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« Making Sense of Wilfred Owen’s Keatsian Heritage: “Exposure” and “Ode to a Nightingale” »

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Readers of Wilfred Owen usually agree that the war poet’s early admiration for John Keats faded after he enlisted in the army; his poetry then turned against Keats’s. The opening paraphrase of Owen’s poem “Exposure” is thus often read as a rejection and a subversion of the Romantic poet’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” This essay will argue that Owen’s poem can be seen as a radical reversal of Keats’s ode. While “Exposure” is indeed more violent and political than “Ode to a Nightingale,” it does not depart from Keats’s conception of human suffering and of nature. Instead, the war poem builds on Keats’s fleeting description of suffering humanity in “Ode to a Nightingale” and extends it. It also echoes bleak descriptions of winter found in lesser known poems by Keats, which sheds new light on “Ode to a Nightingale” and can turn “Exposure” into a grim conclusion to Keats’s ode.