[In the following review of The Odes of John Keats, Bromwich finds shortcomings in what he considers Vendler's artificial treatment of Keats's odes as a sequence of progressive excellence culminating in “To Autumn.”]

This intense study [The Odes of John Keats] makes one great demand of its readers: they must have in mind, for any given stretch of exposition, a good many details from all of the six major odes; a text for each poem appears at the start of the corresponding chapter, and helps to lighten the task considerably. A fair review needs to make the same demand without offering any comparable assistance: those who have not read the poems lately are advised to read them now and come back when they are finished. Most such experiments in reacquaintance will leave three impressions of the poems as a group. First, Keats’s invention, in “Ode to Psyche,” of the mind itself as the “main region” of his song, is the single gesture that creates the inward psychological subject of all the odes. Second, the “Ode to a Nightingale” seems to carry the most simply appealing melody, with the most directly emotional rhythms of rise and fall. And third, the ode “To Autumn” is the most delicate in its tone of feeling, the fullest in its tacit identification of landscape with consciousness. By comparison, the “Ode on Melancholy” may feel embarrassingly homiletic, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” divided between its wish for a cold sublimity and its responsiveness to human passions, and the “Ode on Indolence” an indecisive sort of warm-up. This, it should be added, is our modern consensus. Readers of Keats’s time, or of the World War I generation, would have cared for different poems for different reasons.

Helen Vendler’s argument is that the earlier odes lead up to the ode “To Autumn.” She shows Keats improving gradually, with false steps which she documents carefully. By treating the odes not only as a sequence but a progressive sequence, she gains some drama for the story, at the sacrifice of some credibility. The whole development that interests her takes place within a period of approximately six months and it would be best for her analysis if the odes came evenly spaced from each other. As it happens, the first five come nearly at once, and “To Autumn” so much later that one is tempted to take the absence of “ode” from the title as a clue that Keats did not regard it as part of the group. Further, Vendler’s ordering （Indolence, Psyche, Nightingale, Urn, Melancholy, Autumn） does not accord with Jack Stillinger’s edition of 1978 （in which these would be 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6）, yet she offers no reason for correcting him apart from her own conviction. Still, the argument is original. It begins some way into Keats’s last phase, where other critics have been content to suppose his work already mature; and it explains as partial failures, or only interim successes, three poems which they have often regarded as masterpieces. “Other critics” is not an empty phrase, since of all English poets Keats has been the best served by modern criticism. In her opening pages Vendler acknowledges two dozen predecessors. Her list is not exhaustive, and yet she is not much indebted to any of them.

A device by which Vendler proposes to measure Keats’s advances within the ode-sequence is what she calls the “constitutive trope.” This varies from one poem to the next: taking them again in her order, she finds “dispute” helpful for an understanding of the “Ode on Indolence,” “reduplication” for the “Ode to Psyche,” and so on through “reiteration,” “interrogation,” “admonition,” to “enumeration” for “To Autumn.” The patterns that these words name are not what any other critic would call tropes—a term usually reserved for strong figures that twist the meaning of a word. They are, simply, patterns, or pedagogic aids to reading. If one thinks of a chain of powerful questions as essential to the effect of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”—then the word “interrogation” justifies itself, without our having to pretend it gives us a new trope. Even with the help of “admonition,” however, the “Ode on Melancholy” may remain the most elusive of the group. In her somewhat perplexed admiration for this poem Vendler writes from a perspective natural to most readers today. But the same “Ode on Melancholy” would have been the poem of the group most accessible to Keats’s predecessors in the English ode, Thomas Gray and William Collins. Its allegory, which we find strained, was at home in their kind of poetry. It had become a conscious formality by the time Coleridge wrote “Hence, viper thoughts”; but to Keats that mode of address seems to come effortlessly again, and we are not sure what to make of his dexterity.

In arranging a deliberate buildup for Keats’s triumphal march at the end, Vendler is obliged to discover a fair number of shortcomings in the earlier odes, which readers not attuned to her story have either passed over or refused to consider as faults. The larger problems she discovers in Keats’s maturing view of poetry are often of her own devising. Thus, in the “Ode to a Nightingale” he is said to show dissatisfaction with his “postulate … that lyric art, of which the model is natural music, is self-expressive, a vehicle of sensation, nonmimetic, deceptive, uttered to no particular ear, and beautiful without respect to truth and verisimilitude.” Outside of this book, of course, Keats never credited anything like such a postulate, and its only function is to move the argument forward. Since we are two notches past Indolence but still three short of Autumn, something must be wrong, and this tells us what it is. Vendler’s more straightforward prospects of the task ahead can seem equally arbitrary. Because Keats went on writing at all after the odes “To a Nightingale” and “On a Grecian Urn,” we must, she supposes, “presume [that these poems] were still in some way unsatisfactory to him.” It would be just as safe to assume that he went on writing because he was delighted with what he had done so far.

Of Keats’s actual opinions, about poetry or anything else, we hear very little in this book. Vendler is as minimal as Cleanth Brooks in her use of biographical detail, and fragmentary in her dealings with all of Keats’s poetry before the volume of 1820. She excludes on principle most of his friendships, enthusiasms, hobbyhorses, prose, and sex. （In a curious moment she cites, as a mark of his identification with the nightingale, the fact that the bird is “sexless, [being] no more than a ‘wandering voice.’”） Nevertheless, the poet she has imagined is temporarily faithful to many postulates like the one just cited. He believes that “the diction of dream and waking” is “a way of making truth-claims.” He conceives of a flat opposition of sensation to thought, and beauty to truth, only at last coming to realize their interdependence. And in the “Ode to Psyche” he writes a poem which aims, “whatever its sensual metaphors （and these will demand their own recognition later）, at a complete, exclusive, and lasting annihilation of the senses in favor of the brain.” The “recognition” seems plain enough, however, in a phrase of the “Ode to Psyche” itself—“branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain.” Vendler, in short, furnishes the mind of Keats with some silly notions, before she puts in their place some better ones.

