John Keats and Romantic poem
Joe
Does any one have the data about Romanticism and "Ode to a
nightingale" of John Keats?
If you do, please reply to my e-mail box
Thanks a lot
--
Yet I cannot tarry longer
And alone and without his nest shall the eagle
fly across the sun
Ken Palmer
4:21PM 12/23/97
Keats wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" around May 1, 1819, shortly after the
"Ode to Psyche." It and the "Grecian Urn" have been descussed as fully as
any two lyrics in the English language. Yet, because fo their richness
and universality, almost every reader contiues to find in them new
attractions and suggestions. In these two odes Keats develops a prototype
for the modern lyric of symbolic debate. The drama is that of a process of
changing response to a symbol, a "greeting of the Spirit: and its object
(to use Keat's phrase; see the letter to Benjamin Bailey, below, March 13,
1818). The debate lies in the fact that the "greeting" or
interpenetration can never be complete, and there is a continuing tension
between what the imagination seeks to make of the object and what the
object continues to suggest in its own right. Meanwhile it may be noted
that Keats here attains what is to be more or less the norm for his new
ode-stanza (an alternate-rhyming quatrain followed, with some variations,
by six lines with a rhyme scheme like that of the cvonventional sestet in
the Petrarchan sonnet: abab cde cde). The "Ode to a Nightingale" is on
eof the rere cases where the whole of a major poem was written almost
extemporaneously: these
eightly lines (apparently with little revision) were composed in a single
morning. Charles Brown, with whom Keats was living in Hampstead, wrote
the following account:
In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest mear my house.
Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and onne morning he
took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a
plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the
house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he
was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps,
four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our
nightingale.
Letter to Benjamin Bailey
To Benjamin Bailey
(March 13, 1818)
Teignmouth Friday
My Dear Bailey,
. . . You know my ideas about Religion - I do not think myself more in the
right than other people and that nothing in this world is proveable. I
wish I could enter into all your feelings on the suybject merely for one
short 10 Minutes and give you a Page or two to your liking. I am sometimes
so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to
amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance - As Tradesmen
say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental
pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer - being
in itself a nothing - Ethereal thing[s] may atleast be thus real, divided
under three heads - Things real - such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars
and passages of Shakspeare - Things semireal such as Love, the clouds &c
which require a greeting of the Spirt to make them wholly exist - and
Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit - Which
by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch
as they are able to "consec[r]ate whate'er they look upon.
aye this may be carried - but what am I talking of - it is an old maxim of
mine and of course must be well known that eve[r]y point of thought is the
centre of an intellectual world - the two uppermost thoughts in a Man's
mind are the two poles of his World he revolves on them and every thing is
southward or northward to him through their means - We take but three
steps from feathers to iron. Now my dear fellow I must once for all tell
you I have not one Idea of the truth of any of my speculations - I shall
never be a Reasoner because I care not to be in the right, when retired
from bickering and in a proper philosophical temper - . . .
Your affectionate friend
John Keats -
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
I
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk;
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
II
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth:
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
III
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leave hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or New Love pine at them beyond to-morrow
IV
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy
ways.
V
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
VI
Darkling I listen: and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.
VII
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
VIII
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?
1819(1820)
4:46PM 12/23/97
Here's the data you asked for on "Ode to A Nightingale" by John Keats.
I hope it's what you were looking for.
Ken Palmer
Ken Palmer
THE POET
A Fragment
by John Keats
Where's the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him!
'Tis a man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato;
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger's yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.
1818 (1848)
Ken Palmer
FANCY
"Fancy" was written as part of a letter (Dec.-Jan., 1818-19) to Keats's
brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana, who had emigrated to
Kentucky. The theme is the insatiable restlessness of the imagination,
desiring to combine all experiences into units of pleasure denser than
actual life permits - a theme that recurs in the great odes and Lamia.
Ever let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain Pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer's joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter's night;
When the soundless earth is muffed,
And the caked snow is shuffled
From the ploughboy's heavy shoon;
When the Night doth meet the Noon
In a dark comspiracy
To banish Even from her sky.
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw'd,
Fancy, high-commission'd: -send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it; -thou shalt hear
Distant harvest-carols clear;
Rustle of the reaped corn;
Sweet birds antheming the morn:
And, in the same moment-hark!
'Tis the early April lark,
Or the rooks, with busy caw,
Foraging for sticks and straw.
Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plum'd lillies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst;
Shaded hyacinth, alway
Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
And every leaf, and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its celled sleep;
And the snake all winter-thin
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,
When the hen-bird's wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering,
While the autumn breezes sing.
Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Every thing is spoilt by use:
Where's the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gaz'd at? Where's the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where's the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where's the face
One would meet in every place?
Where's the voice, however soft,
One would meet in every place?
Where's the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
Like to bubbles when rain peleth.
Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind:
Dulcet-eyed as Ceres' daughter,
Ere the God of Torment taught her
How to frown and how to chide;
With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe's when her zone
slipt its golden clasp, and down
Fell her kirtle to her feet,
While she held the goblet sweet,
And Jove grew languid.-Break the mesh
Of the Fancy's silken leash;
Quickly break her prison-string
And such joys as these she'll bring,-
Let the winged Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
1818(1820)
jeanne khan
Ken,
Every snippet or whole from Keats enchants me.
I remember reading these words as a child:
When I have fears that I shall cease to be
before my pen has gleaned my teaming brain...
I etched these words within; they comfort me
as a chant or mantra would when I feel unwell.
Fears that I would cease to be flew out as the
pen flowed onto paper. Now the fingers press
keys and the apprehension leaves with the first
click. Recall of those Keats words makes others
arrive as truth becomes beauty now and then!
Your contributions here are catching my eye.
I see what pleases me and lo' there is your
name. You and David from Australia have
enhanced what we see of late..Thanks.
Jeanne
In article <Pine.SUN.3.95.971224225754.17401B-100000@scfn>, Ken Palmer
<sfd...@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us> writes: > THE POET
Ken Palmer
Does any one have the data about Romanticism and "Ode to a
nightingale" of John Keats?
If you do, please reply to my e-mail box
Thanks a lot
THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET
This sonnet was written (Dec.,1816) in a sonnet-writing contest with Hunt,
who suggested the topic. Hunt's sonnet with the same title.
ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET
by John Keats
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury,-he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness halflost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
This poem was composed in a sonnet-writing contest with keats.
TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET
by Leigh Hunt
Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass,
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are
strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song-
In doors and out, summer and winter, mirth.
1816 (1817)
Ken Palmer
Does any one have the data about Romanticism and "Ode to a
nightingale" of John Keats?
If you do, please reply to my e-mail box
Thanks a lot
"Romanticism"
THE HALF CENTURY from approximately 1775 to 1830 saw the American
revolution and the emergence of the United states, the French revolution
and Napoleaon, the spread through-our Europe and America of democratic and
egalitarian ideals, the origin or intensification in every European
country of a sentiment of national identity, and, especially in England,
the first important develoment of the industrial system. At the same
time, virtually every realm of thought and art underwent a profound
modification of which we still feel the impact. Three famous names in
Germany alone-Kant, Goithe, Beethoven-may briefly suggest something of the
scope of this cultural achievement and transition.
The term "Romantic," which is conventionally applied to the last thirty
years of this period (1800-30), is far from adequate. All historical
labels are, of course, simplifications and fail to suggest the diversity
of life, thought, and art in the period to which they are applied. And
this particular ear, which in may respects ushered in the modern world,
was at least as deverse as any previous thirty-year period. As a
qualitative or descriptive term, the word "Romantic" -in its traditional
and popular sense-si strictly applicable to only some aspects of the
intellectual and cultural character of the thirty years it acquired in the early and middle eighteenth century,
when it was connected with one of several reactions against neoclassical
taste. In contrast to the reactional order, regularity, and generalization
associated with neoclassical art and literature of the middle
Ages-suggested the "irregular," "picturesque," "wild," and distant. Of
course interest in these qualities was strong in the early nineteenth
century. But if the literature of the "Romantic" era was concerned with
the remote or the distant, it was also concerned, in a new and vital way,
with The concrete and the directly familiar; and init we find the
beginnings of modern naturalism and realism. If it was also at times
directly empirical, and it flourished contemporancously with a rapid
development of historical study and psychological analysis. If it was
attracted to the Middle Ages it was equally drawn to classical antiquity;
and its critical values both encouraged and profited from a resurgent an
more informed study of the classical.
Beginning in 1798 the word "Romantic" was caught up by the influential
German critics Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who gave it a
deeper and more specific group of meaning; and throughout the nineteenth
century the term became more widely used for the simple reason the nothing
better appeared. The Schlegel brothers were interested in defining a
contrast between the art and literature of the classical world and that of
the Middle Ages and Renaissance (which they called "modern" in antithesis
to "ancient"). According to the Schlegel's, the "modern" is relatively
indifferent to artistic form and seeks instead "fullness and life" - a
complete expression of all life in its dynamism and its endless variety
and particularity. Because this ideal in infinite, the spiritual quality
of "modern" or "Romantic" art differs totally from the classical. The
"Romantic" refuses to recognize restraints in subject matter or form and
so is free to represent the abnormal, grotesque, and monstrous and to
mingle standpoints, gentes, modes of expression (such as philosophy and
poetry), and even the separate arts in a single work. Ultimately it
mirrors the struggle of genius against all limitation, and it leads to a
glorification of yearning, striving, and becoming and of the personality
of the artist as larger and more significant than the necessarily
incomplete expression of it in his work. In this antithesis the Schlegel's
exalted the Romantic over the classical, but, it may be repeated, they
applied the term to medieval literature and to such figures as Cervantes
and Shakespeare and did not, on the whole, have in mind the writers of
their own day. Never the less, they defined an ideal with which men of
their time could identify, and it is especially as a result of their
writings that the word "Romantic," as Goethe said in 1930, "goes over the
whole world and causes so may quarrels and divisions . . . everyone talks
about classicism and romanticism-of which nobody thought fifty years ago."
