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Keats's Ode to a Nightingale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Richard Harter Fogle
Richard Harter Fogle*
Affiliation:
Tulane University, New Orleans 18, La.
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Extract

The Nightingale ode has been judiciously dealt with from inside the tradition of Keats scholarship by such experts as Sir Sidney Colvin, Ernest de Sélincourt, Douglas Bush, and H. W. Garrod. Recent reinterpretations by Brooks and Warren, by Thomas and Brown, by Allen Tate, F. R. Leavis, Marshall McLuhan, G. Wilson Knight, Albert Guérard, Jr., and others, have brought the Ode into contact with current critical theories. In following them here I can, I believe, be most useful by steering something of a middle course between the modern and traditional: with, however, an unusual emphasis upon general English Romanticism. My explication, then, will consider the Ode to a Nightingale as a Romantic poem, and will venture some exposition of its Romantic principles. I shall also try to bear in mind the implications of recent criticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 1953 , pp. 211 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 Modem Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939), p. 31.

2 “A Reading of Keats,” On the Limits of Poetry (New York: Swallow Press, 1948), p. 177.

3 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), p. 107.

4 Introd., Poems of John Keats, ed. G. Thorn Drury (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., n.d.), p. lxiv.

5 Keats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 113-114.

6 See Sir Sidney Colvin, “A Morning's Walk in a Hampstead Garden,” in The John Keats Memorial Volume (London: John Lane, 1921), p. 73.

7 The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. B. Forman (London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 67. Punctuation and capitals are altered from Forman's text.

8 “Aesthetic Pattern in Keats's Odes,” Univ. of Toronto Quart., xii (1943), 167-168.

9 Letters of Keats, p. 71.

10 “Longinus,” in Lectures in Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), pp. 61-62.

11 Revaluation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), p. 244.

12 Letters of Keats, p. 108. Punctuation and capitals altered.

13 Keats, p. Ill.

14 “Prometheus and the Aeolian Lyre,” Yale Review, xxxiii (1944), 495.

15 Biographia Literaria, Ch. xiv.