critical appreciation of the poem to autumn by john keats
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To Autumn is one of the most popular poems in the English speaking world and is considered by many critics to be one of Keats's finest creations. It is a shortened ode, a formal poem of meditative reflection.
Over the years it has been interpreted in several different ways, the most recent being a political reading of the poem by a prominent Marxist poet. This article will explore all the various alternatives, from literal to allegorical, and focus on rhyme, metre (meter in USA), syntax, allusion and language.
Suffice to say that, despite these alternative approaches, the poem has retained its reputation as a masterpiece of form and content, and elicits positive reaction wherever it is read.
John Keats wrote in a letter to a friend, Leigh Hunt: 'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us...Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters one's soul.'
Keats would be happy to know that much of his poetry is still considered great art and affects even the post-modern mind (and soul). But the question has to be asked - Can a poem written by a leading poet be totally immune to the social, political and cultural environment it is born in to at that time?
Certainly Keats was aware of social and political upheavals of his time, including the infamous massacre of working protestors at the Battle of Peterloo in Manchester in the summer of 1819. He did have radical leanings but tended not to express them in his poetry.
So, is To Autumn simply about the season and nothing else?
To Autumn seems to have been written following a walk Keats took on Tuesday 21st September 1819, when living in Winchester. He wrote a letter to a friend, John Hamilton Reynolds:
'How beautiful the season is now - How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather - Dian skies - I never liked stubble-fields so much as now - Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm - in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.'
Keats's composition, based on his observations and imaginative sensitivity, was inspired by an autumnal walk. This simple act produced a work of art that has enthralled and intrigued ever since.
Critics will make of it what they will but there is no mistaking the central themes contained within each stanza:
the fecundity and natural bounty of the season.
the cessation/culmination of that now managed process.
the cyclic nature of time, change.