Even this more comprehensive use of the term is frequently attacked. It
is argued that English writers did not think of themselves as "Romantic"
or as constituting a "movement"; even in Germany the group that called
itself "Romantic" did not include most of the figures now embraced by that
generalization. Furthermore, as a critical term it tends to equivocate
between the Romantic considered as a recurring type of personality and as
a particular historical era. Moreover, even as the name of a cultural
epoch the term constantly shifts meaning. Romanticism was not the same
phenomenon in literature, fine arts music, philosophy, historiography, and
science; nor did it fall within the same span of time in the separate
lines of endeavor and in the several nations. Hence, the argument goes,
Romanticism is a name without a corresponding object, and it should either
be used in the plural ("Romanticisms") or scrapped. On the other hand, it
can be urged that the era under consideration, however variously
delimited, was relatively short, and that within it one can identify
widespread, though not necessarily harmonious, ideals, concepts, tastes,
interests, and feelings. The term will be used here to refer to leading
aspects of this cultural era, keeping in mind the era's variousness and
distinctness.
I hope this is what you want.
Ken Palmer
Anonys
Ken Palmer wrote:
>
> Does any one have the data about Romanticism and "Ode to a
> nightingale" of John Keats?
> If you do, please reply to my e-mail box
>
> Thanks a lot
>
> "Romanticism"
>
> THE HALF CENTURY from approximately 1775 to 1830 saw the American
> revolution and the emergence of the United states, the French revolution
> and Napoleaon, the spread through-our Europe and America of democratic and
> egalitarian ideals, the origin or intensification in every European
> country of a sentiment of national identity, and, especially in England,
> the first important develoment of the industrial system. At the same
> time, virtually every realm of thought and art underwent a profound
> modification of which we still feel the impact. Three famous names in
> Ken Palmer
***************
Dear Sir,
An extremely enlightening document.
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Thank You and regards.
Anony.
Ken Palmer
Does any one have the data about Romanticism and "Ode to a
nightingale" of John Keats?
If you do, please reply to my e-mail box
Thanks a lot
JOHN KEATS
1795-1821
THE YOUNGEST of the major Romantic writers, Keats died at the age of
twenty-five. But he gave the surest promise of a form of genius (and a
breadth of humanity) found only in the very greatest poets. It has been
seriously argued that no English or American poet of the last two
centuries excels him in natural endowment; and when writers think of the
richly varied nature of that endowment (from effortless magic of phrase,
through fertility in the use of different styles, to clairvoyance, humor,
and range of sympathetic understanding) the comparison most frequently
made is with Shakespeare.
The life of Keats has been told and retold even for readers who have
little interest in literature. It is a moving dramatic story. He was
born of October 31, 1795, the first child of Thomas and Frances (Jennings)
Keats,
in what was then the northern part of London (the district of Finsbury).
Thomas Keats, a young man who had come from the western part of England,
probably Cornwall, worked in the stables of the prosperous John Jennings
Keat's grandfather, who provided horses for coaches that ran from London
to the northern parts of England. The couple had other children-George,
who later, at the age of twenty-one, emigrated to America and settled in
Kentucky; Thomas (or Tom as he was always called); and then the younger
sister, Fanny Keats the only child to live to an old age. (She married a
Spaniard, went to live in Spain, and died in 1889, sixty-eight years after
the death of her brother. The date reminds us that if Keats had lived even
into middle age he would have been a Victorian, with incalculable
consequences for the literature of the period.)
At the age of eight Keats was sent to a small school in the village of
Enfield, not far away. Shortly afterward his father was killed in a
riding accident. Keats's mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen,
leaving the four Keats children with only their elderly grandmother, Mrs
Jennings, to look after them.
At the school in Enfield, Keats showed little interest in books at
first. Schoolmates afterward recalled mainly his terrier courage in
fighting: he "was a boy whom any one . . . might easily have fancied would
become great-but rather in some military capacity than in literature."
