Keats's Ode Research Articles

The Nature-Human Relationship: An Ecocritical Reading of Self in Keats’ Poem

This study analyzes the fusion of self and nature in John Keats's ode "Ode to a Nightingale" from ecocritical perspective. To do so, the ecocritical insights envisioned by Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions and Timothy W. Luke have been used as theoretical parameters to analyze the primary text. As the focus of the deep ecological trend, the uniformity between the human self and nature is represented in this text. This uniformity restores the significance of realizing the self with nature. This realization leads to the fusion. The fusion combines harmonious relationship between the self and nature to form a single entity. Due to this process, the selected primary text merges human beings and natural sublimity by means of a nightingale bird. When human beings cannot make positive attitude towards nature and act accordingly, their self does not get chance to be attached with nature. Nature is essential for all entities. The destruction of natural world causes the destruction of self. This destruction gets a solution only when there arises symbiotic bonding between human beings and nature. This bonding adds new knowledge in the existing scholarship being itself different from the previous research works.

Theme of Bhaktinian nature in the Odes of John Keats

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism as a theoretical framework, this article seeks to investigate the use of dialogic voice in John Keats's Odes. This research essentially delves into a dialogic interpretation of the poems "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to Psyche," "To Autumn," and "Ode on Melancholy," from the perspectives of the poems' respective themes. Keats may be seen to be an engaged and social poet of his day if his odes are analyzed from a dialogue perspective. Furthermore, Keats is an escapist poet who seeks refuge in the realm of fantasy and imagination as a means of escaping the tensions of his time.

A Road to Aesthetic Stylistics

Being a linguistic phenomenon, poetry is marked by the defamilarization of language in a poetic discourse there is an aesthetic distortion of the normal codes, in which the aesthetic value is the most prominent function of the poetic texture . This study is a new adventure in correlating linguistics to aesthetics by and through the so-called approach Aesthetic stylistics ( As). Aesthetic stylistics is the application of the theory of beauty to the intentionally violated components in literary text. It proceeds with the hypothesis that John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and Kabbani's Maritime Poem are disinterested poetic experiences which create ecstatic responses to the reader's awareness, therefore, the judgment of the reader's taste is aesthetic. The study aims at highlighting the stylistic-aesthetic factors which generate the judgment of taste. While drawing heavily on the aestheticism of the Prague Linguistic Circle and Halliday's Functional Linguistics (FL), or what has come to be called the Traditional European Functionalism, the study will analyze Keats' Ode and Kabbani's poem in terms of Kant's Kritik der Urteilstraft, KdU . The two circles of the linguistic description and aesthetic interpretation will be internally interlinked to create the coherence of the stylistic process. The study consists of an introduction, two parts, one in theory and the other in analysis; it is eventually rounded up with concluding remarks elicited from the semiotic quest. Keywords: Stylistics, Functionalism, Aesthetics

Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy

This essay considers the connections between myth and sympathy in Keats's poetic theory and practice. It argues that the ‘Ode to Psyche’ exemplifies the way in which Keats uses mythological narrative, and the related trope of apostrophe, to promote a restrained form of sympathy, which preserves an objectifying distance between the poet and the feelings that his poetry examines. This model of sympathy is informed by Keats's medical training: the influential surgeon Astley Cooper and The Hospital Pupil's Guide (1816) both identify a sensitive but restrained sympathy for patients' suffering as an essential part of the scientific and professional methods of nineteenth-century medicine. However, while The Hospital Pupil's Guide claims that mythological superstition has been superseded in medicine by positivist science, Keats's ode suggests that myth retains a central role in poetry, as the foundation of a poetic method that mediates between imaginative sympathy and objective impartiality.

