Is it safe to assume that John Keats is the narrator in his poem, “Ode to a Nightingale?”?
Both of the above are correct. You should NEVER assume that the narrator and the poet are the same. While you may interpret that the poet uses the speaker to say the things that he himself believes, the speaker is a fictional, literary construct. One could argue that Sylvia Plath, for example, IS the speaker of her poetry, in that her style is extremely confessional and personal, but you should still never assume that. Keats wrote at a time when poetry was very formalized, and it is incredibly unlikely that he would ever have considered himself to be the narrator of his own poetry.
