- In both survey courses and specialized seminars on Romanticism, I
like to engage students in the tension between the "internal,"
personal, romantic poem and its "external" participation in
the historical context. Particularly in discussions of hypercanonical
works, often presented as "timeless," it is useful for students
to grapple with ways in which such a work can be reconstituted within
its historical moment. Interesting discussions and debates emerge since
students generally like to locate themselves in various camps, defending
the timeless work of art, defending the poem as solely the author's
personal expression, or just as adamantly reading the work as a public
statement, bound by its particular historical moment. Moreover, students
often see these modes of reading as incompatible. Is the poem a deeply
felt personal expression, or is it a public statement, having less to
do with the poet's emotional interior than it does with the volatile
politics of nineteenth-century England? Or does the poem's significance
reside in a transcendent realm of art, outside the bounds of history
or biography altogether? My goal is to allow for a discussion of the
poetry that can encompass all of these registers simultaneously. Naturally,
Keats's"Ode on a Grecian Urn" presents a remarkably rich site
in which to explore these tensions.
- At the point of the course when we get to the "Urn," students
have noted that, for Keats, nature is the realm not only of the timeless
beauty of "rocks and stones and trees," but also of sensuality,
sexuality, and notably of suffering and mortality - a perpetual curb
to any transcendent ideal. They have seen this exemplified most profoundly
in the Nightingale ode, and it is crucial to consider "Ode on a
Grecian Urn" in relation to this poem. Helen Vendler and others
have stressed that Keats's odes should be read in relation to one another,
and this holds particularly true for these two odes. It is useful to
remember that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" follows the nightingale
ode in both the 1820 volume and in their earlier, first, publications
in The Annals of Fine Arts. In significant ways the second
ode, in Vendler's phrase, is "as near a twin to the earlier ode
as one poem can be to another" (The Odes of John Keats,
116). It answers and continues the first. The "Ode to the Nightingale,"
celebrates the "immortal Bird," like the urn, as a generalized
ideal of beauty. In the Annals publications, however, both
poems are surrounded by essays by Hazlitt and B.R. Haydon which severely
criticize the aesthetic ideal promoted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and the
Royal Academy. Both Hazlitt and Haydon strenuously promote the verisimilitude
of the Elgin Marbles, their truth to nature, over what they cast as
the conceptual and artificial aesthetic favored by the Royal Academy,
which is treated in these essays as an extension of the corrupt Regency
government. (Haydon reminds his readers that it is no accident this
body is known as the Royal Academy.) Students have seen photocopies
of selections of these essays, as well as of the versions of the odes
printed in the Annals. They are familiar with some of the political-reformist
implications of this debate over "legitimate" aesthetic authority
and of the subtle innuendoes inherent in this discourse. In this context,
the tensions concerning the timelessness of a work of art and its engagement
with an historical moment are profoundly apparent as the subject
matter of Keats's odes. Students can see that Keats himself, in
these poems, is grappling with some of the same issues of art and meaning
that they are also now confronting. The title, for starters, of the
Nightingale ode, both in the Annals and in Keats's manuscripts
is significantly not "Ode to a" but to "the
Nightingale." As Robert Gittings has pointed out the "a"
of the 1820 volume seems to have been the publisher's decision. Keats's
"the" presents a "universal," which stresses
the timeless ideal of beauty represented by the nightingale—beyond
the realm of suffering (detailed in stanza III) which Keats would escape.
Stanza III, however, anchors this visionary experience in an excruciating
awareness of human limitation. Students have devoted a good amount of
class time discussing how, with cold skill, these lines present a list
of unavoidable "natural" facts, facts the students must face
themselves, including age, loss of love, sickness, suffering and death,
all of which prefigures the failure of the imagined ideal in the final
stanza: "Adieu, the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is fam'd
to do, deceiving elf"! If the imagination can seem a "cheat,"
however, Keats is loath to rest with this. Here, in relation to the
poem's conclusion, I have the students consider Keats's concept of negative
capability. The concluding lines, students gradually note, leave us
hovering in an ambiguous, or negatively-capable, state in which the
transcendent ideal vies with mortal limitations for the last word: "Was
it a vision? Or a waking dream? / Fled is that music? Do I wake or sleep?"
The question mark after "Fled is that music?" (present only
in the Annals version) adds to the ambiguity. Naturally this
gives rise to an open-ended discussion, which suits well my goal of
unsettling students' desires for a single "legitimate" interpretation.
Does the music of the bird, and all its implications of transcendent,
eternal presence remain, merely unperceived by the "dull brain
[that] perplexes and retards"? Is its absence the illusion?
