Recommendations
Books Like The Odes of Keats
Best books to read after the Odes of John Keats
Readers who love the Odes of John Keats — 'To a Nightingale,' 'On a Grecian Urn,' 'To Autumn' — will enjoy these works of Romantic poetry, the literature of beauty and mortality, and the great tradition of the lyric poem that meditates on what beauty costs and what it gives.
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Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
by John Keats
The 1820 volume that contains the Odes — 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is the most perfect of Romantic narrative poems; 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' is the most resonant of Romantic ballads; reading the full volume shows the Odes in their original context.
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Lyrical Ballads
by William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge
The founding Romantic collection that established the tradition the Odes develop — Wordsworth's concern with the relationship between the human mind and natural experience is the philosophical foundation of Keats's sensuous engagement with the same relationship.
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Don Juan
by Lord Byron
The Romantic poem most different from Keats — Byron's satirical comic epic is the counter-example that reveals what makes Keats distinctive; the contrast between Byron's outward-looking wit and Keats's inward-turning sensuousness defines the range of the Romantic tradition.
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Songs of Innocence and of Experience
by William Blake
Blake's visionary lyrics address the same questions the Odes address — the tiger and the lamb, experience and innocence, the beauty and the terror of the world — in a radically different formal key; reading Blake and Keats together shows two Romantic poets working on the same problems.
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In Memoriam A.H.H.
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Victorian long poem most deeply influenced by Keats — Tennyson's meditation on grief and the beauty of the world uses Keats's sensuous method applied to the Victorian crisis of faith; 'In Memoriam' is the greatest Victorian heir to the Odes.
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The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
by W.B. Yeats
Yeats began as a Keatsian poet of pure beauty and transcended that beginning into the most powerful lyric voice of the twentieth century — the Keatsian yearning for permanent beauty is the starting point of Yeats's career; reading both traces the tradition's development.
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Harmonium
by Wallace Stevens
Stevens's first collection is the American poetry that most directly continues the Odes' project — the meditations on beauty, imagination, and the relationship between mind and world in poems like 'Sunday Morning' and 'The Snow Man' are Keats's concerns recast in an American modernist frame.
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Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion
by John Keats
Keats's two attempts at a Miltonic epic — the abandoned fragments that show what Keats was reaching toward beyond the Odes; 'The Fall of Hyperion' (1819, like the Odes) is the most ambitious of all his works and the one that most directly addresses the poet's vocation and its costs.
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