“ROMANTIC LONGING AND ETERNAL SONG: IMAGINATION AND ESCAPISM IN JOHN KEATS’S ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE”

Abstract

John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale stands as one of the most celebrated expressions of Romantic aesthetics, weaving together themes of longing, mortality, beauty, and the transformative power of imagination. This paper, titled “Romantic Longing and Eternal Song: Imagination and Escapism in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale”, explores how Keats employs the nightingale’s song as a symbol of transcendence, contrasting the permanence of art with the fleeting nature of human existence. The nightingale, imagined as an immortal voice, embodies the Romantic ideal of escape from worldly suffering, offering the poet a vision of eternity beyond the confines of time and death.

Through close reading and critical analysis, this study examines the tension between the poet’s yearning for dissolution and his recognition of life’s inevitable limitations. The ode dramatizes a quintessential Romantic conflict: the desire to transcend reality through imagination and art versus the sobering return to human finitude. The paper also situates Keats within the larger Romantic tradition by drawing intertextual connections to Wordsworth’s concept of transcendental imagination and Coleridge’s exploration of dreamlike states in Kubla Khan.

Ultimately, this research argues that Ode to a Nightingale exemplifies the Romantic pursuit of beauty and truth, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of permanent escape. Keats’s ode reveals that the nightingale’s song is both a source of solace and a reminder of the limits of human imagination. Thus, the poem endures as a meditation on the paradox of Romantic longing: the simultaneous desire to flee reality and the inescapable return to it.