Ode To Psyche - Background

Background

Keats was never a professional writer. Instead, he supported himself with a small income that he earned as a surgeon for Guy's Hospital. At the age of 23, Keats left the hospital, losing his source of income, in order to devote himself to writing poetry. He lived with Charles Brown, a friend who collected Keats's poetry while supporting him, during spring 1819 and composed poetry. The early products of this effort included La Belle Dame sans Merci and "Ode to Psyche", the first of a series of odes that he would write that year. It is uncertain as to when the poem was actually completed, but Keats sent the poem to his brother on 3 May 1819 with an attached letter saying, "The following poem, the last I have written, is the first and only one with which I have taken even moderate pains; I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry; this one I have done leisurely; I think it reads the more richly for it, and it will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit."

Keats was exposed to a few sources of the Psyche myth. His contemporary sources for the myth included Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and Mary Tighe's Psyche, an 1805 work that Keats read as a child and returned to in 1818. Keats wrote to his brother George, just a few months before writing "Ode to Psyche", to say that he was no longer delighted by Tighe's writing. Dissatisfied, he turned to Apuleius's Golden Ass, translated by William Adlington in 1566, and read through the earlier version of the Cupid and Psyche myth. After reading the work and realizing that the myth was established during the twilight of Roman mythology, Keats wrote to George: "You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour—and perhaps never thought of in the old religion—I am more orthodox than to let a heathen Goddess be so neglected."