Chapter – 1

INTRODUCTION

Keats belongs to the second generation of romantic poets. He is

essentially a romantic poet despite his great love for Greek myths and
literature. Speaking of the romantic contents of his poetry, Saints bury
observes: “Keats, as none of his own contemporaries did, felt, expressed and
handled on the exact change wrought in English poetry by the great romantic
movement. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott and even Southey, to some extent,
were the authors of this, but being the authors, they were necessarily not the
result of it. Byron was fundamentally out of sympathy with it, though by
accidents of time and chance he had to enlist: Shelley, an angel and en
effectual angel of poetry, was hardly a man still less an Englishman. But
Keats felt it all, expressed what of it he had time and strength to express, and
left the rest to his successors, helped, guided, furthered by his own example.”

Keats possesses those features which entitle him to be called a

romantic poet all romantic poets were essentially escapists and Keats is no
exception to it. No social or political tendencies of his age are to be seen in
his poetry. He does not want to be involved in sordid realities of the present
times. Hence, he flies to the Middle Ages or the Greek age. In The Eve of
St. Agnes, the poet takes us back to the medieval world with knighthood and
chivalry, and tells us the romantic story of Porphyro and Madeline.

Keats’s opportunities were slight and his allotted span of life short.
But by the force of his poetic genius, in four brief years, he had got over all
obstacles and won the world’s acknowledgement of his right to a place
among the great poets not only of his own country but of any other country.
In the words of his own friend, Leigh Hunt, “Keats was born a poet of the
most poetical mind. All his feelings came to him through a poetical medium,
or were speedily coloured by it.” Keats’s poetic achievement with all its
1
extraordinary great excellence is a miracle of four brief years. That is why
in the opinion of some critics, he is “the greatest among the younger
Romantic poets, and his poetic work has traces of the greatness of
Shakespeare and Milton.”

To appreciate Keats’s poetry aright, it is necessary to understand his

idea of poetry and its functions. His views regarding poetry were
diametrically opposed to those of Wordsworth. According to Wordsworth,
instruction is the end of poetry that has a palpable design on us,” the
declared. Poetry, according to him, should not serve as a medium for
preaching philosophical, religious, social and political ideas. It should be an
end in itself. A poet, according to him, takes delight in poetic creation and
should write poetry for its own sake. He always believed, the poetry should
“come naturally as leaves to a tree.” It should be spontaneous, great and
unobtrusively enter one’s soul, as he himself says, “Poetry should surprise
us by a fine access.” Its only aim should be to please and thereby “soothe the
cares and lift the thoughts of man.” In short, he believed in what it is called
“a wholesome detachment”. Keats’s protest against Wordsworth’s
didacticism is equally applicable to Shelley. Dissatisfied with Shelley’s zeal
for reform, Keats wrote to him: “You will, I am sure, forgive me for sincerely
remarking that you might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist
and load every rift of your subject with ore.” Thus, he is an artist in the truest
sense of the world.

Keats is primarily the poet of Beauty. His conception of beauty

evolves with the growth of his genius. For him, poetry was simply the
incarnation of beauty, and the pursuit in the abstract was his life’s mission.
In his earlier poems, the regards beauty as merely physical fact, and cares
only for physical beauty –

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“Light feet, dark, violent eyes and parted hair,
Soft dimpled bands, with neck and creamy breast.”

By and by his conception of beauty was in increase, and in the very first line
of Endymion he strikes the key-note of all his works –

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

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1.1 LIFE OF JOHN KEATS

Of all the great poets of the early nineteenth century, John Keats was
the last born and the first to die. He was the son of Thomas Keats, a west-
country head ostler in a livery stable, and was born prematurely on October
31, 1795, at Moorfields, London. He was the eldest of the five children of
his father – four boys, one of whom died in infancy and a girl, the youngest
of all. His father, Thomas, was a shrewd, careful man of business, his mother
a lively young woman fond of enjoyment. He was brought up amid
surroundings by no means calculated to awaken poetic genius. Hereditary
influences and family environments seemed unpromising, and it is difficult
to explain the birth of a genius in a family of relatives, far or near; none of
whom showed any taste for art. Keats must have been a born genius,
otherwise it is not easy to explain the birth of a great poet in the family of an
ordinary stable-keeper.

At first, John and his brothers George Keats and Tom Keats were
educated at a less expensive private school run by Rev. John Clarke at
Enfield near London, where he remained for six years, without showing any
signs of special interest in intellectual things. But, being high-spirited,
affectionate and skilled in outdoor exercises, he was distinguished more for
fighting than for study, and his bright, brave, generous nature, his fits of
vehement passions, rapid changes of mood and extreme sensibility made him
popular with masters and boys. His school-fellow and friend, Charles
Cowden Clarke, son of Rev. Clarke – the headmaster, said of him – “He was
not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize fighter, for his terrible courage:
but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of mean motive, his
playability, his generosity wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I
never heard a word of disapproval from anyone, superior or equal; who’ had
known him.” This was an indication of his future greatness but not in the
realm of literature.
4
 During his last two years of school, Keats and developed a great
enthusiasm and love for literature, which remained unabated during his four
years of apprenticeship, and he spent all his leisure during this period in
reading books of literature and translating Virgil’s Aeneid into English prose.
Clarke’s literary companionship at school and afterwards, proved specially
relishing stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. He borrowed
books from Clarke, read them and discussed them with him at Enfield. Once
Cowden Clarke introduced him to the works of Spenser, “the poets’ poet.”
Keats read the great master’s The Faerie Queene and like so many other
poets who received their first inspirations from Spenser, Keats was charmed
by this moral allegory. It was the first incident of great importance in Keats’s
life which prompted him to write and greatly helped to develop his poetic
genius. But off all the poets he studied, Shakespeare, whose works
permeated Keats’s whole being, widened his view of life and increased his
humanity, wielded the widest and deepest influence on him.

When nineteen, Keats returned, in 1815, from Edmonton to London,

for he quarreled with Dr. Hammond and left him a year before the
completion of his apprenticeship. In London, he continued his training as a
student of St. Thomas’s Hospital and Guy’s. Though an industrious and able
medical student, he gradually realized that poetry was his true vocation.
Soon even against his guardian’s opposition, Keats decided to give up his
medical profession in favour of poetic vocation. Luckily for Keats, Cowden
Clarke also came over to London, and introduced him to the literary circle,
of which Leigh Hunt, something of a poet himself and a pleasant prose
writher, was the leading spirit. Hunt’s encouragement did much to stimulate
Keats’s genius. Here also Keats was glad to meet other notable literary men
of the time – Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Shelley, etc. Another man besides
Hunt, who became Keats’s great friend and wielded a special influence upon
him, was Haydon, “an artist of mediocre creative talent but great aims,” an
5
amazing belief in himself, and a fine him the beauty of her masterpieces of
Greek sculpture – the Elgin Marbles. Keats would have become a successful
surgeon by his surprising of poetry was to him irresistible. His brothers also
encouraged him for the change. Hence, in the teeth of Mr. Abbey’s
opposition, Keats finally made his choice for poetry.

The poetic Muse was already at work in him before his switching over
from surgery to poetry – a far cry. But now, instead of writing with a boy’s
secrecy, he circulated his earliest verses among his friends whose praise of
them was a source of great joy and encouragement to him. His reading of
Homer’s poems revealed to him a vast unexplored treasure of mythology
and wonder. In 1817, Keats published the first little volume of poems,
including Sleep and Poetry and it was dedicated to Leigh Hunt. The sonnet
of dedication was hurriedly dashed off and not a word of the first draft was
altered. There is much in this volume, which strikes the key-note of the
typical in Keats’s later work. There are many memorable lines, and touches
of his unique insight into nature. Yet the volume showed considerable
immaturity, and was anything but a success. It was criticized, but far from
being discouraged. Keats knew his faults better than the critics and felt his
power to outgrow them. His friend, Haydon, advised him to devote himself
to the development of his poetic talent by undisturbed study. So Keats went
to the Isle of Wight in the hope getting quiet and rest there. But in the chance
of agreeable company there he returned to London. In 1818, he finished his
Endymion which was violently attacked by critics, although in its preface he
had explained its imperfection.

On May 10, Keats wrote to Haydon – “I read Shakespeare – indeed I

shall, I think, never read any other book much.” Spenser’s influence on him
continued but Shakespeare’s had become the dominant influence. Gradually,
he also came under the influence of Wordsworth’s philosophy of poetry and
life, and of Milton in respect of his style to some extent. “But Shakespeare’s
6
influence was the widest, deepest and most lasting, though it is the hardest
to define. Hit study of other poets left traces upon his work in turns of phrase
or turns of thought: Shakespeare resemblance of style, for Shakespeare can
have no imitators, but in broadening view of life, and increased humanity.”
Keats knew very little of Latin and no Greek, and all his knowledge of
classical stories, which he loved and constantly used, came to him from his
reading of Chapman’s translations of Homer’s Iliad, etc.

