Abstract
Chapter 6 links the odes to the Hyperion project by showing that the odes too were concerned with the consolatory rationale of modern poetry. All of these lyric meditations unfold as exercises in secular consolation. Despite recent claims to the contrary, “Ode to Psyche” does not conceive the goddess as a figure of the immortal soul. From its dramatic opening, “Ode to a Nightingale” reveals ideal havens to be metaleptic projections born of human pain. The voice that narrates “To Autumn” assimilates natural fact to imaginative pattern, dramatizing the mind’s freedom and power to remake temporality as beauty. In all of these texts, Keats insists on the consolatory agency of the poetic imagination.
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Notes
- 1.
See Wasserman’s readings of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as exercises in visionary idealism, in The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems (175–223, 11–62). I first encountered a reference to the “Harvard Keatsians” construed as representatives of a shared approach in the Introduction to Morris Dickstein’s Keats the Poet: A Study in Development (xiii). Idealist readings of Keats generated a critical counter-tradition that, in its concentration on showing that Keats was not an idealist, ironically awarded idealism greater presence in his poetry than in my judgment it deserves.
- 2.
This “noble fellow lying on the bed,” Severn wrote in one letter, “is dying in horror—no kind hope smoothing down his suffering—no philosophy—no religion to support him—yet with all the most knawing desire for it—yet without the possibility of receiving it” (KL 2.368). For an argument that Keats consistently held an undoctrinaire religious faith, and that his deathbed pessimism was the expression of an uncharacteristic mood, see Robert Ryan’s Keats: The Religious Sense.
- 3.
Chandler has described the “Ode to Psyche” as an “act of historiography in the unlikely form of a verse apostrophe” (Chandler 410).
- 4.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (112); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (253); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode” (53–54).
- 5.
Bate, “Tom Moore and the Making of the ‘Ode to Psyche’” (331). Leon Waldoff was also troubled by Keats’s shifting treatment of Cupid, who is displaced throughout the body of the poem and then unexpectedly willed back into the text’s conclusion (113).
- 6.
Keats encodes history chiastically in “Ode to Psyche” as the basis of the text’s intelligibility, Chandler shows, by framing the two middle stanzas describing Psyche’s rites with first and final stanzas describing Psyche herself, and then linking those inner stanzas with an even more concentric narrative transition (in lines 36–44) that expressly recounts Psyche’s cultural displacement, so that “the iterations function historiographically,” with the poem’s mythmaking triggered by the historicist recognitions inhabiting its center (Chandler 409–411, quotation 411).
- 7.
John Barnard (102). My previous chapter cited Daniel Watkins (“History, Self, and Gender in ‘Ode to Psyche’” 92) and Helen Vendler (56) on behalf of the same point. In “Psyche,” Keats seems to resurrect former attitudes to supply content for a project of greatest interest for its stylistic experimentation and technical challenges.
- 8.
By Douglas Bush, for instance, in John Keats (137). In identifying Keats’s allusions in “Ode to a Nightingale,” I rely on the annotations in Bush’s Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats, Allott’s KCP, and Barnard’s John Keats: The Complete Poems. For “Nightingale” and Wordsworth, I also use Beth Lau’s Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (31–59), which lists some twenty-one proposed “Echoes/Allusions” to Wordsworth in Keats’s Ode; for “Nightingale” and Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, which argues that “there are about fifty” borrowings from Shakespeare in the Ode (192 and 264n.25); and for Keats’s possible recourse to the poetry of sensibility, Christopher Miller’s The Invention of Evening (151–162). Ordinarily—“hemlock” serves for instance as an exception—my reading only features allusions detected by several critics. For the sake of economy of argument, I ignore Keats’s echoes of his own previous poems in “Nightingale.”
- 9.
See Lau, Keats’s “Paradise Lost” (61–66), where she discusses Keats’s response to Miltonic “Pathos.”
- 10.
