Keats's odes and contemporary criticism

Abstract

James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present. While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude (Ode to a Nightingale), the inaccessibility of the past (Ode on a Grecian Urn), the excess of melancholia (Ode on Melancholy), and the beneficence of nature (To Autumn) become culturally coded as female, and he demonstrates how they confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms.