j e f f r e y n c ox Such a context might suggest different ways to think about Keats’s odes, placed within a volume named for its narrative poems The satiric turn of so many contemporary odes might make us alive to the punning, coinages, oxymorons, and other witty wordplay of Keats’s poems, which, as contemporary reviewers noted, were “vivacious, smart, witty, changeful, sparkling, and learned” (The Edinburgh [Scots] Magazine [2nd series, (October 1817), pp 254–7]), and also “insolent,” marked by a “bravado style” (The London Magazine [September 1820], pp 315–21).29 The “Ode on Melancholy” might perhaps then be read as satirizing a tradition of courting melancholia, and even “Ode on a Grecian Urn” might be relieved of some of the utter seriousness that has accompanied its hypercanonicity.30 Even if we not embrace a thoroughgoing satirical reading of Keats, these odes offer daring language and startling patterns of thought that have led to a general agreement that these poems are engaged in both intellectual experimentation and an experiment with form, seen perhaps most clearly in accounts of the ways in which Keats creates his new odal stanzas out of his work on the sonnet Given the place of the sonnet in Keats’s 1817 Poems and noting Wordsworth’s publication of his River Duddon Sonnets in 1820, we need to consider Keats’s turn from the sonnet to larger lyric forms as a key feature of the 1820 volume We also need to remember that the great odes are placed within a volume named for and framed by narrative poems Wordsworth famously stated in his “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads that contemporary taste was being destroyed by “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse”;31 beyond a concern that poetry is losing its place to the Gothic novel and to imported plays, Wordsworth stands against the rise of the poetic tale or romance that in many ways would define “Romanticism” for contemporary readers.32 Keats, who at the time of finishing his 1820 volume was writing a “German” tragedy in Otho the Great, signals his sense that such romances are what readers want by labeling his book with his three poetic tales As Stuart Curran, Peter Manning, and St Clair have shown, romance was the dominant form in the era that ultimately would be called Romantic As St Clair puts it, “To contemporary readers the great poems of the Romantic age were not those that feature in modern university courses but The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Manfred, The Pleasures of Hope, and Lalla Rookh” (p 215) We might add Southey’s Thalaba, A Rhythmical Romance (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), or Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816), but that is just to expand the list of romances 28 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008