The living pantheon of poets in 1820 the Hanoverian monarchs, George I to George IV – let alone such other 1820 offerings as “An Ode to Britain,” attached to An Illustration of the Dangerous Consequences Arising from Youth Listening to the Destructive Discourse of Atheists, Deists, and Freethinkers, and “Ode on the King’s Birthday,” written on June 4, 1820, from New South Wales, by Michael Massey Robinson, the “First Poet Laureat of Australia,” which seeks to “Retrace the PatriotChief’s Career of Glory!” (l 118) What have been seen as controversial claims for the political valence of Keats’s odes27 might strike us differently when we place his poems against a context in which one was less likely to read meditative odes to solitary birds than to read overly political poems such as the 1819 “Ode to Wellington,” by Byron’s acquaintance Robert Charles Dallas, who offers a sixty-two-page paean where the “muse Æolic” and “The living strains of Pindar’s lyre” are invoked to sing “WELLESLEY’S martial name” (ll 1, 3, 11), or Charles Bucke’s Cockneyesque “Ode to the Nymph of the Fountain of Tears” (in The Fall of the Leaf; and Other Poems of 1819), where the Nymph weeps “When despots wield their giant powers / Against the sons of liberty” (ll 3–4) Most odes at the time were not Horatian moral meditations or sacred or sublime apostrophes to the natural or the supernatural, but instead amorous odes in the manner of Anacreon, as in Thomas Moore’s Odes of Anacreon by “Thomas Little,” or, even more strikingly, satiric odes While Pindar was seen as the great exemplar of the “heroic” ode, the most popular writer of odes in the period was the satirist “Peter Pindar,” John Wolcot (1738–1819), who first made his name with Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782 and who went on to write Farewell Odes, Expostulary Odes to a Great Duke, and a Little Lord, Odes to Mr Paine, and Ode upon Ode, or, A Peep at St James’s At the height of his popularity he could sell 20,000 copies of a satire in a single day, and he was an influence not only on such imitators as “Peter Pindar, Jun.” (who issued The Old Black Cock and His Dunghill Advisers in Jeopardy; or, The Palace that Jack Built as part of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820), “Philo Peter Pindar” (who published The Field of Peter-loo, An Heroic Poem, in Two Cantos [1820]), and C F Lawler (who also used the “Peter Pindar, Esq.” pseudonym), but on Moore and Byron as well At the time when Keats was publishing the great odes in his 1820 volume, Paul Thackwell released his Collection of Miscellaneous and Religious Poems To Which is Added a Series of Odes, on Various Subjects, Illustrated with Original Tales Given his main title, we might imagine Thackwell offering sacred, sublime odes, but instead we find odes to “Stupidity” and “Craft and Subtlety,” to which are appended exemplary tales, as a satiric ode’s subject is narrativized.28 27 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008