Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”

John Keats's "Ode to Psyche" is one of the most beautiful and original poems in the English language, though rarely recognized as such. More usually it is taken as his slightly stumbling first effort at a personal ode form before the better-known Great Odes: more straightforward in its emotional tone, and less susceptible to convenient forms of cynical modernist interpretation. Keats's "system of salvation" is often spoken about as if it were another neo-Christian justification of the value of suffering—in its most degraded form, none other than the British stiff upper-lip. But suffering in itself has no virtue for Keats—unless in the older equivalence of "passion" and "suffering". Almost everything in the February–May journal-letter records some minute "touchstone" by means of which Keats reshapes his soul at that period, working towards the revelation of the "Ode to Psyche". Keats, in his tentative approach to the Muse of his poem, says that his language is "tuneless"—"wrung" from his inner urgency.