Introduction to Keats' Odes

Hello. My name is Karen Russell,

and I'd like to talk to you today about six of Kate's odes.

Um, we will talk about in order

the Ode to Psyche,

the Ode on indolence,

The Ode on a Grecian urn,

The Ode

to a Nightingale,

The Ode on Melancholy

and

to Autumn,

with the exception of Indolence,

which didn't make its way into print until after keeps his death.

All of these great roads are collected in

a volume of poetry that's published in 18 20.

Their title

doesn't appear.

None of their titles appears in the title of this volume. It's called Lamia,

Isabella

and the Eve of ST Agnes.

In fact, none of the roads is collected in that volume. As a distinct group.

They're sort of dispersed throughout the volume.

But in the course of the little mini lectures that follow,

what we're going to do is think about what they have in common with each other

and what they have in common with the old form

and its history as Keats

inherits it.

So inheritance is quite an important idea for, uh, discussion today. Um,

in particular, I think I'm going to be drawing your attention to

the importance of Shakespeare,

thought Keats as, uh, someone thinking about what it means to be a poet.

So Keats described Shakespeare as his great

presider. He liked to imagine him sort of looking over his shoulder,

and you'll notice that, uh, as I read today,

I've actually got Keats

in bust form looking over my shoulder,

and I'm afraid to say that I think that keeps would not have approved of this.

Um, it was very ambivalent

about white busts.

He didn't like the kinds of people who ostentatiously put

busts of great cultural figures on display in their houses.

He was also very sensitive about being patronised

for reasons which we'll discuss in a moment.

He didn't like the idea that he might be thought

of as a kind of verse if eyeing pet lamb.

He wrote in a letter to a female friend in 18 19 that he'd been trying

to be a bit more of a philosopher and consequently less of a diversifying pet lamb.

And we'll be thinking, as we go through about that opposition of, um,

getting wisdom, getting philosophy.

Getting knowledge to the idea of poetry is something which could

be sort of patronised or something rather saccharine or effeminate,

Uh, that could be created for a kind of paying audience.

Um, he also I think, wouldn't like,

have liked the idea of him in this rather

diminutive and decorated form on my shelf here,

taking on a lady's shelf is very conscious of his size.

He was a small person, five ft and three quarters of an inch tall.

And

status

and size

really matter

for cultural reasons, for political reasons, which I'm going to go on to discuss,

but also from reasons connected to poetic form.

So the poems that we're going to look at are not

the long

narrative romances, which are named in the title of the 18 20 volume.

No more compact they proceed, stands a sickly.

They have little rooms or spaces, um, separated from each other

in the course of which an argument, a feeling a journey is expatriated, is worked out

and keeps us constantly thinking in the space of these little spans of, uh, poetic

organisation

about

what can be done

with this compact

form,

what the limits of it might be,

how those limitations might at once be a disadvantage

and imprisonment something against one which one might push

and, uh, something creative creative opportunity.

So be thinking about the poetic forms,

which keeps experiments with in which he borrows

and modulates. Uh, in the course of these six ode poems,

I talked about Kate's consciousness of status,

and by the time these poems are being written in 18 19,

he has a very good reason to be very, very conscious of his class

status, because it's something to which attention has been relentlessly drawn

in the reviews.

Reviews that this period really are the medium, the organ through which the tone

and the parameters of taste are set for a literary audience

but also

deeply urgently political vehicles.

And

in particular,

the prosecution of a

an anti liberal political campaign had been carried

out through a series of review articles in

a magazine and Edinburgh magazine called Blackwood's by

a reviewer critic called John Gibson Lockhart,

and between 18 17

and most pertinently for Keith in 18 18, he had been

writing a series of articles on what he labelled the cock knee school of poetry.

He wasn't writing under his own name. He was writing under

the pseudonym Zed,

now after keeps his death.

Um mm.

The editor of another more liberal magazine

calls out John Lockhart

over

the tenor, the tone of these articles by calling out.

I mean, he challenges him to a duel.

And

the editor of the London magazine, John Scott,

actually ends up being shot and killed

by Lockhart's representative in these deals.

So this really gives you a feel for how urgent this matter was.

These are reviews, but they're also a matter of life and death.

And what the Colony school articles actually do is absolutely set.

The terms of Keith's critical reception

for about the next 150 years are extremely, extraordinarily perceptive

and successful in that way.

What

what Lockhart is really aiming at is the liberal politics

of Kate's friends of a circle of friends around the newspaper editor, Um, poet

and critic um,

Leigh Hunt.

Um,

now

the term cock me,

in this

phrase, the cock me school

implies a number of things.

It does have the implication which we now expect of somebody who lives entirely,

has lived all their life, has been born, lived all their life within

the confines of the city of London.

But working back from that idea of a city

dweller,

we have the idea of

limited experience,

someone who doesn't know anything beyond the narrow

range of their rather socially impoverished upbringing.

Working back from there we have it's Entomology in the idea

of a little hen's egg Cock me a cox egg,

a misshapen or runty small little egg.

So then we have working forward from that, the idea of a sort of the runt of the litter,

a weedy fellow, someone who is a milk sop, a mummy's darling,

A kind of the deeds talks about a child that suck us

long so someone who can really stand up for themselves someone who's

such a sort of weed and a delicate, effeminate,

city dwelling type that they can't take real life.

