Page 101 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and, even though
it is discussed in which order they were written, “Ode to Psyche” opened the published series.
Brown believed that “Ode to a Nightingale” was composed under a plum tree in a garden.
Brown wrote, “In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a
tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-
table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into
the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly
thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained
his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale.” Dilke, co-owner of the house, tirelessly
denied the story, printed in Milnes’ 1848 biography of Keats, considering it as pure delusion.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
First stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”,
May 1819
Ode on Melancholy” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” were inspired by sonnet forms and possibly
written after “Ode to a Nightingale”. John Keats’s new and progressive publishers Taylor and
Hessey issued Endymion, which Keats devoted to Thomas Chatterton, a work that he called “a
trial of my Powers of Imagination”. It was damned by the critics, giving rise to Byron’s quip that
Keats was ultimately “snuffed out by an article”, signifying that he never truly got over it. A
chiefly harsh review by John Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of The Quarterly
Review. “John Gibson Lockhart writing in Blackwood’s Magazine defined Endymion as
“imperturbable drivelling idiocy”. With sharp sarcasm, Lockhart advised, “It is a better and a
wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to
plasters, pills, and ointment boxes “. It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who invented the defamatory
term “the Cockney School” for Hunt and his circle, which consisted of both Keats and Hazlitt.
The dismissal was as much political as literary, meant to upstart young writers deemed uncouth
for their lack of education, non-formal rhyming and “low diction”. They had not attended Eton,
Harrow or Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.
John Keats in 1819, wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, Hyperion, Lamia
and Otho (critically damned and not dramatised until 1950). The poems “Bards of passion and of
mirth” and “Fancy” were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place. In September, short of
finances and in despair considering taking up a post as a ship’s surgeon or journalism, he went
to his publishers with a new book of poems. They were uninspired with the collection, finding
the presented versions of “Lamia” confusing, and describing “St Agnes” as having a “sense of
pettish disgust” and “a ‘Don Juan’ style of mingling up sentiment and sneering” saying it was “a
poem unfit for ladies”. The last volume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes,
and Other Poems, was finally published in July 1820. It received much more recognition than
had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both Edinburgh Review and The Examiner.
It was recognised as one of the most significant poetic works ever published.
Wentworth Place now houses the Keats House museum.

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