DOCSLIB.ORG

1. the Letters of John Keats, Ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 Vols, II, 98. This Synthesis

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
1. the Letters of John Keats, Ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 Vols, II, 98. This Synthesis Notes CHAPTER I 1. The Letters ofJohn Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols, II, 98. This synthesis of the images from the two poems occurs in the long letter Keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law (February to April, I8I9), immediately after the first draft of 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. Miriam Allott, The Poems ofjohn Keats, rev. ed., gives the holograph variant 'sedge-buried· urn' (p. 508). 2. It would be more accurate to say that the poem is 'in process of' receiving critical attention. Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems, devotes an entire chapter to it (pp. 6 3-8 3) in what I take to be the 'breakthrough', and the poem has recently been dealt with in some detail by Fran~ois Matthey, The Evolution of Keats's Structural Imagery, pp. I74-81. The almost unanimous preference for the earlier version need not be documented in detail. Of the critics I have read, only Matthey seems to favour the 'Indicator' version, for reasons which seem quite close to my own, as will be seen. 3· A survey, which is at least a temporary landing-place amidst the flood, can be found in Harvey T. Lyon, Keats' Well-Read Urn: An Introduction to Literary Method. I shall try to incorporate at least the major developments in the case since the appearance of this book. 4· I use 'dramatic' in the sense defined by Coleridge as 'suited to the narrator'; see The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I9I2), p. 267. This edition is cited throughout. Several critics have touched upon a distinction between poet and speaker, without developing the point in quite the way I have chosen. Among them are Leo Spitzer, 'The "Ode on a Grecian Urn", or Content vs. Metagrammar', Comparative Literature, 7 (I955), 203-25; Cleanth Brooks, The Well- Wrought Urn, pp. I 39- 52; Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet, p. 270f.; Morris Dickstein, Keats and his Poetry, p. I96f. Douglas Bush and M. H. Abrams make some brief but provocative remarks in Twentieth Century Interpretations ofKeats's Odes, ed. Jack Stillinger, pp. Io8- I 1. Dickstein sees the poem as intelligible 'only as a series of movements within a single (though divided) consciousness' (p. I96), whereas Jacob Wigod, 'Keats's Ideal in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"' (in Twentieth Century Interpretations) describes the protagonist as 'Keats or the speaker' (p. 58). Brooks wants to introduce a dramatic speaker for the last lines, rather than for everything but the last lines, seeing there 'a consciously riddling paradox, put in the mouth of a particular character, and modified by the total context of the poem' (p. I42). Sperry notes a 'pattern of imaginative engagement and disengagement' (p. 270), and sees 'not a poet repeating earlier assertions, but rather discovering in them difficulties he had formerly ignored' 20I 202 IRONY AND AUTHORITY IN ROMANTIC POETRY (p. 277). Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, comes closest to what I am getting at when he remarks that 'Part of this poem's strength is in the deliberate vulnerability of its speaker, who contemplates a world of values he cannot appropriate for his own, although nothing in that world is antithetical to his own nature as an aspiring poet' (p. I 3 7). s. See my 'Keats's Lady, Metaphor, and the Rhetoric of Neurosis', Studies in Romanticism, IS (I976), 265-88. Much of what follows is dealt with in this paper, though from the specific perspective of Freud's analysis of the dream process. Further, I have made changes and modifications in the argument where they seemed necessary. 6. See, for example, Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, p. 97: Logic teaches us to distinguish the language object from meta-language. The language object is the very matter subject to logical investigation; meta­ language is the necessarily artificial language in which we conduct this investigation. For Barthes, this phenomenon arose when 'literature began to regard itself as double: at once object and scrutiny of that object, utterance and utterance of that utterance, literature object and metaliterature' (p. 97). He is concerned to relate this specifically to a crisis within Modernism, and therefore tends to regard the late nineteenth-century novel as the historical originator of that heuristic or participatory genre he calls the 'scriptible'. I do not find this assumption at all convincing, but do take the point that a metalanguage 'is conducted not from outside but within literature itself, or more exactly at its extreme verge' (p. 98). In other words the metacomment offers no stable, external positioning of the primary material, but is itself implicated within the same context and the same problems. 7· OED gives a seventeenth-century origin for 'flowery' as 'florid', and a Miltonic spelling of 'brede' as 'breade', along with some indication of the word as an obsolete form for breed. 