Fade Far Away, Dissolve,and Quite Forget

Keats’s 1819 odes are composed in his prime of poetical craftsmanship and have long been the center of academic study because of their artistic virtuoso. After numerous monographs and papers has discussed profoundly the formalistic and thematic features of the odes in various perspectives such as Keats’s biographic study, historical, intellectual context and influence of artistic skills, some critics begin to summarize predecessors’opinions and read the odes as a whole. For example, Bate examines the stylistic development and Vendler analyses Keats’s philosophical reflection on art and nature, by tracing the evolution of similar images and themes. However, at home most scholars still focus their attention on the six odes’ formalistic features. Not many utilize various perspectives to enlarge the discussion of the odes’philosophical thoughts and studies of individual ode dominate. Only a few scholars such as Luo Yimin notice the similarity in narrative, structure, and stanzas. But evolution in the odes is yet to be revealed.Though it seems unanimous that Keats’s works is permeated with anxiety, its structure, causes and Keats’s transcendence is never deeply discussed, which have been too much taken for granted. This paper draws on Heideggerian existentialism and the methods Helen Vendler adopts in her book The Odes of John Keats, that is, enquiry will be made of the evolution of similar images and the meanings behind such evolution by New Critical close reading based on an overview of Keats’ works. The six odes will be studied as a whole in attempt to understand his existential reflection with anxiety and transcendence as a clue.To understand the meaning of Being, Heidegger set Dasein as his primary object of investigation, because the basic characteristic of Dasein is that it has to decide its own existence, and in this decision Dasein must have a comprehensive grasp of the meaning of Being. But such a grasp is covered by the daily averageness. Only by anxiety and Being-towards-Death, can Dasein break away from the preconception to enter the authentic mode and understand the meaning of Being. One of the most important themes in Keats’s poems is his profound experience of the world and the quest of such experience. The six odes’ formalistic development is connected with each other. The process from irregular stanzas to regular ones and the increasing number of short rhymes in the "Ode on Melancholy" and "To Autumn" correspond to the theme of his troubled quest. Miseries in life like the early departure of relatives and frustration in love and poetical career feature Keats’s experience of the world with a feeling of uncanniness and indifference. It is the uncanniness that makes Keats feels the Heideggerian collapse of the worldhood and begins his search for an uncovered ideal world, the authentic mode. With his personal concepts such as soul-making and impersonalization of poets, he thinks upon the problem of individualization, which manifests in his poems as the anxiety over his poetical competence. Greek art begin as model of Keats’s construction of his ideal world, but when Greek art itself in turn becomes the obstacles of his search like other preconception or tradition, Keats abandons it for the integration of nature and conveys his full experience of nature in a rich form by resorting to organic metaphors, which avoids deliberate construction of meanings.This thesis reads the six odes as a whole in the perspective of Heideggerian existentialism and traces the stratification and evolution of anxiety in them, which to some extent broadens the horizon of Keatisan criticism.