Keats' Odes: Beauty and Truth

John Keats wrote all six of the odes that anchor his legacy in 1819 — five of them in a two-month period, during April and May, and the sixth that September. In October of the same year he turned 24. Seventeen months later, at the age of 25, Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis, leaving behind one of the most concentrated periods of lyric achievement in English literary history.

In addition to covering all of Keats’ odes, in this six-week study we will also examine their extraordinary influence on the lyric tradition by examining other works that wrestle with Keats’ canonical meditations on art, beauty, truth and transience.

Week 1: Ode to Psyche — We begin the study by discussing the first ode in Keats’ sequence — his first mature work — contrasted with two poems by Wallace Stevens, one of Keats’ best known modern admirers and critics. Like Keats, the earlier Stevens poem builds a mental shrine to an internalized goddess of imagination; the later poem is the last one Stevens ever wrote, while he knew he was dying (published posthumously).

• Wallace Stevens: To the One of Fictive Music (1923) & Of Mere Being (1955)

Week 2: Ode to a Nightingale — written in early May 1819, reportedly composed in a single morning under a plum tree in the garden of Wentworth Place (now Keats House, Hampstead).

• Emily Dickinson: I Heard a Fly buzz — when I died (1862)
• Rita Dove: Reverie in Open Air (2003)

Week 3: Ode on a Grecian Urn — written May 1819, closely contemporary with the Nightingale ode. The two are often read as companion pieces exploring related problems of art, permanence, and mortality from different angles.

• Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (1942)
• Eavan Boland: The Dolls Museum in Dublin (1992)

Week 4: Ode on Melancholy — written May 1819.

• William Butler Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium (1927)
• Sylvia Plath: Tulips (1961)

 Week 5: Ode on Indolence — also May 1819, though it was the last of the Spring odes to be published (posthumously in 1848).

• Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man (1921)
• Anne Carson: The Keats Headaches (2019) a handout will be supplied

Week 6: To Autumn — written on 19 September 1819, in Winchester, after Keats took an evening walk along the water meadows of the River Itchen.

Mary Oliver: The Summer Day (1990)

John Berryman: Dream Song 14 (1964)

JOINING DETAILS:

• Six meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK time), 4 June – 9 July
• £240 for six meetings

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REDUCED COSTS:  We are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We can’t promise to help but please email us if you would like to be considered for a reduced-fee place (your details will be treated as confidential).