An Explication of the Text of John Keats' Ode on Melancholy
Graduation Date
Summer 1954
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Degree Granting Institution
Catholic University of America
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
What has proved of interest to critics is the internal evidence that Keats’ poetry shows not only a most acute sensitivity to sensuous beauty, but also a penetrating and analytic interior vision not always co-existent with the sensuous. Consequently, any poem of Keats crystalizing these two characteristics will obviously afford a rich field for study. His "Ode on Melancholy” is such a poem.
The primary objective of this study is the explication of the text of the ”Ode on Melancholy.” It is hoped that this explication will demonstrate Keats’ theory of the relation between beauty and melancholy as he presents it in this ode. I do not hold that all the facets of Keats’ theory of the relation between beauty and melancholy are contained either explicitly or even implicitly in this poem, nor that what he says in this work necessarily harmonizes with his various statements on the same or related topics in his other works or letters. But in no other place is there a richer "comment on the experience of beauty in general” and its paradoxical relation to melancholy.