John KeatsOdes

• The power of imagination• What we find beauty in the world or in our

imagination. Beauty is truth or truth is beauty.• Art is about beauty, not about teaching or persuasion• Keats' poem is after the form of the Horatian ode.

• Odes were one of the classical verse forms reintroduced and experimented with in the Romantic period.

• Romantic odes were often used in meditative tributes.

• This ode consists of five 10-line stanzas, each composed of a quatrain followed by a sestet. The quatrains have an ABAB rhyme scheme, sometimes employing off-rhymes.

• The sestets have a rhyme scheme that varies. On the printed page, the lines in the sestet that rhyme are indented by the same amount. The base meter of Ode is iambic pentameter.

• Horatian Ode• Iambic metre• The Horatian Ode is simply a stanzaic form in which

all stanzas are structured in the same pattern at the discretion of the poet. (rhyme, meter, number of lines etc.), more technically it is "nonce stanzaic" or a "homostrophic" ode (ode made up of same structured stanzas created specifically for that poem).

• Horatian ode, short lyric poem written in stanzas of two or four lines in the manner of the 1st-century-BC Latin poet Horace

Characteristics of the Ode

• a single, unified strain of exalted lyrical verse• tends to focus on one purpose and theme• its tone and manner is typically elaborate, dignified,

and imaginative• There are three types of Odes in English: 1) the

Pindaric or Regular ode; 2) the Horatian or Homostrophic; and 3) the Irregular.

• The Pindaric is characterized by a three strophe pattern of strophe, antistrophe, and epode. Each new three strophe pattern repeats the meter and rhyme scheme of the first set.

• The Horatian has only one stanza type. • The Irregular has no consistent stanza pattern.• Keats' odes tend to be ten-line stanzas in

iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ababcdecde. On the basis of this, one could argue that Keats is broadly Horatian.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

• Ode on a Grecian Urn: a meditation on an urn

• Stanza 1: Imagery• The first four lines serve to

present the urn first as a bride, then as a foster-child, then as a historian. These comparisons are productive, if fully visualized

• The use of imagery, sound effects, and poetic form in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn

• The urn is an as yet unravished bride of quietness. It is not a wife. This may mean that the pictures and engravings on the urn are as sharp as the day it was made; if it had been ravished by quietness, the figures on the urn might not speak to the poem's speaker as strongly as they do.

• The urn is an adopted child of silence and slow time. This may refer to the urn as a product of the busyness and industry of an artisan's workshop that now, probably in a museum, stands separate from the bustle and noise of human life.

Sound effects

• pipes and timbrels,• Stanza 2: Imagery• The imagery in stanza 2 is straightforward, yet it is used to express

complex ideas: unheard melodies are sweeter than heard melodies, so "pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone"; the lover who will never kiss, yet who will love forever. The "sweeter unheard melodies" is an expression of the speaker's great respect for imagination. Few of us would suggest that it is better to imagine hearing great music than to actually hear it. The whole stanza seems a tribute to the imagined ideal as being greater than the actual could ever be. Or perhaps it is a tribute to the process of imagining as being greater than any of its products.

Sound effects

• The stanza's quatrain has not one line of full regular meter, while all the lines of the sestet can be read as regular. It is almost as if the speaker is playing a ditty not of tone, but of rhythm in the quatrain. The sestet begins a theme that continues through the first seven lines of stanza 3. In this theme regular iambic pentameter is maintained, and within lines words are repeated as one might do in the height of passion or when speaking to a child. There is particular emphasis on the "ver" sound, for example "nor ever, …lover, never, never." Every line of the sestet but the last is filled with "not" and "never." This causes tension to build that is resolved in the last line of the sestet.

• Cleanth Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme of "Ode to a Nightingale" somewhat differently: "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast.“

• Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of...inner conflicts."

• Pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn” and in Ode to Psyche; love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure.

Conflicts in Keats’ Odes• transient sensation or passion / enduring art• dream or vision / reality• joy / melancholy• the ideal / the real• mortal / immortal• life / death• separation / connection• being immersed in passion / desiring to escape

passion• Identity is an issue.

Keats' Theory of Negative Capability

• 'The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.‘

• “Negative Capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.

• The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty & truth [. . .] I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [. . .] with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

• Keats' theory of "negative capability" is concerned with a particular state of poetic receptivity that makes literary creation possible. Ist "concentrates on capturing the intensity of emotion and communicating this feeling via the imagination.

• This involves a key action: the poet must throw himself into an object in order to obliterate his personal identity. [. . .] The purpose of this is to fuse emotional intensity with the object so that the object becomes symbolic of the emotions.

• This complete fusion of poet and thing is so intense that all "disagreeables," all associations that are not particularly relevant to the poet’s key insight, are displaced.

• As a result, the beauty and the truth that are present there are a union of the perceived object and the poet’s emotions. This is especially important to Keats because it removes the need to establish a kind of scientific certainty; instead, the poet (and audience) reveal in the mystery, the undefined ambiguities. It represents an openness to experience. Keats' theory breaks down as the following:

• Imagination communicates an intense emotion.• The poet gives up personal identity to focus on the

object being described.• As a result, the object becomes symbolic of these

intense emotions.• And all other matters not important to this emotion

are sidelined.• The poem's beauty/truth are a combination of poetic

emotion and perceived object.• This leaves open the enjoyment of mystery because

the poem is a subjective truth.

• The urn in "Ode to a Grecian Urn," is an object that speaks a truth and a beauty, but that truth and beauty are understood by the negative capability of the artist. The urn's message is one that is finally open-ended and mysterious.

• Keats says that the 'poetical character... has no self- it is everything and nothing- it has no character and enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated- it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet... A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body’.