On his return to London, he and his brother Tom took lodgings at

Hampstead. Here he stayed for some time, worried by the illness of Tom.
The departure of his brother, George, to seek his fortune in America,
depressed Keats’s spirit all the more. Moreover, immediately after his undue
strain in completing his Endymion, he completed Isabella. As a result of
these overstrain and anxieties he felt compelled to relax himself. So he set
on a long walking tour in the North with his friend Charles Browne visiting
the English Lakes, Dumfries and parts of Ireland and Scotland. But the
holiday brought tragic consequences. While crossing the Isle of Mull, he
contracted sore throat, which proved very troublesome, and he cut short his
holiday and returned home. This was the first sign of the fatal disease which
ultimately took Keats’s life. “This was the beginning of the end. There was
consumption in the family; Tom was dyi8ng of it; and the cold, wet and over-
exertion of his Scotch tour seem to have developed the fatal tendency in
Keats himself,” as M. Hills reports. From now onwards bedside.
Immediately on his return to London, his Endymion was brutally criticized.
This together with the death of Tom, George’s migration to America, and
the alarming symptoms of his growing illness left him desolate and
miserable.

He turned again to poetry for relief, and his most anxious days of
misery and suffering gave his finest poetry to the world. The first few months
of 1819 were the most fruitful of his life. Besides working on Hypersion,
7
which he had begun during Tom’s illness, he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes,
The Eve of St. Mark, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and almost all his famous
odes.

Troubles, however, continued to depress him. He had to render

financial assistance to his poor artist-friend, Haydon, who was in difficulties.
His own illness was growing more and more alarming, and, above all, he
was consumed by an unsatisfying passion for one Miss Fanny Brawne, the
young and beautiful daughter of a neighbor Mrs. Brawne. She returned his
love, but she seems never to have understood his nature and needs. His
failing health and poverty seemed to him to stand in the way of his marriage
with Fanny. Consequently, “his love throughout brought him restlessness
and torment rather than peace and comfort.”

About the end of July, he went to Shaklin and there, in collaboration

with Brown, wrote a play, Otho the Great. There, too he had begun to write
Lamia. His last achievements are really wonderful because his thoughts at
this time, which were deeply coloured by his grief and melancholy and
depression, were faithfully expressed in his poems. He returned to London
and determined temporarily to give up writing poetry, so as to be able to earn
money by reviewing (or, journalism) and support himself and his needy
brother in America. He gave up poetry, but returned to it how and then. But
he found himself unable, due to his failing health, to bear the strain of writing
poetry and more.

In February 1820, before the completion of Hyperion and The Cap

and Bells; a satire, he had an attack of illness, which gave the first definite
sign of consumption. On the evening of Thursday February 3, he came home
in high fever caused by his careless exposure while driving on a very chilly
day. As soon as he lay in bed, he coughed and spat blood. His medical
knowledge was sufficient to diagnose his disease. Brown quotes Keats’s own

8
words on that occasion: “It is arterial blood; I cannot be die.” He lived for
another year but he himself called it his posthumous life.’ He was already
the victim of consumption.

His last volume of poetry published in the first month of his illness
was highly admired by reviewers and the public. But Keats did not care
much for fame now, for he knew he was fast nearing his end. The only
thought that was at that time tormenting his soul, was that death would
separate him from the woman he loved. In spring, there was a temporary
recovery. But soon the doctors warned him that a winter in England would
kill him. His darling, Fanny Brawne and her mother did all they could do to
help him in distress. But all in vain. In September 1820, he left London for
Naples (Italy) with one of his most devoted friends, Joseph Severn, a young
artist. There Shelly invited him to stay with him at Pisa. But Keats refused,
for they were mere acquaintances and not deep friends and Keats, as an
invalid, did not want to be a burden on Shelley, though Shelley seems to
have developed a link for him. By November, he and Severn reached Rome,
but there his condition rapidly worsened in spite of Severn’s desperately
devoted nursing. Separation from Fanny Brawne and his penniless condition
constantly preyed upon his mind, and besides, the change of climate did him
no good. On February 23, 1821, he breathed his last, for which he had, begun
to long. He died peacefully in the arms of Severn. On the 26th, he was buried
in the beautiful cemetery of which Shelly said that it made one in Love with
death to think that he could be buried in so sweet a place such was the end
of a life which was a miracle of twenty five years.

According to Keats’s own will, the words to be inscribed on his tomb-

stone were to be “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” But Keats’s
works are sufficient to believe in these words. He left a deep mark on English
poetry. His name was certainly not ‘writ in water’. Keats has enjoyed
immense popularity ever since his death. His first memorial was unveiled in
9
the parish church of Hampstead on July 16, 1894. In 1909 the house where
he died was declared as Keats-Shelley memorial. Keats Museum was opened
in 1931.

10
 Chapter – 2

KEATS’S DEVELOPMENT AS A POET

Within a short life span and short literary career Keats wrote many
poetries which were marvelous both in magnitude and in quality, in his short
life he proved to be one of the greatest and most original thinkers of the
second generation of Romantic poets with his works. His choice of subject
in his poetries differs from that of most of the other romantic poets. His love
of nature is intense and is constantly to be seen in the imagery of his poems,
but it involves none of the mystical worship of the mighty being which have
been seen in Wordsworth. He has none of the satirical bent of Byron and
little of the prophetic vein of Shelly; rather is he the poet of legend and myth
of romance and chivalric tale. According to a critic of Keats, John Keats’s
poetic career has three important features:

(i) The sudden flowering of the poetic sensibility which had lain
slumbering for a comparatively long time.
(ii) A continuous development towards maturity of style and
profundity of thought which emerges gradually through the
struggle between the lure of the imaginative beauty and a growing
consciousness of the world.
(iii) The concentration of all that is best in his poetry within brief span
of a single year, a spell of the most vigorous assertion of creative
spirit before it was quenched by the premature death.

All these three features of Keats’s poetic career can be seen in his
volumes of poetry which are divided into three volumes namely- Poems
(1817), Endymion: A Poetical Romance (1818) and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve
of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).

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2.1 Poems (1817)

This is Keats’s first volume of poetry which was published in the year
1817. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth were his inspiration
and challenge. Keats was introduced to Spenser by Cowden Clarke. This
volume includes his first written work the Imitation Of Spenser (1814). It
shows his influence of Spenser as Charles Brown reports, ‘It was the “Faery
Queen” that awakened his genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was
enchanted… till, enamored of the stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and
succeeded’. It also includes his first published poem O Solitude, which was
written in 1815 shortly after Keats entered Guy’s hospital, after leaving
Edmonton. It was first published on May 5, 1816, in Leigh Hunts’ the
Examiner. This volume contains little of any outstanding merit, except for
some its sonnets, which include the superb On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer. The poems, which include Sleep and Poetry and I Stood Tip-toe
upon a Little Hill, show the influence of Spenser and, more immediately, of
Leigh Hunt, to whom the volume was dedicated. But even at this stage there
can be seen individual note. For example, in I Stood Tip-toe, Keats gives
such unparalleled expression:

“A little noiseless noise among the leaves

Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.”

His other works of merit of this group are- Calidore. A Fragment, To Ladies,
To Hope, To A Friend who Sent some Roses, etc.

2.2 Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)

This is his next volume of poetry which was published in the year
1818. The subtitle of the volume provides a slight idea that, this volume
contains most of his romantic poetries. For instance the first poetry of this
volume can be taken, and that is Endymion which was written in April 1817

12
to November 1817 and was published as a volume in May, 1818. This poem
was probably based partly on Drayton’s The Man in the Moon and Fletcher’s
The Faithful Shepherdess, this remarkable poem of Endymicin professes to
tell the story of a lovely youth who was kissed by the moon-goddess on the
summit of Mount Latmos. Keats develops this simple myth into an intricate
and flowery and rather obscure allegory of over four weaknesses both of
taste and of taste and of construction, but many of the passages are most
beautiful, and the poem shows the tender budding of the Keatsian style – a
rich and suggestive beauty obtained by richly ornamented diction. The first
line is often quoted, and it contains the theory that Keats followed during the
whole of his poetical career;

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

The crudeness of the work laid it temptingly open to attack, and as it

has been noticed, the hostile reviews found it an easy prey. This volume also
contains the poems such as O Blush Not So! O Blush Not So! God of The
Meridian, To the Nile, In Dear-Nighted December, etc.

