English 216 Lecture 6 Keats February 4th, 2010

I.

Background a. Career lasted only five years i. First published 1816, died 1821 ii. Best work published during 1819 1. Fell in love that year couldnt propose because he was poor and couldnt set up a household, knew he was ill and dying (turned out to be tuberculosis) 2. Writing filled with awareness of mortality a. Focuses on intensity of bodily/sensual experience 3. Very varied body of work a. In addition to mortality and sensuality, interested in many forms of poetry b. Father worked in a stable, kept an inn i. Both parents died young, nursed mother through tuberculosis ii. Guardian apprenticed him to a surgeon 1. Pre-anesthesia a. Horrified, stopped at rank of apothecary (lowest medical rank) b. Left that for poetry. iii. First volume subjected to very harsh reviews 1. Commented on his class status c. Cockney School v. Lake School 1. Working class Londoners (stuck in London due to class) 2. Name of content said poets were vulgar, lacked class 3. Cockey poets

a. Famous for sparkling and sensuous language i. Went as far as being sexual on occasion, offended some people 4. Lake School a. Writing more about nature b. Outside of London ii. Keats is writing while Wordsworth and Coleridge are famous 1. Keats revives ornateness and classical allusions 2. Puts art about nature 3. Comments on Wordsworth a. Norton, p. 943 b. February 3rd letter i. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive primrose! ii. Mocking Wordsworth and Wordsworthian nature iii. Deliberate distance 4. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence a. Poet is the least interesting aspect of poetry. b. Poetry should be about things that are poetic, not about creating poetry d. Negative capability i. Norton 942 ii. The best artist is the one that can be passive he can just let the world be, doesnt have to solve everything. 1. Shift away from self greatest poet doesnt want to exert too much power over his subject matter, but rather will let it exist in all its contradictions II. Ode to a Nightingale (Norton 903) a. Ode form i. Composed to/in honor of something

ii. Keats returns to this form often 1. Trying to write about something other than himself a. Focus on you, not I b. I/you relationship c. Dedication to you b. Ode i. Highly regular form 1. All Odes are ten stanzas, same rhyme scheme 2. Didnt like Petrarchan/Shakespearean forms on their own, so he combined them ii. Written in rhyming iambic pentameter iii. Usually written as a comment on what it means to be a poet iv. How does Nightingale song differ from poetry? 1. No words, abstract in a way 2. Keats says its immortal 3. Natural bird artist vs. human poet 4. Mortality v. immortality a. Series of oppositions b. Contradiction from beginning i. Numbness pains sense ii. Opposites v. Lines 5-6 1. Happiness and pain 2. No envy, though? 3. What does it mean about the self when your feelings and someone elses feelings are so strong that they produce the opposite emotion? vi. Distance between poetry and subject matter

1. Poet and bird a. Poet feels differently because of distance between bird and himself, cant experience the song in the same way c. Synaesthesia i. Notion of tasting colors, having sensory experience ii. Hemlock doesnt let you have a sensual experience 1. Kills you instead iii. Wine, however, does 1. But the resulting feeling is overwhelming 2. Notion of feeling and dissolving d. Pattern of repetition i. ABAB ii. Thinking about rhyme through structure of opposition e. End of second stanza into third i. Pleasure and experience Nothingness 1. Want to dissolve, forget a. Sickness and death b. Want to die to forget human experience of mortality f. Thinking (sorrowful) and death (nothingness) i. Alternatives? Whats more desirable? g. Poesy i. Brings him closer to Nightingales song ii. viewless 1. Cant see, or cant be seen? h. Inability to break free of mortality i. See stanza 5 ii. Goes towards love poem, but pulls away 1. half in love with easeful death

2. Ease of death v. ease of Nightingale (Stanza 1) a. Death means speaker would become part of earth, while Nightingale would be able to go on singing i. You is essential to ode poetry III. Ode on a Grecian Urn a. When written, Greek art was en vogue b. Lack of conventional Christian imagery in poetry i. Pagan/Greek feel to poetry c. Ode to Nightingale considered i. Dedicated to form of art created in nature ii. Urn developed to physical piece of art 1. Emphasis on sound, pushes away vision/values viewlessness (Nightingale) 2. Values vision (Urn) iii. Both concerned with immortality, time, concept of what art is 1. Distance between immortal beauty and mortal human experience iv. Lovers on Urn arent sick of each other 1. Always spring on the Urn (stanza 3) d. Beauty is truth, truth beauty i. Urn is all of a sudden speaking? ii. Where do the quotations go? 1. Just the phrase, or full last two lines iii. T.S. Eliot deems it a blemish on the poem iv. A blunt philosophical statement 1. Not made by the poet (Keats), but an ancient Greek vase 2. Lyric poem with two speakers v. Question marks throughout 1. Poet questioning Urn, Urn remains silent in face of interrogation

2. Negatives follow a. Stanza two 3. Answer that isnt really an answer Urn is cold and inhuman? Immortal, timeless. a. Does it even pertain to our experience as humans? b.