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The Odes of John Keats Helen Vendler The Belkbap Press of . Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Copyright 0 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in th~ United States of America Ninth printing, 2003 This book is printed on acid-free paper. and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Vendler. Helen Hennessy. The odes of John Keats. Includes index. I. Keats, John, 179S-lbl-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR4837. V4 3 1983 bl'.7 83-IS8 ISBN 0-674-63075-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-63076-9 (paper) To Marguerite Stewart Acknowledgments It has been a privilege (which only others who have written on Keats can fully know) to have spent a portion of my life with Keats's words and thoughts constantly in my mind. I am grateful to those who helped in the writing of this book. First of all, I am . indebted to the late Douglas Bush: it was his masterly introduction to the Selected Poems that took me from my first knowledge of Keats (a legacy from my mother) to a more adult one; and it was his life-mask of Keats that first showed me Keats's face. Walter Jackson Bate has given me a life-mask of Keats made at the same time as Douglas Bush's; the book has been written with the mask as Presider (as Keats called the picture of Shakespeare which he orna mented with tassels). The Department of English at Kenyon Col lege encouraged me to begin this book by inviting me to give the John Crowe Ransom Memorial Lectures; the memory of the happy week spent at Kenyon remains for me in these pages. I wish to thank as well Princeton University, where these lectures were given as a Gauss Seminar; the audiences at Kenyon and Princeton and other universities all helped me refine my original tentative draft. The chapter on the ode To Autumn was delivered as a Beall-Russell Lecture at Baylor University in 1982. The Keats Museum at Hampstead and the Houghton Library of Harvard are resources to which I, like all writers on Keats, am indebted. This book was sub stantially completed during my tenure of a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, supplemented by a sabbatical leave and by research and typing grants from Boston Uni- viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS versity: much of the writing was done while I was an overseas Fellow at Churchill College of Cambridge University. lowe partic ular thanks to Sir William Hawthorne, Master of Churchill College, and to George and Zara Steiner for their kind hospitality to me during my college stay. I am grateful to Harvard University Press for permission to quote both text and notes from The Poems ofJ ohn Keats, edited by Jack Stillinger (1978): readers should consult that edition for bibliograph ical details encountered here in notes labeled "Stillinger's notes." Keats's letters are quoted by permission from the Harvard Univer sity Press edition by Hyder E. Rollins (1958). I quote from the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by kind permission of Alfred A. Knopf. The ambrotype of Fanny Brawne is reproduced by permis sion of the Curator of the Keats House and Museum in Hampstead; Keats's tracing of the Sosibios Vase is reproduced by permission of the Curator of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome. The two fragments from the Elgin marbles are reproduced by permis sion of the British Museum; Canova's Cupid and Psyche is repro duced by permission of the Louvre; and the death-mask of Keats is reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, England. Finally, I wish to thank those close friends on whom my mind depends for daily sustenance, especially Marguerite Stewart, named in the dedication of this book. Many of my thoughts were hers first. Contents Introduction / 1 I Stirring Shades and BafBed Beams: The Ode on Indolence 15 II Tuneless Numbers: The Ode to Psyche 41 III Wild Warblings from the Aeolian Lyre: The Ode to a Nightingale 71 IV Truth the Best Music: The Ode on a Grecian Urn 111 V The Strenuous Tongue: The pde OJ' Melancholy 153 VI The Dark Secret Chambers: The Fall ofH yperion 191 VII Peaceful Sway above Man's Harvesting: To Autumn 227 Conclusion / 289 Notes / 297 Index / 327 ILLUSTRATIONS Drawing of the Sosibios Vase from the Musee Napoleon, ascribed to Keats / 17 I I Cupid and Psyche, by Antonio Canova / 43 I I I Frontispiece and title page to The Nighti1fgale (London, 1742) / 73 I V Fragment from the Parthenon frieze representing the Panathenaic procession / 113 V Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne. taken in England in the early ISSOS / 155 VI Death-mask of John Keats / 193 V I I Figures from the pediment to the Parthenon, sometimes identified as Demeter, Persephone, and Aphrodite / 231 I deem Truth the best Music. -Endymion, IV, 772-773 They will explain themselves - as all poems should do without any comment. - Keats to his brother George, 2 January 1818: Letters, II, 21 Is Criticism a true thing? -Keats's marginal comment to Dr. Johnson's remarks on As You Like It