Keats's Poems Research Articles

The Development and Reflection of Romanticism in John Keats' Poems

Romanticism is one of the most precious and culturally developing times throughout history, and John Keats was a representative figure in the romanticism movement. This study is aimed at the historical background of romanticism and the influences of John Keats. After close reading and research, the cause of romanticism is found: in the long term, the theory of enlightenment influenced people and led them to pursue freedom and human rights; in a short time, French Revolution, which happened in 1789, turned to be a failure, which causes people to search for a spiritual world to express their intense emotions. Because of the background, romanticism has unique features which convey intense feelings and connections with nature; usually, many literary devices are applied to make it exquisite. Also, in terms of form, blank verse poems became more diverse. His writing characteristics were well expressed by studying and analyzing John Keats' work, specifically Bright Star and the ode to the Nightingale. He used a lot of mythological metaphors and personification in his poem, which gives it a feeling of a fairytale. Because his poems illustrated the main ideas of romanticism, a lot of poetry and writers were influenced by him. In addition, his influence has expanded to the artistic field. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood considered him a spiritual leader, composing many works based on Keats's poems. Therefore, John Keats contributed uniquely to developing romantic literature and art.

On a Universal Tendency to Debase Retranslations; or, The Instrumentalism of a Translation Fixation

AbstractSome readers prefer an earlier translation in which they encounter a source text, particularly a canonized work, over later versions of the same text. The decisive encounter is so compelling as to establish an enduring attachment that entails denigration or outright rejection of later versions. Insofar as the attachment suggests obsessiveness, it can be called a fixation. The readers’ responses share features that transcend membership in specific linguistic communities and cultural institutions: they value a high degree of readability, which is construed as an indication of greater equivalence to the source text. Here the readers reveal their assumption of an instrumental model—that is, an understanding of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect. The fixation can be illuminated by considering the intersubjective relations in which the preferred translation is first encountered. Cases recorded or represented in literary texts enable a more incisive account of the conditions that shape the reader's experience: John Keats's poem “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957). These texts disclose an identity-forming process that can be deepened with Jacques Lacan's concept of the “object a.” The instrumentalism that underpins the fixation deserves consideration because it would in effect deny or stop cultural change, innovative interpretation, the very practice of translation.

‘Later Flowers for the Bees’: Keats and Pollination

In this essay I propose that John Keats's bee imagery may have been informed by the idea of insect pollination, an idea that was widely socialised if as yet unorthodox in his time. I locate Keats's clearest expression of such an idea in an 1818 letter, and articulate some of its social, sexual, and political implications. Reading pollination into four of Keats's poems, Isabella, Lamia, and, in a more substantial way, ‘On Fame’ and ‘To Autumn’, I contend that the idea is both enriching to our understanding of his poetry and consistent with the theories he develops in his correspondence.