But before his mother's death he had already begun to dip, on his own,
into the small school library. Now he turned to books avidly. He also
started to write a prose translation of Vergil's Aeneid. By this time he
had caught the attention of Charles Cowden Clarke, an assistant at the
school, which was conducted by his father; and Clarke, who was seven years
older than Keats, did everything he could to encourage him. But Keats was
to remain at school for only another year. His grandmother, uncertain how
much longer she herself might live, appointed as guardian to her
grandchildren a tea-merchant named Richard Abbey, who was later-after the
grandmother's death-to use for his own purposes money they should have
inherited. Abbey thought little of schools-he himself was poorly
educated- and he removed Keats from Enfield and apprenticed him to a
surgeon in the nearby village of Edmonton. But Keats could walk over to
his old school in the evening, and he and Clarke continued to read out
loud and to talk of books. Clarke tells of the time they began reading
Spenser's Faerie Queene; Keats went through it, he says, "as a young horse
would through a spring meadow-ramping," In this eagerness of response
Keats already showed his remarkable gift of empathy (or sympathetic
imagination). Coming across a phrase in the Faerie Queene,
"sea-shouldering whales," he feltempathically the parting waves, and
"hoisted himself up," said Clarke, "and looked burly and dominant, as he
said, 'What an image that is-sea-shouldering whales.'"
After four years as an apprentice, Keats went in 1815 as a beginning
medical student to Guy's Hospital. Here he attended lectures and helped
in the hospital wards. Meanwhile he had started to write poetry. The
thought of the great poets of the past became a dominant, challenging
ideal, and this bold response to the "vision of greatness," to use
Whitehead's phrase, never left him. At this time (Oct,. 1816) he began to
meet writers, most notably Leigh Hunt, whose liberal political journalism
Keats had already seen at Enfield and who was also fearly well known as an
"advanced" poet-a a poet who was trying to do something very different
from the neoclassic tradition of Dryden and Pope. Keats's early poetry,
down through "Sleep and Poetry" and even Endymioon, shows the influence of
Hunt. His first book of poems (March, 1817) was published when he was
twenty-two.
But he wanted to write a "long poem," one that, he said, would be a
genuine "trial of Invertion." He plunged into Endymion-an enormous effort
of about four thousand lines-and finished it by the end of the year.
Throughout this time he was also reading and rereading Shakespeare (one
result was the famous "Negative Capability" letter, Dec.21-27, 1817).
Little satisfied with Endymion, he now, after this apprentice effort,
hoped to begin a different sort of poetry. He was haunted by the great
English poetic forms-the Miltonic epic and, above all, the Shakespearean
drama. But also, throughout the spring of 1818, he was reflecting upon the
direction that modern poetry seemed to be taking, and especially upon
Wordsworth, whose poetry typidied to Keats a new "thinking into the
heart." Keats's ultimate hope was to combine the power and scope of the
earlier poetry with the inward searching of the new. While trying to fine
ways to do this-which he took for granted would involve a "long
preparation"-he tossed off a short romance, "Isabella," and a number of
Shakespearean sonnets. His brother George married at about this time and
emigrated to Kentucky; it was necessary for Keats to take George's place
in looking after their brother Tom who had tuberculosis. But Tom seemed
well enough to allow Keats to go the summer (1818) on a walking tour of
northern England and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown. He returned
with a sore throat that was to bother him for another year, and, on
returning, found that Tom was dying. Throughout the fall he nursed Tom,
and, though he felt it was premature to do so, he began his most ambitious
poem thus far, Hyperion. He was, he said, "obliged to write and plunge
into abstract images" as some release from the consciousness of Tom's
illness.
At this point, needing money badly, he started to look for a position on
a magazine. But he was feeling unwell; he had caught tuberculosis while
nursing Tom, if not before. He returned to Hampstead, where he shared a
house with Charles Brown (Fanny Brawne and her family lived next door),
and tried fitfully to write, but his lungs soon began to hemorrhage. For
eight months he put aside all writing on the advice of physicians.
Finally, in August, 1820, he was told he could not survive another English
winter and must go to Italy. With no money except what his publishers
kindly advanced, and accompanied by a friend, Joseph Severn, a young
painter, he arrived in Rome after a painful voyage of six weeks on a small
ship. He suffered constantly during the last three months, not only from
illness but from knowledge that everything was lost-Fanny Brawne, friends,
life itself, and the hope that had inspired his career. He felt that he
had scarcely crossed the threshold to the sort of poetry he sought
ultimately to write; and in his despair he asked that his grave bear no
name but only the words, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Yet in these last months (which he called his "posthumous existence") he
continued to show his courage, his constant thought of others, and even
flashes of his old humor. When he died in Rome on February 23, 1821, his
age was twenty-five years and four months.
Keat's mind was the least dogmatic it is possible to be. It was
dialectical and speculative. As he thought about any large question,
whatever answer suggested itself was soon challenged by an opposite answer
that might be equally true and that, at least, claimed attention and
honest reflection. And so he found himself between antithetical beliefs,
or rather possibilities for belief and he did not try to reconcile them
immediately. He distrusted the coaxing and squeezing and tenuous defining
of ideas by which we seek to hold a logical position amid the weltering
contrarieties of fact; he preferred to wait hopefully for future
experience. A mind of this character cannot help but be speculative-that
is, richly productive of points of view and generalizations but unwilling
to attach "truth" to any of them. Yet at the same time Keats was not a
skeptic in any thoroughgoing way. Ultimate answers may be impossible, but
a genuine, altogether valuable increase in a wareness, understanding, and
wisdom remains open to mankind. And the adventure of experience and
growth is itself deeply satisfying, even while it leads to the knowledge
of possible tragedy.