Set in relation to Hazlitt's and Haydon's discourses, the ode seems
less a duplication of their arguments than an active working out of
a critique. By both positing and unsettling universal ideals of beauty,
whether natural or conceptual, Keats marks his own place in the public
discourse, with an impassioned questioning of issues that deeply concern
him personally—enmeshed with his own grappling with personal suffering,
and his personal poetic project. But also, in this "timeless"
work, Keats overtly participates in a contemporary public dialogue concerning
the potential meanings of art.
- This engagement with public issues, beyond the merely personal, continues
in the ode "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where the first-person
"I" of the Nightingale ode interestingly shifts to a more
distanced, subtly more "objective," "thou." The
ode has traditionally been read as either a successfully autonomous
poem celebrating an ideal of aesthetic beauty, or, more recently, as
an attempt at this goal but fraught with all the ideological contradictions
and paradoxes inherent to an idealist aesthetic. Paul Magnuson notes,
however, that this line of criticism "has appropriated [Keats's]
poem for an ideology opposite that of the Annals of the Fine Arts,"
and that "the strange fate of the 'Ode On a Grecian Urn' is to
have become an idealized object, when its original context strongly
denied the existence of that ideal" (Public Romanticism,
169). While the "Ode to the Nightingale" ambiguously keeps
the ideal in float, "On a Grecian Urn" echoes Haydon's and
Hazlitt's denial of a "beau ideal," favoring a poetics of
sensation, and vehemently reconfiguring the ideal as emerging from the
empirical. Haydon (in a passage from the Annals I photocopy
for students), clarifies the debate in terms which frame Keats's poem:
There was but one period of art in the world which can be
said to approach perfection, viz. the period of Phidias [sculptor
of the Elgin Marbles], whose great principle was to restore every
object represented to the qualities and properties bestowed on that
object at its creation, adapted to its intellect or instinct, and
then to clear these qualities or properties from the results of accident
and disease, to their essential powers: thus, a god was only a human
being in his highest perfection, with the qualities of a human being
restored, and not violated; a horse, was characteristically a horse;
a cow, a cow, a dog, a dog; a fish, a fish, and so forth, essentially
and characteristically a horse, a cow, a dog, a fish; whereas in the
time of Alexander, and after that, in the time of the Roman emperors,
the artists then living wandered from the sound path, and attempted
to elevate nature, by a violation of many of her great principles,
and never suffered action or repose to have their due influence, if
that influence at all disturbed the shape of the figures
they represented, or the 'beau ideal' of the human form they
had fixed on in their own minds as a standard of perfection. The figures
then produced have thus misled the world with false and pernicious
notions of ideal beauty; which were no other than making nature bend
to a capricious system, and never bending the system established to
the great and eternal laws of nature. The 'ideal beauty' of Phidias
was but to restore nature to the essential qualities given her by
God.
- For Haydon and Hazlitt, the "'ideal beauty' of Phidias,"
means an ideal derived from nature—as represented by the Elgin
Marbles. This "natural" ideal is posited against the later
Roman, and neoclassical "beau ideal" which would elevate nature,
presenting, in Hazlitt's words, the notion of an "ideal perfection
which never existed in the world, nor even on canvas" (Works, VIII,
144). Haydon's attention to "shape," "action,"
and "repose," and his emphasis upon natural objects cleared
of "the results of accident and disease," articulate the central
tensions in Keats's ode. I pair students and have them examine the figures
represented on the urn. The figures are caught in action: in Bacchic
revelry bold lovers pursue "Maidens loth," while a "happy
melodist" pipes "songs for ever new." Students are quick
to note that, like the Nightingale, these figures represent a realm
of beauty, of sensual bliss at its peak, forever beyond the world of
flux and sorrow: "All breathing human Passion far above, / That
leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloyed / A burning forehead and a
parching tongue." While fully natural in expression of active sensual
desire, the figures may yet, however, present a "cheat" in
that the permanence of their beauty is an atemporal fiction—blissfully
freed from time and change, "accident and disease." The question
emerges: what is Keats saying here about the truth or fictionality of
an ideal of beauty? At this point it is useful, again, to have students
review stanza III of the Nightingale ode in relation to the figures
on the urn. Ironically, the very pathos of this tension between mortality
and an immortal ideal heightens the beauty frozen on the urn. But this
is an ideal of beauty not bent to fit a "capricious system,"
imposed upon the natural, but one that recognizably emerges from the
full-blooded experience of human passion in action, caught at its height.
- The sacrificial procession in stanza IV furthers and deepens this
aesthetic dialectic, also engaging the volatile context of pagan religion.
