ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses critical responses that 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'. It explores that legacy through the Romantic and Victorian trope of birdsong to illustrate the porous nature of those generic and historic boundaries that traditionally separate the poetics of Romanticism, Victorianism, and modernity. Keats's own sense of 'darkling' further complicates these commonplace critical assumptions about Victorian poetic depictions of birdsong as an antidote to Romantic idealism. Shelley's comment located Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' at the zenith of a Romantic lyric tradition that aligned poetic outpourings with the natural profusion of birdsong. Keats's ode negotiates those tropes of the nightingale as the melancholic bird of mythology and life-giving bird of spring and renewal. This critical misperception of Keats's bird as belonging solely to a Romantic company of cheerful nightingales, ironically, finds Romantic precedent.