2.3 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve Of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)

Keats’s health was already failing, as much as he was nearing to his

death his poetic genious was in its full swing both in magnitude and in
quality. His third and last volume, published in 1820 by Taylor and Hessey
just before he left England, contains a collection of poems of the first rank,
which were written approximately in the order that follows:

Isabella, or The Pot of Basil (1818), is a version of a tale form

Boccaccio, and deals with the murder of a lady’s lover by her two wicked
brothers. The poem, which is written in ottava rime marks a decided advance
in Keats’s work. The slips of taste are fewer: the style deeper in tone: the tale
is told with an economy and precision new in Keats. And the conclusion,
though it is sentimentally treated, is not wanting in pathos.
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 In Hyperion, (begun 1818, abandoned 1819), Keats took up the epic
theme of the primeval struggle between the older race of gods, such as
Apollo. Both in style and structure the poem is modelled on Paradise Lost.
The blank verse has not much of the sonorous weight and dignity of its
model. At the same time, it replaces the vigor and passion of Milton with a
repose and charm of its own. As the poem progresses, the Miltonic is
gradually supplanted by a tone more truly Keats’s own, and in the third book
it ends abruptly, because, as Keats himself said, it was too Miltonic. It is
doubtful whether it could ever have been completed as it lacks the gripping
action which must be the basis of the epic poem. Yet, as far as it goes,
Hyperion is a successful work, which has been claimed by some critics as
Keats’s greatest achievement. Book II provides us with the fullest exposition
he was ever to give of his theory that “first in beauty shall be first in might,”
and the poem shows clearly his growing control over structure and style. It
is full of striking passages, of which the following, the opening lines, is a
good example:

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,

Sat grey-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence roundabout his lair;

Forest on hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,

No so much life as on a summer’s day

Robs not one light seed from the father’d grass,

But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest,

14
 A stream went voiceless by, still deaden’d more

By reason of his fallen divinity

Spreading a shade: the Naiad’ mid her reeds

Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.”

The Eve of St. Agnes (1819), regarded by others as his finest narrative
poem, is a tale of elopement of two lovers. The story is slight but moves
quickly; the background of family feud is kept well in mind, and the love-
scenes are more controlled than those in Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. In the
chivalric tone, the stanza form, and the occasional archaisms, the influence
of Spenser is seen: but the style is Keats’s own, and the poem is full of
beauties of description, imagery and colour, It is sensuous and highly
decorative without being cloying. Typical of its exquisite beauty is the
following stanza:

“Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast –

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon:

Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven: Porphyro grew faint:

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free form mortal taint.”

In the same year was written The Eve of the St. Mark which remained
unfinished. It has the fine pictorial work of The Eve of St. Agnes but the

15
material is handled with more restraint. In style it is effortless, and free from
Keats’s fault over-luxuriance.

The story of Lamia (1819) is taken from Burton’s The Anatomy of

Melancholy. It tells the story of a beautiful enchantress. The narrative is
well-handled, runs smoothly, and shows a true sense of proportion than
Endymion, though here again, the story is rendered somewhat obscure by the
introduction of a rather confused allegory. In style, it is modelled on the
fables of Dryden and the heroic couplet is skilfully used. The poem is full of
typically Keatsian pictorial richness, which, on occasion, becomes rather
excessive. The following description of the snake-enchantress is one of the
more gorgeous part of the story:

“She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue,

Vermilion-spotted, golden, and blue:

Striped like zebra, freekled like a pard,

Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;

And full of silver moons, that as, she breather,

Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed

Their lustre with the gloomier tapestries –

So rainbow-sided touch’d with miseries,

She seem’d at once some penanced lady elf,

Some demon’s mistress, or the demo’s self.

Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire,

Sprinkled with stars like Ariadane’s tiar:

Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!

16
 She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete;

And for the eyes; what could such eyes do there

But weep, and weep that they were born so fair?

As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air.

Her throat was serpent, but he words she spake

Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake.”

At the end of 1819, Keats made an attempt to refashion his unfinished

epic The Fall of Hyperion, A Dream. Casting off the Miltonic style of the
first version, Keats here creates a blank verse which accords well with a
severer and more thoughtful tone than is to be found in any other of his
poems. It carries till further Keats’s philosophy of beauty which he now feels
to be attainable only by those who have experienced pain. Over the merits
of this revision, as compared with the original draft, controversy raged. A
comparison of parallel versions of the same have gone. On the other hand, it
may be argued that not only is the poem more truly Keats’s own, but that it
shows a deeper insight into human problems.

Together with the longer poems are many shorter pieces of supreme
beauty. The great odes To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, On
Melancholy, To Autumn – were nearly all written in 1819, and in their
approach to flawless perfection the best of them are unequalled in Keats.
Between the impassioned longing for escape of the first and the calm of
fruition of the last, there is a very great difference but all, with the exception
of To Autumn, show a concern with the poet’s desire for the true beauty, and
they, thus, have a close link with Endymion, Hyperion, Lamia, and The Fall
of Hyperion. The odes are experiments in verse form based on the sonnet.
All except To Autumn, which has an eleven-line stanza, are in stanzas of ten
lines, made up of the Shakespearean quatrain and Petrarchan sestet. We
17
quote the first stanza of the well-known Ode To Autumn, probably the most
perfect poem Keats ever wrote:

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-caves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core

To well the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

United they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells.”

As a sonneteer, Keats rank with the greatest English poets. Oh his

sixty-one sonnets some ten, including On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer, When I have fears that I may cease to be, and Bright Star, Would I
were steadfast as thou art, are worthy to be ranked with those of
Shakespeare. After a strict adherence to the Petrarchan form in the 1817
volume, Keats turned to the Shakespearean form, which undoubtedly suited
him better. The sonnet quoted below will show how effortless is his best
work in this medium:

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in character,

18
 Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain:

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love: - then on the shore

O the wide world I stand alone, and think,

Till love and fame to nothingness so sink.”

Among the other shorter poems, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a kind of
lyric ballad, is considered to be one of the choicest in the language.

In 1819, Keats collaborated in a drama, Otho the Great, and began

another King Stephen, which he did not complete. Neither effort is of much
consequence. The Cap and Bells, a longish fairytale which also is unfinished,
is much below the level of his usual work.

19
 Chapter – 3

ODE AND HIS POETIC CONCEPTS

3.1 Ode and its types

In its traditional application, “ode” denotes a long lyric poem that is

serious in subject and treatment, elevated in style, and elaborate in its
stanzaic structure. Norman Maclean said that the ten-n now calls to mind
lyric which is “massive, public in its proclamations, and Pindaric in its
classical prototype.”

The prototype was established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes
were modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama. His complex
stanzas were patterned in sets of three: moving in a dance rhythm to the left,
the chorus chanted the strophe; moving to the right, the antistrophe; then,
standing still, the epode. The strophe and antistrophe consist of any number
of lines of any length following any rhyme scheme that the poet chooses;
however they are identical in structure. The epode differs in structure, in
whatever ways the poet chooses to make it. It also differs to suit poet’s
content or their odes.

The regular or Pindaric ode in English is a close imitation of

Pindar’s form, with all the strophes and antistrophes written in one stanza
pattern, and all the epodes in another. This form was introduced into England
by Ben Jonson’s Ode To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble
Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison(1629); the typical construction can
be conveniently studied in this poem of in Thomas Gray’s The Progress of
Poesy (1757). The irregular ode, also called the Cowleyan Ode, was
introduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who imitated the Pindaric style and
matter but disregarded the recurrent stanzaic pattern in each strophic triad;
instead, he allowed each stanza to establish its own pattern of varying line
lengths, number of lines, and rhyme scheme. This type of irregular sranzaic
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structure, which is free to alter in accordance with shifts in subject and mood,
has been the most common for the English ode ever since; Wordsworth’s
Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1807) is representative.

Pindar’s odes were encomiastic; that is, they were written to praise
and glorify someone – in the instance of Pindar, the ode celebrated in
victorious athlete in the Olympic games. The earlier English odes, amid
many later ones, were also written to eulogize something, such as a person
(John Dryden’s Anne Killigrew), or the arts of music or poetry (Dryden’s
Alexander’s Feast), or a time of day (Collins’ Ode to Evening), or abstract
concepts (Gray’s Hymn to Adversity and Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty).
Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate
meditation, which is stimulated by (and sometimes at its close reverts to) an
aspect of the outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a personal
emotional problem or a generally human ore (Wordsworth’s Intimations
ode, Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode, Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. More
recent examples of this latter type are Allen Tate’s Ode to the Confederate
Dead and Wallace Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West.

The Horatian ode was originally modelled on the matter, tone and
form of the odes of the Roman Horace. In contrast to the passion, visionary
boldness, and formal language of Pindar’s odes, many Horatian odes are
calm, meditative, and colloquial; they are also usually homostrophic (that
is, written in a single repeated stanza form) and shorter than the Pindaric ode.
Examples are Marvell’s An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from
Ireland (1650) and Keats’ ode To Autumn (1820).

3.2 Keats As A Writer of Odes

Who found me the grandeur of the Ode,

Growing, like Atlas, stranger from its load.

