Genius and Creativity: Keats' "Ode on Indolence"
By David Gosselin
Throughout the ages, critics, academics, scientists, and artists have pondered the question, “What is Creativity?”
In the spring of 1819, John Keats experienced one of the greatest bursts of creativity in the history of art and science. When fully considered, the astounding poetic achievements of the spring of 1819 parallel Einstein’s celebrated “miracle year” of 1905. Just as Einstein revolutionized our very idea of the universe, overthrowing the linear conception of time and space, Keats opened new vast vistas into the domain of the creative imagination and its power to capture truth through beauty. 1819 might rightly be considered Keats’s “miracle year.”
To appreciate the nature of Keats’s creative breakthroughs fully, it is necessary to dispel a popular belief that certain academics insist on keeping alive: that Keats was a Romantic poet. Contrary to their interpretation, the nature of the Great Odes was anything but Romantic. Romanticism was obsession with pretty descriptions of an idealized sensual world and the titillating effects that such descriptions could arouse in the audience. While like the Romantics Keats availed himself of lush and natural imagery, his use of such imagery represented a universe fundamentally different from the one inhabited by the Romantic poets.
William Wordsworth and the Romantic school in general contented themselves by simply entertaining the senses with pleasant imagery. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the universally acknowledged manifesto of Romantic poetry, Wordsworth was explicit about his intention of wanting to keep the reader in the company of “flesh and blood,” that is, to avoid higher forms of metaphorical ideas and paradoxes, which challenge human beings to venture beyond what they could simply touch, taste, hear, see, or smell:
The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men . . . I have wished to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him.
However, Wordsworth himself recognized the limitations of his brand of poetry:
But, whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt but that the language which it will suggest to him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life . . . However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering.
Had Keats simply been another poet of the Romantic school, he would have embraced Wordsworth’s view of poetry. Had this been the case, the Odes would have never been possible.
For Keats, poetry represented the creative agency by which he could transcend the very limits defined by the contemporary view of poetry and art, the limits of the senses, and a purely mortal sense of identity.
In this respect, “The Ode on Indolence” is a perfect entry point for exploring Keats’s celebrated miracle year because the subject of the ode is the process of creativity itself. Keats describes, or more precisely takes us through his own process of wrestling with creative inspiration and becoming the instrument of what he refers to as his “visions.” It flies directly in the face of the popular literary practices of aspiring writers today who often lack genuine inspiration or ideas to write about, those busying themselves with “writing prompts” and self-help styled articles that might sound something like, “7 Great Steps to Having a Productive Writing Day” or “How to Find Inspiration When You Have None.” Rather than a manual or step-by-step guide to writing, Keats discovers an awakening of his creative powers by confronting one of the greatest paradoxes of the human condition: our mortality.
Confronting one’s mortality is something any truly creative person must do if they are to fully develop and sustain their gifts. Keats thus becomes one of our greatest allies in discovering and unfolding our own creative potential. He does this by taking the reader through his own creative process and getting him to relive the kinds of paradoxes Keats had to confront within himself in order to give birth to the ideas whose uttered expression came to be known as the Great Odes.
