keatsy

Whoa it’s been a while! I’m not sure how long a blog on Keats can stay fresh, but he sure stays fresh in my mind. We’ve been learning in class about Modern vs. Romantic writing. Though I know Keats has always been classified as a Romantic, now I’m not so sure. It seems as though, according to T.E. Hulme’s definition, that he fits both categories pretty well.

To Hulme, moderns are classicists that are firmly groundly in “the real,” and recognize the boundaries of human nature. Romantics, he says, get carried away and go off on tangents that try to escape “the real,” which to them is torturous and enslaving; they seek those sublime moments that can let them enter what they think it real— the world of the imagination.

Keats, though, maybe wasn’t so easy to put in a box. Sure, he had his moments of trying to escape painful human experience— “Nightingale” and “Grecian Urn” definitely don’t help his case. But, then again, he always came tumbling back down into the here-and-now, no matter how painful it was to him. And, when that crash landing happened, he realized something: that it actually wasn’t so bad.

Especially in “Ode on Melancholy” or in “To Autumn,” or even “Bright Star,” he realizes that what’s truly beautiful is that pain, because it’s so real. Not “real” in the Romantic sense that reality must be a total escape from the empirical and tangible, but “real” in the sense of what humans actually experience together— painful or not. He says in “Autumn” that, though the plains are “stubble” and empty, showing the mournful end of the harvest, they have a “rosy hue.” It’s almost like they have a human blush, giving them vitality despite their sad barrenness. In the end, for Keats, it’s not about human experience vs. the life of the imagination, or sensation vs. thought. It’s about what’s true— a subject that can dissolve those dichotomies and transcend generational labels.

Check out Keats's MySpace :)

12/4/09

We’ve been talking in class about “creative receptivity” or allowing yourself to be open to experience grace— to let the world influence you instead of actively trying to influence the world.

Through a Wordsworth poem, however, we found that you can’t really separate one from the other; you always kind of put your spin on things even if your just passively observing. In his poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth talks about going on a walk and seeing daffodils, which “all at once” appear before him, showing that they are the ones doing the action, not him. He mixes it up, though, by saying that “I saw,” giving himself some agency as well. He also says they were “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Obviously, he is the one giving those honorary terms to their movement; he is the one who chooses to see the beauty in something that he has no control over.

And this is where the “creativity” comes in— it’s not just receptivity, it’s “creative receptivity.” I think that Keats was the king of being creatively receptive, even though in class we only discussed his contemporary, Wordsworth. Keats, especially in “To Autumn,” found that he can’t control everything, he can’t find the solution to avoiding pain, so sometimes you just have to let it happen and see the beauty in it. He, with the personified Autumn, stands back towards the end of the ode and, though both of them question, “Where are the songs of Spring?”, Keats answers “Think not of them, thou hast they music too.” He sees that there’s beauty in the coming of winter and that he can’t change the inevitable, natural human suffering; he’s being receptive, but choosing to see the truth and beauty in what he can’t change.

11/16/09

Picking up where I left off, I think the answer lies in enjoying learning for is own sake. So what if I don’t have to present in front of a panel, turn in a paper, or take a test on what I’m learning? I should be content with just the knowledge, without it’s practical application.

I think this assertion applies to the Core here at the University of Dallas, especially, because much of what we learn may not be of technical use in the real world. I don’t think I’ll ever have to recite the Gettysburg address or analyze a poem in whatever I do later in life, unless I’m a teacher I suppose. But, you learn it anyway, just for the good that it results in— analyzing, memorizing and thinking critically make you a better, more well-rounded person. Like John Henry Newman said in his “Idea of a University,” “Though the useful is not always good, the good is always useful.” So, while you might not have to repeat what you learn at UD at your future job, the things you learn will come in handy; everyone needs to know how to read critically, analyze problems and be able to find connections, even if it’s not what you were hired to do.

John Keats finds this relationship in art, in that he sees art as a good in itself, with perhaps no higher good. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example, he tries so hard to apply the truth of the urn to his own life— he wants to engage in the “happy, happy love” of the couple under the tree, and hear the soundless music of the pipe player. But he can’t enter into their pleasure for any prolonged period of time, for art is there for its own sake, not his. He realizes this when he sees the sacrificial procession in the fourth stanza. The town is desolate, he doesn’t know where they’re going or why, and there’s no truth to the urn’s picture to give him any answers. Finally, the acknowledgment of desolation and doubt bring him back to earth, and he realizes that the urn is its own good, not his. It is simply a “Cold Pastoral” that can assert that “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” but can’t apply it to the viewer’s own life. It is only in learning, in observing the artwork for what it truly is, that Keats can find the truth about reality and humanity. And it is in learning for its own sake, in appreciating literature, art and other disciplines in themselves, that we reach the truth as well.