Keats: In Your Time of Pandemic

KeatsIn Your Time of Pandemic Kathleen Driskell (bio) You remember in Rome you stood in front of a facsimile of a remarkably narrow sleigh bed, a suggestion of the actual bed in which Keats died from consumption when he was twenty-five. What caught your attention were the ceiling carvings over the bed, and you studied them a long while, fascinated by the idea you were looking at one of the last things Keats had seen before dying. [End Page 35] Each square held a carving, a relief of an articulated petaled blossom, a little dome in the center, a pattern repeated again and again, creating a grid. You felt its fine excess. You're a poet, that's what brought you to Keats's bedside. Now, quarantined at home, isolation your best weapon against the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping across America, you remember walking through the muggy crowded streets in Rome toward the museum next to the Spanish Steps. In your quarantine, you are exhausted by the rage you feel at the utter failure of your government. You want a plan. You want action. You want accountability. You don't want to keep coming back to Keats. You don't want to scuffle again with what the young genius called "negative capability." But what he's written keeps surfacing as if it's your Serenity Prayer: "God give me the grace to 'live with uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'" He's calling for you to live fully within this liminal space, this place of half-knowledge. The trouble is that Keats's concept of negative capability is slippery. Each time you believe you can hold onto it, it mutates and becomes something else. Then it dissipates before you. It floats away like something writ on water. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful thing. An aesthetic philosophy that dodges and ducks and ultimately throws a knock-out punch to anyone trying to reason out its mysteries. Still you take the punch and get back up. You believe if you could understand more fully what Keats meant by negative capability, you would know how to be here, but also there, and all places in between. You would understand how to keep writing. You want to do as he says, to "let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts," open yourself freely to move among associations. But America's pandemic has made a swamp of your mind. [End Page 36] You brought some students with you to the museum. They milled around the rooms, placing their palms on the glass display tables, leaning in to read archival yellowed manuscripts of letters and old books splayed open, revealing Keats's poems on their brittle pages, while you continued to study the carved ceiling. You've somehow always known, even as a child, that the harvest of pattern is surprise. A gift bestowed by turning away from what's expected. You wonder had Keats lived another year what further would his mind have reaped? Would he have explained negative capability more fully? You wonder if Americans live through this pandemic, who will we be on the other side? How many will be on the other side? What will we understand that we hadn't before? The rooms upstairs in the Keats museum are dark but for a ray of glaring sunshine streaming through a window. When you glance back at your students they are shadows surrounded by golden motes in the air around them. You think, well, that's romantic. ________ You have recently entered the demographic who have a higher risk of dying from Covid-19. You reassure yourself that it won't come for you, not because you're in tip-top shape, but because you have only very slightly crept over the margin of that age group. Mostly you stay inside, wash your hands, work remotely, wear a mask when on rare occasion you venture out to the grocery or slip back to campus to pick up something you need to plan your hybrid courses for the fall. Covid-19 only slightly ups your thinking about mortality—which is to say you often think...

All the women of 'Endymion': From blues to bliss

The paper analyses John Keats's poem 'Endymion' in the light of archetypal literary criticism. Particular attention is paid to female characters in the poem, especially Cynthia, Circe and Peona, who, taken as archetypes, represent anima and libido. Endymion's search for immortality is in fact his mission to understand and embrace his anima while going through many challenges, so his quest is essentially a process of introspection, broadening of his consciousness, personal transformation. As an infantile Prince Charming dazzled by his narcissism, Endymion will go a long way from an ordinary shepherd to a mature young man full of empathy who finally manages to reach his personal integration.

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. …

Reading the Heart, Reading the World: Keats's Historiographical Aesthetic

In view of John Keats's critique that “the nature of the world will not admit of” philosophical history's progressive temporality, this essay reads anew the relation between William Robertson's History of America and Keats's “Chapman's Homer” sonnet. Much recent criticism cites Robertson's History as Keats's historical “source” for the poem, without questioning the narrative form through which it mediates historical realities. By contrast, this essay shows how the aesthetic and formal effects of Keats's poem critique the temporal assumptions underlying the predominant narrative forms of Enlightenment historiography.

The Encrypted Prospect: Existentialist Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Speculative Realism in “To Autumn”

Despite critical interrogations of the mastery communicated by both the prospective view and the prospect poem genre, the explicit prospect continues to suffer from accusations of imperialism, class privilege and labor exploitation. I show how Keats's “To Autumn” anticipates this critique by instancing an implicit, encoded or encrypted prospect. The irrealization, sublimation or aestheticization of nature and the local by culture and poetic media at the heartland of the encrypted prospect produces, however, as many epistemic, epistemological and existential problems as it solves. Keats's poem proleptically undertakes this problematization in relation to the interpretative potential of deconstruction by placing it in interaction with its existential-phenomenological inheritance and its present-day inheritor, the philosophical movement known as Speculative Realism. The end result is a becoming-slimy of the Romantic (media) ideology that insists upon a Modernist-New Critical poetics of difficulty as a (formal) window opening onto the (global) world.