Tragic Consolation in “Ode to a Nightingale”

'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3 THE CONFIDENCE OF JOHN KEATS's WRITING IN 1819 WAS ACCOMPANIED by continuing uncertainty about the moral office of poetry. Most of the more ambitious texts of Keats's great year interrogate their own imaginative logic in some way and many of them, Keats critics can attest, expressly seek to understand how poet can in fact qualify as a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men. (1) It should occasion no surprise, consequently, that in to Nightingale, the nightingale's beautiful song both ravishes the poet's senses and fills him with disquietude. It is disquietude which soon affiliates itself with the tragic catalogue of the poem's third stanza. Doubts of the real worth of poetry were crowding in upon Keats as he wrote those opening lines, David Bromwich speculates; for at worst is done out of vanity may be judged by posterity to have been done in vain. Is not every poet an egoist, compared to every nurse? How is Tom's death to be weighed in the balance with the composition of an ode? (2) These questions, I agree, were deeply implicated in the occasion of Keats's Ode. The project of is both to commemorate lapsing happiness and to ask, what then? What solace can Keats's poem or any poem offer to the victims of world Where but to think is to be full of sorrow (27)? In addressing such questions, the procedure of to Nightingale becomes historicist in James Chandler's sense of the term: as historicist exercise, the Ode is unavoidably concerned with its cultural modernity, and concerned to investigate that modernity by placing it in dialogic interplay with past texts and discourses. (3) That imperative explains in fact the typically Keatsian literariness of Nightingale: as elsewhere in Keats the poem's intertextual linkages serve as historical references to previous poems and their defining values, among which the poet must then find his own way. Here, though, Keats's historicist intertextuality works in tandem with his Ode's dramatic rhetoric. is still frequently regarded as sublime or visionary poem which charts the poet's progressive rejection of transcendent flight. In my view, the Ode overrules transcendence right from the start: Keats assumes the inadequacy of idealizing dream rather than making it his poem's lesson and story, and so sets himself to tell different kind of story. The earthbound meditation of takes the form of dramatic soliloquy detached from its theatrical context; and indeed the poem reflects both Keats's appreciation of Edmund Kean's innovative acting and William Hazlitt's dramatic criticism, especially his Characters of Shakespear's Plays. These are the chief influences on the defense of modern poetry's consolatory office that finally hazards. By its analysis of the psychology of idealism, the Ode dismisses the traditional consolations of western philosophical and religious tradition: they cannot provide modern poetry with effective consolatory resources, and their various defenders, Wordsworth in particular, must be firmly resisted. The secular alternative that dramatizes Keats takes from his understanding of tragic representation. 1. to Nightingale has been often declared one of the most densely echoic of Keats's lyric poems. (4) The Ode reveals creative mind well-stored with its reading and habituated to incorporating that reading into even its most personal, emotionally urgent efforts of self-expression. Yet the imagination which announces itself in the poem's bold opening lines is from the beginning functioning in an intellectually associative fashion and recalling some texts rather than others because of their pertinence to the poem's thematic concerns. …

Tender Is the Night & F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities

Tender Is the Night &amp; <i>F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities</i>

