2 posts tagged “romantic”
Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988 (1814-1820).
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 (1815-1820).
Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
You can't do this kind of concurrent reading with every writer (the thought of trying it with Henry James gives me the shivers), but Keats's career is so brief and changes so rapidly that periodic switching from work to life and back again makes a pretty congenial project. What cheered me in the overall sad story was Keats's silliness as a person (at dinner he starts an impromptu concert with his friends; he makes the bassoon noises), his nerdy bookishness (Shakespeare and Milton are never out of his mind for a moment), and the way his ambition keeps pace about a league ahead of whatever he's actually working on. The unfathomably brilliant works -- the sonnets, odes, ballads -- appear almost by accident, while his greatest effort is turned to those longer pieces in which compositional brilliance is tied to structural flaws that he's always aware of, keeps trying to outpace, keeps discovering in new forms. It's the admission of uncertainty, the continued questing, that makes me feel so warm - maybe in this era of improved medical care there is still hope for us all.
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 (1815-1820).
Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
You can't do this kind of concurrent reading with every writer (the thought of trying it with Henry James gives me the shivers), but Keats's career is so brief and changes so rapidly that periodic switching from work to life and back again makes a pretty congenial project. What cheered me in the overall sad story was Keats's silliness as a person (at dinner he starts an impromptu concert with his friends; he makes the bassoon noises), his nerdy bookishness (Shakespeare and Milton are never out of his mind for a moment), and the way his ambition keeps pace about a league ahead of whatever he's actually working on. The unfathomably brilliant works -- the sonnets, odes, ballads -- appear almost by accident, while his greatest effort is turned to those longer pieces in which compositional brilliance is tied to structural flaws that he's always aware of, keeps trying to outpace, keeps discovering in new forms. It's the admission of uncertainty, the continued questing, that makes me feel so warm - maybe in this era of improved medical care there is still hope for us all.
Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Oh man, this really is how it's done. Remember how an account can be detailed and historically grounded without being reductive about it? Remember?...
One thing this has finally brought me to articulate is that if you're going to talk seriously about lit and philosophy, you have to distinguish between philosophy and poetics - that is the poetics are rules of art which may imply a philosophy but need not necessarily do so - they are a background for the construction of forms and are not identical with philosophy any more than life itself - though both life and poetic form may be subjected to the interpretive art which aims to distill out the unspoken propositions of philosophy drop by drop - All this needs much more room to spread like the pattern of a Persian carpet into the length and breadth of the treatise I hope to complete if I am granted the time - and yes I have been reading the letters of Keats and have contracted his epistolary style. Gentle Poet! - yours ever - adieu
Oh man, this really is how it's done. Remember how an account can be detailed and historically grounded without being reductive about it? Remember?...
One thing this has finally brought me to articulate is that if you're going to talk seriously about lit and philosophy, you have to distinguish between philosophy and poetics - that is the poetics are rules of art which may imply a philosophy but need not necessarily do so - they are a background for the construction of forms and are not identical with philosophy any more than life itself - though both life and poetic form may be subjected to the interpretive art which aims to distill out the unspoken propositions of philosophy drop by drop - All this needs much more room to spread like the pattern of a Persian carpet into the length and breadth of the treatise I hope to complete if I am granted the time - and yes I have been reading the letters of Keats and have contracted his epistolary style. Gentle Poet! - yours ever - adieu
