Prognosis without Verdict: Clinical Judgement and the Endings of Keats's Odes of 1819

Abstract

Criticism of Keats's odes has been overwhelmingly diagnostic. It asks what the poems know, and it reads their endings as limits of knowledge or of feeling. This essay argues that the endings are better described as prognostic. Keats was examined on semeiotics, the branch of the medical institutes that divided signs into the diagnostic and the prognostic, and he served as a dresser at Guy's Hospital, where the case report is a genre that by convention does not conclude. We reconstruct five terminal moves available to a Georgian clinical case, state a formal criterion for locating the terminal move of a poem, and apply that criterion to the six odes of 1819 and to a control set of five odes published between 1746 and 1820. Five of the six odes fall within the clinical repertoire. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" does not, and we argue that the long editorial quarrel over the quotation marks in its last two lines is a quarrel about who signs the note. The control odes end in maxim, benediction, or consolation. We propose prognostic suspension as a category of lyric closure absent from Barbara Herrnstein Smith's taxonomy: formal closure completed, judgement withheld.