Keats’s Odes, Socratic Irony, and Regency Reviewers

For some time now there has been in Keats criticism the sense that the odes have something to say to Keats’s critics. The disguised irony of the spring 1819 odes does indeed plot a response that until now has escaped notice. Marjorie Levinson was the first to highlight a form of self-parody in Keats in relation to the reviewers: “a transformation of social and genetic nothingness to ‘camelion poet’ … instead of ‘apothecary’, there would be ‘physician, sage, healer’; and the so-called purveyor of ‘extenuatives and soporifics’ would name himself a provider of balms, hemlock, and sweet solutions.”¹ What had previously been read as a form of indeterminate irony in Keats, generated by the experience of life’s contradictions,² is after Levinson “aggressively literary,”³ a highly self-conscious rendering not so much of the poet’s experience of life generally, as of his social and literary position. More recently, Richard Marggraf Turley has written of Keats’s use of a “directed puerility and jejune tastelessness” to challenge the reviews,⁴ while Jeffrey N. Cox has underscored the way that Keats’s puns demonstrate his “Catullan and Cockney delight in toying with what others consider serious.”⁵ Cox and Turley provide valuable readings of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn” respectively, but neither considers the odes as a sequence in this respect, and Levinson makes only passing reference to them. Of course the odes might hardly seem a special case; as early as Endymion, Keats had an eye on the periodicals, as the special pleading of the Prefaces shows. Indeed, a case can well be made that all of Keats’s productions after the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Quarterly Review attacks of 1818 were influenced in some way by the young poet’s experience of critical censure and ridicule. A unified rhetorical method underlies the odes’ overt pattern of imaginative engagement and disengagement. The lesson about “earthly limitations” Jack Stillinger thought Keats had learned in the odes is not the whole picture. In fact, this is the very lesson that the most hostile of the reviewers had wished Keats would learn: where Stillinger has Keats “wake up” in the odes,⁶ Blackwood’s had wished the young Cockney dreamer would be more sparing of soporifics, directing him “back to the shop.”⁷ I will argue that the pattern of visionary flight and return in the odes is itself part of a disguised Socratic dialogue with the critics, for whose benefit the well-known dialectic of imagination and reality is ironically rehearsed—though in such fine-toned ways that it will be seen of none.

The few explicit references Keats makes to Socrates in his letters, together with the passing allusion to Socrates’s death at the start of “Ode to a Nightingale,” might seem a flimsy basis on which to construct a new reading of the odes. In Keats’s case, though, the letters often contain and introduce the poems, at times offering obvious glosses on them. It is here we find the poems embedded among the feelings and ruminations and ideas out of which they are transmuted, and it is through a key reference to Socrates that Keats attempts to explain this very process. The reference in question is in the spring 1819 letter-journal to George and Georgiana Keats, a month before Keats writes “Ode to Psyche,” and at a time when “Ode on Indolence” is evidently gestating: “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase—a Man and two women—whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement,” he muses, before mention of a friend who expects the death of his father leads Keats to reflect on how far he is from attaining “any humble standard of disinterestedness,” such as Socrates and Jesus embodied.⁸ The reference is more than incidental—Keats here claims to know Socrates’s “Histories” (Keats was first urged to read Plato by Benjamin Bailey in the summer of...