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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
During the reconsideration of English Romanticism that has been going on for more than a decade, repeated attention has been given to individual poems, to the myths and “systems” of individual poets, to common images and themes, but oddly not to common forms. One of the most important of these is the ode, in which many of the best known and most often examined Romantic poems were written. Although today we have a better understanding of the major Romantic odes as poems, the general notion of the form remains much as it was a generation ago. What is obviously needed is a method of reassessment that will go beyond the older exclusive and now inadequate concern with prosody, stanzaic structure, and conformity to classical models. The approach in the present study, which is offered as a tentative beginning, has been suggested in large part by an essay published several years ago by Norman Maclean, who led up to but did not carry his investigations into the Romantic period. According to Maclean's thesis, in brief, the English ode in the seventeenth century was constructed as a fragmentary “plot,” with the poet's conception embodied in an “agent” and his “actions,” as in “Alexander's Feast” by Dryden. In the eighteenth-century ode, on the other hand, the primary emphasis was on the devices of language—allegorical personification, metaphor, static descriptive imagery—as in the odes of Collins and Gray. While it is possible to question Maclean's distinction in particular instances, the concepts and terminology he borrows in light disguise from Aristotle's Poetics have the advantage of making the ode available to critical as well as historical discussion. In the present study, the Poetics will be drawn on more directly but in somewhat different fashion. Modifying Maclean's conception, I have chosen the terms “rhetoric” and “drama” to express a relation between language and inner structure which makes the Romantic ode as distinctive as its Neoclassical and Preromantic predecessors, at the same time that it carries forward tendencies latent in both.
1 In slightly different form, portions of this essay were read before English 9: Wordsworth and His Contemporaries, at the annual MLA convention, Chicago, December, 1961.
2 See G. N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New York, 1940), Ch. ix. Carol Maddison, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (Baltimore, 1960), ends with Cowley.
3 “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” in Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 408–460.
4 See Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric i.iii.1-4, ix (Loeb Classical Library ed.).
5 On these distinctions, see Humphry House, Aristotle's Poetics: A Course of Eight Lectures, rev. Colin Hardie (London, 1956), pp. 96–97.
6 As House points out (ibid., p. 98), Discovery is not limited to the recognition of objects or persons but “is intended to include the discovery of whole areas of circumstance, whole states of affairs, about which there was previous ignorance or mistake.”
7 Maclean's colleagues at the University of Chicago have sought to extend or adapt the theoretical concepts of the Poetics to cover the novel and the lyric. (See R. S. Crane, “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones,” rev. version, in Critics and Criticism, pp. 616–647; Elder Olson, “An Outline of Poetic Theory,” ibid., pp. 546–566.) It should be emphasized that the present study pretends to no such aim. The Aristotelian terms are used here solely in a pragmatic and descriptive sense, in the absence of suitable terms in our own critical vocabulary. My justification is the universality of the structural relations which in the Poetics are discussed with respect to tragedy and epic; the Aristotle called upon is the practical literary critic, not the metaphysician and aesthetician.
On the other hand, from an historical standpoint there is the question, which can be only acknowledged here, of how the Romantic ode as I am presenting it may have been related to the changes in the understanding of Aristotelian critical theory that occurred during the eighteenth century. (On such changes concerning the nature of tragedy and the concept of catharsis, see the summary by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History, New York, 1959, pp. 290–292.) Whether the Romantic ode writers in their practice were closer to the critics of the period just past or to Aristotle himself might suggest something of interest about the general relation of poetry to literary criticism.
8 Recent studies in which the major Romantic odes are analyzed more or less intensively as poems include the following: Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London and New York, 1959); Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven, 1959) and The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York, 1961); Graham Hough, The Romantic Poets, 2nd ed. (London, 1957); Humphry House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures, 1951–1952 (London, 1953); Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: The Man and the Poet (New York, 1960); Kenneth Muir, ed., John Keats: A Reassessment (Liverpool, 1958); David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats (Cambridge, Eng., 1957); M. E. Suther, The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1960); E. R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats's Major Poems (Baltimore, 1953).