A capacity for imaginative sympathy can be directed to points of view of
beliefs as well as to objects or persons. So with Keats. We never find
him cautiously criticizing and analyzing a proposition. Instead, he is
astonishingly quick to enter with gusto into ideas, to explore them by
adopting and believing them, however transiently. In other words, the
same mind we described as dialectical and speculative is quick to commit
itself-it is dialectical only in that commitments can be opposed,
speculative in that they are not final. Keats's thinking about poetry is
an example. Should poetry offer a dreamy escape, a luxurious massing of
delightful sensations? For a while Keats not only thought so but welcomed
the possibility. Or does the poetic imagination, as it pictures a
happiness the world cannot give, intuit a truer world beyond or behind?
Perhaps "the Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and
found it truth." Here Keats shares a hope common in the Romantic era. Or
should poetry dwell on the truth of man's suffering here and now, and, if
so, how? Should it follow Shakespeare and portray human beings in all
their complexity, diversity, and clashing purposes? Or should it seek
rather to imitate the epic sweep and peerless artistry of Milton? And
again, there is Wordsworth, who also knows and reveals the truth of man's
experience, but who comes to it by concentrating on his own individual
mind and feelings. He has not Milton's comprehensive range, but he may be
deeper. And in any case, is it enough merely to reflect the truth of
experience? Is poetry, after all, man's highest achievement?
For Keats's attitudes to poetry can never be isolated from his more
generally moral and religious searching. One ideal is what he called
"Negative Capability"- "that is when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason." It is especially necessary for achievement in literature,
but it is also a possible attractive human stance. It implies
skepticism-for, after all, "nothing in this world is provable"-and a
morally disinterested contemplation of the energies of life. But there is
another sort of disinterestedness: "Very few men have ever arrived at a
complete disinterestedness of Mind: very few have been influenced by a pure
desire of the benefit of others . . . I can remember but two-Socrates and
Jesus." Are not such "Benefactors of Humanity"-
Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good-
[The Fall of Hyperion, I.156-59].
far nobler than poets of any kind? Yet perhaps poetry, too, can be a
"friend to man." Perhaps it can fortify and console. If so, does it do
this solely by incorporating with beauty and formal order its vision of
things? Or must it present a doctrine that will sustain? In this case, the
"human friend philosopher" may give us more than any poet. Yet "Can it be
that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his goal without
putting aside numerous objections?" Are we really to believe in Hyperion
that the beguiling Oceanus has fathomed the mystery of the cosmos? And
the other philosopher in Keats's poetry, Apoolnius in Lamia, has an
impressive dignity and may be intellectually right, but certainly shows
himself remarkably insensitive to other human beings. Yet if philosophy
is not by itself the answer, reading and reflection are indispensable in
forming a "Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of
Identity." And in partial contrast to the ideal of Negative Capability,
the forming of an individual Identity of Soul and by means of "a World of
Pains and troubles: may be suggested as "a grander system of salvation
than the Christian religion."
The point in this quick review is not to leave everything in the air,
but to recall the complexity, range, and self-critical alertness for
Keats's speculation. There was, of course, a development in his thinking.
It was not that he achieved a synthesis, but he sifted to fundamentals,
seeing ever more clearly what must be included in any systhesis. and
meanwhile, there was a constantly increasing depth and breadth of
awareness. The great image of the countenance of Moneta, in The Fall of
Hyperion, is not an answer to anything but a powerful posing of the
mystery of suffering that would have been altogether beyond the early
Keats.
It was, therefore, inevitable that Keats's greatest work would be
dramatic in character if not in form. That is, the poetry gives full play
to diverse elements and points of view and follows the method of
experience itself, from which no single or simple answer can be obtained.