On the whole, Vendler’s bias is ascetic rather than anti-intellectual, and she sees the temptations Keats has to resist as coming with about equal frequency from intellect and from fancy. In the “pained awakenings from fancy” may be found “Keats’s most solid poetic strength, a strength which eventually affirms not a vanishing but a discovery.” We are asked to trust those pained awakenings. Keats’s exhilarations, on the other hand, ought to leave us coldly suspicious: “Though it is true that the sequence about wine follows Keats’s usual rhythm of expansion and sinking, the impression left by the stanza （on us as on Byron） is one of feverish and insistent self-manipulation.” Byron’s exact words were: “Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always f—gg—g his imagination—I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.” Though Vendler does not give the passage, this must be what she has in mind: there is nothing else remotely like it among Byron’s comments on Keats. It does not capture the impression left by any part of the “Ode to a Nightingale”—indeed it was not written about any poem in particular. It is an instance of vulgarity and snobbery working together, and therefore a strange judgment for a modern critic to cite approvingly and in passing. Vendler probably would not go so far as to accuse Keats of frigging his imagination. Yet her willingness to have Byron as an ally is consistent with her general strictures: she admires Keats in his moods of equilibrium, and distrusts every touch of personal pathos. When she wants to praise lines that might seem to approach the “sublime-pathetic” that Keats appreciated in Milton, she has to clear them of any such feeling. “And, little town, thy streets for evermore / Will silent be …”: many readers have found in these words a strong current of sympathy. But for Vendler they express “a complete capitulation to mystery,” an “admirable acquiescence in ignorance.” The negative capability of this Keats is strictly negative.

The term of praise to which Vendler recurs most often is “aesthetic.” And a truly aesthetic art-object must be self-enclosed, autonomous, “a system of inexhaustible internal relations.” The Fall of Hyperion seems to her a failure because Keats’s muse, Moneta, and his subject, the Titans, “have not found a common aesthetic territory, or a theoretical base in Keats’s letters.” Again, the “Ode to a Nightingale” takes a wrong turn because “loading rifts is a retarding aesthetic.” The moral appears to be that a great many aesthetic defeats, which look like rhetorical victories, are needed to make a single aesthetic victory. For this critic the ode “To Autumn” is alone a sufficient reward for the long apprenticeship that produced it. She writes fifty-five pages on the poem, and leads in with three pages composed of twenty-two citations from other works by Keats. All that raw matter becomes important as ur-Autumn ode-stuff. In writing his farewell ode, Keats makes the “powerful discovery” of “a form of structural polyphony, in which several forms—each one autonomous, each one pregnant with meaning, each one continued for the full length of the ode—overlap in a palimpsest of effects.” So, very near the end of his life, Keats has the good fortune to be aesthetically complete. We may have admired “how great a step he had taken in the submission to reality in introducing, in the ‘Ode on Melancholy,’ Joy’s grape, which is nonetheless permitted to burst gratifyingly on the palate.” We must now recognize how far beyond this “To Autumn” reaches, with its fruit which “ascetically remains unconsumed, though crushed out of its former being.” To a performance that is chastened, realistic, and wholly serious, Vendler accords her highest praise:

Lyric—to Keats’s supreme joy—admits guiltlessly all five senses, and pleases all five senses, not directly … but with “spiritual sweets.” Keats’s perplexed mind has come to the great discovery that lyric makes sense by giving a natural topography to the algebra of thought. … [The poem] moves outward to engirdle the earth. … It can remember the songs of spring and it can forget that warm days can ever cease. … It is mimetic; it is （in its antiphony） dialectical. … Most of all, it is multiple.

“Guiltlessly” perhaps stands out as a vestige of the critic’s own asceticism rather than the poet’s, and the use of “algebra” may puzzle a reader who has not followed the whole argument of the book. But this word as Vendler employs it refers merely to the compression by which a detail may appear at once sensuous and allegorical. Simple arithmetic will in fact show the reason for her praise. “To Autumn” incorporates every pattern from the earlier five odes. It is therefore at least five times as good; and in describing the effect Vendler plainly shares something of Keats’s joy.

In addition to its several interpretations, The Odes of John Keats offers miscellaneous suggestions about sources and analogues. The retreat at dawn of the ghost in Hamlet, as a source of Keats’s “fade” in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” sounds reasonable but far from intuitive. On the other hand, the analogues with Yeats, which Vendler finds particularly in the “Ode on Indolence,” are good at first and improve on acquaintance. The connection she draws between Keats’s Moneta and Spenser’s Mutability is immediately persuasive, and will be important to anyone’s reading of Keats. And yet, having come this far, she misreads both the tone of Keats’s feelings about his muse, and the sense of his presentation: “the blank appearance of [Moneta’s] visionless eyes” reminds her chiefly of “art’s indifference to its audience.” But it is Keats who is indifferent, and Moneta who admonishes him for being so:

“High prophetess,” said I, “purge off
Benign, if so it please thee, my mind’s film.”
“None can usurp this height,” returned that shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”

Moneta is visionless because she is beyond education by sight. She keeps the audience for poetry as well as its subject, the fate of others, always before Keats’s eyes; the miseries of the world concerned him so much that he could portray the “high prophetess” of his vocation as a being who knew everything about them. In a book full of good things, Vendler nowhere suggests the character of a poet for whom this could have been an appropriate muse.