11/9/09

Today, I presented my Junior Poet project to the panel of professors who will judge me for my knowledge of Keats. Even though I choked up in a few parts, and could have done much better than I did, I basically poured out my soul, which was then full of Keats. But for some reason, he’s still there.

I’m kind of glad he is, too, because, as happy as I am that I don’t have to worry about being tested on what I know, I don’t want to forget what I know either. I want the relief of no schoolwork, but not the relief of no knowledge—that wouldn’t be any relief at all, actually. But why is the fact that I’m not being tested on it so freeing? I still want to learn, it’s not the learning that I dread— so am I contradicting myself in wanting one but not the other?

It’s kind of sad how much more I enjoy learning when I don’t have to do it. It’s kind of a hard situation for educators/students to be in—that students would enjoy learning if they didn’t have to be tested on it, but the only way to gauge their learning is through testing. Teachers couldn’t realistically measure any progress or gain of knowledge if they didn’t test, yet students, at least interested students, would probably learn more if there were no standard of measure.

Then again, without the motivation of having to present in front of a panel and turn in a huge project, I would have never picked up Keats’s poetry at all, and never would know what I know today.

I’ll try to tackle this question more next time, but for now I’ll just try to be a little “negatively capable,” and try to dwell in uncertain without reaching for answers.

11/5/09

Sometimes I think that society needs to get to know someone like Keats and adopt his vision. He sees the solidarity in humanity—that we’re all in everything together, despite differences, difficulties and seeming contradictions.

So I think when it comes to health care, Keats would want everyone to have it. I don’t care, and I don’t think Keats would either, about how it’s implemented, or whether it would bring down the overall quality of care for people who can pay for it, or if people would be standing in line at the emergency room for hours before receiving attention. Those seem like big concerns, and they are to some extend, but what is most important is that there is the potential for everyone to be taken care of. Having an underpaid doctor seems like a petty concern next to having no doctor at all. I think it’s our duty, as members of society, to help each other out. And if succumbing to lower quality health care is the price we have to pay for those less fortunate than us to have it, so be it.

I know those aren’t the only issues at stake, but that’s what I think is most important, and so would Keats. As a romantic and idealist (terms which have somewhat negative connotations nowadays), Keats focused on what was true and good over what was convenient. What was convenient was getting lost in the song of the nightingale in “Ode on a Nightingale,” so that he didn’t have to think about the agony he was in; what was convenient was participating in the “happy, happy love” of the figures on the urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But what was true was that he couldn’t stay there; that there’s pain and sorrow, and he needed to confront it—pure joy with no truth attached isn’t joy at all to Keats.

So keeping health care to yourself so that it can be top-notch brings joy, but selfish joy; joy that doesn’t extend beyond yourself into the realm of others; joy that can’t be true for everyone else just as much as it’s true for you.

Keats put up with being called naïve and immature, as I would probably be called for having my idealist stance on health care, for the sake of sticking to the true and the good. Yes, the matter is more complicated than that, but, like Keats does with pain and sorrow, you can incorporate those difficulties into the truth—you don’t have to deny them or ignore them, but reconcile them in rooting them in the common ground of humanity and solidarity. Keats strove to find a universal law of this kind, and universal health care goes along with it.

11/3/09

It’s my 21^st birthday! I wonder what Keats was doing on his 21^st birthday. He had barely started writing poetry at that point, and was in the midst of his medical training at Guy’s Hospital in London. He eventually abandoned this career path to write full-time, but as a consequence was penniless for the rest of his life, having to live off of his friends, especially Charles Brown, John Reynolds and Joseph Severn.

I think, though, that even though a switch from doctor to poet is a huge one, they are strangely connected, and I think Keats saw that as well. From his time in the hospital, he learned to have a deep sympathy for human nature. Even outside of the hospital, he was his brother Tom’s nurse during the last year of his life, and took care of him up until the day that he died.

He sometimes described his feeling towards Tom and towards his patients in the hospital by saying that “his identity pressed upon me”—he felt so much empathy for the person that it weighed him down. Sometimes he even lost his own identity in others, just like he lost his own in Fanny.

He said in his letters that “a poet is the most unpoetical thing” there is, because he has no identity of his own, but assumes the identity of others—he is so deeply sympathetic that he can in effect become his subject.

In light of this, he defines his famous “negative capability,” or “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Throughout his odes, he was “irritably reaching after fact and reason”—he wanted to know how pain and pleasure, beauty and truth and sensation and thought all came together. He finds out though, that he just needs to be receptive, empathetic.

He finds in “To Autumn” that he can just watch a season pass and he’ll find the truth—he can be fine dwelling in the uncertainty and sorrow of truth. “The setting sun will always set me to my rights,” he said, and it should set us to our rights too—to be able to be passive, to receive, and let the identity of others press upon us, so that we can understand others, and in turn, understand ourselves.