Ode on Melancholy

“Ode on Melancholy” is a poem that was composed by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819. It was published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), which appeared shortly before Keats’s death at the age of 25.

Keats was part of the second generation of British Romantic poets who expanded upon the ideas conveyed by William Wordsworth in his Preface to the second printing of Lyrical Ballads (1800). “Ode on Melancholy,” along with five other odes—“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Indolence,” and “To Autumn”—make up what are known as Keats’s “great odes,” which are considered some of the best poetry ever created by an English writer. Stylistically, Keats adopted a new stanza form for the odes, borrowing from sonnets. The poems are lyrical, centering themes such as the mystery of existence, the beauty of nature, and the relationship between creativity and imagination.

In his lifetime, much of Keats’s early work was treated with disdain; however, due to laudatory memorials by contemporaries like Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the quality of his last collection, Keats’s reputation grew rapidly after his death. By the late 1800s, he was said to be one of the greatest poets in all of English literature.