy of the last few lines lends his last ode an gentle conclusion, full of autumn’s music. We will think about how this ending works in relation to the ode’s first two stanzas and the previous four odes we read.

Given enough time we would like to incorporate some of the critical readings— especially those by Vendler and Rovee—into our conversation. Vendler guides us through a close reading of Ode to Psyche by illuminating Keats’ allusions to Milton throughout the ode.

Her book on the Odes reads them in thematic relation to each other, which we will largely follow in class, though we should ask whether placing them in a narrative of evolution or progression is ultimately productive for us. Rovee leads us on a discussion of Keats’ history of reception, which we might ground with reference to Yeats “Sailing to Byzantium” and

“Ego Dominus Tuus” and Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar.” We will read these poems in class (handouts/projector) if we have time or the discussion leads here.