Acts of Stillness: Statues, Performativity, and Passive Resistance

The idea for this essay was sparked by reading Barbara Johnson's Envy (1998), in which she interrogated the canon of Western poetry and its persistent idealization of female silence.1 Muteness, she argued, became a repository of aesthetic value in poems such as John Keats's Ode On a Grecian Urn (1819) because of the ways that the inability to speak served to facilitate patriarchal power.2 In the tradition she critiques, a lack of access to speech is upheld as a precursor to the judgment of beauty. When reading through Johnson's many cases of the ways in which muteness incited the desire to control, to ravish, or to protect, was struck by an analogous feature in the history of sculpture. If, in Johnson's formulation, muteness becomes the condition that both sparks and authorizes rape, paternalism, and objectification, then how does muteness operate in relation to surrogates for human beings that stand before us and do not speak? Muteness is a special feature of poetry and prose because of those media's direct relation to language, and began to question how, for sculpture, the related and more fundamental term is stillness.What follows is a proposition for reassessing the history of sculpture with a view toward characterizing a wider range of viewers' reactions to statues. In this, consider the sculptural encounter as a theater of power relations between active viewers and passive statues. This dynamic is fueled by the bodily and spatial engagements of the viewer or artist with the three-dimensional representation of the human body, most pointedly at a one-to-one scale, that stands before them. My emphasis will be on statues in the post-Enlightenment tradition of European and American art, with an emphasis on the history of modern sculpture, but one could ask analogous, if differently inflected, questions of other times and places. have pitched my argument toward recurring patterns in the history of sculpture, and have avoided in-depth case studies in preference for a more wide-ranging and general assessment of the effects of statues acting on us by standing there, motionless. The performativity of statues' passive resistance has underwritten the aesthetics of sculpture, and a focus on stillness can illuminate the ethical contours and recurring historical themes of the sculptural encounter.* * *A three-dimensional figurative image-that is, a statue-both depicts a body in space and is a body-in-space. can look at a statue of an athlete, of Apollo, of a fieldworker, of a politician, of a heroine, or of a fawn and see it in its representational distance. am confronted by an image of something not actually present, perhaps never seen in everyday life, or maybe recognized as a character from books, poems, dreams, or the televised news. At the same time that it functions in this way as a three-dimensional image, the statue is also present for me as a physical object displacing space with its volume. It stands, sits, or lies in front of me. can touch it. do touch it. walk around it. move up to it. walk away from it.Sculpture differs fundamentally from the vast majority of twodimensional, pictorial media in its coextensiveness as depicted image and depicting object. A statue can be equivalent in volume to the represented body, sharing its proportions and construction. Jean-Paul Sartre saw this as the paradox of the statue: I have real relations with an illusion; or, if you prefer, my true distance from the block of marble has been confused with my imaginary distance from [the image it represents].3 Because of this paradox, the address of a statue is necessarily corporeal, spatial, and relational. Sartre saw the statue as dependfing] on the relativity of the angles from which it is viewed. As for the spectator, he takes the imaginary for the real and the real for the imaginary.4 The situation the statue presents is more akin to an encounter with another person than any twodimensional representation could offer. …

The Mother, The Psychoanalyst, The Poet and The Artist: Containment and Growth of The Mind

This paper considers the difficulties which humans have in using and developing their capacity for thought. Growth of the human mind, through attunement of the mother's unconscious experience with the infant's, is explored along with the distortions which arise because of aversion to uncertainty and suffering. It then looks at psychoanalysis and the verbal and visual arts in the light of the maternal function, and the way in which they also promote the growth of the mind. Four products of the human mind – an excerpt from an infant observation published in 1998, some post‐Kleinian psychoanalytic clinical case material from the 1980s, John Keats's 19th century Ode to a Nightingale and Lucas Cranach's 1526 painting, Adam and Eve – are used to illustrate some of the similarities and differences among them in giving conscious form to the unconscious.

Romantic Reinventions in D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love"

Previous articleNext article No AccessRomantic Reinventions in D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love"Eugene StelzigEugene Stelzig Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 44, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044228 Views: 36Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship by Karen Fang

Karen Fang. Romantic Writing and Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 236. $35. In last sentence of her rich, intricately textured book, Karen Fang remarks on irony of how, in empire that arose in post-Napoleonic Britain, the entity that benefited most was individual author, very person usually thought to be lost in corporate and collective nature of periodical format, but whose upward mobility through affiliation with that format actually legitimated era's pervasive imperial metaphor (190). Indeed, while Fang characterizes her book's most significant methodological innovation as an emphasis upon dimension of space rather than time as periodical form's defining attribute, others may be even more struck by her unapologetic recuperation of idealist concerns of traditional Romantic studies. For while much of excellent earlier work on Romantic-era periodical writing--by Jon Klancher, Mark Parker, Mark Schoenfield, Kim Wheatley, and others--focused on how materiality of periodical format elicits effects in excess of, or even contrary to, text considered as an isolated phenomenon, Fang's equally careful attention to context and intertext produces, instead, a figure of author as supremely intentional: capable of reinscribing material conditions of his or her into ornate, layered, even devious strategies. Fang takes for her subject late Romantic period which Virgil Nemoianu once influentially described as Biedermeier, but which she--with a different set of geographical referents and an outlook informed by postcolonial theory--re-characterizes as a moment in which consolidation of print capitalism felicitously collaborated with post-Napoleonic consolidation of Britain's imperial identity. Yet while new geopolitical realities brought about by Napoleonic wars (and Britain's everexpanding imperial ambitions) loom large throughout this book, Fang is not primarily interested in demonstrating how authors she studies advance imperial ideology or apologize for orientalism. Instead, she treats their engagements with Napoleonic history and iconography as stuff of authorial self-fashioning--which happens, in various cases she examines, sometimes to coincide with, sometimes to critique or even subvert, more straightforwardly capitalist and expansionist ambitions of periodical industry's literary lower empire. The geographical reach of periodicals, and the prominence of imperial and geographic metaphors throughout [the] writing that populated them (28), account for Fang's insistence upon space as primary axis of periodical text; and indeed, her analysis takes in a remarkable array of phenomena closely or loosely affiliated with vicissitudes of Britain's contemporary global engagements. Extending from British trade with China to Napoleonic Italy, post-Napoleonic Egyptology, and colonization of Tahiti, Fang's interpolated histories are vivid, absorbing, and thoroughly researched, showing a nicely calibrated sense for telling detail. The structure of book, on other hand, recapitulates formalist allegiances of Fang's interpretive method. Following an introductory discussion of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and Elgin marbles sonnets, which she relates to ongoing discussion about meaning of Greek antiquities in Annals of Fine Arts, Fang divides her study into four long chapters, divided between two exemplary cases of what she calls collaboration (Chapters One and Two), and two exceptional cases (Three and Four). Each of two sections, in turn, is divided between a happier, or less ideologically fraught, instance of periodical authorship and a more problematic or critical one. Thus, in Chapters One and Two, Fang juxtaposes Charles Lamb and James Hogg, while in second section she contrasts Letitia Landon and Lord Byron. …