Real Money and Romanticism by Matthew Rowlinson

Matthew Rowlinson. Real Money and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xi+249. $89.00. An Coleridge famously remarked in Statesman's Manual, but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of senses; principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and former shapeless to boot. Following Coleridge, critics have often denigrated allegory, reading literature in philosophical or historical contexts symbolically, in Coleridge's terms, partak[ing] of reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates whole ... as a riving part in that unity of which it is representative. To be sure, critics appreciate fact that, in practice, symbolic analysis is itself highly figurative, even allegorical. As Frye noted in The Anatomy of Criticism, the instant that any critic permits himself to make a genuine comment about a poem (e.g., 'In Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be portraying tragedy of irresolution') he has begun to allegorize. In 1970s, Paul de Man showed that criticism undermines its symbolic pretensions by revealing its allegorical dimensions in moments of rhetorical self-consciousness. New-historicism demonstrated how literary works resist their own historicization by making history itself appear as allegory. Still, such acknowledgments are rare. We tend to assume--symbolically--that Keats's poems or Austen's novels tell us about capitalism or interiority or secularism rather than admit that such associations come from us. Real Money and Romanticism takes an overtly allegorical approach to its historical subject: Romanticism's relation to financial history. For a long time, suspension of cash payments at Bank of England, which made Britain a paper economy from 1797 to 1821, warranted little more than a few footnotes in Romantic studies. The last few years have seen several articles on subject and three books: Robert Mitchell's Sympathy and State in Romantic Era (Routledge, 2007), Mary Poovey's Genres of Credit Economy (Chicago, 2008), and now Rowlinson's. But whereas Mitchell and Poovey read both literature and economics historically, that is symbolically, as illustrations of an overarching historical narrative, Rowlinson is interested in what historical method leaves behind, its waste, curious relationality or allegories that exist between forms of value: and literature and connections between them. Rowlinson takes as his starting point Marx's dictum that money is a social relation. Money exists as difference between values of commodities in exchange. It comes into being when that relation is reified in a system of price or credit, and when commodities disappear persists in a symbolic or sublime form. This story has been told since before Greeks. Yet, following recent work in anthropology and sociology, as well as a panoply of critical theorists from Freud and Mauss to Derrida and Zizek, Rowlinson turns this story inside out: monetary objects (coins, bills, records, accounts, books) survive their conversion into and retain traces of social relations that form abandons. Thus, when a check is endorsed, it can pass as from one recipient to another. But in retaining form of a written contract, endorsed check retains traces of original exchange and its status as is exposed as a further relation dependent on it. Rowlinson calls these surviving monetary objects curiosities; while he does not cite recent important work by Ina Ferris, Katie Trumpener, and Susan Manning, there is much in Rowlinson's argument that will, I think, attract anyone interested in theoretical implications of Romantic antiquarianism. To this already difficult theoretical argument Rowlinson adds an equally controversial historical one. …

The Austen Effect: Remaking Romantic History as a Novel of Manners

2009 release of Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career. A. O. Scott of New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: I read all the letters. didn't read all the poems. Then worked out a storyline (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet Bright Star to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being pillowed on my fair love's breast as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a feminist intervention even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

