The Acceptance of Mortality in Keats’s “To Autumn”

In this third and final installment of our series on Keats’s odes, we’re looking at To Autumn, the poet’s last major work before his death at the age of 25. Keats’s elegiac meditation on the season also serves as a metaphor for his favorite subject matter, artistic creation itself. What parallels does Keats find between art-making and the bounty, harvest, and barrenness of autumn? And what can the poem teach us about loss and our own mortality? Wes and Erin analyze.

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Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.