ABSTRACT

Recognising John Keats’s continued presence in late modernity and early twentieth-century writing complicates assumptions about discontinuities between Romantic and Victorian literature. The critical prejudices are particularly evident in discussions of ornithological poetry, which define Victorian sensibilities as more attuned to the brutal circumstances of the mythological Philomela than were the idealising imagination of their Romantic predecessors. Critical responses regard Victorian poetry about birdsong as a decisive corrective to Romantic poetic depictions of birds and birdsong epitomised by Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Keats as Romantic precursor remains ever-present in Hopkins’s later verse. The early modernist poetic exchanges between Yeats and Keats further testify to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ as a pivotal text for later nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses to the pre-Romantic and Romantic metaphors of birdsong. The Victorian imagination was inescapably captivated by those Romantic Apollonian harmonies interfused with the Dionysian tragic consciousness of Keats’s nightingale.