Here I introduce students, briefly, to some scholarly commentary on
this mysterious stanza. As Ian Jack, in Keats and the Mirror of
Art, has shown, the stanza's imagery with its "mysterious
Priest," and "Heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her silken
flanks with garlands drest," derives in part from an Elgin frieze
which depicts just such a sacrifice. However, as Robert Gittings has
pointed out, it also echoes an article by Haydon. Haydon's article describes
and discusses a "Cartoon" (or drawing) by Raphael depicting
the "Sacrifice of Lystra," a Biblical scene in which St. Paul,
who has just cured a cripple, looks with disdain upon a Priest and procession
leading a bull to be sacrificed in gratitude to Paul for his miraculous
act of healing. As Gittings notes, Haydon's description of the drawing
provides "the garlanded heifer [here a "Bull"], the priest
and worshippers, the town emptied of its inhabitants to attend sacrifice,
even the players on the sylvan pipes, whom Haydon described as 'wholly
absorbed in the harmony of their own music' . . . Even the central theme
of the agelessness of art was put in almost the same words by Haydon,
who, passing on to the classical statuary of Michaelangelo, remarked
that they 'look as if they were above the influence of time; they seem
as if they would never grow old, and had never been young'" (Odes
of Keats and their Earliest Known Manuscripts, 70).
- Along with these imagistic and thematic influences, the drawing, as
described by Haydon, significantly depicts a moment of tension between
paganism and Christianity. Haydon quotes the relevant Biblical passage
from Acts in which "when the people had seen what Paul had done,
they lifted up their voices, saying . . . the Gods are come down to
us in the likeness of men." Haydon notes that the apostles were
mistaken for Mercury and Jupiter. The passage concludes with the apostles,
Barnabas and Paul, rending their clothes and crying, "men why do
you do these things? We also are like you, and subject to the same infirmities,
and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the
living God, who made the heaven and earth and the sea, and all things
that are in them." Keats would also have relished the populist
message in the Biblical passage: the divine power of healing is not
imparted directly from hierarchically superior pagan divinities, but
is diffused through the agency of mortals: "We also are like you,"
cry Paul and Barnabas, "subject to the same infirmities."
Students can continue to explore connections. This passage, for example,
complements Haydon's discussion (above) of the Phidian ideal in which
"a god was only a human being in his highest perfection, with the
qualities of a human being restored." For Haydon, again, "the
'ideal beauty' of Phidias was but to restore nature to the essential
qualities given her by God." But Keats's attention to the desolation
of the town, "emptied" this morning of all its pious inhabitants,
may also, in the context of epochal change, lament with Leigh Hunt,
in the latter's critiques of the corrupt national church, the passing
of such "cheerful" pagan piety, here bound up with the loss
of a more "natural" sense of aesthetic beauty. The urn, and
the ideal it presents, as the final stanza reminds us, is a relic of
antiquity, an "Attic shape."
- In the final stanza, the "Attic shape" becomes a "fair
attitude," a "silent form" that "dost teaze [sic]
us out of thought / As doth eternity!" Keats's pronounced attention
to "shape" calls up Haydon's key statement concerning the
neo-classical aesthetic, which "never suffered action or repose
to have their due influence, if that influence at all disturbed the
shape of the figures they represented, or the 'beau ideal'
of the human form they had fixed on in their own minds as a standard
of perfection." Disjoining the "ideal" from the human
figure and transposing this to the more purely abstract formal perfection
of the urn, Keats quite deliberately "disturbs" that shape,
imposing fully the dialectic of "action and repose" upon the
"silent form," "with brede / Of marble men and maidens
overwrought." At this point, when students are immersed in a multiplex
of possible interpretations, it is good to, once again, remind the class
of Keats's concept of negative-capability. A complex of double-entendres
and puns ("attitude" "brede" "overwrought")
climaxes in the poem's crucial paradox, "Cold Pastoral." Keats
holds the disjunctive energies of the poem in a tense equipoise: "Perfection,"
in this dialectic, exists not solely in the permanence of these figures
within an ideal work of art, but rather in conjunction with the exacerbating
impermanence of the fleeting scene they simultaneously represent and
belie. This scene exists forever, paradoxically, as a frozen moment
in the history of human passion, framed on this "Attic shape,"
and captured in the "leaf-fringed legend" of the urn as "Sylvan
Historian." The "truth" equated with "beauty"
in the poem's concluding lines may be that of a "timeless transcendent,"
(similar to the neoclassical "beau ideal"), or of the "time-bound"
world of natural mortality (as in Hazlitt's and Haydon's verisimilitude—a
beauty and truth arising out of nature). Or it may be both simultaneously,
hovering in Keatsian negative capability.
- Introducing students to this kind of contextual reading unsettles
without demolishing the idea of the "timeless" classic. By
opening up possibilities of interpretation and understanding beyond
the boundaries of the work in itself, students begin to see that works
of art, particularly hypercanonical works, may give way to a multitude
of possible, responsible, readings, dependent on the version of the
work one is reading, and in what particular context(s). Indeed the continued
hypercanonical status of a work like "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
may be owing to the poem's uncanny ability to comply with various readings,
to be several works at once.
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