Ode On Indolence - Critical Response

Critical Response

Literary critics regard "Ode on Indolence" as inferior to Keats's other 1819 odes. Walter Evert wrote that "it is unlikely that the 'Ode on Indolence' has ever been anyone's favorite poem, and it is certain that it was not Keats's. Why he excluded it from the 1820 volume we do not know, but it is repetitious and declamatory and structurally infirm, and these would be reasons enough." Bate indicated that the poem's value is "primarily biographical and not poetic".

"Ode on Indolence" is sometimes called upon as a point of comparison when discussing Keats's other poems. Charles Wentworth Dilke observed that while the poem can be read as a supplemental text to assist the study of "Grecian Urn", it remains a much inferior work. In 2000, Thomas McFarland wrote in consideration of Dilke's comparison: "Far more important than the similarity, which might seem to arise from the urns in Keats's purview in both Ode on Indolence and Ode on a Grecian Urn ... is the enormous dissimilarity in the two poems. Ode on Indolence ... is a flaccid enterprise that hardly bears mention alongside that other achievement."

Sidney Colvin, in his 1917 biography on Keats, grouped "Indolence" with the other 1819 odes in categorizing Keats's "class of achievements". In 1948, Lord Gorell described the fifth stanza as, "lacking the magic of what the world agrees are the great Odes" but describes the language as "elicate, charming even". Later, in a 1968 biography of Keats, Gittings describes the importance of the poem: "The whole ode, in fact, has a borrowed air, and he acknowledged its lack of success by not printing it with the others ... Yet with its acceptance of the numb, dull and indolent mood as something creative, it set the scene for all the odes that followed."

In 1973, Stuart Sperry described it as "a rich and nourishing immersion in the rush of pure sensation and its flow of stirring shadows and 'dim dreams'. In many ways the ode marks both a beginning and an end. It is both the feeblest and potentially the most ambitious of the sequence. Yet its failure, if we choose to consider it that, is more the result of deliberate disinclination than any inability of means." Andrew Motion, in 1997, argued, "Like 'Melancholy', the poem is too articulate for its own poetic good ... In two of his May odes, 'Melancholy' and 'Indolence', Keats defined themes common to the whole group with such fierce candour that he restricted their imaginative power. His identity had prevailed."