Keats for Beginners

IN A LETTER TO COVENTRY PATMORE, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS DESCRIBES John Keats as of of Romantic movement, by which he means one of poets who helped start movement away from neoclassical poetry and poetics. (1) Given that Keats's first book of poems was published in 1817 when Wordsworth was in his mid 40s, calling Keats of beginners seems almost anachronistic. But Hopkins's letter evokes another sense of beginner, one on which I will focus. An awareness of Keats as beginner--one invested in principle of beginning--lurks within Hopkins's letter. Of poets one might associate with Romantic movement--Wordsworth, Tighe, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Hemans--Keats of beginners, as if only some Romantic poets ought to be considered beginners. Following Hopkins, or, at least, following this hint in Hopkins's letter, I want to ask: what does it mean to call Keats beginner? Who or what beginner? What and when beginning? How might Keats's poems be understood as beginners? These questions might take one in any number of directions, but as philosopher Hannah Arendt, to whom we shall turn, suggests in opening to The Human Condition, beginning and not ending, natality and not mortality, may be central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. (2) Beginning is, for Arendt, political because it of, and not beyond, world. Calling Keats a beginner makes possible rethinking of Keats's relationship to politics. The event of beginning, I show with specific reference to closing lines of Sleep and Poetry and opening lines of Endymion, exposes fundamental gap between cognition and perception, understanding and experience; for Keats, I argue, this gap makes possible political commitment even as it complicates very idea of political action. One of Beginners Almost from start, Romantic poets have been accused of turning away from active involvement in politics, understood as instrumental action or intervention in world of human affairs. The defining turn of poet inward to explore his own thoughts and feelings, it argued, constitutes simultaneously turn away from poet's own historical moment. Turning inward, poet turns away from others. Keats for instance most famous for addressing not his fellow man but nightingale and an urn. Indeed, of Romantic poets accused of turning away from history and politics, Keats often prime example. As Stopford A. Brooke writes in 1907: [Keats] has ... no vital interest in present, none in man as whole, none in political movement of human thought, none in future of mankind, none in liberty, equality and fraternity. (3) Brooke offers particularly damning picture of Keats but it picture of Keats largely still in play. It view of poet, in other words, that we have largely inherited. Keats: dreamer-poet far removed from (and even uninterested in) world of human affairs. More damning than Brooke's argument that Keats has no interest in the political movement of human thought Jerome McGann's later suggestion that Romantic poets use art as means to escape world. It one thing to take no interest in politics; it quite another thing actively to flee all things political. In response to world turned topsy-turvy--with French Revolution's dramatic failure, marked by violence of Terror and rise of Napoleon as dictator--the Romantic poet, argues McGann, sticks his head in sand (or, perhaps more precisely, in idealized work of art). Romantic poetry, writes McGann, is everywhere marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic conceptualization whereby actual human issues with which poetry concerned are resituated in variety of idealized localities. (4) The poet uses poetry to transport himself into an idealized world and so away from actual human issues, and once again Keats prime example. …

'This Living Hand': Commonplacing Keats

This essay examines the way that John Keats's circle memorialized him in their commonplace books. It takes two pages from two commonplace books as case studies — one compiled by Georgiana Keats and the other by Richard Woodhouse. Because Keats's handwriting appears on both pages, these manuscripts are shown to key into the larger symbolic valence of handwriting as synecdochically related to the living body, a trope featured in Keats's late poem 'This living hand'.

Achtung Maybe: A Case Study of the Role of Personal Connection and Art in the Literary Engagement of Students with Attentional Difficulties

This study examines a collaborative reading of John Keats's poem, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” by two high school seniors with attentional difficulties in a mainstream British Literature class, with a focus on one of the students, Rita. The data consist of a retrospective verbal protocol during which the students recounted their process of composition as they interpreted the poem through an artistic medium, and a reconstructed transcript of a presentation of this drawing to their classmates. The data were analyzed with a coding system that focused on the setting of the students' composition, their goals for composing their interpretive text, and the tools through which they produced their interpretation. The data suggest that two factors were prominent in Rita's interpretation of the poem: her connection of a recent personal experience (the death of a friend) to the themes of the poem and the possibilities afforded by the artistic medium. The study concludes with a consideration of how students with attentional difficulties stay focused on their school tasks, particularly in relation to the ways in which their environments are structured.

First Fruits or ‘First Blights’: A New Account of the Publishing History of Keats's Poems (1817)

<i>First Fruits or ‘First Blights’: A New Account of the Publishing History of Keats's Poems (1817)</i>

First Fruits or 'First Blights': A New Account of the Publishing History of Keats's Poems (1817)

