Discovering poetry: Keats the humourist

Keats is justly famed for his late odes and their lyrical beauty. What is not so often recognised is that Keats was also a very funny poet, and that a great many of his poems are parodies, pastiches, and sometimes downright dirty.

I’m afraid there’s nothing titillating about this poem, but it’s a wonderful example of how Keats used parody to expose the limitations of the famous poets of his day – even those he admired greatly. ‘Oxford’ was included in a letter Keats wrote to a friend in which he had a bit of a moan about Wordsworth (who was, all in all, a hero for Keats). He complained that some of Wordsworth’s lines are, in short, a bit dull, “in”, as Keats put it, “the Style of School exercises”. It is of lines like this that Keats says he is thinking:

The lake doth glitter Small birds twitter etc.