Hence interpretation has had to follow varying lines of emphasis, and no
brief comment can be more than illustrative. Many of the later poems-the
odes, "La Belle Dame," Lamia-may, for example, be viewed as exploring the
Romantic hope to intuit and imaginatively participate in a happier realm
of being. The strength of these poems is that they give complete and
powerful expression to the natural human longing for a better world, a
more perfect love, a lasting intensity of happiness, and yet they also
remain faithful to the critical intelligence that forces us to
acknowledge that dreams are only dreams and that in the sole world we know
values are tragically in conflict, Life is process and death the
condition of all natural fulfillment and beauty. (But natural fulfillment
and beauty are as much a part of reality as death itself. Death does not
make them absurd; Keats is no existentialist.) The course of Keat's
greater poems reflects this habitual insight. The odes "On a Grecian Urn"
and "To a Nightingale" are the living process of an experience. They
begin in a happy state of mind, sweep into a culminating intensity of joy
in a trance of self-forgetfulness, and return a little sorrowfully to
ordinary reality. They must be read as we might read a soliloquy in a
drama where the effect depends very much on the interplay and quick shift
of feeling ad realization. Moreover, except at the end of the "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," They remain radically concrete, working with massed blocks
of imagery. They imply uncanny depths of meditation and self-awareness,
but they also refuse to abstract of generalize. it is largely this
concrete and dramatic character that has rendered them inexhaustible to
contemplation. This together with the unrivaled power of phrase makes
them the greatest English lyrics of the nineteenth century.
The strength and diversity of Keats's stylistic resources have never
been denied since the middle of the nineteenth century. So far as is
possible, he was constantly imitated, particularly in two features-his
typical line of verse(typical, that is, of Hyperion, The Eve of St. Agnes,
and the odes) and his suggestive and concrete imagery. The Keatsian line
is a regular, end-stopped, and slowly moving unit, bound together by
complex patterns of assonance and alliteration:
A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device
[The Eve of St. Agnes, ll.].
Such a passage also illustrates the wealth of concrete detail Keats
lovingly renders (in sharp contrast to the Wordsworthian vocabulary of
general terms).
But more generally one sees in such work the mingled intensity and
control Keats prized. The control is obvious in the patterning; the
intensity results partly from the thick massing of imagery and partly from
the degree to which Keats's imagination reinforces and extends its
presentations. Assonance and alliteration are themselves a type of
reinforcement, but the effect we have in mind is suggested by Keats when
he praises Milton's "gusto": Milton "repeats his blow twice: grapples with
and exhausts his subject." So in the famous lines from the "Ode to a
Nightingale": the song of the nightingale
off-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening of the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Another poet might have used the image in a more stripped way, referring
perhaps to open casements in faery land. The Keatsian gusto or intensity
in working out the image lies in the incredible enrichment conveyed by the
words in italics. And the passage also reminds us that as he matured
Keats learned to replace adjectives by participles, thus giving a constant
suggestion of active energy. Even in the abundant images of repose of
slowed process objects are characteristically portrayed as doing
something, as caught up in a dynamic relation with other objects. Thus
the opening stanza of "To Autumn" conveys a feeling of stasis or pause
while using verbs of strong activity:
to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.
Often this sense of dynamic relationship and motion-in-stillness is given
in pictorial or sculpturesque effects. The "vines that round the
thatch-eves run" are and example, or the emblematic figure of joy in the
"Ode on Melancholy"-
Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding, adieu.
One thinks also of Porphyro "Buttress's from moonlight" of following the
old Angela
Through a lowly arched way,
Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume.
Often the vividness of conception merges into a direct empathy or
sympathetic participation. Keats seems to sense the pressure of the song
against the throat as he describes the nightingale singing "of summer in
full-throated ease." A quality that fascinated poets in the 1890's is
synaesthesia, the substitution of one sense for another, as in the phrase
"pale and silver silence." But much more characteristic of Keats, W.J.
Bate points out, is the "substantiation of one sense by another in order
to give. . . additional dimension and depth" as in "the moist scent of
flowers" or "embalmed darkness." Keats, as Douglas Bush says, "makes us
simultaneously see, touch, smell, and almost hear 'hush'd, cool'rooted
flowers, fragrant eyed.'" In particular, Keats appeals in an unusual
degree to the senses of touch and taste, thus giving a peculiarly
voluptuous and intimate sense of object, as in the phrase "globed
peonies," where the hand seems almost to cup the flowers. To this should
be added the remarkable condensation of meaning in his phrasing:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down.
Of course, this style was not attained at once. Keats was not precocious,
and his early verse shows, along with much promise, perhaps more diverse
weaknesses than the apprentice work of any other poet. The
self-corrective growth is astonishing. What is even more
remarkable-characteristic of only the greatest artists-is that having
created this style Keats went on to something else. Lamia is a totally
new attempt. Though brilliant inits way, it would probably not have been
pursued further. The direction Keats might have taken shows rather in The
Fall of Hyperion. Here his style has become less crowded with imagery,
less patterned, more discursive and colloquially relaxed. while keeping
in mind that the odes are the high point of his achievement, it is
possible to admire this style ever more, especially for a long poem.
