Poems tend to employ a higher concentration of figurative language (metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, symbol, personification, zoomorphism, chremamorphism) than prose does. The advantage of a technique such as metaphor is that it allows you to concentrate a great deal of meaning in a single phrase. But merely heaping up a large quantity of figurative language is not effective; the poem must use figurative language in a way that adds to the poem’s vividness and effect on readers. Examine “Ode on Melancholy” — especially the second and third stanzas — to determine how Keats uses figurative language and why it is effective. The best way to do that is to consider the implications of the figurative language fully.
Keats was an exceptionally self-aware poet, much concerned with the poet’s character and place in the world. Read the last stanza of the “Ode on Melancholy” closely. What do these famous lines say about this subject?
In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes and praises an imaginary work of art. What are the reasons for his praise? At any point, does his opinion of the urn change? If so, where and in what way?
Keats’s so-called “Great Odes” (of which you are reading two for today) are extraordinary poems that by themselves go a long way toward defining the Romantic sensibility. What do they have in common? If you had to sum up the attitude or philosophy of these poems, what would it be?
The letter from Keats to his two brothers reveals his love of theatre (especially Shakespeare), his political leanings, his awareness of himself as a poet, and his closeness with his brothers. But this letter — one of the most important ever written by a poet — is famous primarily because it introduces Keats’s concept of Negative Capability. What does Keats mean by this term, why is it important to a writer, and why does he find it lacking in Coleridge? What connections can you make between Negative Capability and the odes you have read? In other words, how are Keats’s ideas expressed in this letter to his brothers demonstrated in his poems?