First Fruits or 'First Blights': A New Accountof the Publishing History of Keats's Poems (1817) John Barnard School of English University of Leeds The publication, and immediate failure, of Keats's first volume of poetry in 1817, published by Charles and James Ollier, was a determining factor in his future attitude to publication and to the reading public. The psychological impact of this (in 1820 he bitterly described the poems in his first book as his 'first-blights'1 ), with its swift effect on his attitude to Leigh Hunt, is a key to an understanding of Keats's subsequent poetic development and his later anxieties about appearing in print. For all of Keats's biographers the publication of Poems (1817)is a crucial part of their story. Keats's most recent biographers have not made use of the work by Shelley scholars on the Ollier brothers, which has an important bearing on Keats's first book. Charles E. Robinson's life of Charles Ollier in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) says that Poems (1817) and Shelley's A Proposalfor Putting Reform to the Vote, published by the Olliers in 1817, were 'both apparently published on commission' (that is, the author was responsible for all the manufacturing costs and the charges for any advertising). This claim draws on his essay on the Olliers and Shelley, printed in 1982, which shows that the firm received 10% commission, and clearly suggests, without quite saying so explicitly, that Keats himself met the cost of Poems (1817). In addition, he suggests that Shelley paid for the simultaneous advertising of both volumes.2 In 1973 Donald H. Reiman made it clear that the Olliers set up in business later than any of Keats's biographers assume,3 and thought that Shelley 'attempted to assist Keats' to publish Poems (1817).4 William St. Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) takes the last point a step further: Shelley 'seems to have put up the money for Keats's first volume'.5 Using this and other instances, St. Clair makes a more general and entirely convincing claim: 'Shelley was just one of the many scarcely known and commercially unsuccessful authors whose books could only be printed at their own expense, if at all.'6 Publishing on commission was a common and, indeed, the normal way for an unknown author to appear before the public. If Keats, as Robinson believes, paid forthe publication of Poems (1817) and not the Olliers or Shelley, it materially affects our understanding of Keats's personality, the decisions he made about his life between summer 1816 and the volume's publicationin March 1817. In particular, it explains why,in March 1817, Keats so swiftly dropped the Olliers in favour of Taylor and Hessey's firm, which subsequently published both Endymion (1818) and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820). The relevance of Reiman's, Robinson's and St. Clair's work on the Olliers and Shelley to [End Page 71] an understanding of the publication history of Keats's Poems (1817) therefore deserves closer attention. This entails re-examining the evidential basis for the accepted version given by Keats's biographers of the publication history of Poems (1817). Because it is difficult to re-imagine long-accepted and entirely plausible narratives, this necessitates a close scrutiny of the extant evidence. In assessing this evidence it became clear that the question of whether or not Keats published his first volume on commission had wider ramifications. I will be drawing on a number of facts, someof them new, from various sources: an unpublished letter by Leigh Hunt, substantial oddities in the volume's structure and layout, three of Keats's presentation copies, Jack Stillinger's detailed analysis of the manuscripts in The Texts of Keats's Poems (1974), and Nicholas Roe's recent dating of when Keats probably first met Leigh Hunt, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and...

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. …

Revising keats's “the eve of st agnes”: the shift from dreams to reality in adelaide procter's “a legend of provence”

Adelaide Procter's commitment to the “Woman Question” compels her to revise Keats's romantic myth in “The Eve of St Agnes”. Like Keats, Procter is fascinated by the possibilities of the imagination, but in “A Legend of Provence” she focuses on the very real dangers of women's romantic dreams. Procter asks her readers not only to sympathize with the plight of a “fallen woman”, but also to acknowledge the hope that is available to everyone through Catholicism. She proposes that the glorious reality of God can transform the world, protectingwomen from social inequalities and providing motivation for change. By examining “A Legend of Provence” in the context of Keats's poem and in the context of Procter's political and religious values, we can begin to see Procter not simply as the “sentimental” poet she has often been called, but also as a politically active writer who was committed to transforming her world