From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs. Terence Allan Hoagwood.

Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) 196 $84.00 Focusing on simulation of and role Romantic poets played in industrializing of and of those industrial products (xi), Terence Alan Hoagwood's From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs builds upon insights articulated by such scholars as William Laffan, Sean Shesgreen, and Dave Harker. In series of finely nuanced arguments, book documents Romantics' use of various poetical and commercial sleights of hand to exploit their readers' love of song, showing how resultant pseudo-songs sometimes self-reflexively make theme of their own simulative status (xii). Chapter 1 provides an overview of pseudo-song genre, beginning with commentary on Psalms and psalmic imitation in writings of John Milton, Isaac Watts, Joel Barlow and others, before discussing ways in which pastoral poets such as Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Spenser used the language of oral song as metaphor for written (2). The chapter identifies two types of Romantic pseudo-song: those poems ... are sold as if they were songs when they are entirely scriptorial or typographical objects; and those that refer to and use rhetorical resources to conjure imaginary mu sical effects, without pretending to be, really, music (4-5). Subsequently, chapter examines musical references in selection of Romantic poems, including Shelley's Music, when soft voices die, The Revolt of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound; Blake's Introduction to Songs of Innocence; Felicia Hemans's A Spanish Lady; several of Keats's odes and Clare's pastorals; and some miscellaneous poems by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. These close readings helpfully set stage for more focused discussions of individual authors and texts that follow. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of Scottish Border engages the paradox of using writing as means of ostensibly cherishing and preserving orality while replacing it (24). To illustrate this process, Hoagwood first considers Scott's primitivist claim that Scottish poetry was inseparable from song prior to the advent of literacy and ... widespread adoption of English language in Scotland (27). Just as James Macpherson's Ossian epics and Thomas Percy's Reliques exploited their audience's desire to recapture poetic glories of Scotland's savage past, so Scott invoked popular image of poet as bard in order to exploit same sense of nationalistic folkloric nostalgia (30). In series of incisive close readings of Scott's poems and their accompanying prose commentaries, Hoagwood reveals a story of increasing fictitiousness: narratives of supposedly historical fact are succeeded by supposedly authentic relics of superstitious culture followed by admittedly faux ballads, referring to neither historical realities nor historical origins (30-31). Linking this fictitiousness to contemporary British politics, he demonstrates how themes in Minstrelsy build upon conservative principles set forth in Burke's Reflections on Revolution in France. The chapter concludes by showing how Scott's Lay of Last Minstrel and The Lady of Lake achieved commercial success by self-consciously highlighting same themes of authenticity and fictitiousness that had previously made Minstrelsy such popular commodity. In Chapter 3, Hoagwood focuses perceptive critical eye on Sydney Owenson's The Lay of an Harp. Although this work seems to espouse nationalism, From Song to Print endorses view that Owenson's literary ambition and appeal were much more Anglo than Irish (45). To illustrate, Hoagwood examines Owenson's role in marketing her poetry, which included what would now be called commercial tie-ins and product placements, showing how costumes she wore and green harp she played at English aristocratic revelries entailed concerted commodification of Irishness (48-9). …

