The Ode

Nancy Goldstein is offering this LitSalon Short as a “taster” for anyone considering joining her for the full Keats’ Odes: Beauty and Truth study, starting on Thursday 4 June. We’ll be discussing Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) first, then considering Wallace Stevens’ adjacent Anecdote of the Jar (1918).

Keats wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn in May of 1819, alongside three of the other six odes for which he is best known: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy and Ode to Indolence. In the previous month he began his sequence with Ode to Psyche; he ended it in September with To Autumn. In October of that year he turned 24. Seventeen months later he died in Rome, of tuberculosis, at the age of 25.

It is one of the most concentrated periods of lyric achievement in English literary history, and Ode on a Grecian Urn, alongside Ode to a Nightingale, is considered one of the exemplars of the English lyric tradition. 

Small wonder then that Wallace Stevens asks, in his poem written while visiting Elizabethton, Tennessee, what it means to follow in Keats’ wake — and in the wake of the entire British literary tradition. Remember: Stevens is a secular 20th-century poet from the new world power that emerges after the First World War. Previously, the United States had been largely peripheral to European great-power politics, and the country and its people were still considered boorish at best and lacking any real aesthetic tradition.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short ahead of the Keats’ Odes: Beauty and Truth study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein, starting in June.
• Wednesday, 29 April, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• ‘Shorts’ are offered free-of-charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. 
• Although there is no fee for this study, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation – perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? – to José Andres’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza, Lebanon and Israel, to Iran, Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.