Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, written in fourteen line terza rima stanzas, is a major poem in the form, but perhaps the greatest odes of the 19th century were Keats's Five Great Odes of 1819 which included Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, and To Autumn.

Lyric poetry, for instance, like Keats's " Ode on a Grecian Urn ", is dominantly centripetal, stressing the sound and movement and imagery of the ordered words.

A. C. Swinburne placed it with " Ode on a Grecian Urn " as " the nearest to absolute perfection " of Keats's odes ; Aileen Ward declared it " Keats's most perfect and untroubled poem "; and Douglas Bush has stated that the poem is " flawless in structure, texture, tone, and rhythm "; Walter Evert, in 1965, stated that " To Autumn " is " the only perfect poem that Keats ever wrote – and if this should seem to take from him some measure of credit for his extraordinary enrichment of the English poetic tradition, I would quickly add that I am thinking of absolute perfection in whole poems, in which every part is wholly relevant to and consistent in effect with every other part.

" In the same year, Thomas McFarland placed " To Autumn " with " Ode to a Nightingale ", " Ode on a Grecian Urn ", " The Eve of St. Agnes " and Hyperion as Keats's greatest achievement, together elevating Keats " high in the ranks of the supreme makers of world literature ".

" Ode to a Nightingale " is a personal poem that describes Keats's journey into the state of Negative Capability.

Of Keats's six major odes of 1819, " Ode to Psyche " was probably written first and " To Autumn " written last.

Keats's odes seek to find a " classical balance " between two extremes, and in the structure of " Ode on a Grecian Urn ", these extremes are the symmetrical structure of classical literature and the asymmetry of Romantic poetry.

Like many of Keats's odes, " Ode on a Grecian Urn " discusses art and art's audience.

A. Richards, an English literary critic who analysed Keats's poems in 1929, relied on the final lines of the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " to discuss " pseudo-statements " in poetry:

* Abrams, M. H. " Ode on a Grecian Urn " in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes Editor Jack Stillinger.

* Bateson, F. W. " Ode on a Grecian Urn " in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes Editor Jack Stillinger.

" Passion and Permanence in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn " in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes Editor Jack Stillinger.

" Form and Content in Keats's ' Ode on a Grecian Urn '".

Biographer Robert Gittings suggests " Ode on Indolence " was written on 4 May 1819, based upon Keats's report about the weather during the ode's creation ; Douglas Bush insists it was written after " Nightingale ", " Grecian Urn ", and " Melancholy ".

The latter part of this description is a quotation from John Keats's poem, ' Ode on a Grecian Urn '.

Among Harty's compositions from these years, Kennedy mentions a setting of Keats's " Ode to a Nightingale " ( 1907 ), a Violin Concerto ( 1909 ) premiered by Joseph Szigeti, the tone poem With the Wild Geese ( 1910 ) and the cantata The Mystic Trumpeter to words by Walt Whitman ( 1913 ).

During his years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry including Choice or Chance ( 1934 ) and Shells by a Stream ( 1944 ), prose works on Charles Lamb ; Edward Gibbon ; Keats's publisher ; Percy Bysshe Shelley ; John Taylor ; and Thomas Hardy ; and a book about a game he loved, Cricket Country ( 1944 ).

He had met Hunt after seeing his painting The Eve of St. Agnes, which is based on Keats's poem.

The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in 1820 in a volume of Keats's poetry that included Lamia and The Eve of Saint Agnes.

The work has been interpreted as a meditation on death ; as an allegory of artistic creation ; as Keats's response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in the same year ; and as an expression of nationalist sentiment.

" Not everything on Keats's mind at the time was bright ; the poet knew in September that he would have to finally abandon Hyperion.

Keats did not send " To Autumn " to Reynolds, but did include the poem within a letter to Richard Woodhouse, Keats's publisher and friend, and dated it on the same day.

Of all of Keats's poems, " To Autumn ", with its catalog of concrete images, most closely describes a paradise as realized on earth while also focusing on archetypal symbols connected with the season.

Early reviews of " To Autumn " focused on it as part of Keats's collection of poems Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.

In an 1844 essay on Keats's poetry in the Dumfries Herald, George Gilfillian placed " To Autumn " among " the finest of Keats ' smaller pieces ".

In 1997, Andrew Motion summarised the critical view on " To Autumn ": " it has often been called Keats's ' most ... untroubled poem ' [...] To register the full force of its achievement, its tensions have to be felt as potent and demanding.

This reliance on vowel sounds is not unique to this ode, but is common to Keats's other 1789 odes and his Eve of St. Agnes.

The twentieth-century British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion elaborated on Keats's term to illustrate an attitude of openness of mind which he considered of central importance, not only in the psychoanalytic session, but in life itself.

The blank verse of Keats in Hyperion is mainly modelled on that of Milton, but takes fewer liberties with the pentameter and possesses the characteristic beauties of Keats's verse.

He was also responsible for the famous Quarterly article on John Keats's Endymion.

Many contemporary essays and articles on these works shared Keats's view that classical Greek art was both idealistic and captured Greek virtues.

The word choice represents a shift from Keats's early reliance on Latinate polysyllabic words to shorter, Germanic words.

At the turn of the 20th century, a 1904 analysis of great poetry by Stephen Gwynn claimed, " above and before all Keats's poems are the three odes, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn.

The moment that Cupid and Psyche are revealed is an example of " Keatsian intensity " as they are neither in a state of separation nor are they united ; they exist in a state somewhere in between in a similar manner to the figures depicted in Keats's " Ode on a Grecian Urn ".

This inability of the narrator to know if he was awake is a theme that appears in many of Keats's odes that followed, including " Ode on Indolence ", " Ode on a Grecian Urn ", and " Ode to a Nightingale ".

Helen Vendler expands on the idea, in her 1983 analysis of Keats's odes, when she claimed " the complex mind writing the Urn connects stillness and quietness to ravishment and a bride ".

" In 1981, William Walsh argued that " Among the major Odes [...] no one has questioned the place and supremacy of ' To Autumn ', in which we see wholly realized, powerfully embodied in art, the complete maturity so earnestly laboured at in Keats's life, so persuasively argued about in his letters.

In Keats's Odes.

" Later, T. S. Eliot thought very highly of Keats's work and wrote " The Odes — especially perhaps the Ode to Psyche — are enough for his reputation.

" The Ode to Psyche " in Keats's Odes ed.

Ezra Jack Keats's John Henry: An American Legend, published in 1965, is a notable picture book chronicling the history of John Henry and portraying him as the " personification of the medieval Everyman who struggles against insurmountable odds and wins.