Staging Creative Experience: 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' by John Keats

Abstract

Abstract This thesis argues that the two poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ written by John Keats in 1819 are modelled on the sonnet-form. In this sense they stand as examples of experimentations in poetic form common among Keats and his contemporaries. But they also reflect traditional rhetorical structures inherent in such forms. By adapting the rhetorical themes of polarity, desire, and poetic urge from Renaissance love-sonnets, Keats’s two odes combine and develop these topics together with the increased interest among his fellow poets in the relation between the inner and the outer world and the workings, questions, and responses of the subjective mind. The two odes play on both these traditions; and in uniting various rhetorical devices the resulting effect is one that manages to enact, stage, and produce in the reader as much as for the speaker in each poem an ongoing experience of creative urge.