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The Theme of Mutability in the “Ode to Psyche”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Leon Waldoff
Leon Waldoff*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana
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Abstract

A sound basis for interpreting the odes as a sequence, with unity of theme and progression of thought, may be found in the theme of mutability. It is generally acknowledged as central in the other odes but has been neglected in discussions of the “Ode to Psyche.” Though this theme is dealt with defensively, it is evident in the tone, in the paradoxical conception of Psyche as a dying immortal, in the imaginative effort to restore her presence and rescue her from the “faint Olympians,” and in the final act of internalization. As in the other odes, the answer to the problem of mutability lies in an acceptance of the natural process of which man's life is a part and in a will to adapt. Though Keats would make Psyche the presider over his soul, he is aware that in the end he must preside over his own growth and “Soul-making.”

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , May 1977, pp. 410 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

1 Kenneth Allott, “The ‘Ode to Psyche,‘ ” Essays in Criticism, 6 (1956), 278-301, rpt. in John Keats: A Reassessment, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 74-94.

2 On the dating of the odes, see Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats's Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974). The text used here for the poems is H. W. Garrod's The Poetical Works of John Keats, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958). For the letters the edition is The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958).

3 See, respectively, H. W. Garrod, Keats (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), pp. 94-97; Leonidas Jones, “The ‘Ode to Psyche’: An Allegorical Introduction to Keats's Great Odes,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 9 (1958), 23; John Holloway, The Charted Mirror (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 41; Max Schulz, “Keats's Timeless Order of Things: A Modern Reading of ‘Ode to Psyche,‘” Criticism, 2 (1960), 56; and Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 244-45, 258. For a discussion of the difficulties of interpreting the odes as a sequence, see Robert Gleckner, “Keats's Odes: The Problem of the Limited Canon,” Studies in English Literature, 5 (1965), 577-85.

4 John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 486.

5 The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 104.

6 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), p. 107.

7 For a discussion of the psychology of primal fantasies—how they derive from a child's interest in parental sexuality and may become the prototype of later voyeuristic concerns—see Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: Norton, 1945), pp. 92, 347-48.

8 See Freud's essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-66), xiv, 73-102.

9 John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 340. Of the various psychoanalytic discussions I would cite three: Harold G. McCurdy, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Character and Personality, 13 (1944), 166-77; James Hamilton, “Object Loss, Dreaming, and Creativity: The Poetry of John Keats,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 14 (1969), 488-531; and Stanley Leavy, “John Keats's Psychology of Creative Imagination,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 39 (1970), 173-97.

10 John Keats (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 16.

11 The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 421. I find this early discussion more convincing than Bloom's recent attempt, in A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 152-56, to see “Psyche” as a response to various precursors.

12 The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 197.