ABSTRACT
Until the time of the composition of the odes, Keats had employed conventional metrical and stanzaic forms which were immediately recognizable. During the month of April, Keats had composed two irregular sonnets, predominantly Shakespearean, but without either the three contiguous alternate rhyming quatrains or the concluding couplet. Garrod assumes that the "legitimate" sonnet to which Keats refers is the Petrarchan, and that the "pouncing rhymes" to which he objects are the couplets of the Petrarchan octave. The word "elegiac" would appear to have been a little more perplexing to critics of Keats than it should. Keats himself had employed the quatrain for his early elegiac stanzas On Death. Yet, despite the care he lavished on the construction of the Ode to Psyche, Keats perceived the unneeded complication of its metrical form. The argument is not advanced here that the ode-stanza was necessarily that specific "better sonnet form" which Keats had said he was intending to devise.