9 See Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats, pp. 245–248.
10 Listing means of amplification in epideictic rhetoric (Rhetoric i.ix.38-39), Aristotle especially recommends comparison of the subject with “illustrious personages” or even ordinary persons. “Speaking generally, of the topics common to all rhetorical arguments, amplification is most suitable for epideictic speakers, whose subject is actions which are not disputed, so that all that remains to be done is to attribute beauty and importance to them.” The whole passage on amplification might apply equally well to the odes discussed in secs. iii and iv of this study.
11 Cf. Collins, “Ode to Evening,” 11. 33–36.
12 Lines 104–107 have a suggestive parallel in a passage in Jacob Boehme's De Signatura Rerum. Discussing the fall of Adam in terms of a favorite image, also a lute (the usual reference is to the “signature” or form of nature in a passive state, which must be quickened into being by the divine will), Boehme calls the devil a “lutanist” and “the instrument and actor in the wrath of the eternal nature,” who as Adam's tempter serves the purpose of God's anger. (See The Signature of All Things, trans. William Law, Everyman's Library ed., p. 118.)
13 4 April 1802, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, ii (Oxford, 1956), 795.
14 The image of the lost “little child,” which recurs in Coleridge's writings before and after “Dejection,” had an obvious autobiographical origin in the childhood experience recounted ibid., i, 353. Cf. also “To William Godwin” (1795), 11. 11–12; “Encinctured with a twine of leaves,” verse fragment from “The Wanderings of Cain” (1798), 11. 16–18 (The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, Oxford, 1912, i, 287); “The Pains of Sleep” (1803), 11. 39–42; Collected Letters, iii, 669. With the storm image alone, cf. Collected Letters, ii, 916, and The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series L, i (New York, 1957), 1577, 1718.
15 The best discussion is M. H. Abrams, “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” rev. version, in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York, 1960), pp. 37–54.
16 Cf. Boehme (The Signature of All Things, p. 17): “No joy can arise in the still nothing; it must arise only through motion and elevation that the nothing finds itself.” Cf. also Coleridge's 1807 ode “To William Wordsworth,” 11. 63–66. On the function of painful emotions according to eighteenth-century theory, see E. R. Wasserman, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” ELH, xiv (1947), 283–307.
17 There was perhaps an adumbration of the dramatic Reversal in the Romantic ode in the “sudden and abrupt transitions always specified as characteristic of Great Odes” in the Neoclassical period; see Maclean, Critics and Criticism, p. 435.
18 Now I recentre my immortal mind
In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content;
Cleans'd from the vaporous passions that bedim
God's Image, sister of the Seraphim. (11. 158–161)
In a revision of 1803, l. 160 became the more specific “Cleans'd from bedimming Fear, and Anguish weak and blind” (Complete Poetical Works, i, 168).
19 “Tragedy . . . therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr'd up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.” To my knowledge, no one previously has called attention to this important parallel.
Ll. 594–596 of Samson Agonistes, which have a verbal echo in stanza iii of the ode (“My genial spirits fail”) are quoted in a 1797 letter to Joseph Cottle (Collected Letters, i, 319). A notebook entry for March–April 1802 (Notebooks, i, 1155) indicates Coleridge had been at least thinking about Milton's poem shortly before writing the first version of “Dejection.” On the Poetics and Biographia Literaria, see Raymond Preston, “Aristotle and the Modern Literary Critic,” JAAC, xxi (Fall 1962), 63–64, 66, 69 (n. 10); cf. R. H. Fogle, The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), passim.
20 Abrams, English Romantic Poets, p. 39. Directly opposed is Suther, The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 122.
21 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London, 1907), i, 202.
22 With 11. 132–136, cf. “Ode to Tranquillity” (1801), 11. 21–24. House points out (Coleridge, pp. 134–135) that in the original letter version of the ode the passage on the loss of imagination follows rather than precedes what was later to be stanza vii, and the full account of joy is given at the end of the poem in reference to the joy of Sara, instead of being divided between stanzas v and viii. In his revisions, Coleridge both heightened the contrast of states of mind and altered the effects of the wind storm, turning self-analysis into drama.
23 See summary by Shuster, pp. 259–262.
24 Shelley's own note describing the setting in which the ode was “conceived and chiefly written” (Prometheus Unbound, . . . With Other Poems, London, 1820, p. 188) includes wind and a sunset storm like those in “Dejection.” On the beginning state of mind, cf. “Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples” (1818), esp. 11. 19–27.
