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This essay perceives Keats’s aversion to Christian orthodoxy as central to his idea of soul-making, and thus interprets “Ode to Psyche” as his attempt to replace the worship of the Christian God, an external deity, with the worship of an inner deity whose name ‘Psyche’ literally means the human soul. I argue that Keats’s embrace of a neglected Greek goddess registers a fierce struggle with Milton—in fact, fiercer than Keatsian scholarship has assumed so far. The internalization of Psyche’s temple and the surrounding scenery in the ode’s final stanza represents the poet’s challenge to Milton who presented all nature as being polluted by Original Sin, which is held to have brought pain and death to this world. Keats’s celebration of Psyche is underpinned by his rejection of Christianity, specifically of the concept of Original Sin as dramatized in Milton’s Nativity Ode and Paradise Lost. Keats uses internalization as a means of defending himself against the Christian system of salvation, which he condemns as an insult to humanity.