Bibliography
Keats profoundly influenced poets throughout the nineteenth century. The
effect is already in Tennyson's Poems of 1832. At midcentury and later
the Pre-Raphaelites were devoted readers and imitators. Though
deliberately reacting against both Keats and Tennyson, Arnold shows their
blended influence in some of his best work, notably "The Scholar Gypsy"
and "Thyrsis." Walter Pater claimed Keats as a forerunner of the art for
art's sake movement. But critical and popular recognition advanced much
more slowly, and his reputation did not reach its present height until the
1890's and the early years of the twentieth century. For one thing, the
admiration that seems inevitable to us was checked by the strangeness, as
it seemed to contemporaries, of his mode of style. Readers in the early
nineteenth were naturally attuned to the poetry of the past age, and they
valued the refined purity of diction and denotative clarity of which
Gray's "Elegy" is a supreme example. They could think Keats's bold
coinages ("Lethe-wards had sunk") were barbarisms, and dense concrete imagery seemed obscure. Byron, according to
Leigh Hunt, could not understand "the meaning of a beaker 'full of the
warm south.'"
Moreover, for at least twenty-six years after his death Keats's
reputation was damaged by two myths, one propagated by deliberate malice
and the other by the limited taste of defenders. The first was
Heinverito of J. G. Lockhart in a notorious series of articles "On the
Cockney School of Poetry" , Published anonymously in Blackwok's Magazine
in 1817 and 1818. Leigh Hunt was the object of these attacks; Keats drew
himself into the field of fire by his grateful and generous poetic
tributes to his friend. Lockhart portrayed an ignorant young surgeon's
apprentice, Johnny Keats, a poor simpleton led into affectation and puffed
with vanity by the praise of Leigh Hunt and his "'Ampstead" circle, which
also included "pimpled Hazlitt" ("the Cockney Aristotle"), and B.R. Haydon
("the Cockney Raphael"). Other Tory journals joyfully seized this vivid
and vicious image and it was widely repeated and seriously credited.
Meanwhile Shelley did grater hovoc, in the long run, with his portrait in
"Adonais" of Keats as a spirit too sensitive for the shocks of life, "a
pale follower by some sad maiden cherished," who had been killed by a harsh
review (Shelley was thinking of the review of Endymion by J.W. Croker in
The Quarterly, April, 1818). This bizarre misrepresentation lingered on,
fostering a sentimental pity that blinded readers to the tough
intelligence of Keats's best verse.
These mythswere largely dispelled by the first biography, Life, Letters,
and literary Remains, by Richard Monckton Milnes, 1848, which also made
clear how extraordinarily rapid Keats's development had been and hence
what immense natural endowment he must have brought to bear. From this
time of critics were likely to concede his greatness and to argue whether
it was a greatness in promise only or actual achievement as well. but the
impression of Keats was still remarkable one-sided. Even his most
enthusiastic admirers could see only a poet of extraordinary sensuous
richness and exotic imagination. To the Pre-Raphaelities he was a poet of
the enchantment of medievalism and of vivid colors and pictorial effects.
To Arnold he was an inspired interpreter of the beauty of the natural
world; in "word magic" and "natural poetic felicity" he could be compared
only with Shakespeare. But at the the same time, he lacked a "matured
power of moral interpretation"; his poetry was not animating and
fortifying.
A more rounded and just estimate of Keats gradually formed as more
letters and poems were printed (for example, The Fall of Hyperion in
1856), but it was not generally shared until the beginning of the
twentieth century. (Keats's impact on the Victorians is closely studied by
G.H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians, 1944.) Needless to say, we do not
claim that Keats was a systematic philosopher, any more than Shakespeare.
But we have come to see in him a powerful intellect-quick, sensitive,
open, deep-unceasingly confronting the large, unanswerable questions of
human nature and destiny; he had a cast of mind that might be described as
sanity raised to the highest degree. Douglas Bush remarks that if we
"imagine ourselves contemporaries and in urgent need of wise advice," of
the great English Romantics we would turn first to Keats. The statement
itself indicates how radically our view of him has changed.
Among the many signs of a new understanding in the early twentieth
century, one may pick out the significant essay, "Keats and 'Philosophy'"
by A.C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures of Poetry, 1909. C.D. Thorpe, The Mind of
John Keats, 1926, explored the range of ideas to which Keats was
sensitively open, concentrating particularly on his self-questioning about
the mode and function of his art. In less sober vein, J.M. Murry, Keats
and Shakespeare, 1925, also tried to convey the character and profundity of
Keats's mind. (Murry's Keats, 1955, comprises a collection of excellent
essays on miscellaneous topics.) The subject is covered with magisterial
sweep by Douglas Bush in " Keats and His Ideas," The Major English
Romantic Poets, ed. C.D. Thorpe and others, 1957 (also cited in the
general bibliography o Romanticism, above). Most general studies of
Keats have continued the Murry and Thorpe tradition. That is, they see
him as speculative and undogmatic, and explore habitual preoccupations and
themes, showing polar tensions and gradual evolution in his point of view.