These pronouncements come from Keats’s well-known “Mansion of Many Apartments” letter, in which he insists that developing philosophical maturity requires recognition “that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression” (KL 1.281). In an interesting recent essay, Brittany Pladek argues that “between 1817 and 1819 Keats reoriented his aesthetic and ethical perspective to accommodate a poetry tasked with transmitting suffering rather than alleviating it” (403).
- 11.
Paul Fry has perhaps denied the achievement of sublime transport in “Ode to a Nightingale” most emphatically. “Neither the poet nor the nightingale ever levitates in this ode,” Fry wryly comments; “Since talk of wings and flight has intervened, we miss the essential repetition of ‘Here’” in the ode, as well as “Keats’s repeated and self-sufficient proofs of presence to the hum of existence” (The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode 239).
- 12.
For Vendler, the Keats of “Nightingale” “decides for beauty alone, without truth- content,” and thereby attempts “an escape from threatening sorrow by a deliberate averting of the eyes from human suffering” (78, 82); for Cynthia Chase, the ode ends with “the emptiness of sensory evidence” and in an unbridgeable disjunction between sensation and knowledge (223); Susan Wolfson seemingly sees “Nightingale” as a text stalemated by its skepticism, a poem where “the questions persist” as a legacy of the poet’s experience (Wolfson 317). Not wishing to misrepresent Vendler, I should note that for her Keats “chooses life, and thought” as the death stanza concludes; but what she ultimately stresses is the text’s dissociation of sensibility: “The ode ends, then, as a poem inscribed to beauty rather than to truth, to sensation rather than to thought” (93, 106).
- 13.
The gates of horn and ivory myth is the locus classicus of contrasts between truthful and trivial modes of dreaming, with dreams from the gates of horn being true because prophetic. Keats’s phrasing is most often referred to Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Visited,” which includes the words “waking dream” (3); to Hazlitt’s description of Spenser as “the poet of our waking dreams…lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled” (“On Chaucer and Spenser,” CWH 5.44); and to The Merry Wives of Windsor: “is this a vision? Is this a dream? do I sleep?” (3.5.124).
- 14.
Jonathan Mulrooney argues that as early as late 1817, “Keats’s theatrical experience, and his identification with Kean in particular” moved him towards a poetics of dramatic immediacy: “beginning in 1817, the tellers of Keats’s poems speak from within the experiential moment itself” (“Keats in the Company of Kean” 243, 245). Mulrooney shows that this poetics encouraged Keats’s representation of a liminal, “halfseeing” subjectivity; but it thrust Keats at the same time towards a dramatic lyricism associated with tragedy and soliloquy.
- 15.
Taylor’s letter to Clare of 16 March 1820, as cited in John Goodridge (35).
- 16.
James O’Rourke stresses the necessity of reading Keats’s closing echo of Milton against his poem’s more obvious echo of Donne’s Meditation 17 (“Intrinsic Criticism” 44–45).
- 17.
Keats’s concluding questions mark an ending, Stuart Sperry argued: they “only arise when the poem itself, considered as a vital process of unfolding, has ended. They issue from a standpoint outside it” (267).
- 18.
Bate (58), Miller (163). Similar comments recur in the secondary literature, but see Grant Scott’s claim that here “Keats’s purpose, then, is to write an ode that is as still as a picture, or as nearly as he can, paint a poem.… Unlike the other odes in which the poet is as obsessed by the psychology of the speaker as he is by the desired object, in ‘To Autumn’ his attention has shifted entirely to the sensual aesthetics of the objects themselves” (168). The most direct counterstatement to this sense of the text is James Lott’s essay on “To Autumn,” to which I am indebted for Lott’s insistence both that “the poem depicts a speaker who reacts to the scene” and that the speaker “denies time’s mastery over him” (72, 81). (Miller’s “quasi-mythological presence,” incidentally, is of course the personified Autumn of stanza two.)
- 19.
