The Ecstasy of the Unknown in John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” Aline Dolinh College

Within the canon of English Romantic literature, John Keats’ work is distinguished by its willingness to portray beauty as a blissful and unfathomable mystery. In contrast to the founding generation of Romantics most prominent during the late 18th century, a group that included William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Keats was arguably uninterested in attempting to recapture some bygone state of natural innocence via disciplined self-transformation – rather, he sought to appreciate nature by accepting its sheer incomprehensibility. This impulse is clearest in the fourth and fifth stanzas of his “Ode to a Nightingale,” which both revel in the poet’s ability to immerse himself within the fantastic magnitude of the natural world.

Given the ode’s apostrophic mode, the fourth stanza’s opening exclamations of “Away! away!” suggest an urgent need to escape, or at least a concern that the titular bird’s presence is somehow unsuitable for the mundane setting where the speaker first encounters it. Curiously, Keats’ narrative persona also does not dwell on his physical inability to join the nightingale – he quickly assures it that he “will fly to thee,” implying his existing possession of some transportive power. Yet he is “not...