Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Keats' Visions/Visions of Keats
Keats' odal celebration of Psyche, deified as a goddess rather than merely a figure of myth, initiates a dynamic whereby we understand Keats' conception of the feminine, and of women. Psyche, importantly, is virginal but not a virgin; if she has retained her original innocence, it is also tempered by the vagaries of an active amatory life. Keats' also initiates, from the second generation of Romanticism, a strain of androgyny in his writing, whereby he can appear wisely passive and receptive or active and imposing. These two complexes together can equal, on one level, a simple whole: Keats likes women. He likes feminine energy, feminine innocence, and the seductive power (power to charm) which emanates from this energy and innocence put into dramatic, dynamic motion in art and myth. There is, in his appreciation of the feminine, nothing particularly perverse or lateral; he represents his tastes in such a way that the wholesome (or natural or organic) is emphasized. Even what is Pagan in Keats is nature-worshipping, and wholesome. The imaginative vistas spun out of this ethos are also nature-worshipping, and wholesome, as befits a cognitive attachment to a classical reality deemed "happily pious" in relation to the England Keats was raised in. Psyche stands in the center of the odal cycle as the charming, seductive synecdoche of this facet of Keats' sensibility.
Yet, however John Keats chose to live his life among the female of the species, clearly Percy Bysshe Shelley found Keats disingenuous or deluded. Adonais takes all this healthy, organic, wholesome energy and inverts it. As female splendor after splendor (what a splendor is for Shelley is a kind of earth-spirit or half-ghost) jumps on and molests Keats' corpse, we also see a kind of reversal in sensibility suggesting another inversion: Shelley does not like women, and feminine energy, as much as Keats does. This may be refuted by other sectors of Shelley's oeuvre, but Shelley was a poet of many moods, and a misogynistic mood may be one of them. By showing us these "damp deaths," Shelley adds an implicit critique of Keats' treatment of the Psyche myth in his odal cycle, and also (maybe, and daringly) opens a window not only on Fanny Brawne, but on what other kind of women were attracted by Keats during his lifetime. This is not just a question of the class differential between Shelley and Keats, which is (admittedly) huge in and of itself- it is a question of writing a palimpsest over a whole vision of human reality, an idealistic one, and replacing it with a perverse, materialistic, yet (also) more painstakingly honest one. If, traditionally, Keats is seen to be the materialist and Shelley the idealist, it is only because twentieth century literary criticism evinced its own perversity in molesting corpses with its splendors, and taking the easy way out, back to an inverted paradise.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Dear, Brutal
For those with an interest in my books, this might be a useful revelation, from the writer's life. The character "N" in Chimes, who appears here:
The Junior Prom deposited me (and fifteen
others) on the floor of her basement. I could
barely see daylight at the time, and at three in
the morning I began to prowl. I was too scared
to turn on any lights. She emerged like a mermaid
from seaweed. I needed comfort, she enjoyed my
need. We had gone out— she was bitter. The whole
dialogue happened in shadows. No one was hooking
up in the other room, either. You spiteful little princess.
Dancing with Dancing with Myself Pt. 2
I have a few more things to say about Dancing With Myself. The perspective adopted by the author of a sonnet does not have to be a youthful one, but it tends to be. The youthful voice, exploring feelings of confinement, isolation, or (conversely, as in Keats' sonnets) euphoria and expansiveness, tends to hit us with a sense of something bubbling over or overflowing. The protagonist of Dancing with Myself adopts, uncommonly, a weathered voice and perspective, a voice already scarred by a lifetime of painful experience, even if the voice still believes in the redemptive powers of love and companionship. I think of Wordsworth and "The world is too much with us...", probably the gravest, most profound sonnet of the nineteenth century; my exiled-from-paradise protagonist shares with Wordsworth's the sense of disenchantment and alienation from the dreary intercourse of daily life and its vagaries. Yet the melancholy of age and experience vie here with the poignant sense of not-yet-atrophied emotional responsiveness, and not-yet-atrophied intellectual curiosity to go right along with it. This protagonist is weathered but not defeated.