The Keats and Hopkins Dialectic in Seamus Heaney's Early Poetry: “The Forge”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1In Stepping Stones, Heaney mentions that he read “a whole lot of Wordsworth and Keats” (404) in his final year of high school at St. Columb's in Derry, while later, at Queen's University in Belfast, he reveled in the “great delights of reading Keats, when I was an undergraduate […]” (35). 2See my discussion of this column in my Poetry and Peace, 308–10. 3In Stepping Stones, Heaney compares Ted Hughes to Hopkins's blacksmith Felix Randal, noting that “I think of a ‘bright and battering sandal’ that has more power than pitch, more effulgence than finish, and generally more mana” (339). He is quoting the last half line of Hopkins's poem, “his bright and battering sandal!” (“Felix Randal” 87). Heaney also compares his dying father to Felix Randal in “Seeing the Sick” from Electric Light when he opens that poem by musing, “Anointed and all, my father did remind me / Of Hopkins's Felix Randal” (79). The opening half-line is taken nearly verbatim from the start of Hopkins's sixth line, “Being anointed and all” (“Felix Randal” 86). Later in Heaney's poem, he notes that he had “None of your fettled and bright battering sandal” that Randal had in his prime (79), again drawing on the conclusion of Hopkins's poem. 4In Stepping Stones, Heaney happily notes that Barney Devlin, the model for the blacksmith of “The Forge,” is “in his late eighties now, but still capable of striking the epic out of the usual. For example, at midnight on the last day of 1999, he hit the anvil twelve times to ring in the millennium—and relayed the tune to his son in Edmonton by cellular phone. He's still going strong […]” (91). The poem “Midnight Anvil” treats this incident. 5See the similarly gripping, sonic language Heaney uses about first discovering Hopkins in “The Drag of the Golden Chain”: “Hopkins had a definite fetter-melting effect on my mid-Ulster tongue when I was an undergraduate.” Recalling his reading of the opening stanzas of Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Heaney muses that “Suddenly the world was tuned to a new and irrefutable note. The liturgical power, the ontological base-touching, the body-bracing sheerness of sound in Hopkins's apostrophe to God the Father, had the force of a primal incantation …” (14). 6Heaney's embrace of energetic, masculine figures in his early poetry obviates the slight embarrassment he feels in his apologia for the “book work” of poetry in “Digging” over against the real “spade work” of his father and grandfather. The scholastic Hopkins similarly embraced soldiers and other figures of action in his poetry. 7To put it more positively, Keats's urge toward truthfulness in his famous ode has generally affirmed for Heaney the truth of lyric poetry. In this regard, see the passage in Crediting Poetry where Heaney is clearly thinking of the emphasis on truth in Keats's ode: “[I]n lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices” (50–51). 8See my analysis of this aspect of the poem in Poetry and Peace, 189–90. 9Stanley Plumly has recently commented that the vision of the urn “is frightening. It is what the afterlife could be like: ‘no change of death in paradise,’ writes Stevens, a place where ripe fruit never falls” (346).

Derek Mahon’s Homage to Pasolini

This essay aims to show that Derek Mahon's 'Roman Script' and the prefatory 'Ghosts' draw on rich veins of history, art and literature to bring out a number of meaningful connections. For example, the same self-indulgence that wrecked a family in Ibsen's 'Ghosts' seriously weakened the Roman Empire and undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church. The cultural mediocrity that Mahon's mother fought so hopelessly prompts modern tourists to desecrate Keats's grave or great works of art with their cheap photography, just as it contributed to the creation of the deadly Fascist myth as well as to present-day consumerism, which produces so much ruin and refuse. Quotations from Shelley's 'Adonais' and 'Hellas' and from Keats's Odes reveal echoes of these poets in 'Roman Script'. In their fight for truth against falsity, Gramsci and Pasolini take their rightful place beside Shelley and above all Keats, whose portrait emerges from the concluding “re-make” of Metastasio

