Helen Vendler once called John Keats' "To Autumn" "one of the best poems in the English language" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=Vendler&st=nyt&scp=1). I can't argue with her--I wouldn't dream of it--but I will say that it has taken me years to come around to an appreciation of Keats.
A few years of teaching poetry to high school students yields a simple explanation of what makes Keats so hard to appreciate: we don't read or hear with the same ears today. We stumble over the words, sometimes even the ones we know. Reading is re-reading, and we generally don't have the patience for that. Unless you grow up cultivating an ear for the musical quality of English verse, it takes years to develop your sense of sound. In teaching Keats, what I have discovered, though, is the joy of reading his poems aloud. "Joy" isn't a word I use often or lightly, but it applies here.
To take in the full effect of iambic pentameter, you have to learn to hear it twice at once. You need to learn to hear the steady beat of the iambs, and you need to hear the fluidity of the melody that surrounds this beat: the natural flow of the line. To read properly, you have to see both on the page. To hear properly, you have to listen for both--and you have to read it out loud. This is the music of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to the Modern era, and although we don't tend to use it much anymore, that doesn't mean that it can't sing to us now.
When we read out loud in class, I normally make my students do the work. With poetry, they take turns; they go around the room and read to a significant punctuation mark (period or semicolon, usually), or sometimes they practice "spirit reading"--where you start and stop as the spirit moves you. This year, I let my students perform a spirit reading of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," but then I told them that I was going to read "Ode on a Grecian Urn" myself. I wanted them to hear it the way I hear it, after having worked on the reading for years. I wanted also, somewhat greedily, the experience of reading the poem aloud.
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" gives us Keats' initial statement on the power--transportive as much as it is transformative--of poetry. Transport figures large in the sense that the speaker claims to have "travell'd in the realms of gold" but not to have truly breathed the "pure serene [air]" of far-away lands until reading Homer--specifically, Homer as mediated through the Elizabethan translation of George Chapman. In Keats' envisioning of him, Homer ruled a "wide expanse" of the ancient world "as his demesne"--that is, as though he were the lord of a feudal territory. Five years later, Shelley famously expressed a similar notion to what Keats hits on in this poem when he said, in A Defense of Poetry, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." (That Shelley's statement came five years after Keats' poem--and the same year that Keats died--is of little consequence; the two poets are of the same moment and ideas surely ran back and forth between them.)
In "Chapman's Homer"--as in Shelley's "Ozymandias"--the speaker's experience of the ancient world is mediated by time, history, and art, and in the process gives example to a great talent that the Romantic poets had for embedded narration. (Blake also does this to some extent in both versions of "The Chimney Sweeper.") This same method is used to convey a message of devastating irony in "Ozymandias" and a message of sublime inspiration in "Chapman's Homer."
A few years of teaching poetry to high school students yields a simple explanation of what makes Keats so hard to appreciate: we don't read or hear with the same ears today. We stumble over the words, sometimes even the ones we know. Reading is re-reading, and we generally don't have the patience for that. Unless you grow up cultivating an ear for the musical quality of English verse, it takes years to develop your sense of sound. In teaching Keats, what I have discovered, though, is the joy of reading his poems aloud. "Joy" isn't a word I use often or lightly, but it applies here.
To take in the full effect of iambic pentameter, you have to learn to hear it twice at once. You need to learn to hear the steady beat of the iambs, and you need to hear the fluidity of the melody that surrounds this beat: the natural flow of the line. To read properly, you have to see both on the page. To hear properly, you have to listen for both--and you have to read it out loud. This is the music of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to the Modern era, and although we don't tend to use it much anymore, that doesn't mean that it can't sing to us now.
When we read out loud in class, I normally make my students do the work. With poetry, they take turns; they go around the room and read to a significant punctuation mark (period or semicolon, usually), or sometimes they practice "spirit reading"--where you start and stop as the spirit moves you. This year, I let my students perform a spirit reading of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," but then I told them that I was going to read "Ode on a Grecian Urn" myself. I wanted them to hear it the way I hear it, after having worked on the reading for years. I wanted also, somewhat greedily, the experience of reading the poem aloud.
