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Such a context might suggest different ways to think about Keats’s odes,
placed within a volume named for its narrative poems. The satiric turn of so
many contemporary odes might make us alive to the punning, coinages, oxymorons, and other witty wordplay of Keats’s poems, which, as contemporary
reviewers noted, were “vivacious, smart, witty, changeful, sparkling, and
learned” (The Edinburgh [Scots] Magazine [2nd series, 1 (October 1817),
pp. 254–7]), and also “insolent,” marked by a “bravado style” (The London
Magazine 2 [September 1820], pp. 315–21).29 The “Ode on Melancholy”
might perhaps then be read as satirizing a tradition of courting melancholia,
and even “Ode on a Grecian Urn” might be relieved of some of the utter
seriousness that has accompanied its hypercanonicity.30 Even if we do not
embrace a thoroughgoing satirical reading of Keats, these odes offer daring language and startling patterns of thought that have led to a general
agreement that these poems are engaged in both intellectual experimentation and an experiment with form, seen perhaps most clearly in accounts
of the ways in which Keats creates his new odal stanzas out of his work on
the sonnet. Given the place of the sonnet in Keats’s 1817 Poems and noting
Wordsworth’s publication of his River Duddon Sonnets in 1820, we need to
consider Keats’s turn from the sonnet to larger lyric forms as a key feature
of the 1820 volume.
We also need to remember that the great odes are placed within a volume named for and framed by narrative poems. Wordsworth famously
stated in his “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads that contemporary taste was being destroyed by “frantic novels, sickly and stupid
German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse”;31
beyond a concern that poetry is losing its place to the Gothic novel and
to imported plays, Wordsworth stands against the rise of the poetic tale or
romance that in many ways would define “Romanticism” for contemporary
readers.32 Keats, who at the time of finishing his 1820 volume was writing a
“German” tragedy in Otho the Great, signals his sense that such romances
are what readers want by labeling his book with his three poetic tales. As
Stuart Curran, Peter Manning, and St. Clair have shown, romance was the
dominant form in the era that ultimately would be called Romantic. As St.
Clair puts it, “To contemporary readers the great poems of the Romantic

age were not those that feature in modern university courses but The Lay of
the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Manfred, The Pleasures
of Hope, and Lalla Rookh” (p. 215). We might add Southey’s Thalaba, A
Rhythmical Romance (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), or Hunt’s
The Story of Rimini (1816), but that is just to expand the list of romances.

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