Another bizarre Romanticism tangent, this time to Keats' Odes: the protagonist of Dancing with Myself finds himself exploring all the silence and slow time he needs, as Keats' does when he beholds his Grecian Urn.What these sonnets are drained of is the sense of original innocence engraved into the urn; that the urn celebrates youth, ecstasy, conflict, faith, and mythology, and Keats ricochets them back into his poem, mirroring the themes reckoned, adding his own gloss and prosodic richness; while Dancing with Myself explores age and aging processes, keeping the conflict, faith, and mythology, losing the youth and ecstasy. Part of the aged or weathered quality of the Dancing with Myself sonnets are expressed in their approach to form: rather than aping the Romantics, as a younger poet might, I employ what I call "clustering" or semi-formal techniques. Thus, I avoid the merely imitative, and express the maturity of a poet who can make formal compromises towards the creation of new forms.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Dancing with Dancing with Myself
As I've recounted elsewhere, the middle portion of When You Bit..., Dancing with Myself (mp3 locked in here PennSound), was completed in 2007 but then had to be scrapped and re-written in the spring of '08. Listening to how this twenty sonnet cycle worked out, it strikes me that the ambivalence of the protagonist, how he is on a hook he might or might not want to be on, is the dominant theme or motif which emotionally charges the piece with pathos, longing. That pathos and that longing, expressed both directly and with imagery/metaphor, raises Dancing with Myself above the first and third sections of the book (Sister Lovers and Two of Us) so that it is the most fit to stand alone.
In terms of where the Dancing with Myself protagonist is headed: if he cannot admit how many bets he is hedging about what confronts him in this relationship he's had to push (briefly) to the side (this is in "Palliative"), it is because he probably cannot decide himself how many bets need to be hedged himself. The construction crew grinding away at pavement on 21st Street ("Whiskey"), and how this protagonist "lives in his churned guts," both make visceral the cognitive-affective meat-grinder he's been placed into. Yet, looking at Dancing with Myself in relation to the history of the sonnet, other meat-grinders, which have ensnared the likes of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney, have tended towards more of a sense of grievance and complaint. Wyatt and Sidney whine, where I offer up resignation. Lingering in the back, also, is the issue of duration; how long can I get this love-object to commit to me? While Dancing with Myself is more than loosely based on a situation which really did happen to, and isolate, me, I will leave it to my readers and listeners to decide whether the sonnets justify the suffering or not. That, by the way, is one function the sonnet has as a poetic form (more than, say, an ode or an elegy): to let a protagonist show us why and how he or she is suffering, and then to ask us to accept and bless or sanctify their suffering in an embrace of the literary moment.
Friday, June 26, 2015
Apparition Poems: Apologia (two-part preface '13-'22)
With twelve years
hindsight, and with a sense of affection for the text, combined with an
acknowledgement that I am partly being arch, it seems to me that Apparition
Poems has established itself as a less-than-wholesome book. The sense,
in the text, of both perversity and perversion in a generalized sense, creating
textual angles meant to cut or incise rather than (as is more usual in America)
to caress, make an approach to this text after all these years what could,
possibly, be considered superfluous. The problem with an abrupt dismissal, and
it is a less-than-wholesome problem, is the recourse the book has to
philosophy and philosophical thought, still within the bounds of the
aestheticized, as a reaching or attempted journey beyond perversion, or into perversion
transcendentalized again into allegory, loaded metaphor, and formal
reinvention. Once poetry here has attempted intercourse with the higher
frequencies of discursive thought, we deduce that an interrogation is necessary
as to whether this intercourse is possible, in a real way, at all. To answer
this query, it must first also be interrogated, even into more open air than we
might like, what intercourse is possible between poetry and philosophy; further
investigating, when we understand what the possibilities are, whether this form
or manner or intercourse is desirable or not.