The pleasures of contamination: evidence, text, and voice in textual studies

Through the concept of contamination, David Greetham highlights various ways that one text may invade another, carrying with it a residue of potential meaning. While the focus of this study is on written works, the scope ranges widely over music, politics, art, science, philosophy, religion, and social studies. Greetham argues that this sort of contamination is not only ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but may also be a necessary and beneficial circumstance. Tracing contamination from the Middle Ages onward, he takes up issues such as the placement of quote marks in Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, the controversy over the use of evidence for yellowcake uranium in Niger, and the reconstitution of reality on YouTube, to illustrate that the basic questions of evidence, fact, and voice have always been slippery concepts.

Poignancy as Human Rights Aesthetic

This essay offers an aesthetic of “poignancy” as a potential theoretical ground of human rights, as opposed to Kantian formulations currently finding expression in the language of “cosmopolitanism.” The lack of concern with health and life found in Immanuel Kant's definition of human freedom is reproduced in what the author calls “magisterial” human rights practice, which tends to emphasize civil proceduralism and is advanced by a global elite. An immanental aesthetic indebted to Theodor Adorno, by contrast, might coincide with an immanental justice responsive to the physical and spiritual demands of human subjects, thus advancing vital if underdeveloped impulses of the UDHR, namely those expressed in its recognition of freedom from want and freedom of worship. This aesthetic is described with reference to the Orpheus myth, to John Keats's odes, and to a January 2009 account of shelling in Gaza. It is furthermore deployed in response to the dismissal of human rights emerging from such leftist intellectuals as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.

Keats's ‘Dull Rhymes’ and the Making of the Ode Stanza

AbstractThis article focuses on how John Keats's experimentation with the sonnet genre led to the development of his famous ode stanza. Several sonnets written in 1818 and 1819, most notably ‘If by dull rhymes our english must be chain'd’, illustrate Keats's dissatisfaction with traditional forms and his desire for a stanza that could present a more meditative speaker. Providing a brief survey of critical approaches to Keats's odes, the author stresses that the vital connection between ode stanza and the sonnet needs renewed discussion. With close readings of the interplay between syntax and form in the stanzas of Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn, the article attempts in a preliminary way to explore how the odes highlight their speaker's revision of tradition, presenting a lyric voice conscious of its own position in literary history.

