Tragic Consolation in "Ode to a Nightingale"

In addressing such questions, the procedure of "Ode to a Nightingale" becomes historicist in James Chandler's sense of the term: as a historicist exercise, the Ode is unavoidably concerned with its cultural modernity, and concerned to investigate that modernity by placing it in dialogic interplay with past texts and discourses.3 That imperative explains in fact the typically Keatsian literariness of "Nightingale": as elsewhere in Keats the poem's intertextual linkages serve as historical references to previous poems and their defining values, among which the poet must then find his own way. [...]throughout 1819 he explored tragic situations and emotions in other venues: