The Odes by John Keats

Like the soliloquies, the Odes offer stream of consciousness, not logical discourse; they are frequently ambiguous; they have a definite dramatic quality. The very origin of the ode form is, of course, dramatic, deriving from the plays of Ancient Greece, later becoming, in the hands of Pindar, a complex public declamation. The Latin poet, Horace, developed the tradition further, making the ode much more personal in character. The odes of Wordsworth and Coleridge retain a certain public character – for example, there are elements of didacticism in structure and style. Keats is much more private: the Odes form a window into his mind.

Possibly because of an awareness of the Greek origin of his form, but, more likely, simply following the fashion of his day for all things Greek, Keats refers to mythological creatures such as dryads and the Greek gods continually. However, even this entirely conventional use of Greek mythology had a deeper significance for him, something he explored in the letter to George Keats and his wife quoted above:

It is pretty generally suspected that the chr(i)stain scheme has been copied from the ancient persian and greek Philosophers. Why may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension by introducing Mediators and Personages in the same manner as in the hethen mythology abstractions are personified -

This implies that Keats saw deeper, more complex, truths in pagan Greek religion than in Christianity, which was too reasoned and dogmatic for his taste; the Greek pantheon was, after all, the product of the unfettered imagination, the creation of artists like Homer and Hesiod and therefore superior in its beauty. It is particularly enlightening to consider the Ode to Psyche in this light, since Psyche was never a ‘real’ goddess, but entirely a literary creation. However, for Keats, the distinction is meaningless: the mind (psyche) mated with love (eros) becomes an inner temple of imagination and creativity. In such a sense, an ‘imaginary’ deity like Psyche points, for Keats, toward a deeper, and no doubt more divine, reality that that taught in the schools and churches of his own time.