Keats's Ode Research Articles

Ovid's Golden Age and Keats's Ode 'To Autumn'

Ovid's Golden Age and Keats's Ode 'To Autumn'

Keats's ODE to a Nightingale

Keats's ODE to a Nightingale

Keats's Urn and Ovid's Pygmalion

Scholars have commonly speculated on how Keats, in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1819), may have collected ideas for the poem's theme, central artefact, and split bacchic and sacrificial scenes from his known encounters with a number of classical vases and the works of various artists and writers.! An additional and hitherto unrecognised single inspiration for all of these aspects of the ode: theme, artefact and split frieze elements, however, may be found in the story of Pygmalion in Ovid's the Meta1110rphoses (c. AD 8). Keats's use of this collection of myths in the composition of EndY111ion (1818) and Hyperiol1 (1818-19) has been recognised from as early as 1905,2 but the apparent connections between Ovid's Pygmalion and the urn poem, it seems, have not yet been examined. In Ovid's recounting of the myth, Pygmalion, offended by the sexual wantonness of Cyprus's female inhabitants, and seeing how they 'spend their times/ So beast-like; [he] frighted \\lith the many crimes/ That rule in women';3 rejects the fleshly revelry he finds around him and chooses a 'higher' state of celibacy. Similarly, the speaker of Keats's ode, inspired by the urn's transfixed

Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism

Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism

Keats's "Paradise Lost" , and: Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism (review)

James O'Rourke. Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). Pp. xiv + 193. $39.95 cloth.

England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism by James Chandler Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity by Saree Makdisi Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 by Tim Fulford , Peter J. Kitson (review)

MLR, 96. , 200I MLR, 96. , 200I Whittakerdrawsparallelsbetween Druidism and Deism in Blake:beginning with TheFour Zoasnaturalreligion is associatedwith Druidism and priestcraftand linked with such elements of patriarchal religion as serpent worship and temples that enshrineauthority. One mightmention anothereighteenth-centurymovement thatinfluencedBlake, that stemming from Winckelmann's advice to revitalize art through producing more vivid portrayalsof traditionalfigures. Blake chose Britishmaterials to forge his epic works. Wordsworth,in the late I790s, also considered the use of British themes, but in a creative reverie was led instead to look within for the topic of his own epic. Thus he broke away from the eighteenth century and the burden of traditionto discovera new world of the imagination. FRAMINGHAMSTATE COLLEGE MARGARET STORCH England in I8i9.- ThePoliticsofLiterary Culture andtheCaseofRomantic Historicism.By JAMESCHANDLER.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. I998. xxii+ 584 pp. $35;?27.95. Romantic Imperialism. Universal Empire andtheCulture ofModernity. By SAREE MAKDISI. (CambridgeStudiesin Romanticism)Cambridge,New York,and Melbourne: CambridgeUniversityPress. I998. xv + 248 pp. ?37.50; $59.95 (paperbound ?I3.95; $18.95). Romanticism andColonialism: WritingandEmpire,I780-1830. Ed. by TIMFULFORD and PETERJ. KITSON. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge UniversityPress. I998. xi + 287 pp.. ?35; $59.95. These books differently engage historical argument within literary criticism. Chandler'sEngland in i8i9, one of the largestand most importantRomantic studies for fifteenyears, offersa dual argument.The criticalargumentis that many British writings of the Romantic period and especially of 1819, canonical and noncanonical , are themselveshistoricist,includingannualizedrepresentationsof events and works,andjoining a representationalmissionwith a purpose of interventionin current conflicts. The meta-critical argument cites Sartre,Levi-Strauss,Althusser, Foucault,Marx, FredricJameson, and others, 'thepolitics of literaryrepresentation in a regime of historicism' (p. xiii). They repeat or continue the historicizing practices of the Romantic-period writers themselves. So to read writings of the Romantic period via historicismis to read them in accordwith theirown meanings and purposes rather than against them. What Chandler calls 'our contemporary "returnto history"' (p. xv) is conceptuallycontinuouswith Romantic writings. First, Chandler explains and documents the arguments about historicizing approaches to literary study. The book-length Part I discusses the hermeneutic superstructureforPartii. PartIalsodevelopsan account of therelationshipbetween polemical literaturesand the 'artof the state'(p. 94) via the tropeof'representation' in the spheresof artandpolitics(pp. 159-66). An 'Interchapter'on Thomas Moore, drawingheavily on the Journals of Thomas Moore(ed. by William S. Dowden, 6 vols (Cranbury,NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1983-9I)) illustratesthe extent and the characterof the activities of historicizingboth representationand intervention in the period. Partii presents'cases':TheBrideofLammermoor by WalterScott, Byron'sDonJuan, Keats's odes and especially'Ode to Psyche',WashingtonIrvingand Englishwriters on America, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. PartII presentspractical criticismbut also massive contextual detail and equally voluminous self-consciousness about the Whittakerdrawsparallelsbetween Druidism and Deism in Blake:beginning with TheFour Zoasnaturalreligion is associatedwith Druidism and priestcraftand linked with such elements of patriarchal religion as serpent worship and temples that enshrineauthority. One mightmention anothereighteenth-centurymovement thatinfluencedBlake, that stemming from Winckelmann's advice to revitalize art through producing more vivid portrayalsof traditionalfigures. Blake chose Britishmaterials to forge his epic works. Wordsworth,in the late I790s, also considered the use of British themes, but in a creative reverie was led instead to look within for the topic of his own epic. Thus he broke away from the eighteenth century and the burden of traditionto discovera new world of the imagination. FRAMINGHAMSTATE COLLEGE MARGARET STORCH England in I8i9.- ThePoliticsofLiterary Culture andtheCaseofRomantic Historicism.By JAMESCHANDLER.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. I998. xxii+ 584 pp. $35;?27.95. Romantic Imperialism. Universal Empire andtheCulture ofModernity. By SAREE MAKDISI. (CambridgeStudiesin Romanticism)Cambridge,New York,and Melbourne: CambridgeUniversityPress. I998. xv + 248 pp. ?37.50; $59.95 (paperbound ?I3.95; $18.95). Romanticism andColonialism: WritingandEmpire,I780-1830. Ed. by TIMFULFORD and PETERJ. KITSON. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge UniversityPress. I998. xi + 287 pp.. ?35; $59.95. These books differently engage historical argument within literary criticism. Chandler'sEngland in i8i9, one of the largestand most importantRomantic studies for fifteenyears, offersa dual argument.The criticalargumentis that many British writings of the Romantic period and especially of 1819, canonical and noncanonical , are themselveshistoricist,includingannualizedrepresentationsof events and works,andjoining a representationalmissionwith a purpose of interventionin current conflicts. The meta-critical argument cites Sartre,Levi...

Keats's odes and contemporary criticism

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.

The Shape of Despair: Structure and Vision in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

According to Karl Kroeber and Stuart M. Sperry, Keats languished in the gap between the "audience" he had achieved as a poet and the "community" he longed for. This, claims Kroeber, is the fate of all Western artists, who are doomed merely to report "dream material" to an audience of witnesses rather than to transfer a "vision" to a community that can enact it and derive social cohesion and "energy" from it. As I examine the structural underpinnings of Keats's ode, however, I find that it both enables and provides a location for a ritual transformation of the reader as an active participant. As readers of the ode, we are escorted through a rite of passage that has the shape of what anthropologist Victor Turner has called a "liminal" transition. According to Turner such "liminal" transitions, passages in which individuals suffer both disintegration and reintegration, are the means by which people are synthesized into a community. The "Ode on a Grecian Urn," then, stands apart from Kroeber's lament that western art can only serve to draw "energy" from an audience. The ode transfers visionary energy to a community of readers.

Herbert, Keats, and the Romantic Revival of Metaphysical Poetry

Herbert, Keats, and the Romantic Revival of Metaphysical Poetry by William R. Hooton, III Heard echoes are sweet; however those previously unheard are sweeter, as they give voice to literary and historical relationships that have been ignored or suppressed. Such has been the case with the influence of early seventeenth-century poets on the Romantics, a topic largely ignored by critics. For example, Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding have questioned whether the critical theory of strict New Historicists, such as Jerome McGann, discourages inter-era criticism. According to McGann, the historical critic should focus on the "relevant differentials" that distinguish both eras and the minds within them, thus preserving the "historical uniqueness of subject and object." For McGann, then, historical criticism "establishes the ground on which such differentials can be adequately and fully articulated ."1 McGann's method, however, does not preclude cross-period historical analysis, a point I intend to utilize in establishing how the historical text of Herbert enters into the Romantic era as a communicative , and thus political, object. McGann does not sequester the past from the present entirely; he rather requires that the past be interpreted as past within criticism of the age. Both the Romantic era and the seventeenth century suffered from serious political instability, and were filled with military actions and a heated dialogue of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ideas. These significant historical similarities probably played a part in determining how readers in the Romantic period received seventeenthcentury literature, and "relevant differentials" help us understand the variety of responses to the reappearance of a volume like Herbert's Temple. A new effort to unearth connections between Romanticism and the "century of revolution," to use Christopher Hill's term, has taken place in the last few years. For example, three recent publications have focused on historical, political, and literary relationships between writers of the two ages. A special edition of The Wordsworth Circle provides many new insights into political connections between the revolutionary-minded Romantic era and the seventeenth-century.2 An entire issue of the John Donne Journal offers an excellent discussion 34William R. Hooton, ?? centering on the reception of the literature of the Metaphysicals during the nineteenth century.3 And Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism, a collection of essays edited by Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding, opens up a dialogue between Romantic and seventeenthcentury literature that should prove enriching for critics of both eras.4 Beyond these fine volumes, an expanded examination of the direct influence of specific seventeenth-century authors on Romantic writers is needed. Emphasis must be placed on how the Romantics "read" their predecessors and in what sociopolitical context their reading and reaction takes place. As a particular case, I will examine the influence of Herbert's "Jordan" (I) on several odes of John Keats. I hope to show that his use of Herbert's ideas and poetry underscores Keats's political liberalism, religious non-conformity, and poetic