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It’s the 200th anniversary of John Keats writing his famous ‘Ode to Autumn’
September 2019 marks 200 years since ‘Ode to Autumn’ was written by John Keats, the tragic Romantic genius who died of tuberculosis at the age of 25
On September 19, 1819, John Keats, while lodging in Winchester, the old West Saxon capital of England, wrote his famous ‘Ode to Autumn’, perhaps the most anthologised of poems.
Keats (1795–1821) had come to Winchester in the late summer from the Isle of Wight where he had gone to work on poems and his verse play Otho. He was attracted by the city’s medieval ambience — and the need for a reference library.
Walks to the countryside, ‘an hour before dinner’, from his lodging house near Winchester Cathedral (the building where he stayed is long gone), became his evening custom.
On Sunday, September 19, Keats took just such a walk. He probably went by the ‘river sallows’ and water meadows along the Itchen, or to St Giles Hill where he would have seen thatched cottages and those ‘stubble-plains’.
We know about that walk from a letter he sent to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds two days later in which Keats describes the effect the landscape had upon him, inspiring him to write ‘To Autumn’.
‘How beautiful the season is now — How fine the air,’ he wrote. ‘A temperate sharpness about it … I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now … Somehow a stubble plain looks warm — in the same way that some pictures look warm — this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.’
‘To Autumn’, drafted that evening, was included, after some revisions, in Keats’s 1820 collection entitled Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems. It was the last in a series of six great odes that Keats produced during 1819 and, indeed, the last major poem he wrote in his short life, effectively ending his career.
Marking the writing of ‘To Autumn’ focuses our attention on the odes, in this their anniversary year, and I discuss them in a follow-up essay (‘Celebrating the bicentenary of the great odes…’) for they assured Keats of his place in the pantheon of English poetry.
