The Odes by John Keats

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it.

This is clearly a disordered, if passionate, longing and it creates significant tensions in some of the Odes. A much more positive way of dealing with the problem of suffering is suggested by Keats’ letter to his brother George and his wife (1819) in which he describes the world as “‘The vale of Soul-making’ .” He asks them, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” The essence of suffering for Keats is transience : the fact that everything in this world is fading, dying, ending is something he felt powerfully. And imagination is the primary means for achieving permanence in the passing world, by the creation of beauty.

Notions of beauty, uncertainty and mystery are all closely associated in the Odes. Keats’ most famous letter of all was written to his brothers George and Tom in 1817:

several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability , that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium (= inner sanctum) of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

From Keats’ point of view, Shakespeare wrote entirely from the imagination with no interference from the reasoning faculty. He does not attempt to explain Hamlet, Iago, Lear: he has the ‘negative capability’ of simply allowing them independent imaginative existence. This acceptance of the mystery of imaginative creation is what Keats seems to mean when he says that “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration.” Clearly, the Odes would be expected to exhibit a form of ‘negative capability,’ and, in fact, there is little sense of reasoned argument, progression or explanation, and much more a sense of acceptance ; a stream of consciousness, ambiguity and mystery.

The model of Shakespeare is, perhaps surprisingly, central to the whole conception of the Odes. His great characters’ soliloquies, especially those of Hamlet, were a primary inspiration.