The
apparition which haunts the book: a sense of depth and solidity, held within an
individual consciousness; a sense of wholesomeness; leads the protagonist
beyond the landscape of the carnal, and of jejune inquiries into language,
which fall short of achieving more intellectually than stylization or stylized
modes of disjuncture and deconstruction. The only oxygen which reaches him,
which can propel the shards of a decimated consciousness into at least an imagination
of wholesomeness, is that supplied by a desperate surrender to discourses aimed
higher than aestheticized language is designed to reach, and at the conditions
and terms the aesthetic generally offer. The image arises of a Don Quixote
figure, pacing the streets of Center City Philadelphia in the middle of the
night. In the state of perversity, perversion, and the less-than-wholesome
within which the book was written; a trance of sorts; it never occurred to the
author that a reliance on the aesthetic, and on stylization in general, could
give way to limpidity if control was relinquished into those more limpid
discursive spaces. Rather, bifurcating the philosophical so that it could also
fulfill the terms of the aesthetic, and of stylization, seemed a viable tactic
towards giving vent to that sense of the fragmented, the jagged, the incisively
sharp, which animated his consciousness.
Philosophy, and philosophical
discourse, aims, at its highest pitch, for the most objective kind of truth.
Language becomes a conduit for vistas opened, meant to answer questions that
cannot be answered by the quantifications of scientists— the being of beings, the
precise nature of human consciousness itself. The poet’s aim is more about a
sophisticated form of entertainment— language as a conduit for the pursuit of
sumptuousness, imagination strained to make things, or things-of-the-world,
transitive to other things (metaphor), along with a lower, compromised version
of objectivity, functioning in harmonious balance with imperatives to
imagination and melopoeia. The real intercourse possible between
philosophy and poetry is thus a borrowing, by poetry, of a more objective lens
with which to view poetry’s traditional objects— eros, affectivity, metaphoric
creativity. What philosophy can take back, in its turn, is a something
intermittently useful to the philosopher and his discourses— a sense enjoyment
or playfulness in a lower mode of discourse— waters warmer, if less ultimately
nourishing, to splash around in.
The assignation of desirability or not desirability to this congeries of circumstances manifests a sense of ambiguity, which can only be answered by individuals forced to confront it. If I continue to affix my own assignation of less-than-wholesome to Apparition Poems, it is because the point at which philosophy appears in the book has a hinge to a less-than-traditional poetry aesthetic, which substitutes rancor, discord, and semantic/syntactic explosiveness, in several directions, for sumptuousness, and metaphors constructed and perpetuated in a textual Theater of Cruelty, to borrow from Artaud, all of which push against the bounds of what might be considered entertaining, for poetry’s conventional pursuits. What entertainment could then be derived from Apparition Poems, would be the emergence of philosophy, as an objective antidote to a subjectivity jaundiced by immersion in a jungle of overly sharp, hostile metaphors— thus alienated from the wholesomeness of the conventionally aesthetic.
As an individual, confronting a text, it may be acknowledged or unacknowledged that Apparition Poems creates new waters for higher discourses to play around in— play, here, being a function of metaphors-as-toys, aesthetic landscapes as stomping grounds, idiosyncratic syndromes as vehicles of possible universalization. The book, in other words, cannot cure itself, make itself wholesome— though, through its sense of reaching for philosophy, it tries— but philosophy itself, engaging in a mode of investigation here (ransacking the Theater of Cruelty for points of interest) can do for the book, what the book cannot do for itself. If all these things happen amidst an ambiance of mischief, of willing transgression, so much the better.
