‘Philosophic Numbers Smooth’: The Ambivalence of Song in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the double currency of song in Keats’s poetry. I read Keats’s presentation of song as a symbol of both transcendent purity and meaningless sensuousness against the eighteenth-century rise of abstract music and speculative histories of the origins of language. Conceptually released from logos, music is considered to be expressive of individual interiority through technique and structure. Traced to involuntary expressions of the emotions, human language finds kinship with (mechanical) animal vocalisation. At the intersections of language and music, song, as a motif, allows Keats to explore how we translate quantitative material into aesthetic experience through the projection of intentionality. Keats plays with the suppression of the anxious quantifying tendencies of the human mind through absorption into pure sensation and intransitive consciousness. Ultimately, however, Keats’s poetics, with animal song as its ideal, frustrates itself with its self-annihilating desire for sensation without meaning.