8. H. W. Garrod, Keats, 2nd ed., p. IOI, complains about line 4I in these terms, as does William Empson The Structure of Complex Words, p. 374· 9· Most accounts of the poem vary between these two extremes; it is in the account of Newell F. Ford, The Prefigurative Imagination ofJohn Keats: A Study of the Beauty- Truth Identification and its Implications, that the hypothesis of a poet­ speaker distinction seems most called for, when he notes that the third stanza 'rings over and over the theme of unfading happiness ... A less empathic poet would have remembered the irony implicit in his theme .. .' (p. I 3 7). IO. Biographia Literaria, ed.J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I907), II, 6 5-6. Subsequent references will be to this edition. See also The Poetical Works of Edward Young, 2 vols., II, 148-9; and Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols., I, I I 3- I 4, for similar remarks on the generic features of the ode. A modern critic has noted much the same thing of Keats. Bruce E. Miller, 'Form and Substance in "Ode on a Grecian Urn"', Keats­ Shelley Journal, 20 ( I97 I), 62-70, observes thus: Considered dynamically, the Keatsian ode consists of an unstable vehicle that works towards resolution. As it throws off imbalances and rights itself, it produces tensions and ambivalences (p. 63). NOTES 203 Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development ofKeats, p. I 3 s. notes of'Ode on a Grecian Urn' that the 'use ofconsonantal syzygy occasionally assumes a kind of balance ... but such balance is rough and infrequent enough to appear coincidental.' Marianne Thalmann, in The Literary Sign Language of German Romanticism, trans. Harold A. Basilius, observes that: The early romantic structures are built on an eccentric base, which can no longer be comprehended from a center but which is animated by the double resonance of elliptic focuses (p. I22). Thalmann's wider purpose is to relate this, and other phenomena, to a crisis in the experience of the urban environment, which is not to the point here; but the coincidence of the structural dislocation is worth noting. I 1. I shall have more to say about this later, most specifically in the discussion of metaphor in Chapter S· I2. Why the distinction works, I think, is because the poet has the self-consciousness throughout his writing of the poem necessary to present the speaker ironically. This would allow for the speaker becoming one with the poet, as I shall later argue. See also n. 25. I 3· Thus the one reading which I do seem to exclude, for the moment, is that which makes the last line and a half an expression of grim resentment on the speaker's part at the indifference of the urn and its refusal to expand on the tautology. This is, roughly, the interpretation of Walter H. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats, p. 3I7. There may be a deep credibility to this explanation, as will become apparent later in the argument. Brooks, as might be expected, sees the last lines as 'consciously riddling paradox' (p. I42), open to modification in the dramatic context of the whole poem. He is followed by Dickstein, who regards the urn's statement as 'self-limiting, a piece of dramatic irony' (p. 228, note). Wasserman, The Finer Tone, p. 59, sees the antecedent to the 'that' (1. 49) as the whole of the preceding passage from 1. 46 onwards-not just the aphorism itself. A summary of the options, intrinsically tied up as they are with any editorial decision about which of the six versions to adopt as a 'standard' text, and of the most important accounts through which the argument has developed, is Jack Stillinger's 'Who Says What to Whom at the End of"Ode on a Grecian Urn"' in Stillinger, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations, pp. I I 3- I4. This is reprinted and expanded in his book, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, and Other Essays on Keats's Poems, pp. I67-73. See also the same author's The Texts ofKeats's Poems, pp. 245-7· It seems to me that no decision about textual and even grammatical priority can solve the question of 'meaning' with any finality; it could be argued that the meaning is properly conveyed by the very variation between the six versions. In the context of the accusation of philosophical thinness which has been levelled at the aphorism itself, it is worth noting that the relationship of truth to beauty was a central preoccupation of eighteenth-century thinkers. See, for example, Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Coleridge Family
    Coleridge Family: An Inventory of Their Literary File Photography Collection at the Harry Ransom Center Descriptive Summary Creator: Coleridge Family Title: Coleridge Family Literary File Photography Collection Dates: undated Extent: 32 items Abstract: Thirty-two photographs that are primarily portraits of members of the Coleridge family, which includes the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (British, 1772-1834). Call Number: Photography Collection PH-02899 Language: English Access: Open for research. To make an appointment or to reserve photography materials, please email Visual Materials Reference staff. Researchers must create an online Research Account and agree to the Materials Use Policy before using archival materials. Use Policies: Ransom Center collections may contain material with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations. Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in the collections without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin assume no responsibility. Restrictions on Authorization for publication is given on behalf of the University of Use: Texas as the owner of the collection and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder which must be obtained by the researcher. For more information please see the Ransom Center's Open Access and Use Policies.
