"'''To Autumn'''" is a poem written by Romantic poet [[John Keats]] (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821). The work was composed on 19 September 1819 and published in a volume of Keats's poetry that included "Lamia" and "The Eve of Saint Agnes" in 1820. "To Autumn" is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats's "1819 Odes." Although Keats had little time throughout 1819 to devote to poetry because of personal problems, he managed to compose "To Autumn" after he was inspired following a walk near Winchester one autumn evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year following the publication of "To Autumn," Keats died in Rome.
The poem has three stanzas, each of eleven lines, that describe the tastes, sights, and sounds of autumn. Much of the third stanza, however, is dedicated to diction , symbolism, and literary devices with negative connotations, as it describes the end of the day and the end of autumn. "To Autumn" includes an emphasis on images of motion, growth, and maturation. The work can be interpreted as a discussion of death, an expression of colonialist sentiment, or as a political response to the Peterloo Massacre. "To Autumn" has been regarded by critics as one of the most perfect short poems in the English literature, and it is one of the most anthologized English lyric poems.
==Background==
At the turn of the 20th century, a 1904 analysis of great poetry by Stephen Gwynn claimed, "above and before all [of Keats's poems are] the three odes, ''To a Nightingale'', ''On a Grecian Urn'', and ''To Autumn''. Among these odes criticism can hardly choose; in each of them the whole magic of poetry seems to be contained."<ref>Gwynn 1904 p. 378</ref> Sidney Colvin, in his 1920 biography, pointed out that "["To Autumn"] opens up no such far-reaching avenues to the mind and soul of the reader as the odes ''To a Grecian Urn'', ''To a Nightingale'', or ''On Melancholy'', but in execution is more complete and faultless than any of them."<ref>Colvin 1920 p. 422</ref> Following this in a 1934 analysis of Romantic poetry, Margaret Sherwood stated that the poem was "a perfect expression of the phase of primitive feeling and dim thought in regard to earth processes when these are passing into a thought of personality."<ref>Sherwood 1934 p. 263</ref>
Harold Bloom, in 1961, described "To Autumn" as "the most perfect shorter poem in the English language."<ref>Bloom 1993 p. 432</ref> Following this, Walter Jackson Bate, in 1963, claimed that "[...] each generation has found it one of the most nearly perfect poems in English."<ref>Bate 1963 p. 581</ref> Later in 1973, Stuart Sperry wrote, "'To Autumn' succeeds through its acceptance of an order innate in our experience – the natural rhythm of the seasons. It is a poem that, without ever stating it, inevitably suggests the truth of 'ripeness is all' by developing, with a richness of profundity of implication, the simple perception that ripeness is fall."<ref>Sperry 1973 p. 336</ref> In 1981, William Walsh argued that "Among the major Odes [...] no one has questioned the place and supremacy of 'To Autumn', in which we see wholly realized, powerfully embodied in art, the complete maturity so earnestly laboured at in Keats's life, so persuasively argued about in his letters."<ref>Walsh 1981 p. 118</ref> Literary critic and academic Helen Vendler , in 1988, declared that "in the ode 'To Autumn,' Keats finds his most comprehensive and adequate symbol for the social value of art."<ref>Vendler 1988 p. 124</ref>
In 1997, Andrew Motion summarized the critical view on "To Autumn": "it has often been called Keats's 'most ... untroubled poem' [...] To register the full force of its achievement, its tensions have to be felt as potent and demanding."<ref name="Motion p. 461"/> Following in 1998, M. H. Abrams explained, "'To Autumn' was the last work of artistic consequence that Keats completed [...] he achieved this celebratory poem, with its calm acquiescence to time, transience and mortality, at a time when he was possessed by a premonition [...] that he had himself less than two years to live".<ref>Abrams pp. 51–52</ref> James Chandler, also in 1998, pointed out that "If ''To Autumn'' is his greatest piece of writing, as has so often been said, it is because in it he arguably set himself the most ambitious challenge of his brief career and managed to meet it."<ref>Chandler 1998 p. 430</ref> Timothy Corrigan, in 2000, claimed that "'To Autumn' may be, as other critics have pointed out, his greatest achievement in its ability [...] to redeem the English vernacular as the casual expression of everyday experience, becoming in this his most exterior poem even in all its bucolic charm."<ref>Corrigan 2000 p. 156</ref> In 2008, Stanley Plumly wrote, "history, posterity, immortality are seeing 'Ode to a Nightingale,' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' and 'To Autumn' as three of the most anthologized lyric poems of tragic vision in English."<ref>Plumly 2008 p. 343</ref>