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" gives us Keats' initial statement on the power--transportive as much as it is transformative--of poetry. Transport figures large in the sense that the speaker claims to have "travell'd in the realms of gold" but not to have truly breathed the "pure serene [air]" of far-away lands until reading Homer--specifically, Homer as mediated through the Elizabethan translation of George Chapman. In Keats' envisioning of him, Homer ruled a "wide expanse" of the ancient world "as his demesne"--that is, as though he were the lord of a feudal territory. Five years later, Shelley famously expressed a similar notion to what Keats hits on in this poem when he said, in A Defense of Poetry, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." (That Shelley's statement came five years after Keats' poem--and the same year that Keats died--is of little consequence; the two poets are of the same moment and ideas surely ran back and forth between them.)
In "Chapman's Homer"--as in Shelley's "Ozymandias"--the speaker's experience of the ancient world is mediated by time, history, and art, and in the process gives example to a great talent that the Romantic poets had for embedded narration. (Blake also does this to some extent in both versions of "The Chimney Sweeper.") This same method is used to convey a message of devastating irony in "Ozymandias" and a message of sublime inspiration in "Chapman's Homer."
In "Ozymandias," the "frown," "lip," and "snear" of a terrible king are the means by which he conveys his famous message ("I am Ozymandias, king of kings, / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."). A sculptor transfers that message to stone. Time wears away at the stone, altering the message and shattering the statue to pieces. A traveler sees the crumbling remains of the ancient statue, and conveys the message to the speaker. The speaker tells us, and the message has changed: even the king of kings is subject to the decay of time, and we ourselves have little hope of withstanding eternity.
In "Chapman's Homer," the bard is figuratively the king, and his message is translated by Chapman and received by the speaker. The speaker relays it to us, only the content of the message has been lost in the transfer--there are no details evoking the great contest for Ilium or the voyages of Odysseus--it's like the statue of Ozymandias without the inscription--and what we have instead is a statement on the power of poetry. Shelley designs for us a message of despair and the inevitable wrack of history, while the message of "Chapman's Homer" is in praise of the ecstatic, transportive power of literature. (This same message was later transposed to the domain of visual and sound phenomena in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and together the two poems cover the spectrum of aesthetic experience.)
In effect, Homer is more than anything else an idea in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Specifically, he is the idea of the poet, and the power his work gives form to is the power that accompanies any great work of literature. Keats tells us about the transformation brought on by his experience of reading, not about the text itself, and in this context the claim of the poem is that reading is not only an experience but also an act of creativity in and of itself. The experience of reading is first related to the discovery of a new orb in the heavens--"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." But before Keats can travel further along these celestial lines, he changes tack and grounds us with a more developed earthly simile: the discovery of the Pacific by European explorers. The only reaction that Keats can muster initially, upon reading Chapman's Homer, is identical to that of his imagined explorers discovering the Pacific--amazed silence. Thus Keats' poem also corresponds with Wordsworth's famed statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." At the first moment of feeling, the poet is stunned, staggered with awe. There are no words for it then. The words come later. In the case of this poem, it wasn't much later--Keats is supposed to have written the poem immediately the morning after an all-night reading session with friend Charles Cowden Clark.
Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transfers the aesthetic experience of studying the work of a great poet to that of studying intensely a single work of visual art, specifically the "Attic shape" evoked by the title. Keats goes as far as to claim that the urn "canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," though I wonder whether Keats would have stuck with that stance had he been pressed on the subject. Keats devotes the first three and a half stanzas to the sensual imagery evoked by the woodland setting that rolls across the surface of the vase: a lover pursuing the object of his affection, "winning near the goal"; a piper, whose unheard melody transcends in sweetness that of the heard variety; trees with their "happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed" their leaves; and a "mysterious priest" leading a heifer to the sacrificial altar. As in all of Keats' major works, the evocation of sensory experience is riveting and complex, sometimes contradictory; senses overlap in the curious and powerful kind of synesthesia that is Keats' trademark. In the fourth stanza, Keats takes us beyond the imagery directly evoked by the urn itself to imagine the "little town by river or sea shore" that is "emptied of this folk, this pious morn." In Keats' mind, the town is still there to this day, abandoned, wondering where all her inhabitants might be. This extrapolation beyond the surface of the vase's image and into the super-historical moment depicted by it is perhaps the most powerful expression in the poem of the kind of reality engendered by artistic experience.