    [Show full text]
  • Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and John Keats's Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction
    Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and John Keats’s Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät IV (Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften) der Universität Regensburg eingereicht von Charles NGIEWIH TEKE Alfons-Auer-Str. 4 93053 Regensburg Februar 2004 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Rainer EMIG Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dieter A. BERGER 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION .............................................................................................................. I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... II ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... VI English........................................................................................................................ VI German...................................................................................................................... VII French...................................................................................................................... VIII INTRODUCTION Aims of the Study......................................................................................................... 1 On the Relationship Between S. T. Coleridge and J. Keats.......................................... 5 Certain Critical Terms................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • |||GET||| Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE - THE MAJOR WORKS 1ST EDITION DOWNLOAD FREE Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 9780199537914 | | | | | Samuel Taylor Coleridge, First Edition More information about this seller Contact this seller 7. Routledge and Sons Essay on Coleridge's drama "Osorio" by P. Ships same or next business day. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Original publisher's rust-colored cloth binding with printed paper title label to spine. Composers were not handsomely paid for their music, and they often sold the rights to works outright in order to make immediate income. Dell Book LB The collection is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English romantic movement, and despite negative critical reception at first, subsequent editions were produced Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Major Works 1st edition the book has remained a staple in poetry and British literature studies for over two centuries. First Edition; Fourth Printing. New York Times. Condition: As New. See my photos of this book more available upon request. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We respond aesthetically, without purpose. Thomas, a champion of lost works by black composers, also revived Coleridge's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast in a performance commemorating the composition's th anniversary with the Cambridge Community Chorus at Harvard's Sanders Theatre in the spring of Frontis in Volume I. We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured.
    [Show full text]
  • Reviews 213 Especially Unfortunate for a Collection on Textuality, The
    Especially unfortunate for a collection on textuality, the essays are marred by typographical errors (“David Scan Kastan”, “feministm”, “Sommer- ville College”, “modem” for “modern”, “arid” for “and”). ;WUMWN \PMÅZ[\[M\WN ¹[MUQVITºM[[Ia[[PW_\PMQZIOMJ]\QV[WUM ways this is one of the pleasures in reading the volume. McGann’s essay from 1985 asks, “What is the relevance of textual and bibliographical stud- ies to literary intepretation?” and asserts “This is not a question that has been posed in a systematic way very often”. These statements would be unthinkable in the recent essays in the collection, a change due in a large part to McGann’s own work over the last two decades. He suggests that, faced by the same textual feature, literary historians and editors ask differ- ent questions. The former ask “what does this mean?” while the latter ask “is this right or wrong?” McGann’s essay is not about early modern texts, TM\ITWVMJa_WUMVJ]\Q\Q[QV\MZM[\QVO\WZMÆMK\WV\PM_Ia[QV_PQKPMLQ- tors of early modern women have almost always been literary historians ÅZ[\LZI_V\WMLQ\QVOQVWZLMZ\WUISMQVIKKM[[QJTM\M`\[I^IQTIJTMWomen Editing/Editing Women is both an essential primer for any would-be editor of early modern women and a stimulating statement of enduring ques- \QWV[IVLKPITTMVOM[QV\PMÅMTL1\[]OOM[\[IÅMTL_PQKPPI[LM^MTWXML rapidly over some forty years, and provides an exciting picture of both the many questions which have been answered, and those which remain for editors in this vibrant area. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann Stephen Hebron. John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts. London: The Brit- ish Library, 2009.
