ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth wrote the first four stanzas of the poem in 1802, resumed work on it after an interval of more than two years during which there occurred the death of his brother John, and published it under the simple title ‘Ode’ in 1807. Of the younger poets of the time, George Gordon, Lord Byron, is at his best in his longer and often more discursive poems. But his ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ has power, even if it is an assertively rhetorical rather than a poetic power. In the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he sustains to the end his rejection of the real world in favour of an ideal beauty. The figures on the urn are happily immune from trouble, change, and death. Though the ‘Ode on Melancholy’ makes no declaration as confident as this, it has a clear direction. Critics as different as F. R. Leavis and Robert Bridges agree in ranking ‘To Autumn’ first among Keats’s odes.