A Study on the Aspects of Beauty in John Keats's Odes

A Study on the Aspects of Beauty in John Keats's Odes

'A magic voice and verse': Byron's Approaches to the Ode, 1814–16

The Romantic ode steeps itself in the turbulent waters of the mind's and heart's debates with themselves. These debates can take many forms, as Paul H. Fry indicates when contrasting Keats's odes with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's: Keats's odes, writes Fry, are 'not secretly ambivalent but candidly two-faced, or even many-faced'.1 Byron, too, thrives on the 'candidly two-faced', or even the manipulatively dissembling, and some of his finest shorter poems deserve to be associated with Romantic odes more commonly than is usually allowed by critics: in part, perhaps, because of Byron's jeer in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers at Coleridge's fondness for 'turgid ode, and tumid stanza' (196). The poems by Byron discussed in the present essay often wish to give themselves freedom from, even as they draw on, conventions associated with the ode, and thus form intriguing examples of an individual talent's creative way with tradition. 1816 was an annus mirabilis in Byron's career, the year he met Shelley, and, as significantly, learned, via Shelley, to admire Wordsworth's poetic power. It is also a year when a blend of artistic control with difficult and goading feeling issues, for Byron, in poems that have something of the force of the ode. Wordsworth wrote in a note to 'Tintern Abbey' in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads: 'I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and in the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition'.2 The comment intrigues; it shows a leading Romantic poet framing a poem in loose but intense relationship with a traditional form. In a comparable way, Byron derives imaginative nourishment from the example of the ode. If odes invoke, summon, plead, exhort and put us under a spell, so too does the Incantation from the first act of Manfred. The Incantation, first published as a separate piece in Byron's 1816 collection, The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems, contains 'impassioned music' and 'transitions', transitions possessing the quality of 'defensive paradox' of which Byron speaks in '[Epistle to Augusta]' (3). 'Defensive paradox' implies a fightback, organised under the standard of deftly sinuous language, against the slings and arrows of misfortune, and it nerves the poems discussed in this essay. On the first publication of the Incantation, Byron claimed that it was 'a Chorus in an unfinished Witch drama, which was begun some years ago',3 a claim that suggests the Incantation's genesis in the genre of choral ode. In the context of Manfred, it is spoken to Manfred by an unknown voice, but it also can be read as a poem spoken by Byron to his wife. The Incantation, like the work as a whole, thrives on a sense that the fictive cloaks the real. A two-way discharge of emotional poison is appropriate for a poem that is full of doublings. So, in the fourth stanza, Byron writes: And a magic voice and verse Hath baptized thee with a curse; And a spirit of the air Hath begirt thee with a snare; In the wind there is a voice Shall forbid thee to rejoice; And to thee shall Night deny All the quiet of her sky; And the day shall have a sun Which shall make thee wish it done. (I, i, 222-31) Here, the words are joined asunder; associations are married and divorced in the same breath. The 'magic voice and verse' may belong to the past tense: they have 'baptized thee with a curse'. But they are also reawakened by or even summoned up during the Incantation until they materialise as the 'voice and verse' which we are now hearing and reading.4 The mesmeric rhythm ensures that the reader will concede the potency of Byron's art. Yet the 'verse' turns immediately into the 'curse' to which it cedes supremacy in the embrace of rhyme. Any sacrament of the word is interfused with the diabolic. Intimacy and loathing writhe round one another; love and hate fuse. …

Abrams Among the Nightingales: Revisiting the Greater Romantic Lyric

Forty years after publication, M.H. Abrams's Structure and Style in Greater Romantic Lyric (1965) remains a touchstone of literary criticism. (1) Abrams's account of introspective and meditative aspects of Romantic lyric remains a model of concision and elegance that continues orient study of Romantic poetry. This paper revisits Structure and Style in Greater Romantic Lyric elaborate some of its implications. (2) Within Abrams's paradigm of Greater Romantic Lyric, I argue, is an alternative poetics, a shadow-paradigm, which privileges conversational speech over votive, colloquial diction over elevated, a linear, serially-unfolding structure over a cyclical, autotelic one, and rhetorical figures of anecdote and digression--Well--over apostrophic O! of ode.Concentrating on two nightingale poems that Abrams finds compatible, Keats's Ode a Nightingale and Coleridge's Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, (3) my reading reveals their conflicting, even antithetical priorities. Whereas Keats's ode prizes solitude and solicits a mournful Psyche (Now more than ever seems it rich die [55]), Coleridge's conversation prizes sociability and joie de vivre (In nature there is nothing melancholy [15]). Keats's is figurative and symbolic; Coleridge's is quotidian and particular. one is formally strict, organized by strophes of identical shape and length; other is relaxed, organized by irregular blank-verse paragraphs. These differences reveal sociability, conversational rapport and wit of Romantic lyric with which Abrams was not concerned. Structure and Style, Abrams traces lineage of Romantic lyric from such mid-seventeenth and eighteenth-century verse as Denham's Cooper's Hill (1642/55) and Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747), establishing continuity of Romantic lyrics with tradition and defining their unique attributes. Thus, while he alerts reader loco-descriptive traits of many Romantic poems, he believes that to label [them] simply nature lyrics is not only inadequate, but radically misleading (201-202). Romantic according Abrams, synthesizes descriptions of external world and internal states of consciousness, expresses a union of mind with nature, of mind over nature, defeating what Coleridge in another context called despotism of eye (Biographia Literaria, 107). Instead of being organized by a series of perceptions ('First I see a, then b,' and so on), descriptive proceeds by a complex process of perception, recollection, and association whereby the lyric speaker achieves an insight (201), or, as Wordsworth said in Prelude, The mind is lord and master--outward sense / obedient servant of her will (XII, 222-223 [1850]). In fully developed Romantic lyric, Abrams says, the description is structurally subordinate meditation, and meditation is sustained, continuous, and highly (224). greater Romantic lyric is defined by its repeated out-in-out process, in which mind confronts nature and their interplay constitutes poem (202). Abrams's analysis emphasizes shaping capacity of mind, a formalism Sarah Zimmerman describes as an alignment of lyricism and subjectivity, so that mode comes be defined less by formal features than by formlessness of effusion (Romanticism, 17). Effusion, sublime and unchecked overflow of powerful feeling, also aligns Romantic lyric with Pindaric ode, a form which is unacknowledged legislator of Abrams's formal scheme. While Abrams acknowledges importance of ode as an ancestor of greater Romantic he raises question whether ode is merely its generic predecessor or its quintessential embodiment: Some of poems are called odes, while others approach ode in having lyric magnitude and a serious subject, feeling-fully meditated (201). …

Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn

--For Ulrich Keller THEY WHO MISQUOTE THE TITLE OF KEATS'S ODE MAY NOT BE AWARE OF the truth in their mistake. Indeed, Keats's poem is an not but a Grecian urn, most conspicuously so as it opens with a threefold apostrophe (1) and thereby fulfils the requirements of the genre more faithfully than most odes. This faithfulness exposes the poem to the question whether the apostrophe addresses a being worth the effort. Is the addressee an at least potentially responsive partner in the communicative situation of the ode, which is essentially a dialogic one though the utterance may be one-sided in the manner of the dramatic monologue. From its origins in the cult hymn, (2) the genuine partner of an odic address is a divine being, a god, goddess, or a godlike authority, capable of hearing, of understanding, of fulfilling a request. invocation may not be received, the god may not listen, may not care, may not be willing or able to help--the precariousness of prayer--yet there must be a confidence in, and a possibility of, a gracious reception. This requirement is not withdrawn or diminished in post-religious circumstances with no established godhead to address. Then, the demand on the poem is even heavier. It is now the poem's task to create the authority to which it turns. post-religious (3) has to assume the status of poetic self-sufficiency, of, in Miltonic terms, Satanic self-creation, of being the poet's prayer to himself. (4) Put in philosophical terms: It has to assume aesthetic autonomy. Religious belief is being replaced by the poetic faith of Coleridge's definition. Now the has to prove by its very performance that its address is a valid one, the foremost act of such performance being, in Keats's case, the poetic creation of the urn. To the degree this creation succeeds in the course of the poem, the urn will have proved eligible for the odic address. In itself, an urn seems an unpromising addressee. An to a pot is bound to be ridiculous. Then, what about an urn, an earthenware, at best a marble, pot? Can it bear the burden of an odic apostrophe, its serious solemnity? Is not the danger of bathos unavoidable? Would not the title to a Grecian Urn announce a travesty? embarrassment is evident in some literary critics' endeavor to upgrade the urn, notably into a funeral urn, a move which finds no support in the poem, (5) but provides the opportunity for the critic to enrich the poem with ponderous thoughts on death and transitoriness, or with a plethora of symbolic lore. (6) Conversely, other critics have valiantly embraced the precariousness of the inappropriate object with an emphasis on the abject state of the disused utensil, the piece of debris, which through this abasement is elevated to the state of art. From this point of view Keats's Ode is regarded as ancestral to surrealist translations of discarded utensils into art objects. Mentioning Duchamp's ready-mades, K. S. Calhoon barely suppresses the punning, though etymologically correct, connection between urn and urinal. (7) Obviously the predicament has been noticed and there is no reason to assume that Keats was not aware of it. Is this why Keats avoids the obvious title and swerves to on a Grecian Urn, a phrase which does not immediately expose the poem to the doom of bathos? But can the poem escape this doom? Do not the first lines quickly give away what the title may have tried to hide: that the poem is an to a Grecian urn, boldly confident of its success in establishing the urn's dignity? gesture of avoidance in the poem's title which after all announces what it refrains from announcing, namely an ode, which is generally an ode to, may on the other hand not be a sign of embarrassment by the addressee's lowness, but a symptom of awe in the face of the silent work of art, even fear of the unmediated impact of beauty. Grant Scott senses this: The prospect of paralysis before the silent beauty of the unravished bride is never far from the speaker's mind. …