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John KeatsOde to a Nightingale
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1819A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1819)
Written in the same period as “Ode to a Nightingale,” this poem by Keats similarly examines the question of imminent death and immortality through art. While nature symbolizes immortality in “Ode to a Nightingale,” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” art offers the prospect of escaping death.
“Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats (1926)
Composed over a century after “Ode to a Nightingale,” this famous poem by Modernist master Yeats shows the clear influence of Keats. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the speaker laments the “dying generations” (Line 3) of humans and wishes to seek immortality through becoming a timeless work of art.
“Ode to Autocorrect” by Martha Silano (2018)
The traditional ode has continued to evolve through the centuries, its subject changing from objects of reverence and beauty to everyday objects. Silano’s poem pays unlikely homage to the Autocorrect feature on phones, and while doing, it so savagely satirizes the racism and violence of contemporary society.
Further Literary Resources
The Odes of John Keats by Helen Vendler (1983)
Influential American critic and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, Helen Vendler offers a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the six great odes of John Keats in this volume. Examining each ode in depth, Vender argues that the poems should not be seen as merely descriptive; instead, they should be viewed as a deep meditation on art, language, and philosophy.
“An Introduction to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’” by Stephen Hebron (2014)
Writing for the British Library’s website, Oxford professor Stephen Hebron considers the circumstances under which “Ode to a Nightingale” was written. Hebron shows how Keats uses the symbol of the nightingale to bridge the gap between the mortal world and immortality.
“John Keats’s Year of Small Miracles” by Aditya Jha (2018)
Commissioning Editor for Penguin Random House India, Aditya Jha writes a retrospective of 1819, Keats’s year of creative flowering, in The Hindu. Jha offers a poignant glimpse of the cold reception Keats received by the critics of his time, and how he “developed a measured response to these reviews.”
Listen to Poem
British actor, and star of BBC’s Sherlock and the MCU’s Doctor Strange movies, Benedict Cumberbatch gives voice to John Keats’s 1819 poem “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Related Titles
By John Keats
