An Archetypal Criticism Of John Keats’s Odes

Researches on John Keats and his odes mainly consist of bibliography andFreudian analytic criticism of the poet himself, and aesthetic, historical and culturalstudies of Keats’s odes. Eco-criticism is also on the rise, but researches are stillmainly situated on the horizontal level. The connection between Keats’s odes and theproceeding intellectual achievements has been out-proportionally ignored. Morespecifically speaking, the archetypes hidden in these odes did not receive their dueattention.Like William Shakespeare, John Keats is endowed with a capacious universalspirit, blending the archetypes he inherited from both literary and philosophicalpredecessors into his six great odes–"Ode to Psyche","Ode to a Nightingale","Odeon a Grecian Urn","Ode on Melancholy","Ode on Indolence" and "To Autumn".This thesis attempts to provide a more systematic and detailed analysis of the twomain archetypes manifested in Keats’s odes–the rebirth archetype and the Mandalaarchetype.Chapter One analyzes the rebirth archetype manifested in John Keats’s odes. Thepoet first depicts the eternal paradox of transience and immortality faced by all humanbeings, and then creates a precarious balance for this opposing pair through the frozenmoment. This balance is further steadied by Keats’s cycle of life, which is realized inthe natural cycle of seasons, the periodic internal structure of the odes, and hisconcept of the romanticized death. In this cycle, death no longer represents theultimate end. It becomes another starting point for a fresh cycle of life and a newchance to soar up into the perfect realm which is symbolized as paradise. Althoughthis cyclical view of life seems to resemble Biblical reincarnation and resurrection, itdiffers from the Bible in that it treats rebirth on the broader level of the whole genus rather than the individual. Instead of the individual reincarnation, John Keatsemphasized the endlessness of the succession of generations. Moreover, unlike theonce-and-for-all fall of human beings described in the Bible, this cyclical view of liferegards the path between earthly life and heavenly life as cyclical rather than linearand irretrievable.During his quest for the understanding of life and death, John Keats also probesinto the differentiation and reconciliation between the imaginary world and the realworld, between imagination and reality. Through the lens of Jung’s Mandalaarchetype, Chapter Two explores how John Keats constantly vacillates between theflights of fancy and the burden of reality and how he creates the Mandala symbolultimately. In Jung’s works, Mandala refers to the religious cyclical symbol balancingand uniting all opposites. While in Keats’s odes, despite all confrontations, the realworld and the imaginary world achieve ultimate integration by means of the negativecapability. In the abstract sense, therefore, this kind of integration forms the Mandalasymbolism, with the two opposing worlds balancing each other. Within this Mandalaarchetype framework, the boundary between the poet’s individual self and the worldoutside subsequently gets transcended. Moreover, the analogous imagery developedby Northrop Frye is utilized in John Keats’s odes to represent respectively these twoworlds. Exploiting the apocalyptic imagery and the analogy of innocence, the poetdepicts the imaginary world with a Hellenic spirit; while with the shadow archetypeand the analogy of experience, he outlines the real world of wars and IndustrialRevolution.Observed from this point of view, through the rebirth archetype and theMandala archetype, John Keats manages to locate life both within the vertical contextof death and rebirth and the horizontal context of the imaginary world and the realworld. These two archetypes connect Keats to the intellectual heritage shared by allhuman beings, and realize the eventual harmony between life and death, betweenimagination and reality. Opposing pairs on both these levels get integrated, composinga rounded wholeness as the coda.