Adam
Fieled, 2013-2022
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
The Arbitrary and the Artful
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Mad Pursuits
It is natural that the burgeoning twenty-first century have some questions for the remnants of the twentieth. To re-interrogate Deconstructionism, its aims and ethos: would it be transgressive to inquire whether certain Deconstructionist formulations employ roughly the same imperative spread-sheet employed by post-modernists and post-modernism? If Deconstructionism and post-modernism do share a number of imperatives, will that create a conception of Deconstructionism acceptable to us in the humanities now? These questions would not arise in my consciousness unless I harbored suspicions that The Death Of The Author, the dissolution of the constitutive subject, and there is nothing outside the text might have been meant perhaps more literally then some have supposed. As in, the Deconstructionist game consisted, at least partly, of wiping out the potentialities of individuals and individual authorship, and obliterating (as post-modernism did, in destroying both aesthetic formality and metaphysical inquiry) any sense for the potentialities of being an individual against conglomerate interests at all. These are dark surmises, and may end as nothing more, just as looking for depth consonance beneath the surface of Deconstructionist textuality may or may not find anything jeweled, behind the veneer of crabbed hermeticism which constitutes most Deconstructionist texts. They may be games against metaphysical inquiry or not, and indicate whether Deconstructionism amounts, at least in part, to a disguised, baroque-seeming enforcement of post-modern rigor against aesthetic formality, metaphysical inquiry, and the potentialities of the individual against society.
I am thinking of these things as I continue my own inquiry into values around aesthetic formality, via examination of Keats' Odal Cycle. Keats has his own, individual manner of enforcing the form of his forms; how he makes the Odes preen (and I do not wish to use "preen" pejoratively, though it may seem so) and pirouette in advertising their own sumptuous gorgeousness, and every form becomes meta-formal in advertising itself. The liberation possible in this century, expedited through myself, Abby, and PFS in general, has so much to do with the potentialities of individuals, both in alignments and against conglomerates and conglomerate interests, that I cannot help but laugh at the post-modern illness, which blusters boldly forward, proud never to seem to be retreating, from nothingness into greater nothingness, while poor Abby and I are forced to blaze a trail that, where formality is concerned, must begin from nineteenth century models (Keats, Shelley, Ingres, David): shame on us! Metaphysics, formality, individuals! The dark supposition of a secret alignment between Deconstructionism and post-modernism is just one vista issuing out of what we have accomplished in the last ten years of Philadelphia, and it remains just that for me: a supposition. It will take a few decades for Deconstructionism to demonstrate just how much was (and is) actually there beneath the surface of its dictates, and for what manifests around PFS to respond adequately.
Monday, June 22, 2015
When You Bit... Preface ('13)
John Keats and "Mad For It"...
Is the music enough? If the point of John Keats' Odal Cycle is to lead the reader back to the vista that the prosody's the thing, can we accept, as we would accept in Bach or Beethoven, that the rich formality of the Odes is its own aesthetic justification and reward? If I can, it is because (as I said) what we accept in Bach and Beethoven we should be able to accept (also) in Keats. What I want to discuss here is that, in Grecian Urn, Keats' stages a demonstration of melopoeia, poetic music, for its own sake, in stanza three, and the achieved "mad for it" effect is clearly meant to be euphoric ecstasy:
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
To me, stanza three stands as self-conscious mimesis of pagan or tribal spirit, which is angled (as is suggested later in the poem) against cognition and towards the passion and the rapture of purgative, self-expressive celebration (whether in a creative context, as with those who created the urn itself, or not). Ultimately, whether magnificent prosody alone can justify the Odes is an important question, specifically because how you answer is an accurate barometer of how well you do or do not relate to forms and pure formality in major high art consonant art. If form and formal rigor were benched, as from a ball-game, in the twentieth century, it is for a reason few suspect— superior formality in art is just as threatening and dangerous as art's narrative-thematic levels, both to the unenlightened and to conglomerate groups who would like to subject art to its dictates. It is an expression of extreme and supreme individuality, and as such encourages individuals who are moved by it to attempt to find an individual voice for themselves. This, the twentieth century could not abide. If a significant number of individuals go "mad for it" in the twenty-first, once again the human race, at least in some sectors, can come to terms with the vagaries of individuals who bother to do things for themselves.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
How do YUDU...