Clare and the Ghost of Keats

John Clare was fascinated by both literary success and by individual authors, notably John and Robert Bloomfield, whom he considered unjustly neglected. He values Keats's poems for their abstract beauties, cherishes their choice phrases and linguistic turns; but, in letters to their mutual publisher, John Taylor, he describes in obscure phrases which, in his autobiography and correspondence of 1821, he reapplies to his own life. My account of the mediated, self-reflexive and misrepresented relationship between the poets, and the importance of in Clare's developing sense of his own cultural position, centres on two composite texts: To the of John Keats and Fate of Genius. Early in 1821, Clare exchanged regular letters with Taylor while writing his life story for the preface to the second collection. Whatever the subject--Clare's drunkenness and mental wanderings, his frustrating writer's block or, frequently, the detail of proofs and revisions for his forthcoming second volume--the letters convey a constant, unstated anxiety. They are constructed over the ghostly frame of speculation about in the uncertain weeks before March 18, when Taylor received confirmation of Keats's death in Rome on February 23. He told Clare eight days later. Coincidentally, John Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, was killed on February 16, in a duel with John Christie, acting for John Lockhart, the editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The loss was both personal and commercial, the culmination of Scott's indignation against Blackwood's, a coincidence that contributed to the myth of Keats's having been killed by reviews in the Scottish press. A third violent occurrence underscored the relevance of contemporary literary animosity to Clare's own writing career. On February 24, he wrote to Taylor, Is poor Scott gone--Drakard the Editor of the 'Stamford News' has been severly beaten this week in a rather cowardly way by a person coming in with the excuse of buying a book who while D. turnd to look [for] it cudgeld him with a stick & rid off the stranger had a footman with him & is some one no doubt that the Paper has provokingly abused but who it is or for what cause he has beaten him I know (Letters, 159-60). John Drakard, who supplied Clare with paper and books, had run a circulating library in Stamford (the market town five miles from Clare's home) and in 1830 engaged Clare as a regular contributor to his second newspaper, the Stamford Champion, having employed John Scott as editor of his first, the Stamford News (By Himself, 57; Natural History, 190, 230; Letters, 490; Newton and Smith, 292). Clare's letter to Taylor, on or around March 8, demonstrates both the force of the connection and intensity of his response: G[ilchrist] tells me of Scott's death but I know all about it & about it & am as sorry for it as he can be tho I knew nothing more of the man then by his actions which tells me he had more honesty and honour then his enemey Lockhardt is a d--d knave & a coward & my insignificant self woud tell him so to his teeth--but Mr G tells me to stick to a Cudgel when I quarrel (Letters, 163-64). Octavius Gilchrist--co-founder with Drakard of the Stamford News was involved in his own controversy with the Revd William Bowles, a dispute over Pope that drew in Byron, and Clare (Barton). Taylor's report of March 9 presumably crossed in the post: O. Gilchrist came up to attend poor Scott's Funeral which took place this Day. We heard yesterday of Keats; he was still alive, though very weak--but calmer than he had been. It was not considered that he would last many Days longer. Probably at the Time Scott he also died (Blunden, 88). Taylor's final announcement of Keats's death in a letter to Clare on March 26, is appended with an invitation to produce some Lines to his Memory and a warning that the pressures of the literary marketplace are ubiquitous: One of the very few Poets of the Day is gone--let another beware of Stamford. …

Comparative Literary Studies: Lermontov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoj, Blok: Lavater, Lessing, Schiller, Grillparzer by Edmund s&gt; Heier (review)

