Abstract

This paper offers a new reading for Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” in the light of Freud’s theory of creative writing. According to Freud, fantasy is a defense mechanism people use to escape harsh reality. Creative people, like artists and writers, can bring this fantasy to the real world. The paper proposes that in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats offers a psychoanalytic explanation for creative writing very similar to Freud’s theory of “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” In this ode, Keats postulates the real drive behind writing, the aim, and even the process itself. Keats suggests that writing can alter one’s consciousness and help him/her escape the miserable reality into a happy world of dreams. Keats’s world of fantasy is a type of what psychoanalysts call “defense mechanisms.”