Hartman, “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” (The Fate of Reading 131, 130, 124, and 146). The imaginative logic of “To Autumn” is so committed to an effacement of subjectivity and consciousness, for some critics, that even in turning to its personification of Autumn the poem in Richard Macksey’s opinion supplies an “emptied consciousness…almost identical with the objectivity personified” (872). “In the last moment of the ode,” Vendler at one point writes analogously, “both loss and its compensatory projections…are forgotten in an annihilation of subjectivity and a pure immersion in the actual” (261).
- 20.
Abrams (77). Critics who consider “To Autumn” in relation to the greater Romantic lyric mostly stress its divergence from Abrams’s model: see for example Miller (163). In my contrary opinion, “Autumn” converges with the paradigm pretty closely: it even includes a variation on the excursus-and-return by beginning with a predominantly realistic stanza, turning to mythopoeia in stanza two, and resuming a realistic stance in concluding. The crucial point, however, is that “To Autumn” resembles Abrams’s defining texts because all of them—a hallmark of their internalized Romanticism—deal with “the nonhuman only insofar as it is the occasion for the activity which defines man: thought, the process of intellection” (77).
- 21.
Culler (59). Although he chiefly addresses the problem of the vocative for textuality, Culler’s remark that apostrophe seems fundamental to “a poetics of the lyric” (60) sanctions Brower’s emphasis on the spoken character of the form.
- 22.
Wolfson (364). “We are to assume,” she adds, “that it is only the bees who do not realize warm days have a finite term; yet the fact that a figure of delusion enters the verse at all, especially accompanied by the very human verb think, suggests the degree to which the poetic voice is itself hovering over the possibility, participating vicariously in a sensation of ceaseless renewal” (364).
- 23.
Virtually everyone who writes on “To Autumn” mentions Keats’s Winchester autumn field letter (KL 2.167) and his anxieties about death. The orphan motif is Vendler’s contribution (259–260). Macksey rightly comments that a “reference to Keats’s own poetic oeuvre in the ‘songs of spring’” phrase is “often noted” in the secondary literature (880). “To Autumn” echoes earlier Keats poems so often—see for example Vendler’s sequence of epigraphs (227–229)—that the ode can easily seem like a poetic retrospect.
- 24.
Vendler (234–243). For the further intertextual filiations of “To Autumn,” there is Miller on the poetry of sensibility (163–169) and Scott on the tradition of English autumn poems (164–167).
- 25.
For the poem’s recourse to parallel syntax and two-part stanzas, consult Vendler (271–272, 253). The point about the elaborative noun phrase and missing verb is Annabel Patterson’s (450); since verbs are “action words,” the absence of a verb grammatically tends against the representation of nature’s processive agency in the imagery of stanza one.
- 26.
Fry (259), Macksey (875, 874). The subsequent citations in this paragraph are also from Macksey (875, 882).
- 27.
For “To Autumn” and the unimaginability of death, see Vendler (281); Helen Regueiro Elam (170–171); and Mark Bracher’s penetrating analysis of “To Autumn,” to which I am particularly indebted.
- 28.
Bracher (639). As regards Keats and ideology, Bracher observes in passing that early new historicist readings of “To Autumn” argued that the text’s “apparent disinterestedness and objectivity are in fact illusory” (634), an ostensible exception to the interpretive consensus from which my essay took its point of departure. But he goes on to claim that the critics in question finally “repress their own acknowledgement of the ideological nature of the poem” because of a theoretically limiting association of “ideology with a discrepancy between description and fact, between representation and the actual events of history” (635).
- 29.
Another memorable text pertinent in this connection is Keats’s well-known journal letter of early 1819, in which imagery of weather, seed fertilization, and the growth and harvesting of plants reminiscent of “To Autumn” figures the inevitability of “trouble” in human life: “This is the world…Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting—While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events—while we are laughing it sprouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck” (KL 2.79).
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Ulmer, W.A. (2017). Secularism and Consolation in Three Odes. In: John Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9_6
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