So

we have all these

accusations implied in the idea of the cop in the school of poetry.

But perhaps

the most potent element of this attack on Courtney poetry

is the idea that

the lack of education

and experience the lack of social um,

entitlement

with which this school of poetry might be associated

shows

in their taste and in their poetry.

And

they are,

according to Lockhart poets who refer only to the classics in translation.

They haven't been on the grand tour.

Like the sons of the nobility,

they haven't experienced the great monuments of classical Europe at first hand,

they give us only an inauthentic and secondhand portrayal of classical mythology.

So just read you an excerpt. From what Lockhart says about keeps

from his prototype hunt,

John Keats has acquired a sort of vague

idea that the Greeks were a most tasteful people

and that no mythology can be so finely adapted for the purposes of poetry.

As there's

it is amusing to see what a hand the two cock knees make of this mythology.

The one confesses

that he never read the Greek tragedy ins

and the other knows Homer only from Chapman

and both of them right, about Apollo pan nymphs, muses and mysteries,

as might be expected from persons of their education.

So really, the attack hones in on the idea of the lack of entitlement.

These cock knees have compared to, for example,

a prominent aristocratic poets like Lord Byron, who really had

reported from all the great cultural sites of Europe who was able to view

the Parthenon marbles not in the British Museum but on the site itself.

But the attacks on the Colonies school also single out style

and poetic form

and leave us in no doubt that those choices are

political

as well.

They talk about Kate's loose, nerveless versus fication,

where nerveless here means nerve means something like sinewy

so to, um, to conduct nerveless.

Diversification means verse ification that could sort of stand up for itself.

That lacks muscle that lacks masculinity that lacks

a kind of distinct in stopped form.

And that draws our attention to, um, rhymes

and the difference between what are sometimes called masculine rhymes

and feminine rhymes.

In masculine rhymes,

the rhyme

sound,

the chiming effect falls on a stressed

syllable right at the end

of the line,

whereas in feminine rhymes,

the last word may perhaps be,

um,

polysyllabic may have more than one syllable,

and

the stress might fall

slightly before the end of the line, so the rhyme might be on an unstrung est

syllable.

Of course,

one of the great

users

of

polysyllabic rhymes

is Byron,

but Byron does it to show that he can.

Byron does it

because he's so much the master the virtuosic

master of his materials that he can jokingly

keep hold of one idea from the past whilst responding

to whatever comes with agility and mobility and good humour.

The implication about with the colony school attacks on

Courtney Rhymes is that there's something floppy,

something that sort of falls off at the end about their rhyme schemes,

which can't really assert itself in a masculine

and an authoritative way. At the end,

they also draw attention

largely with reference to keeps his previous classes sizing Long Poem

and Damien, which had been published in 18 18

to keep his knee ology ising style.

By any apologising,

we mean

coining new words or more often with Keith shifting one part of speech into, um,

the place of another. So using now sounds as verbs as in the line from men.

Damien Turtles, meaning turtle doves passion their voices cooing Lee.

That's one of the stylistic events that's really drawn out,

pulled out for ridicule in the company school attacks.

But Keats gets that habit, of course, from Shakespeare.

He's been reading in 18, 18 and 18 19,

has been reading Shakespeare really intensively,

and he's using that kind of experimental shifting of the materials of of style, um,

in a Shakespearean way.

They also draw attention in the copy school attacks to keep his

love of compounding wings of the habit of pushing together two words,

sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not into one.

And they say that that just doesn't make sense,

that it makes a nonsense and incomprehensible kind of jargon,

cocky jargon out of language.

But we'll have a look as we go along

at some of the motives

that might be behind keeps this habit of compounding,

of concentrating and intensifying

words into the smallest space

possible.

So these attacks, um, come out really in 18 18 and a year after this attack. 18 19.

The great roads are composed in a great flurry of activity,

probably between March and September of 18 19

within a year of writing. The last of these odes, of course, keeps left England

for Rome,

where he would die

of tuberculosis

in a rented room on the Spanish steps

at the age of 25.

And

at that point

that the process of mythology, isation of pork, eats

by both his friends and his enemies really begins.

That really portrays Keats as an effeminate

poetic we'd who has been,

as Byron says,

snuffed out by an article who was so wounded,

his feelings so hurt by the bad press that he got for his poetry,

that he just

turned over and died,

the owner of a febrile imagination who's oversensitive to abuse.

It's true that keeps had something to prove in writing the odes,

and we'll talk about what he's about his agenda,

what he's trying to achieve as we read through them.

But I think it's clear

when one reads these poems

that there's nothing feverish or, um,

out of control about the intensity with which these great roads are composed.

Um, there's rather a steady sense of purpose, um,

and

an intensive focus on making

and remaking of a poetic form until it becomes a form of philosophical inquiry.

So remember keeps his letter to

Ms Jeffrey in 18 19, where he says, I have a little more of the philosopher about me

and consequently a little less of diversifying pet lamb.

It's the idea of making as philosophy that I

really want to pursue through all these discussions,

and I'll be doing so under the name that the Greeks gave it pious ISP Oasis, Um,

meaning both a kind of making plane to make

and

the creation

of something

that gives us the word

poetry.