Preface: Rising in Scorpio ('13)
Beams Preface ('13)
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Apologia: Race and Vine ('13)
Friday, June 19, 2015
Ode: To Satan
Thursday, June 18, 2015
from What's Behind It... (title poem)
It is not dying: where I
go when I close my eyes
& the world shuts in upon
itself & gives me the womb
of fear I need to forget fear.
Nothing shines but the light
at the end where I catch hold
of myself floating inward/
outward & I know how I
connect to the cosmos &
I am palpitating gently but
intensely & separations do
not exist except to point to
deeper unities of sperm & egg
& rhythm & motion & release
& fucking & what’s behind it
& loving & what’s behind it
& dying & what’s behind it
& the answer is nothing,
nothing at all, all or nothing,
at one, a tone, atone
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Grecian Ideals
Harmony and integrity between the body and the soul: that is the Grecian ideal. I mean the Greece of Plato, Aristotle, and the like. What John Keats taps into in his odal cycle is a desire to re-invigorate this ideal with a new series of assignations and associations. What his Muse, Psyche, is supposed to engender, both in his own psyche as he writes and in his assumed audience, is a sense of complete, all-absorptive arousal- cognitive and physical arousal at the same time. The ideas which animate Psyche as a presence for Keats- innocence, virginity, purity, piety-in-Nature and Natural processes/forces, are arousing for a brain looking to recreate these ideas as a basis for cognitive satisfaction/euphoria; while Psyche, being physically attractive, is also straightforwardly sexually arousing to him and his audience, in the odal manner of being passionate, spontaneous, or (to be a little flippant) "mad for it." Where this created integrity between body and soul leads, in its ideal form, is into the achievement (as I have said) of an apotheosis of artistic form- Keats' prosody.
Why "apotheosis" aesthetic forms are important to bring back, as manifestations of Grecian or Romantic ideals of harmony between body and soul, is very simple- to restore the natural, healthy vigor of pursuing stimulation and satisfaction in major high art consonant art. The perversion and denigration which was foisted on high art in the twentieth century made clear that "pleasure" was no longer to be drawn from its products, just as it is ludicrous to think that a walk through MOMA could "please" anyone profoundly or in an indigenous way. The likes of John Ashbery and Barnett Newman are not there to "please" anyone, and whatever subterranean force placed them in an elevated position did not have in mind (it seems to me) any ideals at all. Being pleased by high art, and seeking to unify the body and soul, or, as a slight tangent, inside the mind and outside the mind, are good ideas, and when a formal apotheosis is attained by an artist, it is also a decent idea to derive as much physical or cognitive ecstasy from it as you possibly can. High art is supposed to be fun too- demanding fun, rigorous fun, cognitively engaged fun, but fun nonetheless. The companionable quality of the Odes are fun, indeed- and that we have bodies and souls which, if drawn into the right alignment, give us access to higher frequencies of thought and feeling, are one subtext of the Odes which throws out the baby with the bath-water if unacknowledged.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Keats and the Reader-as-Ingenue
Keats clearly meant the Odes to be a rite of passage for his readers; a marriage or consummation of some sort. Because Keats makes a fetish of Eros and Psyche, and the sense Psyche has of being (before Eros) a virgin or ingenue, one subtext I derive from the odal experience is that Keats' prosodic genius is meant to "deflower" the consciousness of his readers, de-virginize it into a more suitably experienced-in-aesthetic-euphoria form. As with Shelley and Adonais, the perceived androgyny of the Odal scribe, the admixture of male and female elements which have sharpened and refined his Odal vision into cohesive form, are to be met by the androgyny of his readers, who can both withstand his linguistic thrusts and propel themselves into line with the masculine levels of the melopoeia built into the Odal edifices. The sense of cognitive ravishment works in a chiasmic way here- from us into the prosody, and from the momentary, serendipitous nature of Keats' lyrical genius back to us, as the loops back and forth endlessly replay every time we participate in an inspired reading of the Odes. We become ingenues or Psyches before this mode/manner of formal beauty, and we do so willingly, rewarded in a different way each time so as to suggest a kind of textual eternity channeled through Keats into texts which combine human and celestial essences against the confines of the material, and in a manner more companionable than Shelley tends to be.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Metaphysics of "Nightingale"
When John Keats hits these notes in this order in the fourth stanza of Nightingale:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards...