REVIEWS 5 I I analysis of Gumilev's 'Iz logova zmieva' and its linking of autobiographical impulse with a belief in the centralityof the ballad to acmeist poetics, or her linkingof the topos of a night-timeflight in Akhmatova's'Pobeg'with poems by earlierRussianpoets as well as Keats. However, forallheringenuity,to my mind Ketchian isnot alwayssuccessful in demonstratingthat a linkbetween Keats and her chosen Russiantext really exists. Does Pushkin'suse of the motif of the real or postponed seduction of a sleepinglover in RuslanandLiudmila reallyreflectparallelsituations(withquite different outcomes) in Keats's Endymion and 7JieEveof StAgnes,or do both authors rather draw independently on models in the classical or folkloric tradition?Is Mandelstam's I937 poem 'Kuvshin',which describesan ancient Greekjug in the Voronezh museum and perhaps hints at the simultaneous power and vulnerabilityof art, reallya responseto Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', with which Mandelstam may or may not have been familiar, or is it more productively read in the context of Mandelstam's own long-standing preoccupationwith Greekantiquity? Ketchian pays relativelylittle attentionto two pieces of evidence which link Keats and Russian poetry together much more firmly- the role of Keats's 'LaBelle Dame sansMerci' in the development of the balladas a majorgenre in Russian symbolism, and the presence of direct quotations from Keats, in English, in the poetry of Akhmatova. Both of these have admittedly been discussedelsewherein the literatureand Ketchian does considerthem briefly, but a more detailedtreatmentin the context of her own discoveriesmightwell have reinforcedher pictureof the Keatsian layerin Russianpoetry. Ketchian does linkBlok's'Solov'inyisad' to 'LaBelle Dame sansMerci', but gives little indication of how Blok might have been influenced notjust by Keats himself, but also by the traditionestablishedby Bal'mont,Fofanov,Briusovand others in responseto Keats's poem. With AkhmatovaKetchian prefersto focus on a groupof earlypoems and to mention the Keats epigraphto 'Shipovniktsvetet' and the allusions in Poemabezgeroiachiefly as evidence that Akhmatova was familiar with the work of Keats rather than to re-examine their structural significancein herpoetry. In brief, although Ketchian's book contains much of interestand contains veryhelpfulindexesto allowthereaderto findcommentson individualauthors and poems, she fails to carry her main point. If Keats is indeed a major influence on Russianpoetry, this book may be a necessaryfirststep towardsa criticalevaluationof hisrole, butitisby no means theend of the road. Library andInformation Service D. N. WELLS Curtin University ofTechnology, Western Australia Heier, Edmund. Comparative LiteraryStudies.Lermontov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoj, Blok Lavater, Lessing., Schiller, Grillparzer. Vortrageund Abhandlungen zur Slavistik, 39. Otto Sagner, Munich, 2000. 20I pp. Notes. Index.e I8.41 I THESE comparative literary studies have the form of articles contributed to journals and Festschriftenover approximatelya quarterof a centuryfromthe 512 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 early I970S onwards, the most recent dating from the mid-iggos. They enlargeupon EdmundHeier's earlierstudiesdevoted to literaryportraiturein nineteenth-century Russian prose published in I993, which were parts of a largerexamination of prose portraiturein his studyof the literaryportraitsin the novels of Dostoevskii published in I989. The earlier studieswere at least linked by a general theme, whether Dostoevskii'snovels in the latterinstance or the influence of the SwissphysiognomistLavaterand the phrenologistGall on Russian literaryportraiturein the former,but these 'comparativeliterary studies',asthey arecalled, have no suchthematiccoherence and consequently jostle together in a somewhat haphazard fashion, both linguisticallyand in termsof content. Two of the studies on Goncharov, particularlyObgyv (T77e Precipice) and on Blok's translation of Grillparzer'sDie Ahnfrau -are in German and not readily accessible to an English readership, whereas the 'comparative'element in terms of literarystudy is not clearly evident in the article on Tolstoi and the evangelical revival among the Russian aristocracy, nor is it internationally meaningful in the article on the second Heroof Ouir Time.It is arguable, of course, that most of these studies have a common purpose in the sense of demonstratingthe likelyinfluence of German culture, particularlyGoethe and Schiller, on Russian writing during the nineteenth century. It opens, though, where the earlier studies of Lavater and Gall left off, as it were, with a usefulshortguide to 'The LiteraryPortraitas a Mode of Characterization'. The role of Lessing in the evolution of literary portraiture is contrasted largely with Balzac's approach, although the final verdict on the subject is given as 'a portraitwhich oscillated...

Keats in Transition: The Bicentenary and its Provocations

as indeed Ronald Sharp argued in his paper on 'Keats and Friendship'. This sense of shared elation was also represented inJack Stillinger's splendid keynote address on multiple interpretations of The Eve of St Agnes. Several well-known poets concluded that festive evening with readings of Keats's poems, describing how he had influenced their own work. Yet Keats, himself, reminds us that While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events