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 The Odes of Keats belong to that group of works in which the English
language finds an ultimate embodiment. Keats has made his mark as a
narrative poet, a sonneteer and a writer of narrative poems. However, if one
were to point out the consummate embodiment of Keats’s work in a perfect
form, one would mention his Odes. His six great odes, known as the pillars
of Hercules of human language, give him a unique place in English poetry.
Its reason is that whatever else in his work is faulty, whatever else touched
with decadence, these odes at least have immortal quality: these at least are
exempt from evil. Stuart M. Sperry rightly points out: “The great odes have
for long been placed at the centre of Keats’s achievement and for that matter,
at the centre of the English Romantic achievement as a whole.” T.S. Eliot
has also remarked that the Odes – especially perhaps the Ode to Psyche –
are enough for his reputation.

The major odes of Keats are marked by a similarity and commonness

of theme. They are variations on one theme viz, the irreconcilable opposition
between flux and stability or process and permanence. Prof. Garrod finds
close connections of thought which exist between all the sex great Odes with
the exception of To Autumn, and notes their interrelationship and sequential
nature in these words “Just as each Ode is something in the nature of sonnets-
sequence, so the Odes, taken together, are a sequence; an ode-sequence of
which the relation, not of time, but mood, to some extent, disclose
themselves.” Hence it is thought proper that they should be considered not
in isolation from one another but as a whole. the most important context for
each of the odes is the totality of the other odes, that the odes enjoy a special
relation to each other, and that Keats, whenever the returned to the form of
the Ode, recalled his previous efforts and used every new ode as a way of
commenting on earlier ones. We may say that each ode both deconstructs its
predecessor(s) and consolidates it (or them). Each is a disavowal of a
previous “solution”; but none could achieve its own momentary stability
22
without the support of the antecedently constructed style which we now call
‘Keatsian.’

Keats was practicing a form of intrinsic self-criticism in continuing to

shape the Ode, time after time, to his own purposes. In fact, one poem proves
another and the whole, for the Odes serve as a link between the thematic
concerns of Keats’s earlier poems and later mature poems. The contrast
between the real and the ideal, the actual and the imaginary, escape from and
involvement in the world of process, earthly experience and the heavenly
ideal, and the acquisition of all experience of life with a complete awareness
of death – all these give a poignancy and perturb ability to these Odes.

By the times Keats adopted it, the Ode was already an established
form of verse both in England and elsewhere. Two main traditions of the
Ode – the Pindaric and the Horatian – were followed by poets in various
Countries. In English, both the Pindaric and the Horatian type of odes were
Composed by various poets. The Pindaric ode consisted of tirads i.e. sets of
three stanzas consisting of a strophe, antistrophe and epode. All the strophes
and antistrophes in the ode were written in one kind of stanza and all the
epodes in another. The Horatian ode was written in a simple stanza form
repeated throughout the poem. In this way stanzas may be regular, as in
Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, or irregular (in which case they may be
termed ‘strophes’), as in Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality. Of
Keats’s odes To Psyche is in the tradition of irregularity established by
Cowley and Dryden; the strophes vary in length, the rhyme-scheme is
elaborate and varies from strophe to strophe, and though most lines have five
feet, some have three.

The ode Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair is extremely irregular

but Keats was in search of a new stanza-form suitable both for the sonnet
and the ode. In the sonnet If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,

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Keats had complained that the traditional rhyme schemes of the sonnet
imposed severe limitations. His experiments with the sonnet-form developed
a hybrid form with a Shakespearean octave and a Petrarchan sestet; in other
words, he developed a ten-line stanza consisting of a Shakespearean quatrain
(abab) and a Petrarchan sestet (cde cde).

This new stanza-form with the rhyme-scheme abab cde cde became
the chief form of the stanzas in his odes. On Melancholy, On Indolence, To
a Nightingale and On a Grecian Urn make use of a ten-line stanza whose
rhyme-scheme combines the quatrain of Shakespearean sonnet (abab) with
the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet (normally cde cde, which Keats sometimes
varies as cde cde or cde cde) Ode to a Nightingale substitutes a trimetre or a
pentameter the eighth line of each stanza. To Autumn has a eleven-line
stanza the Shakespearean quatrain (aba b) being followed by a sestet
(rhyming cde dcce, cde cdde and cde cdde respectively). These ten and
eleven line stanzas are just long enough to express a complex modulation of
thought and feeling but not so long as to run the risk of becoming, like a
sonnet in a sonnet-sequence, isolated poems in themselves.

A part from introducing changes in the structure of the ode. Keats has
also introduced new subjects to be dealt within his odes. Instead of dealing
with subjects of the classical odes like religious ceremonies, victory in game,
occasions and events of social and political interest, Keats has treated themes
having a more universal appeal and expressed more lasting thoughts. They
deal with deeper issues than the ones that appear at a first glance. They
contain his emotional reactions to certain situations and his response to the
beauties of art, mythology and nature. The deeper issues dealt within them
are – impermanence of beauty, mutability of life, the contrast between the
real world and the world of imagination or art, and so on. They distinguished
by their concern for the destiny of man and the perplexity of his life. In this
connection Ian Jack says. “The Odes are the sort of poetry that Hamlet might
24
have written.” The Odes are really the anguished expression of Hamlet-like
poet, whose immense brooding over the human situation is matched by his
inability to find out a convincing solution of the complex problems faced by
man.

Odes of Keats reveal almost all his poetic qualities and the essential
aspects and modes of his thought. they are free from didactic element and
express his sensuousness, pictorial quality, medievalism, Hellenism, lyrical
power, melancholy, negative capability, his concept of beauty and nature, a
romantic touch and a reflective cast, his felicity of phrasing and his mastery
over the apt use of language and imagery. The poet seeks to escape into the
world of art signified by the urn and the world of imagination signified by
the Nightingale’s song, but the escape proves illusory and he has to come
back to the world he had sought to escape from. The element of drama is
also found in the description of Autumn as a person performing different
activities in To Autumn. Moreover, his odes are free from ‘palphable design’.
They do not seek to propagate any ides, nor do they provide any solution of
the various social, political or moral problems of the world function which
Keats did not like poetry to perform.

3.3 Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’

What is after all the meaning of Keats’s notion of Negative

Capability? The concept of Negative Capability involves self-annihilation
of disinterestedness. Keats discovers that to comprehend exprehend
experience and to attain freedom from its bondage, what is necessary is self-
annihilation. It requires that an essential quality of a great poet is his
immense capacity of sympathetic identification with some object dearer to
him than himself. Keats believed that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not
possess Negative Capability, Wordsworth could not annihilate the self – or
more precisely, the ego, for the yawning ego hinders, disinterested,

25
perception and action, and leads to involvement in experience. As for
Coleridge, he ‘would let to by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the
sense of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-
knowledge’. Keats believed that Shakespeare exemplified wonderful
sympathy and identification with variety of experiences.

For Keats, the necessary pre-condition of poetry is submission to

things as they are, without trying to intellectualize them into something else,
submission to people as they are without trying indoctrinate or improve
them. Keats found this quality in Shakespeare. This quality is his
understanding of contrary points of view. It may be interpreted as tolerance,
as agnosticism or eclecticism, in December 1817, Keats offered his
formulation of Negative Capability in his letter to George and Tom:
“…several things dove-tailed in my mind. And at once in struck me what
quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature and which
Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability – that
is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The Odes of Keats are the supreme examples of Negative Capability,

since they are produced solely by the methods peculiar to poetry, not by the
aid of the speculative intelligence. It can be traced the examples of Negative
Capability in some of Keats’s Odes. In Ode to Indolence the poet is in a state
of restlessness, uncertainty and doubt. In Ode on a Grecian Urn the picture
of an empty city with its people on their pilgrimage to a shrine is an example
of Keats’s Negative Capability. The poet asks:

Who are these corning to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

26
 And all her silken flank with garlands dressed?

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

3.4 Concept of Beauty in His Odes

“Keats had no religion save the religion of beauty, no God save Pan”,
says Compton-Rickett. Keats was very sensitive to beauty, and responded
heart and soul to its various manifestations. Instead of his enthusiasm of
beauty leading him to philosophical speculation, as it led Shelley, at first he
interested himself in revealing this beauty to human senses, and proclaimed
its universal importance later. Like Shelley, it was not the ethereal spirit of
perfection that Keats pursued, but rather the beauty that he knew, the beauty
that we can all perceive in colour and sound and form – “Beauty, beauty that
must die.”