philosophy in the highly-charged social climate in which he wrote. Furthermore, given the general tendency of scholars to ascribe Herbert's nineteenth-century "revival" to the 1835 Pickering edition, I will attempt to show that Herbert's revival began much earlier, and trace the beginnings of the Romantic recovery of Herbert's work. In doing so, I will show how the politics of the Romantic era facilitated the recovery of Herbert and led to the type of intertextual echoes of Herbert's "Jordan" (I) found in Keats's odes. Herbert in the Romantic Age: The Context for a Revival The poetry of Herbert and the other Metaphysicals enjoyed a revival of interest during the Romantic period. As Arthur H. Nethercot argued long ago, poems written by many of the "elder poets" (Coleridge's term) had been reprinted in eighteenth-century miscellanies, increasing their availability to a growing antiquarian readership and contributing to a general rise in their reputation.' Although the general reading public tended to ignore most Metaphysical poetry, eighteenth-century miscellanies containing Herbert's work kept his reputation alive among many religious readers who enjoyed what they perceived as his pious sentiment. His name and work were mentioned in numerous sermons during the late eighteenth century, whileJohn Wesley...

Writing for the Market: Keats's Odes as Commodities

Writing for the Market: Keats's Odes as Commodities

Keats's Ode on Melancholy

Keats's Ode on Melancholy

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Hardy's the Oxen

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Hardy's the Oxen

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, lines 61–62

Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, lines 61–62

Mourning Becomes Melancholia. A Muse Deconstructed: Keats's Ode on Melancholy

REUD'S Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one is tempted to say, leads mourning melancholia.* Such an outcome for and however, is less conclusive than the universal beyond may suggest. Mourning defies definition just as melancholia, its unworkable other, defies mourning.2 At a first glance, it looks as if, according to Freud, melancholia leads mourning, and it seems to be the pleasure principle that is left behind in melancholia rather than in mourning. At a second glance, then, there is a narcissistic relapse to be observed in melancholia that accounts for the inability to mourn. Melancholia, thus, would be the dead end of the pleasure principle, while the ability to mourn leads in that it not only comes to terms with, but acknowledges that which remains inaccessible to those terms-the human condition

The Causes of Effect: Edith Wharton and the Economics of Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis, from one point of view, is the aesthetician's topos par excellence. In it, one art contemplates another and in the process defines its own limits. In ekphrastic poems such as Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, a literary work compares its temporality to the still moment of the visual arts, yearns for an atemporal transcendence made impossible by its own medium, yet wins out over time through rhetorical sleight of hand (Steiner 1982: 41-42). But this purely aesthetic function of ekphrasis is just one of many that the topos serves. In this paper I would like to explore another: the role of ekphrasis in the novelistic clash between capitalist and aristocratic ideals. This conflict is expressed, in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth as elsewhere, through two opposed plot structures: on the one hand, the rags-to-riches story epitomized in the Horatio Alger books, and on the other, the chivalric romance, with its roots in fairy tale and myth. In the first, value arises from hard work, and causeand-effect relations are crucial. In the second, value is associated with the transcendent and eternal sphere, and the aim is to escape the world of causality into a purer realm. Ekphrasis, as the topos of the still, transcendent moment, opposes the contingency of plot flow and temporal progression in the novel and hence plays a signal role in the confrontation between contextual and acontextual value.

From ‘Autumn’ to Autumn in Keats's Ode

From ‘Autumn’ to Autumn in Keats's Ode

The Musical Quality of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village

The Musical Quality of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village

The Experiential Beginnings of Keats's Odes

The Experiential Beginnings of Keats's Odes

Keats's Ode to Psyche and the Transformation of Mental Landscape

Keats's Ode to Psyche and the Transformation of Mental Landscape