Eden, Arcadia, and the Death of Poetry in John Keats’s Ode on Indolence

Abstract

This essay proposes an interpretation of Keats’s Odes of 1819 predicated on a reading of the Ode on Indolence. The Ode is shown to be articulating a crisis endemic to Keats’s perception of the foundations of his vocation as a poet. The crisis originates in the poet’s increasing self-doubt regarding his ability to achieve the virtue of `negative capability` he associated with the writers he strove to emulate. Keats’s representation of these anxieties was informed to a significant degree by a recognition that neither the Classical models he revered, nor the Christian faith he had been brought up in, and which played an important role in his formal education, provided a promise of the immortality he craved both for his poetry, and latterly for himself, as his health began to deteriorate. The composition of Ode on Indolence lies at the centre of a matrix of thought within which the other Odes of 1819 unite to become a thematically linked requiem lamenting the demise of Keats’s career as a poet, as well as the fragility of his own mortality.