Keats and Shelley stand together in their generation as the two mighty
lovers of beauty, but the distinction between them is vital. Keats travelled
from earth to Heaven, Shelley from Heaven the earth. Beauty for Shelley
was metaphysical; it was an intellectual idea, a spirit working through the
universe and ultimately indistinguishable from love, which lie believed to
sustain the universe. The beautiful things of the world disclosed this beauty,
but beauty itself was a spirit. Keats approached beauty form the other side;
to him it was an exaltation. “Oh, for a fife of sensations rather than of
thoughts!” he cried. And that was his attitude to life. Sensations, whether
real or imagined, was to him the finest experience that life brought; he was
lover of beauty, and in the presence of beauty of any kind he was like a man
in the presence of woman whom he loves. And on this exaltation of senses
he built, or rather was beginning to build, his philosophy of beauty:

27
 ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Or, as he put it elsewhere in prose, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty

must be true.” He also wrote:

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

“It is no small thing,” says Matthew Arnold, “to have so loved the
principle of Beauty as to perceive the necessary relation of beauty with truth,
and of both with joy.” Keats also knew it. In one of his letters addressed to
Fanny Brawne in 1820, Keats wrote, “If I die, I have left no immortal work
behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have
loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had time, I would have
made myself remembered.” In Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats contrasts life
with art and finds that beauty is as enternal as the song of the nightingale.
Keats found beauty in all things. This was Keats’s great poetic intuition, and
the revelation of this beauty the great human purpose to which he dedicated
himself and for which he was prepared to die. It sounds simple; it is
tremendous. It involves the acceptance of life as it is.

3.5 Keats’s Sensuousness

Keats is primarily a sensuous poet. Sensuousness is a paramount bias

of his genius. In fact, sensuousness is a striking characteristic of his entire
poetic output. As Matthew Arnold observes, “Poetry, according to Milton’s
famous saying, should be simple, sensuous, impassioned. No one can
question the eminence in Keats’s poetry of the quality of sensuousness.
Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous.” One might quote
examples from his poetry to show that he was completely under the
domination of his senses and was nothing else. In a letter the exclaims: ‘0 fir
a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!’ In another letter, he remarks,

28
with a great poet the sense of Beauty obliterates every other consideration.
Whether Keats was to confine himself merely to the worship of Beauty as
perceived by the senses or come to the realization of the Beauty of human
action or of the human soul is, however, a different question. But the fact
remains that the senses filled a very significant part in his perception of
Beauty.

(i) Sense of Sight

When we say that he is the poet of

‘Light foot, dark violent eyes, and parted hair,

Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast’

We only focus attention on the dominance of sight, of beauty as perceived

by the eyes. But in the case of Keats, it is not sight alone, not the eyes alone,
but all the senses, contributed to his perception of the beautiful. His poetry
has rarely been equaled in description of the beauties perceptible to the
senses, such as form, colour, perfume or music. It was his mission to
interpret the highest type of sensuous beauty. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn,
the form of the urn as perceived by the eyes captures his imagination. The
‘flowery tale’, the ‘leaf-fring’d legened’, the ‘Attic shape’, the breed of
marble men and maidens, are all perceived by the eyes. Apart from love of
form, the eyes led him to luxuriate like a painter in an assembly of coulurs.
In the following lines from his Ode to Autumn,

‘…….to load and bless’

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run,

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees’,

29
the greenery of the vine-leaves, the grey colour of the thatched-roof of the
cottages, the golden yellow of the mature apples and the emerald moss
provide a feast of varied coulours to the imagination of the poet-painter.

(ii) Sense of Touch

What Milton precisely meant by his definition that poetry is sensuous

art, is easily classified by examples from Keats’s poetry. Keats could not
stay long in the domain of the abstract and as in Spenser’s images, all
abstractions give place to the concrete. The opening passage of The Eve of
St. Agnes illustrates the point,

“St. Agnes’ Eve – ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl for all his features, was a-cold;

The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass.”

The cold touch of the chilly January night could not have been better
communicated. There is the language of pure poetry. That is poetry as a
sensuous art as Milton meant it.

Haydon tells us how Keats once covered his tongue and throat as for
as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious
coldness of claret. In a letter to his sister, he mentions ‘a claret wine, cool
out of a cellar a mile deep.’ It is the same Keats who longed for

“…a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth.”

Cover a rosebud round the tapering end of your finger and ‘smooth it against
thy lips.’ That a simple, direct communication of our sense imprisons can
have far reaching effect on our imagination will be clear from the following
passage of an essay of Robert Lynd on ‘told’. ‘The owl for all his feathers
was a cold. Ever so I envied him his feathers as I lay in bed and thought of
30
the bleak and bitter February morning outside into which I should before
long have to go. How pleasant to be so-well-clad by nature as not have to
get up and dress.

(iii) Sense of Smell

Owing to the dense foliage of the beech trees, Keats cannot see what
flowers are at his feet but by smell he can guess each sweet plant or blossom
with which the month has endowed the grass, the thicket and the wild fruit-
tree, white hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine and fast-fading violets, and
he can guess what soft incense hangs upon the boughs in the scented
darkness. The sense of smell helps him to recreate the pious atmosphere of
the pagan ritual in his Ode to Psyche:

“….incense sweet,

From chain-swung censer teeming.”

Both the senses of touch and smell are gratified by the perfume of fruits and
syrups which he lovingly enumerates in The Eve of St. Agnes:

‘While he from forth the closet brought a heap

Of candied apple, quince, than plum, and gourd;

With jellies soother than the creamy cur&

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon:

Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d

From Fez: and spiced dinaties… … …

…. …. …. ….

These delicates he heap’d with glowing band

On golden dishes and in baskets bright

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 Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand

In the retiid quiet of the night,

Filling the chilly room with perfume light.”

(iv) Sense of Taste

The tongue is one of the most sensitive organs and in the case of Keats,
it was still more so as will be evident from the closing passage of his Ode on
Melancholy:

“Ay, in the very temple of delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against fine.”

In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats describes the taste of the choicest wine:

“O for a beaker full of the warm South;

Full of the true, the blushful Hippoerene.”

Likewise, in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he writes:

“She found me roots of relish sweet

Of honey wild and manna dew.”

(v) Sense of Hearing

The ear is as much an inlet of beauty as the eye to the poet. His ear
missed nothing from the voice of the grasshoppers in summer when ‘all the
evening’. That is why ‘the poetry of earth is never dead’ to him. Autumn
also re-gales his ear with its characteristic music, beautifully mournful – the
buzzing of the gnats, louder when to wind blows, more subdued when like
hilly bourn in the fading light of an autumnal evening, the chirping on the
32
grasshoppers among the hedges, the soft treble of the robin in the above so
as to be ready for their winter migration.

The nightingale has inspired many poets from Milton to Robert

Bridges, but Keats’s Ode to Nightingale is deservedly the most well-known.
this romantic Ode has made the song of the nightingale as immortal as the
poet himself. The song is full-throated, but is accompanied by perfect ease,
the spontaneity of a consummate artist. The bird is the Dryad of the trees
which has made the beechen plot melodious and the note is full of assertion,
promise and expectancy, and it was heard by emperor or clown in ancient
times, and it had penetrated the sad heart of Ruth or gladdened the ears of a
princess held in duress or violence, in a desolate castle on perilous seas and
awaiting liberation by her lover who will defy the waves for the sake of love.
The nightingale makes the poet forget all the fever and the fret, and the poet
passes into a blissful union with its spirit, but the divine spell unfortunately
cannot last forever and the poet is brought back to his sole self, as the
passionate anthem of the bird fades away in the vernal valleys. His perfect
ear could hear the pattering of the sleet just as much as the humming of the
files on summer eves:

“meantime the frost-wind blows

Like Love’s alarum, pattering the sharp sleet

Against the window-panes.”

Thus it is seen that Keats is a poet of perception rather than of

contemplation. “In his mature poetry, particularly in the Odes, and in
Hperion, sensuousness is penetrated by sentiment, voluptuousness is
permeated by vitality, and aestheticism is tempered by-intellectualism. In
Keats’s palace of poetry, the nucleus is sensuous; but the superstructure has
chambers of more abiding things and more permanent colours.” His poetry

33
is not a mere record of sense-impressions, but it is a spontaneous overflow
of imagination kindled by the senses.

3.6 Hellenism of Keats

The ancient Greeks called their country Hellas and themselves

Hellenes, the name of a tribe that in the time of pre-historic migrations had
settled in a part of Thessaly. Graecia was a name given by the Romans to
Hellas, Hellenism is a derivative from Hellas and is a familiar word in
Swinburne, Hellenism with its: passion for beauty is sometimes contrasted
with Hebraism, the influence of the Bible, with its emphasis on moral rig our
or the value of disciplinary forces. The opposition, however, is more
apparent than real. It is generally admitted that modern European civilization
is harmonious blend of three factors, the philosophy of ancient Greece,
Christianity and the jurisprudence of Rome. But in the case of individuals,
the blend is not usually so harmonious. A notable exception, however, is
Milton, in whom the renaissance and reformation forces blend inextricably.
He steeped in the influence of classical literature so much so that his classical
learning in the language of Hartley, Coleridge is amalgamated and
consubstantiated with his native genius. At the same time all his poetical
works are interfused with the sublimity and moral grandeur of Christian
thought. But Milton was a class by himself. The vast erudition of Ben Jonson
or of Milton has hardly any parallel. In a different way, the case of John
Keats is still more unique.

