I've been enjoying your responses to Shelley very much and haven't wanted to cut them short by posting some questions about Keats. But time's winged chariot is hurrying near, so...
I would really like to hear your interpretations of what are perhaps Keats's most famous lines:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. ("Ode on a Grecian Urn" lines 49-50)
I would like your response to be grounded (primarily, though not necessarily exclusively) in Keats's work and in our discussions of this period.
Alternatively, I'd like to hear your ideas about how the twin themes of mortality and immortality are treated in Keats's poetry. Keats wrote gorgeous poems about immortality, some of the most revered in the English language, yet he died at the age of twenty-five. He never lived to experience the "few, last, sad gray hairs" he writes of in his "Ode to a Nightingale." I often wonder what Keats would have written had he lived as long as, say, Wordsworth, but then again, perhaps one reason Keats's poems resonate as they do is because of his short life. Maybe Shelley, who immortalized (and mythologized) Keats in Adonais, would have ended up writing a "To Keats" sonnet to go along with "To Wordsworth." But I like to think otherwise.
We'll continue this discussion up through Thursday's class. See you later tonight.
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One of the things I find most interesting about Keats is the focus on, as you mentioned, mortality/immortality, but at the same time, "negative capability" seems to be his acceptance that he cannot know everything in the world (and perhaps can know nothing of the world[s] beyond). This is a fascinating juxtaposition of ideology; at a brief glance, Keats strikes me as a hopeful agnostic who desperately wants there to be an afterlife, but cannot be certain and refuses to take a stand. What's interesting to me, then, is that these lovely poems about beauty in life and earth, and anything about any "eternal" rest or glory becomes speculation. Hopeful speculation, but speculation all the same.
ReplyDeleteAnd as a brief aside, the following haiku appears in J.D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction:
"John Keats/ John Keats/ John/ Please put your scarf on."
That Salinger sure was a sunny fellow.
I feel like creating a poem to Keats and Shelly named "Ode to Lessons Learned" It would probably compare the two men on how they both loved the stories and characters of greek mythology. Shelly himself seemed to live a life of a greek tragedy, with loving other mens wifes and dying in a storm at sea. But he didn't seem to come away from these Greek dramas learning what not to do, he just was ready to dive into the next phase of his own drama.
ReplyDeleteI think Keats had a whole different way of looking at the past and how it can teach us about the future. I think he looked at the beauty of the story how it was woven. What visuals it gave us. But mostly he gave our minds a look at the stories that were not told and him dying so young gave us chance to really grasp this concept.We have not met Keats or Shelly we do not know who they really were. Just like they didn't really know Apollo or Zeus. All we know is the beauty that they left behind and the sadness of not knowing what beauty they would have created next had their life's not been cut short.