Several of these works also relate him to other Romantic poets and to
their common search for an eternal and transcendent reality in o r behind
the finite and changing: D.G. James, Scepticism and Poetry, 1937, and The
Romantic Comedy, 1948; G.W. Knight, The Starlit Dome, 1941; and David
Perkins, The Quest for Permanence, 1959. The commentary of E. C. Pettet,
On the Poetry of Keats, 1957, covers all the poems and is particularly
valuable for Endymion. One trait of Keats's mind is studied by W. J.
Bate, Negative Capability; The Intuitive Approach in Keat's 1939, a
pioneer essay that opened up a topic of fundamental importancer. Other
studies of special topics are Bernice Slote, Keats and the Dramatic
Principle, 1958, and Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art, 1967, on the
impact of the fine arts on Keats's poetry. The strongest effort to see a
relatively definite, metaphysical system in Keats is by Earl Wasserman, The
Finer Tone, 1953, which is a close and challenging analysis of five major
poems.
Analysis of Keat's poetic style was brilliantly inaugurated by Robert
Bridges in "John Keats, A Critical Essay," 1895 (reprinted in Collected
Essays, 1929), and in the notes and appendices of Ernest di Selincourt's
still valuable edition of the Poems (1905 and subsequent editions). W.J.
Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats, 1945, is a penetrating
discussion of the versification. (A brief discussion of the style
generally is also provided by him in "Keats's style: evolution Toward
Qualities of permanent Value," The Major English Romantic Poets, ed.
Thorpe and others, 1957.) An illuminating work on the subject suggested
by its title is R.H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, 1949, and
M.R. Ridley, Keats's Craftsmanship, 1933, is a valuable study of Keats's
manuscript revisions.
The first tow full-scale lives were those of Sir Sidney Colvin, 1917,
and Amy Lowell, 2 vols., 1925, both still of value in their discussion of
Keats's work. They have now been supplanted, however, by W.J. Bate, John
Keats, 1963. Bate's full and moving narrative provides the best study yet
available of the growth of poetic genius and of what facilitates it. In
the process it offers a comprehensive critical discussion of the poems and
the thought of the letters, and relates the mind and art of Keats both to
the English poetic tradition as a whole and also the the intellectual
background of the age. C.L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, 2
vols., 1936, provides a wealth of detail on sources and influences,
particularly for the early poems. Three excellent biographies, less
concerned with critical study of Keats's writing and focused more on the
events of his life, are those of Dorothy Hewlett, rev. ed., 1950; Aileen
Ward, 1963; and Robert Gittings, 1968. By far the best short critical
biography, distilled a wealth of knowledge, is Douglas Bush, John Keats
1966.
An admirable annotated annotated edition is that of Douglas Bush,
Selected Poems and Letters, 1959, which, though in paperback, excels more
expensive editions in authenticity o text and quality of notes. Since it
is not complete, i may be supplemented either by the edition of De
Selincourt (mentioned above) or by the Poetical Works, ed. H.W. Garrod,
rev. ed., 1958. Garrod offers a definitive text with full textual notes.
Its defect is the complete lack of general annotation. The letters have
been edited many times, most recently and accurately by H.E. Rollins, The
Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, 2 vols., 1958. A good selection of the
letters is that edited by Lionel Trilling, 1951. the Keats Circle;
Letters and Papers and More Letters and Poems of the Keats Circle, ed.
H.E. Rollins, 2 vols., 1965,
contains letters and recollections by Keats's family and friends.
Ken Palmer
Ken Palmer
Does any one have the data about Romanticism and "Ode to a
nightingale" of John Keats?
If you do, please reply to my e-mail box
Thanks a lot
GOD OF THE MERIDIAN
by John Keats
God of the Meridian,
And of the East and West,
To thee my soul is flown,
And my body is earthward press'd -
It is an awful mission,
A terrible division:
And leaves a gulph austere
To be fill'd with wordly fear.
Aye, when the soul is fled
To high above our head,
Affrighted do we gaze
After its airy maze,
As doth a mother wild,
When her young infant child
Is in an eagle's claws -
And is not this the cause
Of madness? - God of Song,
Thou bearest me along
Through sights I scarce can bear:
O let me, let me share
With the hot lyre and thee,
The staid Philosophy.
Temper my lonely hours,
And let me see thy bowers
More unalarm'd!
1818(1848)
LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN
by John Keats
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host's Canary wine?
Or are fruits of Paradise
Sweeter than those dainty pies
Of venison? O generous food!
Drest as though bold Robin Hood
Would, with his maid Marian,
Sup and bowse from horn and can.
I have heard that on a day
Mine host's sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer's old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new old sign
Sipping beverage divine,
and pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
1818(1820)
WHAT THE THRUSH SAID
by John Keats
O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm-tops 'mong the freezing stars,
To thee the Spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness, which thou feddest on
Night after night, when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge - I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge - I have none,
And yet the evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.
1818(1848)