    [Show full text]
  • BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS
    THE ROMANTIC AGE THE SECOND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS: BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS - they all left England, visited Italy and died young - return to complex forms of versification and richer language - interest in the world of ancient Greece - more interest in Politics (especially Byron) - different view of Nature (less idealistic) George Gordon Byron 1. Life (1788 – 1824) • In 1809 he set out on a tour of Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle East. • After his return to England in 1812, he published the first ‘two cantos’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. • He became a literary and social celebrity, but then he left England in 1816, never to return. • He lived in Geneva, where he became a friend of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. • He moved to Venice, where he began his masterpiece, the mock-epic Don Juan. • In 1819 he moved to Milan where he became involved H. Meyer, Lord Byron, 1816, Victoria in the patriotic plots against Austrian rule. and Albert Museum, London • He committed himself to the Greek struggle of independence from Turkey. • His heart is buried in Greece, his body is interred in England. Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 2. Main works • Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818). • The Giaour (1813), The Corsair, and Lara (1814): a series of verse narratives. • Manfred, a tragedy (1817). • Don Juan (1819-24). Jonny Lee Miller is Byron, in the BBC drama Byron. Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 4. The Byronic hero • A moody, restless and mysterious romantic rebel. • Hides some sin or secret in his past.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- Says, Moral and Political, 2 Vols
    Notes Introduction 1. Robert Southey, “On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- says, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (1817; London: John Murray, 1832), II, 82. The identity of Junius remained a mystery, and even Edmund Burke was suspected. For an argument that he was Sir Philip Francis, see Alvar Ellegård, Who Was Junius? (The Hague, 1962). 2. Byron, “The Vision of Judgment” in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–92), VI, 309–45. 3. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Ro- mantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 13. 4. See Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1980). 5. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 23–24. 6. Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 39. 7. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge, p. 39. 8. McGann, “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 1–21 (13). 9. Marilyn Butler, “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,” in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 209–25 (209). 10. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 12–13. 11. Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
    [Show full text]
  • Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius Folkmann, Mads Nygaard
    University of Southern Denmark The Transfigurative Mode of Romantic Discourse Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius Folkmann, Mads Nygaard Published in: Prism(s) Publication date: 2006 Document version: Final published version Citation for pulished version (APA): Folkmann, M. N. (2006). The Transfigurative Mode of Romantic Discourse: Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius. Prism(s), 14, 27-56. Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. If no other license is stated, these terms apply: • You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to [email protected] Download date: 06. Oct. 2021 The Transfigurative Mode ofRomantic Discourse: Poetic Models in Novalis, Keats, and Stagnelius Mads Nygaard Folkmann 0minant feature of Romantic literature is the wish to. transgress A;he given reality or, more precisely, to cnallenge and alternate the ways to both perceive and conceive reality. The literary text may not per it' change reality, yet it can suggest transformations indirectly by constructing new models or modes of seeing and comprehending. In this essay, I raise the question of the principle of transfiguration as a way of dealing with the Romantic desire for a radical transformation of perception.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry Nelson Coleridge
    Henry Nelson Coleridge: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center Descriptive Summary Creator: Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 1798-1843 Title: Henry Nelson Coleridge Collection Dates: 1808-1849, undated Extent: 2 boxes (.84 linear feet) Abstract: Includes manuscripts and letters written and received by Henry Nelson Coleridge, nephew of and editor of the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, along with a few personal items, including his diaries and appointment book. The bulk of the outgoing letters are addressed to his wife, Sara Coleridge, and the rest of his family. Incoming correspondence from various Coleridge family members, Basil Montagu, Robert Southey, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, and others are present. Call Number: Manuscript Collection MS-0860 Language: English, French, Spanish Access: Open for research Administrative Information Processed by: Joan Sibley and Jamie Hawkins-Kirkham, 2011 Note: This finding aid replicates and replaces information previously available only in a card catalog. Please see the explanatory note at the end of this finding aid for information regarding the arrangement of the manuscripts as well as the abbreviations commonly used in descriptions. Repository: The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 1798-1843 Manuscript Collection MS-0860 2 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 1798-1843 Manuscript Collection MS-0860 Works: Untitled essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, handwritten manuscript/ incomplete, 1 Container page (numbered 13), undated. 1.1 Untitled poem What thou didst fear, or fearing not, didst guess..., initialed handwritten manuscript, 2 pages, 1831; included is a copy by Sara Coleridge. Untitled poem Whoe'er, with toil oppressed, would roam..., handwritten manuscript, 2 pages, undated.
    [Show full text]
  • John Keats 1 John Keats
    John Keats 1 John Keats John Keats Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. National Portrait Gallery, London Born 31 October 1795 Moorgate, London, England Died 23 February 1821 (aged 25) Rome, Italy Occupation Poet Alma mater King's College London Literary movement Romanticism John Keats (/ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death.[1] Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.[2] The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature. Biography Early life John Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. There is no clear evidence of his exact birthplace.[3] Although Keats and his family seem to have marked his birthday on 29 October, baptism records give the date as the 31st.[4] He was the eldest of four surviving children; his younger siblings were George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889) who eventually married Spanish author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez.[5] Another son was lost in infancy.