He was born in the house of a London ostler in the most un-poetical

surroundings. His antecedents and environments were not at all favorable
for the fostering of Hellenism. Like Shakespeare, Keats and ‘little Latin and
less Greek’. Shelley, when asked how Keats could have references to a
Grecian story in his Hyperion, replied, ‘Because he was a Greek’. Nothing
could be truer than this epigrammatic utterance, the significance of which

34
Shelley himself probably but half comprehend. He was not a Greek by
education. He did not know Greek at all and his knowledge of Greek
literature was derived from English translations only. There was nothing of
Greek culture in his heritage either. But he was irresistibly drawn towards
everything that was Greek. That shows that his Hellenism was innate or he
was a born Greek, by instinct a Greek owing to the inborn temperamental
‘Greekness of his mind.’

That Homer, the blind epic poet of ancient Greece, had captivate his
youthful mind is clear from one of the fugitive pieces, the Sonnet to Homer;
which begins thus:

“Standing aloof in giant ignorance,

Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,

As one who sits ashore and longs perchance

To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.”

Homer came to him through Chapman’s translation. Chapman’s Iliad,

through animated by a daring fiery spirit’ is not always ‘loud and bold’ and
Palgrave’s luminous comment is well worth remembering; ‘It may be
noticed that to find in Chapman’s Homer the pure serene of the original, the
reader must bring with him the imagination of the youthful poet; - he must
be a Greek himself as Shelley finely said of Keats.’ The famous sonnet was
written at dawn after a whole night spent over the Iliad:

“Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep hrow’d Homer ruled as his dernesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies.

35
 When a new planet swims into his ken.”

As Keats says, his intellectual horizon was widened by Homeric

poetry, even though he had known Homer through translation. No poet has
been able to recapture the spirit of ancient Greek poetry with a greater insight
and a surer touch than Keats in his unfinished Fragment of an Ode to Maia
written on Monday, 1818.

It was Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), a historical painter who

had introduced him to the Elgin Marbles, derived chiefly from the frieze and
pediment of the Parthenon at Athens, the work of Phidias (c.440 B.C). They
were collected by the Earl of Elgin (1766-1841) and placed in the British
Museum in 1816. Keats’s interest was immediately roused. He was
impressed by its majesty, its simplicity and symmetry, its ‘calm grandeur’
and economy.

The sight of these marbles had not caused merely a momentary

pleasure but it exercised a far-reaching influence on Keats’s own poetic art.
It gave a more potent turn to his poetry than any other external influence.
Some of the qualities of this ‘Phidian lore’ are reflected in his Hyperion.
Two of his famous odes, On Indolence and On a Grecian Urn, are directly
inspired by these examples of an ancient Greek sculpture. To him, the
Grecian Urn is a symbol of the external principle of beauty and has an
oracular message for humanity in all ages, a message as deep as the infinite.
In his mood of indolence, Love, Ambition and the Demonical Poesy appear
before him. As they baffle recognition, Keats remembers the inscrutable
character of the figures on a marble vase. In a sonnet, To Haydon, written
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles he offers an enthusiastic tribute to him for his
early recognition of the genuineness of the collection and in the sonnet On
Seeing the Elgin Marbles, he refers to the mingling of ‘Grecian grandeur
with the wasting of old Time.’

36
 Keats did not fight his own age, from which he affected an imaginative
escape, not into a future land like Shelley, but into the past of Greek art or
mythology. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, he declares the supremacy of ideal
art over Nature or life because of its unchanging expression of perfection,
‘for whatever Art may sacrifice of the loveliness and freshness of Nature, it
attains permanence which attains not.’

“Ah, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever did the Spring adieu.”

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 Chapter – 4

KEATS’S FIVE ODES

4.1 Ode to a Nightingale

The poem was written in April 1819 when Keats was staying with his
friend Charles Brown at Wentworth Palace, Hempstead. A nightingale had
built its next near the house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy, in her
song, and one morning he took, his chair to the grass-plot under a plum tree,
where he sat for two or three hours. When he returned he had the ode ready
in his hands. Thus the ode is a spontaneous expression of the poet’s joy in
the song of the nightingale.

“In part the Ode to a Nightingale is a very important song to Death, in

part it is a song of despair as the song of the bird is in part an invitation to
the supreme ecstasy of Death. In part the voice of immortality is sounding
clearly amid the agony of mortality.”

Keats, listening to the Nightingale’s song, is oppressed by its beauty

and joy (Stanza 1). He longs to escape to the world of the forest by the aid
of a cup of wine (Stanza 2). He longs to escape far from the madding strife,
the fever and fret, the cares and sorrows of daily life (Stanza 3). Poesy shall
bear him away; he finds himself transported to the woodland world (Stanza
4). He finds the beauty of the early summer (Stanza 5). The intolerable power
of pure beauty makes him long for death (Stanza 6). ‘With his own mortality
he contrasts the immortality of the bird (Stanza 7). With the word ‘forlorn’
the, closing stanza calls up a train of other associations which wake him from
his dream; he cannot escape as he has pretended. The song of the Nightingale
fades away in the distance and the poet returns, half-dazed, to real life.

The Ode to a Nightingale is one of the greatest lyrics in the English

language. Bridges writes, “I could not name an English poem of the same

38
length which contains so much beauty as this Ode.” Likewise Middleton
Murry praises the poem in very high terms, “For sheer loveliness this poem
is unsurpassed in the English language.” This poem is the most passionately
human and personal of all the great Odes. It was written soon after the tragic
death of his brother Tom. The poet himself was in the clutches of the terrible
disease. He was also feeling keenly the pangs of his intense, but hopeless
passion for Fanny Browne, and his financial difficulties were aggravated by
the brutal attacks on his poetry. All these pains of life should be considered
as an important background of this beautiful Odes.

In the Ode to a Nightingale the world of mankind and the world of the
nightingale are contrasted. In the first two stanzas the mood of the poet is
that of joy and ecstasy. His senses are almost numb under the spell of the
song of the nightingale. In this mood the poet longs to escape to the world
of the nightingale. But the poet does not forget to paint the sorrows and pains
of life. In fact, the Odes gives a vivid portrayal of the eternal drama of pains
and sufferings. Keats’s mind is not free from frustrations, and like Shelley,
he too has fallen on to thorns of life. He is fully aware of the weariness, the
fever and the fret, of the world of man. It is this state that makes him restless.
He expressed the deep-rooted pain of his heart in the following lines:

“Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows pale and specter-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow,

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where Beauty can-not keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”

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 This note of pessimism is also seen in the lines where Keats expresses
his desire to die – “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” In fact, this
longing may be interpreted as a prophetic longing, for Keats died a
premature, death.

In contrast to this hard world of man is the world of the nightingale.

The nightingale ‘among the leaves has never known’ what mankind
suffering from. The bird, ‘the light-winged Dryad of the trees’ is singing in
some melodious plot some song of summer’ in full-throated ease. The
generations tread thee down. Therefore, the grief-stricken poet wants to
switch over to the world of the nightingale. This is an imagined world. This
imagined world at first threatens to be merely fanciful, but is quickly given
actuality by a wealth of concrete detail.

This whole scene is described to reveal inherent contrast. The scene

is dark, not because it is night-time but because it is in deep woodland
shadow, illuminated only by the occasional streak of light as the breezes part
the leaves. Keats has to ‘guess’ at the scenery with the help of scents creating
a situation in which the imagination can operate he is applying the principle
which he enunciates in the ‘urn’ (Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard, are sweater). The darkness is accounted for on a concrete level by
thick woodland but is also attributable to the scene’s being viewed with the
mind’s rather than the body’s eye: ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy
ways’ recalls the ‘beechen green and shadows numberless’ of the
nightingale’s ‘melodious plot’ but its deeper shadow hints at an imagined
rather than a real scene. This whole section moves with immense subtlety
between the levels of the real and of the imagined world.

In this imagined world lives the nightingale who is an immortal world

as compared to man who is subjected to death. The poet, who is tired of this
mortal world, wants to fly away to the world of the nightingale ‘on the

40
viewless wings of Poesy. But the transient world is too real to be forgotten.
The world ‘forlorn’ brings the poet back to this world. This word is like a
bell ‘to toll me (the poet) back from thee (the nightingale) to my sole self.’
With this the poet returns to the world of hard realities, the world of pains
and worries.

