Keats composed his first ode early in 1815, while an apprentice surgeon-apothecary. Addressed to Apollo, it imagines bards singing in the western sky, Shakespeare and Milton among them, their lyres strung with the rays of the setting sun. In the next five years he wrote eleven more, of which five, the so-called “Great Odes” of 1819, stand among the most celebrated in English: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. But what is - and was - an “ode”?

“I’d like all suchlike odes there’ve ever been, binned by a truly democratic nation.” This reaction to the possibility, in 1999, of a Poet-Laureate ode should be compared with John Aikin’s claim, in 1772, that the “modern ode” displays “the boldest flights of poetical enthusiasm, and the wildest creations of the imagination, and requires the assistance of every figure that can adorn language and raise it above its ordinary pitch.” Both comments, political and aesthetic, apply to the ode as Keats knew it, a contradictory genre that came, like the ancient artifact it is, not only with a distinct “attitude” but also, as Stuart Curran reminds us, a “fully realized literary history.” Its principal formal variants (the strict Pindaric, the stanzaic Horatian, and the irregular) had been mastered by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others; all remained working options for Keats and his generation. And yet the inherent paradoxes of the form were particularly obvious at this point in its history. Traditionally dedicated to the celebration of an external object, the ode and its characteristic figures, apostrophe and personification, were frequently read self-reflexively, as bravura displays of visionary imagination.