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.