Ode On Melancholy - Background

Background

While studying at Enfield, Keats attempted to gain a knowledge of Grecian art from translations of Tooke’s Pantheon, Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and Spence's Polymetis. Although Keats attempted to learn Ancient Greek, the majority of his understanding of Grecian mythology came from the translations into English. "Ode on Melancholy" contains references to classical themes, characters, and places such as Psyche, Lethe, and Prosperine in its description of melancholy, as allusions to Grecian art and literature were common among the “five great odes”.

Unlike the narrator in "Ode to a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche", the narrator of "Ode on Melancholy" speaks directly to the reader rather than to an object or an emotion. With only three stanzas, the poem is the shortest of the odes Keats wrote in 1819; however, the original first stanza of the poem was removed before the poem’s publication in 1820. According to Harold Bloom, one can presume that the “harmony was threatened if fully half of was concerned with the useless quest after “The Melancholy”. Despite its adjusted length, Keats thought the poem to be of a higher quality than "Ode on Indolence", which was not published until 1848, after Keats’s death.