Thus, in the Ode to a Nightingale, Keats has created the two worlds
entirely different from each other. With his feet planted in the world of
miseries, he shares the eternal joys of the world of the nightingale or the
world of imagination. The poet has been quite successful in setting the two
worlds – the real and the ideal, the transient and the eternal, in a very brilliant
and interesting presentation.

4.2 Ode on a Grecian Urn

The Ode on a Grecian Urn was written in the spring of 1819. It could
not have been inspired by any single vase or run, because no known urn of
antiquity portrays both a Bacchanalian procession, i.e., a scene of dancing,
singing and merry-making, and a pastoral sacrifice. Keats must have
imagined the urn he describes, by a mental combination of subjects derived
from different urns Weekes suggests that the inspiration for this ode must
have been partly derived from a marble urn belonging to Lord Holland and
still preserved at his residence. This urn has carved on it the scene of a
pastoral sacrifice in outline; and of course, no subject is commoner in Greek
sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. Keats combines both these scenes
on the imaginary urn described by him in the ode.

The poem was also recited by Keats in course of a walk with Haydon
through the Kilburn Meadows “in a deep and thrilling chant”. It was
published in January 1820.

The poem is remarkable for two things – (1) it is the poet’s matures,
almost final world, in his vision of Hellas (Greek life, culture and art); and
41
(2) it has been interpreted in quite different way and has given rise to endless
controversy. Robert Bridges criticizes the ode as having only one static idea.
He finds no development of thought in it and says, “the poem is
unprogressive, monotonous, and scattered, the attention being called to fresh
details without result.” But according to C.M. Bowra, the introduction, in
the second, third and fourth, we get the exposition of the main theme, and in
the fifth, the conclusion.

The Odes opens with an invocation, and the urn is referred to as the
“unravished bride of quietness.” Thus the urn is a symbol of calm response
and timelessness. The two opening lines together constitute one of those rich
passages which have been described by Rossetti as the “pillars of Hercules
of the human language.” Then follows a string of questions, questions which
are at the same time pictures:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

The poet then proceeds to answer the questions in the second and third
stanzas and in this way the main subject of the poem, that is, the legend
carved on the vase, is described. It is the scene of a Bacchanalian procession
consisting of the flute players, that youth singing under the trees, and the
lover about to kiss. The scene makes the poor think; the carven life – the
silent music of the marble pipes, the unuttered song, the bold lover on the
point of kissing, the beautiful maiden – all this imagined life is more real
than the human life of audible melody and physical embraces. The lover
carved on the urn is happier, for he may not enjoy the fruition of love, but
he would always love, and his beloved would retain her beauty forever:

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

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 Then in a higher philosophical conception the poet expresses:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,

Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

Thus the poet prefers spiritual enjoyment to the sensual enjoyment. In

the fourth stanza there is another scene on the Urn which shows a procession
which is going to sacrifice a calf. It is headed by a priest. Keats here is again
catching his poise and asks his mysterious priest about the animal cry? The
poet in contrast to himself in the preceding stanza, has kept a distance and
“designed a succession of effects;” The poet’s mind moves backward to the
possible city from which the priest, the heifer, and the people going out to
the sacrifice, have come:

What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its fold, this pious morn?

In the answering lines Keats gives a picture of the town which the
people in the procession have vacated. The town is painted as situated near
the river at the foot of a hill and on the top there is a fortress. The town is
empty. The town, Keats says, will always remain desolate and no one will
ever tell its tale.

In the last stanza the readers are told that the Urn is a beautiful object
in Greek art. Its surface is carved with many beautiful objects. There are
pictures of men and women on that. It includes the carved patterns of wild
branches and the grass which is walked over by three revelers. Keats
mentions the Urn again as a silent form and sustains the object’s former
43
association in the second line of the poem. It is in this last stanza that the
poet purports to convey to his readers that it is imagination alone that can
enable us to see into the life of things: intellect can lead us nowhere. The
work of art, like the urn, awaken our imagination and thus seduce us from
thought. They are as remote and eternal as eternity itself. They lie outside
the scope of ordinary thought, as well as outside ordinary emotions. Hence
the urn is referred to as “cold pastoral” which in a “silent form, dost tease us
out of thought as doth eternity.” And then in the concluding lines the poet
gives his message:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

These concluding famous lines have given rise to an endless

discussion and a variety of interpretations. For Robert Bridges they redeem
a poor poem: for Quiller-Couch, they are an uneducated conclusion, and for
T. S. Eliot, they are “a serious blemish on a beautiful poem.” Prof. Garrod
takes “Truth” to mean “reality” and rightly explains the lines thus:

“There is nothing real but the beautiful and nothing beautiful hut he
real.”

Prof. C. M. Bowra narrows the application of the message by saying

that it should not be taken to mean a complete philosophy of life but a theory
of art, “a doctrine intended to explain Keats’s own creative experience” the
lines, according to C. M. Bowra, tell us “what great art means to those who
create it, while they create it, and so long as this doctrine is not applied
beyond, its proper confines, it is not only clear but true”. The conclusion,
according to the Hindu way, hints at Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

44
4.3 To Autumn

The poem was written in 1819, In September 1819, Keats wrote to

John Hamilton Reynolds from Winchester: “How beautiful the season is
now! How fine the air! A, temperate sharpness about it. Really without
joking, chaste weather; “Dian Skies! I never liked stubble-fields so much as
now – Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble
composed upon it.” This composition was the Ode to Autumn.

To Autumn, which contains the record of his quiet September days at

Winchester, is the most perfect of the odes of Keats. It is one of those works
of art in which even the severest critic finds no fault, and of which the praise
is unanimous. In it there is no looking before or after, no pining for what is
not, but a complete abandonment to the enjoyment of the present. In the
poem the poet attains that serenity which he had been seeking so far in vain.
“In this unparalleled description of richly beautiful autumn day he conveys
to us all the peace and comfort which his spirit receives,” states M. R. Hills.
The entire Ode brings out the dreamy, sensuous elements of Keats’s nature.
“The poem expresses the essence of the season but it draws no lesson, no
overt comparison with human life,” says Kenneth Muir. The other greater
odes like the Ode to a Nightingale or Ode on a Grecian Urn are greater
poems; but they lack the artistic perfection and the emotional satisfaction
which this ode possesses. His other odes present before us a Keats who is
torn between dream and reality; this poem offers a Keats who is composed
and quiet.

The theme of the poem is fulfillment or maturity, and the poet has
prolonged this fulfilment through the richness of the images. “Each of the
three stanzas concentrates on a dominant, even archetypal aspect of Autumn,
but while doing so, admits and absorbs its opposite. The theme of the first is
ripeness of growth, now reaching its climax beneath the ‘maturing sun’ as

45
the strain of the weighty fruit bents the apple trees and loads the vines. Yet
growth is still surprisingly going on as Autumn and the sun conspire ‘to set
budding more and still more, later flowers’ and the bees are deceived into
feeling that summer will never end.”

Ode to Autumn is remarkable for its sensuousness and love of Nature.

It was S. A. Brooke who said that Keats had a way of fluttering butterfly-
fashion from one object of sensuous delight to another, and the following
stanza fully justifies his remark:

To bend with apples the mossed cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core:

To swell the ground, plumph the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel: to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has over-brimmed their clammy cells.

It is pure sensuousness, the objective directness and simplicity of

feeling, and expression, the stanzas of the ode form as it were a “serene frame
for troubled picture.” The abundance of the season has been described with
all the sensuous appeal. The vine, apples, bees, all these suggest beautiful
touch and smell, the atmosphere is scented and fresh.

4.4 Ode on Melancholy

The Ode on Melancholy is the last of the odes written in 1819. This
Ode was also published in 1820. It was inspired by Beaumont, Milton and
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The underlying mood of the poem is now
complete sadness, dejection and indecision. In earlier odes like on the ‘Urn’
and on the ‘Nightingale’, he had tried to escape for some time the reality and
46
enjoy beauty. The means to this were self-forgetfulness and absorption in
another image. But now Keats does not evade melancholy hut prepares
himself to face both the aspects of life with complete serenity. This poem,
says a woman critic Aileen Ward, carries the meditation of the two preceding
odes to its ultimate conclusion.

Commenting on the theme of the poem Aileen Ward writes: “Beyond

the awareness that all joy passes that life brings sorrow insurmountable by
joy, this ode explores the thought not only that joy and sorrow are
inextricable but that the deepest joys hold the deepest sorrows.” Hence, “The
theme of the ode to Melancholy is the poet’s realization that suffering is
inevitable and the poet must seek some emotional acceptance of life as it
really is. Keats has even elsewhere been asserting occasionally that man
must turn to the concrete, experiencing it as fully as possible.” says Harald
Bloom.

The poem recognizes that sadness is the inevitable complement of the

moment of intense sensuous happiness:

She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die

And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu.

