Ode to a Nightingale

“Ode to a Nightingale” is one of the six great odes written by John Keats, five of them in the summer of 1819. The group includes “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn.” Considered among the most important works of Keats, the odes are united more in their thematic concerns than plot or narrative. The themes running through the odes are Romantic: the power of the imagination, the perfection of nature, and the relationship between nature, art, and humans. They are also an ode themselves to classical Greek forms. Romantic poets like Lord Byron (1788-1824) and Keats were deeply interested in ancient Greece. The visual arts, literature, and philosophy of Greco-Roman culture were seen as the perfect synthesis of nature and art. Keats not only borrows the form of the ode from Greek literature, but he also uses allusions from the culture throughout the odes.

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the symbol of the nightingale may be inspired by the figure of Philomela, a character in the Roman writer Ovid’s tales Metamorphoses. Philomela’s brother-in-law Tereus rapes her and cuts off her tongue so she stays silent about his crime. Philomela gets her escape—and revenge—by transforming into a nightingale and lamenting her fate through song. Strikingly, the nightingale in Keats’s ode also symbolizes the ideas of escape and transformation. In terms of the form of the poem, Keats’s model is the Horatian ode, after the Roman poet Horace. Unlike the Pindaric ode, which is divided in three parts, the Horatian ode has several stanzas of two-to-four lines (Keats modifies this to 10) and has a regular meter, line length, and rhyme scheme. Keats adapts the formal ode to his sensual language, immersive imagery, and deeply personal themes.

Romanticism is a movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts that arose in the latter half of the 18th century in Europe. The high Romantic period in English poetry covers the period between 1800-1850, though Romantic ideas continue to influence contemporary art and literature. Romanticism arose partly in response to the ideals of the Enlightenment (the dominant 18th-century thought), which emphasized reason, intellect, utility, and harmony above all else. While the poetry of the Enlightenment period often celebrated order and reason, Romantic poetry prioritizes the free imagination as well. Imagination is almost a spiritual force in Romanticism, enabling humans to realize the perfection inherent in nature. Nature, representing purity, wilderness, and freedom, is often the ultimate good. These themes can be seen in “Ode to a Nightingale,” though, of course, every work of Romantic poetry interprets them differently. “Ode to a Nightingale,” with its steam-of-consciousness narrative, its descriptions of oneness with nature and hallucinatory states, is also important in illustrating “negative capability,” a term coined by Keats. Keats described “negative capability” as an artist’s ability to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”