25 Contrasting the Neoclassical and Romantic odes with respect to their rhetoric, Maclean observes (Critics and Criticism, p. 434) that the famous odes by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats “are not artistic constructions designed to the end of amplifying the wonders, respectively, of immortality, wind, and nightingales.” Yet to say that “Ode to the West Wind,” like stanza vii of “Dejection,” is first of all an encomium of wind in the fullness of its natural and symbolic meanings is to make possible all else that may be said about it. On the nightingale, see sec. iv below.
26 Cf. “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley's Prose, Or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. D. L. Clark (Albuquerque, N. M., 1954), p. 277AB; “Essay on a Future State,” ibid., p. 176B; Alastor, 11. 42–44, 667–668.
27 R. H. Fogle, “The Imaginal Design of Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind’,” ELH, xv (1948), 221.
28 Cf. Alastor, 11. 583–586.
29 Here I am in disagreement also with the special interpretation of Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking, pp. 87, 89–90. The progression from leaves to seeds and thoughts to words, concluding in a vocal utterance, has a justification in the tradition of prophecy; cf. Aeneid vi.74-76, in which Aeneas prays the Cumaean Sibyl to chant her verses instead of committing them to leaves which may be disordered by the winds.
30 As an “incantation,” the poem itself replaces the “enchanter” wind saluted in the opening (1. 3).
31 In an early draft the line was declarative: “When Winter comes Spring lags not far behind.” (See Verse and Prose from the Manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Sir J. C. E. Shelley-Rolls and Roger Ingpen, priv. print., London, 1934, p. 58.) Cf. The Revolt of Islam ix.xxv.3685-3689.
32 Cf., in slightly different terms, M. T. Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry: A Study of His Prophetic Imagination (New York, 1959), p. 299.
33 Abrams, English Romantic Poets, p. 48.
34 See W. J. Bate, “Keats's Style: Evolution toward Qualities of Permanent Value,” in The Major English Romantic Poets: A Symposium in Reappraisal, ed. C. D. Thorpe et al. (Carbondale, Ill., 1957), p. 227. Cf. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1939), p. 217; Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic Principle (Lincoln, Neb., 1958), pp. 36–39. In the last named study (p. 9), “dramatic principle” is taken to be “the objective playing-out of the clash of oppositions.”
35 Cf. i.826-834, in which a singing nightingale is a simile for the yearning lover. On the relation of the discourse on happiness to this ode and other Keats poems, see Wasserman, The Finer Tone, passim.
36 To John Taylor, 30 January 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), i, 218. Keats adds that the passage in Endymion “is my first Step towards the chief Attempt in the Drama—the playing of different Natures with Joy and Sorrow.” The last phrase might well be a characterization of the 1819 odes.
37 On the death motif in this ode, see esp. Wasserman, The Finer Tone, pp. 193–197, and Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats, pp. 266–274.
38 Cf. the ode “Bards of Passion and of Mirth,” 11. 17–22.
39 “Fancy,” 11. 5–8. The presence of fancy is another link with “Dejection.” If the fancy flies out of confinement when a passage is opened for it, and the song of the nightingale has the power to open such a passage, “charming” the “magic casements,” is the nightingale in its climactic role a symbol of the Romantic imagination?
40 In Byron's ode “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” there is a shift (from sorrow in rejected love to a resolution to act) which is rhetorical without being dramatic, unaffected by anything that happens within the poem. This and others by Byron (summarized by Shuster, pp. 255–257) belong among the minor odes of the period. The difference between major and minor Romantic odes, which can be seen even in the work of the same poet, is a separate problem, more suitably considered as part of the overall history of the ode.
41 Not, I think, really an answer to it. Wordworth too echoes the Poetics, however indirectly, in the passage on “imitation” (11. 102–107).
42 Keats's two odes to Fanny Brawne and “To Autumn” are excluded from this discussion because there is no actual encounter between speaker and object in either instance. The implied flesh-and-blood presence of the woman in the Brawne odes draws the speaker's appeals outside the poem at the same time that it prevents him from being affected dramatically by what he has said. In “To Autumn,” although the season is duly saluted in the second person, the speaker remains only a voice, and the encomium is hardly more than a scaffolding for imagery of description and personification which has a thematic not a dramatic significance.