    [Show full text]
  • Bloody Poetry: on the Role of Medicine in John Keats's Life and Art
    Caroline Bertonèche, On the Role of Medicine in John Keat’s Life and Art Bloody Poetry: On the Role of Medicine in JoHn Keats's Life and Art Caroline Bertonèche To see Keats only as yet another British Romantic poet, author of the odes and the Hyperions, who died in exile, after one last fit of tuberculosis, is to forget that he spent as many years – six years to be precise – of his short life studying medicine as he did writing poetry. First a young apprentice to an apothecary, then a medical student from 1811 to 1816, Keats chose to start his career as an artist without completely burying his scientific past, making sure never to get rid of his old books on medicine – these books that were to previously shape his intellect before he even started putting together his collections of poems. Satisfied to have had the ability to distance himself from a rather contrasted form of education in order to favour a unified conception of knowledge, Keats will always seem to go back to those first readings as a source of reference. They are indeed the foundations of this unique rapprochement between medicine and poetry which, in British Romanticism, is certainly specific to him. It takes a visionary painter and a close friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, to remind us, in his very axiomatic letter of 3 May 1818 that Keats will never cease to praise the medical world as a means to keep “every department of knowledge” alive. From this pattern of now two complementary backgrounds, he therefore extracts the binary substance of one “great whole”1: Were I to study physic or rather Medicine again, — I feel it would not make the least difference in my Poetry; when the Mind is in its infancy a Bias is in reality a Bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a Bias becomes no Bias.
    [Show full text]
  • Disquietude Or the Leap Into the Sea
    Disquietude or the Leap into the Sea Teresa F. A. Alves* For João Flor With Whom I Read Novalis and Keats for the First Time There is so much in Night of a Thousand Blossoms (2004) that evokes the lyric voice and the pseudo-urban landscape of Frank X. Gaspar’s previous three volumes of poetry that I again chose disquietude as the undertow that pulls this poet’s imagination in a given direction and offers a focus around which I will tentatively organize my own reading of his creative work.1 This is nowhere more evident than in the ebb and flow of lines patterned upon irregular length and rhythm, which like human breathing are ruled by the cadence of emotion; or in the hitching of the highly visual world of common perception to a dreamlike sense of experience that challenges the reader to a new awareness of things; or, finally, in the spiritual endeavor made language, which weaves lyricism to the vernacular and achieves a complex web of meaning and speculation. The tripartite structure of Night of a Thousand Blossoms is, as in the preceding volumes of poems, the device by means of which Gaspar organizes and entwines intra-and intertextual resonance, each of the sections being introduced by epigraphs. These, when on the same page, make inroads into each other’s significance, and when introducing a section are thematically relevant. Epigraphs from Novalis and Frank O’Hara open this volume. The temporal gap between the Romantic German poet and the Postmodern American one is overcome by their common incidence on revelation, explicit in the passage from Hymnen an die Nacht (1800) and implicit in the revisitation of a dialogue with the sun in “A True Account Of Talking To The Sun At Fire Island” (1958).
    [Show full text]
  • The Critical Theory of John Keats
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations 1960 The Critical Theory of John Keats Rita Claire Callan Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Callan, Rita Claire, "The Critical Theory of John Keats" (1960). Master's Theses. 1553. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/1553 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1960 Rita Claire Callan THE CRITICAL THEORY or JOHN KEATS by Rita Claire Callan A Thesis Submitted to the Faoulty ot the Graduate Sohool of Loyola University in Partial Pulfillment of the Requirements tor the Degree of Master of Arts June 1960 LIFE Rita Claire Callan, n!£ Wegner, was born in Chicago, Illinois, August 6, 1930. She was graduated from the Aoademy of Ou.r Lady, Chioago, Illinois, June. 1948, and trom the University of Illinois, June, 1953, with the degree of Baohelor of Science. From 1953 to 1957 the author worked as an ocoupational therapist at the Chicago Department of Welfare Convalesoent Home and the Veteran's Administration Researoh Hospital, Chicago. Illinois. She began her graduate studies at Loyola University in February, 1953. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 1 Growing interest in Keats's philosophy ot art-­ Disagreement among critics--Method of this study-­ Character of Keats's letters.
    [Show full text]