I have the feeling that, as an incisive point to make against his self-diagnosis, his cognitive functioning has actually reached a rather peerless apogee. This is not just on prosodic levels, but with the realization that the most solid path to a euphoric state of consciousness is the pursuit of a certain manner/form of textuality itself. This contradiction- the sunken brain really manifesting the elevated or "apogee" one- is something which comes up (sideways) in Apparition Poem 1613, one subtext of which delineates the process by which spiritual elevation is attained through surmounting a hill "constituted by kinds of knives." A tangent metaphysics point to 1613 is that when one is climbing this knife-hill, one may feel themselves falling backward even during their ascension, so that even upwardly mobile movements seem to invert themselves. This cognitive confusion- ascendant consciousness feeling itself (falsely) to be descending, through the sharpness and bizarre configuration of the kinds of knives complicating cognitive movements- is where Keats is at in this fourth stanza. The "dull brain" is the razor-sharp one; what's perplexed and retarded is that this sharpened brain is blinded to its own ascension by the cognitive dissonance of extreme psycho-spiritual anguish, which mystifies consciousness into confusion, irresolution, and self-abnegation, even as Keats unknowingly creates the ideal stage for his prosodic effects.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
YUDU 3 (The Immigrant Song)
The Resonant World, The Shuddering World
Poets have a choice: to keep their poems and books circumscribed by the limits of humanity and the charmed circle of the human, or to include what Keats and the other major Romantics sought to include in their poetry, what I call the resonant world, the shuddering world. The resonant world textual model seeks to include the idea that living energies which surround humanity, but are not strictly human, energies which inhabit forests, skies, mountains, trees, bodies of water, and the like, effect in an interstitial way human consciousness so that the human brain, and all its byproducts, benefits from exposure to and interaction with these elements. Human consciousness resonates with, and shudders in response to, these interactions, which not only stimulate but consummate the human imagination, as in Shelley's Mont Blanc.
Resonant world and shuddering world energies were not favored in twentieth century literature. Modernism and (even more extremely) post-modernism made a point of emphasizing the deadness, superficiality, and illusory nature of resonant world or shuddering world textual connections. By remaining within humanity's charmed circle and ascribing adolescent immaturity to any attempted chiasmus, made in an emotionally earnest way, with nature, Modernism and its own byproducts shut down Romanticism's enterprise most self-consciously, and with an attempt to make this shut-down permanent. If I want to re-open the issue in 2015, it is because the question of human susceptibility to energy sources past the merely human is both too stimulating and too fascinating to let go of permanently, as the Mod and po-mo cognescenti so hoped.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
YUDU2
Euphoria and Form: Ingres/Keats
The better part of two centuries has gone by: has anyone dared to do a substantial critical chiasmus between English Romanticism and French Neo-Classicism? The vision (for instance) of Ingres's Odalisque with Keats' odal Psyche- for me, it has to do with euphoria generated from the apotheosis of aesthetic formality or (if you will) formalism- the most perfect possible artistic forms (Keats' prosody, Ingres's color harmonies and uniquely postured Muse), which innovate and conserve so seamlessly (Greece to England, Greece to Frannce) that what is ecstatic or euphoric in the consciousness of the viewer or reader is the realization of possibilities of "universe structures." That intended effect of aesthetic beauty, of form, lost/corroded in the twentieth century via the perceived desirability of aesthetic hovels (irony precluding euphoria), is shared by the erotics of Keats/Ingres in such a way that, as they reach backwards to the classical and forwards to us, we may understand why the twentieth century lost its sense of possible ecstasy/euphoria in its myopic insistence on "singular time."
