Another kind of subsistent cycle visible in the Odes
adumbrates an unconventional approach to the odal form itself. The ode, as an
established literary genre, is distinguished by a generalized celebratory
sense/sensibility; that what an ode assumes as its subject has been chosen for
a perceived glory or expansiveness inherent in its being-in-the-world,
individualized against all else. The manner in which Keats slants this literary
genre creates its own, steady-within-irregularity cycle— from ode to ode, we
see the way Keats undermines the conventional processes of apostrophe and
assignation, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly. The most unconventional ode,
which chafes against its own generic formality with an intense degree of force
and discomfort, seems to be Nightingale. Here, the celebratory is inverted into
the elegiac; and while Keats’ apostrophes and assignations do celebrate (in a
manner of speaking) the happy, “full-throated” freedom of the nightingale’s
passages set against his own sickness, isolation, and leaden-eyed despairs, the
circle (closed at the poem’s conclusion) of all-encompassing subjective
interest, awareness, and stalemated preoccupation girds around him the
exclusion of what negatively capable thoughts and motives he could possibly
have. The cycle of unpredictability and disregard for generic convention moves
with a sharp sense of willful, dark-toned imaginative imposition through the
Odes as a definitive thread— that autumn and melancholy are worthy to be
celebrated, as are inanimate objects (works of art/utility tools) and “heathen
goddesses” from antique cultures. The incredible, well-rounded richness and
variable tonal qualities of Keats’ prosody are another thread, which
established the Odes’ absolute legitimacy, past their strangeness, odd, stray
angles of thematic approach, and contradictory answer to classical voices.
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