Life & Background
Keats was born in London in 1795, the son of a stable-keeper, and lost his father at eight and his mother to tuberculosis at fourteen. Apprenticed to an apothecary and trained at Guy's Hospital, he qualified as a licensed apothecary but abandoned medicine for poetry. His social origins were used against him: Blackwood's Magazine attacked him as a member of the vulgar 'Cockney School' around Leigh Hunt. He nursed his brother Tom through tuberculosis and contracted it himself. In 1819, the year of his engagement to Fanny Brawne and of severe financial strain, he wrote the odes, Lamia, and The Eve of St Agnes. He travelled to Rome in the hope of recovery and died there in February 1821, aged twenty-five.
Ode to a Nightingale
The speaker, in a state close to numbness, hears a nightingale singing and longs to join it. He imagines escaping through wine, then rejects that route in favour of poetry itself — the viewless wings of Poesy. Carried into the dark of the garden, he cannot see the flowers around him and identifies each by scent alone. In the darkness he considers how easeful death would be at such a moment, at midnight and without pain, while the bird poured out its song. He calls the nightingale immortal, its voice the same one heard in ancient times and by Ruth in the corn. The word 'forlorn' tolls him back to himself, and the song fades over the hillside, leaving him unsure whether he wakes or sleeps.
The ode's movement is the movement of Keats's imagination generally: an intense attempt to escape consciousness through sensation and art, followed by the return of ordinary self-awareness, which is neither defeat nor triumph. Its synaesthetic imagery — tasting sound, seeing by smell — makes sensuous immediacy an epistemological method rather than decoration. The poem holds two irreconcilable claims without resolving them, exactly the capacity Keats named in a letter as negative capability: being in uncertainties and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The Grecian Urn ode poses the companion problem, with its closing equation of beauty and truth still contested as either the poem's conclusion or an inscription the poem has undercut.
Why Keats Matters
Keats produced, in about nine months, the group of odes generally regarded as the finest short poems in English, and his letters have become nearly as important as the verse — negative capability, the chameleon poet, the vale of soul-making, and the mansion of many apartments are all letter-formulations that entered critical vocabulary. He influenced Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the New Critics used the Grecian Urn ode as their central test case for ambiguity and irony. His life, and his sense of having died before his work was done, made him a lasting figure of the artist cut short.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Endymion1818
- The Eve of St Agnes1819
- La Belle Dame sans Merci1819
- Ode to a Nightingale1819
- Ode on a Grecian Urn1819
- To Autumn1819
- Hyperion (unfinished)1820
- Letters1814–21