The cambridge companion to british roman 49

The living pantheon of poets in 1820

the Hanoverian monarchs, George I to George IV – let alone such other 1820
offerings as “An Ode to Britain,” attached to An Illustration of the Dangerous Consequences Arising from Youth Listening to the Destructive Discourse
of Atheists, Deists, and Freethinkers, and “Ode on the King’s Birthday,” written on June 4, 1820, from New South Wales, by Michael Massey Robinson,
the “First Poet Laureat of Australia,” which seeks to “Retrace the PatriotChief’s Career of Glory!” (l. 118). What have been seen as controversial
claims for the political valence of Keats’s odes27 might strike us differently
when we place his poems against a context in which one was less likely to
read meditative odes to solitary birds than to read overly political poems
such as the 1819 “Ode to Wellington,” by Byron’s acquaintance Robert
Charles Dallas, who offers a sixty-two-page paean where the “muse Ỉolic”
and “The living strains of Pindar’s lyre” are invoked to sing “WELLESLEY’S
martial name” (ll. 1, 3, 11), or Charles Bucke’s Cockneyesque “Ode to the
Nymph of the Fountain of Tears” (in The Fall of the Leaf; and Other Poems
of 1819), where the Nymph weeps “When despots wield their giant powers /
Against the sons of liberty” (ll. 3–4).
Most odes at the time were not Horatian moral meditations or sacred or
sublime apostrophes to the natural or the supernatural, but instead amorous
odes in the manner of Anacreon, as in Thomas Moore’s Odes of Anacreon by
“Thomas Little,” or, even more strikingly, satiric odes. While Pindar was seen
as the great exemplar of the “heroic” ode, the most popular writer of odes
in the period was the satirist “Peter Pindar,” John Wolcot (1738–1819), who
first made his name with Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782 and
who went on to write Farewell Odes, Expostulary Odes to a Great Duke,
and a Little Lord, Odes to Mr. Paine, and Ode upon Ode, or, A Peep at St
James’s. At the height of his popularity he could sell 20,000 copies of a satire
in a single day, and he was an influence not only on such imitators as “Peter
Pindar, Jun.” (who issued The Old Black Cock and His Dunghill Advisers
in Jeopardy; or, The Palace that Jack Built as part of the Queen Caroline
affair in 1820), “Philo Peter Pindar” (who published The Field of Peter-loo,
An Heroic Poem, in Two Cantos [1820]), and C. F. Lawler (who also used

the “Peter Pindar, Esq.” pseudonym), but on Moore and Byron as well. At
the time when Keats was publishing the great odes in his 1820 volume, Paul
Thackwell released his Collection of Miscellaneous and Religious Poems.
To Which is Added a Series of Odes, on Various Subjects, Illustrated with
Original Tales. Given his main title, we might imagine Thackwell offering
sacred, sublime odes, but instead we find odes to “Stupidity” and “Craft and
Subtlety,” to which are appended exemplary tales, as a satiric ode’s subject
is narrativized.28

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