Friday, June 12, 2015
The YUDU Chiasmus
The Prosody: Ecstasy/Ecstasy
The quirk which inheres in John Keats' prosody- that it is a kind of representation or enactment of ecstatic states of consciousness, or euphoria- is balanced, in some of the Odes, especially Nightingale and Grecian Urn, by the appearance, within the consciousness of the protagonist, of the second meaning of "ecstasy" in the nineteenth century or back- the circumstance by which a person transcends their own skin, into dementia or madness, past the limitations of the physical. That's why the magnificence of Keats' prosody, its euphoric "ecstasy," can work for or against the narrative-thematic gist of what is being imparted, especially when the other, foreboding side of "ecstasy" is being investigated. Here, the prosodic heft of Keats' language has a phallic quality of triumphant euphoria:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
But in Nightingale, the two strains of ecstasy chafe against each other in such a way that "ecstasy" and its doppelganger are at loggerheads. Why this is interesting is that once Keats' prosodic superiority to the entire English-language canon is established, we may start to look at his music and how it functions within itself, both in relation to narrative-thematic elements and in relation to the structural semantic and syntactic elements which configure it as a self-sufficient linguistic system.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Are Keats' Minor Sonnets Send-Ups?
Twentieth century master narratives around British Romanticism, I predict, may come to look stifled and jejune in the twenty-first century. One of the (if less cherished) myths around this body of work is that Keats' minor sonnets, all written in the nineteenth century Teens, express sentiments without undue irony, and with an inhering spirit of earnestness and naive appreciation of Keats' young life, of literature, and of the social circle around the three Keats brothers. Keats, we were told in century XX, was not being coy when he wrote this (for instance) about painter Benjamin Robert Haydon:
Highmindedness, a jealousy for good,
A loving-kindness for the great man's fame,
Dwells here and there with people of no name,
In noisome alley, and in pathless wood:
And where we think the truth least understood,
Oft may be found a "singleness of aim,"
That ought to frighten into hooded shame
A money-mong'ring, pitiable brood.
How glorious this affection for the cause
Of steadfast genius, toiling gallantly!
What when a stout unbending champion awes
Envy, and Malice to their native sty?
Unnumbered souls breathe out a still applause,
Proud to behold him in his country's eye.
That Benjamin Robert Haydon was by no means a Byron-level celebrity, in collusion with the fact that Haydon's paintings are seen as reasonable if not spectacular successes, leads me to an inescapable conclusion: Keats is "taking the piss" here, deflating both Haydon's ego and the idea that Haydon imagines himself to have a rabid following among the general public. He most assuredly did not, and Keats, being no naif and demonstrating the arch streak which often shows up in his minor (and major, as in Melancholy) writing, enjoys the game of showing us this facet of who Haydon is. Since motifs and games like this recur endlessly in the early sonnets, it is easy for me to imagine that they are dotted with ironic subtexts, and that twentieth century Romantic criticism was abased, as was most twentieth century literary criticism, by a willingness to stay on the surface, and read the surface as adequate in/of itself.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Splendor in the Ghosts: Shelley and Adonais Pt. 2
Another determinative factor in (ironically, and against Romanticism’s century XX master narrative) gauging that the Shelley who writes Adonais is a mature, if perverse, adult, is his conception of variegated nature, “halved” between benignity and the “ghastly, scarred, riven” component parts he identifies in Mont Blanc and revisits here. It is a realistic counterpoint to what in Wordsworth verges on fantasy— the poet (Wordsworth) stands atop Snowdon, surveys the “perfect image of a mighty mind,” and leaves it at that, while Shelley balances the perfection of the natural world with what in it is misshapen, ugly, and impotent. Why Wordsworth’s single-mindedness must fail in relation to Shelley’s sense of variegation, especially in 2015, is that it becomes too clear to practiced human consciousness that the mightiness of nature’s own consciousness cannot account for the devilish duplicity and capacity for self-mutilation of the human race. The twentieth century, which would dare place William Blake with Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, inverted Shelley into an idealistic humanist, which he intermittently was; but his most penetrating writing offers insights in a deeper, darker, miasmic wilderness space in which Shelley’s own brain, in mirroring “halved” nature, see-saws between his own creative and destructive capacities.
