John Keats's 1819 Odes - Structure

Structure

After writing "Ode to Psyche", Keats sent the poem to his brother and explained his new ode form: "I have been endeavouring to discover a better Sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes; the other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded. It will explain itself."

Writing these poems had a particular influence on Keats, as Walter Jackson Bate explains:

However felicitous he may have been in writing them, these short poems of one of the greatest of English lyrists are the by-product of other efforts; and those habits of both ideal and practice left him more dissatisfied than he would otherwise have been with the pressure of most lyric forms toward quick, neat solution The new ode form appealed also because it was sufficiently confining to challenge his conscience as a craftsman. Finally, the union of amplitude and formal challenge offered unique opportunities as well for the concentrated intensity and concreteness of idiom that he had begun to master in Hyperion

In "Ode to Psyche", Keats incorporated a narrative structure that sets the scene, gives background information, and then ends with a conclusion. Of these structural elements, the preface was discontinued in his next odes and the setting is reduced within the other odes until the scene is merely implied.