Keats almost--almost--wins us over with his famed closing statement. Again in the vein of embedded narration, the vase itself tells us that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" That, supposedly, is all we need to know. This statement corresponds with Keats' prose statement on negative capability from his December, 1817 letter to his brothers, where he asserts that the submersion of "fact & reason" and the ability of "being in uncertainties" defines the great poet. For Keats, "the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" and achieves a kind of factual nature. Keats seems to mean that the aesthetic experience is all and everything, that it supersedes history, politics, morality, and even nature itself. If so, this is perhaps the epitome of the Romantic worldview.
I am eagerly willing to go along with Keats until I realize where I am: in the classroom, with obligations to my students, papers to grade, a paycheck to earn, bills to pay, wife and children and mortgage, etc.--all of the things that are important but beyond the purely aesthetic.
The fact of the matter is that Keats' friend Shelley was a cad for abandoning his first wife and their child to pursue new love--and his own artistic temperament. Beauty is not truth. But it is to Keats' great credit that he comes so close to convincing us that it is.
In effect, Homer is more than anything else an idea in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Specifically, he is the idea of the poet, and the power his work gives form to is the power that accompanies any great work of literature. Keats tells us about the transformation brought on by his experience of reading, not about the text itself, and in this context the claim of the poem is that reading is not only an experience but also an act of creativity in and of itself. The experience of reading is first related to the discovery of a new orb in the heavens--"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." But before Keats can travel further along these celestial lines, he changes tack and grounds us with a more developed earthly simile: the discovery of the Pacific by European explorers. The only reaction that Keats can muster initially, upon reading Chapman's Homer, is identical to that of his imagined explorers discovering the Pacific--amazed silence. Thus Keats' poem also corresponds with Wordsworth's famed statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." At the first moment of feeling, the poet is stunned, staggered with awe. There are no words for it then. The words come later. In the case of this poem, it wasn't much later--Keats is supposed to have written the poem immediately the morning after an all-night reading session with friend Charles Cowden Clark.
Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transfers the aesthetic experience of studying the work of a great poet to that of studying intensely a single work of visual art, specifically the "Attic shape" evoked by the title. Keats goes as far as to claim that the urn "canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," though I wonder whether Keats would have stuck with that stance had he been pressed on the subject. Keats devotes the first three and a half stanzas to the sensual imagery evoked by the woodland setting that rolls across the surface of the vase: a lover pursuing the object of his affection, "winning near the goal"; a piper, whose unheard melody transcends in sweetness that of the heard variety; trees with their "happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed" their leaves; and a "mysterious priest" leading a heifer to the sacrificial altar. As in all of Keats' major works, the evocation of sensory experience is riveting and complex, sometimes contradictory; senses overlap in the curious and powerful kind of synesthesia that is Keats' trademark. In the fourth stanza, Keats takes us beyond the imagery directly evoked by the urn itself to imagine the "little town by river or sea shore" that is "emptied of this folk, this pious morn." In Keats' mind, the town is still there to this day, abandoned, wondering where all her inhabitants might be. This extrapolation beyond the surface of the vase's image and into the super-historical moment depicted by it is perhaps the most powerful expression in the poem of the kind of reality engendered by artistic experience.
Keats almost--almost--wins us over with his famed closing statement. Again in the vein of embedded narration, the vase itself tells us that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" That, supposedly, is all we need to know. This statement corresponds with Keats' prose statement on negative capability from his December, 1817 letter to his brothers, where he asserts that the submersion of "fact & reason" and the ability of "being in uncertainties" defines the great poet. For Keats, "the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" and achieves a kind of factual nature. Keats seems to mean that the aesthetic experience is all and everything, that it supersedes history, politics, morality, and even nature itself. If so, this is perhaps the epitome of the Romantic worldview.
I am eagerly willing to go along with Keats until I realize where I am: in the classroom, with obligations to my students, papers to grade, a paycheck to earn, bills to pay, wife and children and mortgage, etc.--all of the things that are important but beyond the purely aesthetic.
The fact of the matter is that Keats' friend Shelley was a cad for abandoning his first wife and their child to pursue new love--and his own artistic temperament. Beauty is not truth. But it is to Keats' great credit that he comes so close to convincing us that it is.
1 comment:
Okay, this comment is really unliterary, but if you grew your hair out and parted it down the middle, you'd kind of look like Keats in this portrait. Maybe you should go as Keats next Halloween...but you'll have to walk around with your hand on your chin looking all moony the whole time.
Can I have a BEAUTY!?
BEAUTY!
Can I have a TRUTH!?
TRUTH!
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