Indeed, one of the ambiguities which Shelley successfully builds into Adonais is his own innocence and/or culpability in regards to Man and Nature. Is he, as he suggests in the self-portraiture segment, half Cain, half Christ? Why is his brow “ensanguined,” suggesting that he is, himself, a kind of slave to forces which oppress him? As he also employs the metaphor of a deer fleeing from naked Diana, mistress of the hunt, what thoughts is he having which so torment him? Furthermore, all that the “nameless worm” is, Keats’ assailant, rings with ambiguities as to whether, in a subterranean way, Shelley identifies more with him, his remorse and self-contempt, then he does with flower-like, angelic Keats? To use a popular culture metaphor, Shelley appears to be a protagonist with hell-hounds on his trail. Shelley’s biography is, indeed, riddled with ambiguities, and it is not for nothing that the Second Gen. Romantics (Keats, Shelley, Byron) are often referred to as the “Satanic School.” Yet ambiguities make for better art (literary or otherwise) then simplicity, and what is tepid in Wordsworth and Coleridge becomes pungent in Shelley and Keats. It also stands to reason that, when Venus herself mounts Keats’ corpse and must be held back by Death, we have the seeds here of Gothic awareness which elevate Adonais out of wonted elegiac territory and make it memorable past these generic constraints. Twentieth century Romantic criticism is short on these insights, into narrative-thematic levels, and long on generalizations and tap-dancing around key issues. But erecting a twenty-first century Keats and Shelley, from awareness not just formal but imaginative, and colored by the lurid constraint of global loss and recession, seems like a potential imperative worth following through, necrophilia and all.
Monday, June 8, 2015
Ode: On Exile
Splendor in the Ghosts: Shelley and Adonais Pt. 1
Why someone might be drawn to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais in a major recession is no mystery— an elegy on the death of his contemporary John Keats, it explores one poet’s struggle with mortality, what constitutes life and death as a chiasmus, and metaphysics among the human race in general. Some quirks of Adonais that make it even more simpatico with macabre 2015— as has not been widely noted in Romantics scholarly criticism, Adonais, as a long poem, evinces consonance with both visionary spiritualism and horror-movie level luridness, down to the convulsions of Keats’ corpse as female “splendors” engage in necrophilia-related antics with it. That, in fact, most of the poem represents, textually, a procession past Keats’ corpse, with different characters issuing speeches over it, and with the corpse itself always visible, has as a subtext which suggests a temperament rather morbid in relation to physical mortality, and uneasy with processes of change, time, and mutation of matter into other matter.
However, a few constituent elements redeem the poem past mere adolescent morbidity. Shelley’s suggested system of metaphysics is a quirky one— that “life,” being bound to time and change, stands opposed to eternity, or a kind of eternal fire (or “burning fountain”), where all worthwhile matter returns. What Shelley calls “splendors”— not exactly apparitions or ghosts, but pieces of the eternal fire which girds up the statelier half of visible reality, and which may take, like Urania (Venus) and her sisters, semi-human form— are what animate (he suggests) a consciousness such as his or John Keats’. Meanwhile, most of the human race, to Shelley, seems to be constituted by “phantoms,” “invulnerable nothings,” vultures, ravens, wolves, and other vicious predators. About humanity, Shelley is a realist-bordering-on-misanthrope here, and what Adonais demonstrates is that the idealism Shelley is often given credit for is balanced by a firmer, harder grasp of human frailty and foible then Shelley’s often featherweight “Romantic” image suggests. In fact, if I declare Adonais to be Shelley’s masterpiece, the most lucid, cohesive, ideologically and intellectually sound of his major poems, it is because (for one thing) it inverts adolescent escapism (to an extent) into a very adult realization of just how vicious, scabrous, and mortifying human life and death is, in a world where “invulnerable nothings” are allowed to hold sway over the likes of Keats and Shelley, and “unwilling dross” resists splendor.