Context
In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and
enduring poems in the English language. Among his greatest
achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes, written between March and
September 1819--astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old.
Keats's poetic achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at
which it ended: He died barely a year after finishing the ode "To Autumn,"
in February 1821.
Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he
was still young, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to
tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. When he
was fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship, and eventually
he went to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty, he
abandoned his medical training to devote himself wholly to
poetry. He published his first book of poems in 1817; they drew savage
critical attacks from an influential magazine, and his second book attracted
comparatively little notice when it appeared the next year. Keats's
brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and Keats moved in
with a friend in Hampstead.
In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During this
time, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration
that enabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the
time before he died. His health and his finances declined
sharply, and he set off for Italy in the summer of 1820, hoping the warmer
climate might restore his health. He never returned home. His death
brought to an untimely end one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of
the nineteenth century--indeed, one of the most extraordinary poetic
careers of all time. Keats never achieved widespread recognition for his
work in his own life (his bitter request for his tombstone: "Here lies one
whose name was writ on water"), but he was sustained by a deep inner
confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his death, he remarked that
he believed he would be among "the English poets" when he had died.
Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century
Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and
imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the
ideas and themes evident in Keats's great odes are quintessentially
Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination
and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and
the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in
which the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth,
and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic
preoccupations--though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats's.
Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story--there is no unifying
"plot" and no recurring characters--and there is little evidence that
Keats intended them to stand together as a single work of art.
Nevertheless, the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations
between them is impossible to ignore. The odes explore and develop the
same themes, partake of many of the same approaches and images, and,
ordered in a certain way, exhibit an unmistakable psychological
development. This is not to say that the poems do not stand on their
own--they do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of the
sequence is that it can be entered at any point, viewed wholly or
partially from any perspective, and still prove moving and rewarding to
read. There has been a great deal of critical debate over how to treat the
voices that speak the poems--are they meant to be read as though a single
person speaks them all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each
ode?
There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the
question itself is wrong: The consciousness at work in each of the odes is
unmistakably Keats's own. Of course, the poems are not explicitly
autobiographical (it is unlikely that all the events really
happened to Keats), but given their sincerity and their shared
frame of thematic reference, there is no reason to think that they do not
come from the same part of Keats's mind--that is to say, that they are not
all told by the same part of Keats's reflected self. In that sense, there
is no harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same
voice. The psychological progress from "Ode on Indolence" to "To Autumn"
is intimately personal, and a great deal of that intimacy is lost if one
begins to imagine that the odes are spoken by a sequence of fictional
characters. When you think of "the speaker" of these poems, think of Keats
as he would have imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the
speaker's trajectory from the numb drowsiness of "Indolence" to the quiet
wisdom of "Autumn," try to hear the voice develop and change under the
guidance of Keats's extraordinary language.
