Celebrating the bicentenary of the great odes that assured John Keats of eternal fame
Keats’s 1819 odes explore the use of the imagination and the creative process to cope with the problems of time, change and the suffering and brevity of life
Taken together, John Keats’s six major odes, written 200 years ago this year, mark a highly significant moment in the history of English poetry and have become regarded widely as the greatest written in the 19th century.
They were to guarantee Keats the eternal fame (posthumous, of course) for which he had yearned; he had created a new kind of lyrical poem, a new form of ode, which was to influence poets of later generations. The odes are derived from the sonnet form with which Keats was always experimenting.
The most prevalent thematic thread running through all of these great odes, culminating in ‘To Autumn’, (see my previous essay, ‘It’s the 200th anniversary of John Keats writing his famous Ode to Autumn’) is that of a profound sense of loss coupled with adaptation to mutability and natural process, representing one of the most remarkable achievements in literature in this regard.
The five other odes are ‘To Psyche’, ‘On a Grecian urn’, ‘To a nightingale’, ‘On Melancholy’ and ‘On Indolence’, this being the probable order of their composition, in rapid succession…