It is, therefore, as vain to attempt to escape this inevitable pain as to

except a light not to cast shadows. Melancholy springs from the transience
of joy, and the transience of joy is a part of its nature. But the note of the
poem is not ‘Gather Ye rosebuds, while ye may’. The idea of impermanence,
the notion of human joy as fragile, transient thing, the Conviction that joy
turns to poison the bee-mouth sips – these provide the theme of the ode.

The Ode takes its colouring form the personal experience of the poet.
He is in a more bitter mood than usual and tells us that Beauty is the eternal
47
source of melancholy. If a man wants to feed fat his sadness, he should not
look at things counted sad and gloomy, hut at the most beautiful. True
melancholy is not to be found in the sad and ugly things of life nor in death
and its accompaniments, but in everything that is beautiful and joyful. The
deepest melancholy is to be found in April showers, and the beautiful roses,
and bright dark eyes of the beloved. When the melancholy fit falls on thee,
Oh reader, advises the poet,

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow, of the salt and wave,

Or on the wealth of gloved promises,

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless rave,

The lines are an expression of the “ache at the heart of felicity, the
sense of tears in mortal things, which has haunted poets form Virgil to
Herrick and from Herrick to our own day,” as Weekes reports.

A man can enjoy melancholy to the fullest, only when be most deeply
loves the beautiful, when he uses his capacities of joy to the fullest. If he
does not feel so much joy, he would not suffer so much and his grief would
not be so bitter; he does not love Beauty so much, he would not feel so much
when is gone. This is so because,

…………in the very Temple of Delight

Veiled Melancholy has her Sovran shrine and because

She (Melancholy) dwell with Beauty – that must die

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

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 Bidding adieu.

The poem is remarkable for its sensuousness also. For example, note
the following lines:

Or, if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

4.5 Ode on Indolence

The great odes of Keats, the odes that make his make immortal,
except the Ode to Autumn, were all written in the spring of 1819, the Ode on
Indolence being probably the first of these 1819 odes. “Those on Psyche and
the Grecian Urn”, says Sidney Colvin, “are inspired by the old Greek world
of imagination and art; …...these on Melancholy and the Nightingale, by
moods of the poet’s own mind; while the fifth that on Indolence, partakes in
a weaker degree of both inspirations.”

The Ode on Indolence is a perfect expression of a mood of absolute

lethargy. The poet imagines himself lying on a lawn half-asleep in a mood
of supremely careless indolence. “He was in that state of effeminacy in
which the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the
body.” The activity of the mind as well as of the body was suspended for the
moment and he was indifferent to both pain and pleasure:

Ripe was the drowsy hour:

The blissful could of summer indolence,

Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;

Pain had no stings, and pleasure’s wreath no flower.

49
 In such a mood the poet dreams. Love, Ambition and Poetry appear
as ghostly or masque-like figures on a dreamy urn.

Keats wrote to a friend in the summer of 1819: “You will judge of my

1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year is
my writing an Ode on Indolence. I have been very idle lately, very averse to
writing both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from the
abatement of my love of fame. I hope, I am a little more of philosopher that
I was, consequently a little less of a versifying pet lamb.”

He wrote another letter to his brother George on March 19, 1819.

“This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless. I
slept long after a stanza or two of Thomosn’s castle of Indolence, my
passions are all asleep, from having slumbered till nearly eleven, and
weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation about three
degrees on the side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies,
I should call it languor, but as I am, ‘I call it laziness. In this state of
effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the
body, and to such a happy, degree that pleasure has no show or enticement
and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have
any alertness of countenance ‘as they pass by me; they seem rather like
figures on a Greek vase – a man and two women – whom no one but myself
could distinguish in their disguise. This is the only happiness, and is a rare
instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the mind.”

The image struck him as he looked at it again and he worked it out in

the Ode on Indolence. Aileen Ward writes: “His original idea and cooled for
almost two months and could no longer give vital shape to the poem or
significance to the allegorical figures who merely appear and reappear in a
vain effort to rouse from his day dreaming and the conclusion in which he

50
dismisses Love and Poetry as well as Ambition, seems to ring false to his
change of mood in the interval.”

Keats imagines himself lying on a lawn half asleep; there appear

before his eyes three figures, which pass and re-pass as if they were carved
on the sides of an urn which is being slowly turned round. Twice they move
by him; and he does not recognize them, so deep is he sunk in indolent quiet,
the third time they turn their beads, and he knows them to be Love,
Ambition, and Poesy: or the worship of art. The sight of them wakes the
drowsy watcher to a moment’s restlessness; he wants wings to follow them.
But he checks himself, and when they return, the fourth time he bids them
be gone. He loves indolence better than ambition, or passion, or even the
artist’s creative energy. Reluctant to face the labour and strife to which they
call him, he sinks back and relapses into dreams, of which he has an ample
store.

According to A. R. Weekes, this Ode represents one side of Keats’s

genius – its sensuous, dreamy, pleasure-loving elements. He loves indolence
better than ambition or passion, or even the artistic creation. He tells them
that they have no power at the time to raise his “head cool-bedded in the
flowery grass.” They call him to action, to a life of labour and strife, but he
would prefer to lay indolently and enjoy, both by day and night, happy
dreams of which he has an ample store:

Farewell: I yet have visions for the night,

And for the day faint visions there store.

He, therefore, wishes the phantoms to vanish from his idle spirit and
never to return again.

Keats lived for a life of sensations rather than of thought. And it is this
love of the sensuous that the ode expresses. The poet enjoys not only the

51
mood of perfect lethargy “honied indolence” as he calls it, but also the beauty
of nature:

My soul has been a lawn besprinkle’d over,

With flowers, and stirring shades and baffled beams.

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 Chapter – 5

CONCLUSION

Keats wrote sonnets, ballads, narrative poems and odes. But it is in

the odes that his best poetic qualities are found. His odes are the gems of
literature, the jewels of poetry. They are the peacock-throne sitting on which
Keats has become an immortal poet and has achieved a place on the
Parnassus. Once Keats said that he wants to be remembered. Indeed, he is.
Keats is not only present in thoughts but he can be felt, because he arises all
the five senses and on reading his works especially his odes one cannot
escape from the reality that he is an immortal poet. It is worthy to mention
that Keats is considered to be an ‘acknowledged master’ of romantics by
some critics. And as a writer of odes he has excelled himself. Though he has
written his lyric work less in quantity than his narrative, its quality suggests
that if he would have survived a longer span of life, Keats might have
rivelled the greatest. In the words of Sidney Colvin, “Odes of Keats
constitute a class apart in English Literature.” Prof. Selincourt admires the
Odes for their indefinable beauty and emotional intensity and writes,
“Nowhere in our literature, save in some Shakespeare’s sonnets, do these
emotions affect us with the same haunting pathos, for nowhere else do they
find such intensely imaginative expression.” Praising the Odes, Robert
Bridges says, “Had Keats left us only his Odes, his rank among the poets
would not be lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature, at least
the six most famous of them.”

“In the Odes,” says Downer, “he is at his best, and they will live as
long as English poetry is read.” Swinburne pays a more glorious tribute to
Keats’s odes when he writes: “Greater lyrical poetry the world may have
seen than many that is in these odes; lovelier it surely has never seen nor
ever can it possibly see.”

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 Beauty is an integral part of his poetries, it is like soul of his odes and
all his narrative works. As a poet he loved beauty for the beauties sake. His
poetry is pure poetry appealing to all senses rather than to mind His language
is like a flowing brook, glistening with its images, its rich in its colour, light
and sound. His style is untouched and he originated his own which is known
as Keatsian, and again even his style is full of melodic beauty. Thus, the five
great Odes of Keats – The Ode on Melancholy, to A Nightingale, On A
Grecian Urn, To Indolence, and To Autumn, have received the highest
praised from all the critics of Keats. These great Odes are a unique
phenomenon in English literature. Nothing like them existed before. Nothing
like them will ever exist in the future.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Barnard, John (1973): John Keats - The Complete Poems, Third Edition,
England

2. Calvin, Sidney: Keats

3. Murry, J.M. (1925): Keats and Shakespeare

4. Murry, J.M. (1930): Studies in Keats

5. Gittintgs, Robert (September 1818-19): John Keats – The Living Year

6. Forman, H.B (1917): The Poetical Work of John Keats

7. Ward, Aileen (1963): John Keats, The Making of A Poet

8. Clarke, C.C and Mary (1878): Recollections of Writers

9. Bate, W.J (1963): John Keats

10. Rollins, H.E (1965): The Keats Circle: letters and papers

11. Barkins, D (1959): The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of

Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats

12. Abrams, M.H and Harpham, G.G (2015): A Glossary of Literary Terms
(Eleventh Edition)

13. Mundhara S.C (2000): John Keats: The Eve of St. Agnes (Seventh
Edition)

14. Albert, E (1979): A History of English Literature (Fifth Edition)

15. Bowra, C.M (1949): The Romantic Imagination

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