A Stylistic Analysis of John Keats’s Poem “Ode to Psyche”

Abstract

John Keats is an English poet whose works profoundly influenced English Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. His poems have attracted many literary critics who have approached Keats’s texts with an aim to analyzing them; however, few approaches have questioned his literary texts from a stylistic point of view. This paper offers a stylistic reading of Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” (1819) that uses linguistic methods to analyze the poem so as to highlight certain features that enhance the text, making it more insightful, attainable, and explicit. This stylistic analysis focuses on repetition, parallelism, sound parallelism or phonetic schemas, style variation, and linguistic deviation, and it pursues the impact of foregrounded features and their contribution to understanding the text. It proves that stylistics plays an essential role in understanding literary texts as it unleashes hidden, fuzzy, and even contradictory meanings. This study shows that Keats employed stylistics devices in a way that differed from his peers of the 19^th century, and, moreover, that his form and style lend themselves to concealed and ambiguous thoughts that come together to create a harmonious work of art. By drawing attention to the unique aspects of Romanticism through stylistic features in the poem, the analysis demonstrates that the aesthetic dimension and form of a literary work remain inseparable from a fuller