Wings and Things: John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale

In April 1819, the poet John Keats, aged 23, told his brother George that he was done with poetry. A few days later, he smashed out the first poem in what is arguably the greatest streak in literary history, with "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This was followed in quick succession by four odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn." And then as summer faded, he had a thing to say about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness in "To Autumn." Throughout this, he also wrote one of his most under-rated longer poems - the mini epic Lamia. All that in six months!

God only knows what marvels 1820 might have had in store, but at the start of the year he suffered his first lung haemorrhage, confirming his fears of tuberculosis, and announced to his friend Charles Browne that he was dying - as indeed he was.

Not only do Keats' Odes stand amongst the greatest in the English language, but their influence was unparalleled in that century. Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement that we associate with Walter Pater, William Morris and Oscar Wilde directly descend from Keats’ work, frequently quoting the final lines of "Ode to a Grecian Urn" as their credo: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’.

So the big question in this episode is simply ‘how?’. How did the 23-year-old Keats manage to do it? What was going on in his life and his art, his friendships as well as the world at large to enable this to happen? And what is it that makes these poems so truly unforgettable? We’re going to be talking about madness, revolution and medicine in Regency England. We’re going to run through a brief history of birds - particularly nightingales - in English literature, and explain what an ode is and where it comes from? There’s love, friendship, laughter, despair, and something called Negative Capability, which is more exciting than it sounds.

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