While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the inaccessibility of the past ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the excess of melancholia ("Ode on Melancholy"), and the beneficence of nature ("To Autumn") become culturally coded as "female", and he demonstrates how they confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms. This original study does much to illuminate what Keats's,most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other.

The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West"

CHAPTER 1
Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds Intertextuality and Agency in the "Ode to a Nightingale"