- This volume on the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is part of the Romantic
Circles Praxis series on seminal texts in Romantic literature. When
I was asked to edit a volume of essays on the "Urn," I decided that
instead of looking for original scholarship on the poem, it would be
more useful to inquire into the present pedagogic state of this hypercanonic
text. As I put it to the prospective contributors to the volume: Every
English major knows something about this poem, but what is it that they
know?
- If the eleven essays in this volume are representative, it seems that
there is a surprising consistency to what students are learning about
Keats's "Urn." In classrooms across the US, and in at least one classroom
in New Zealand, they are hearing that this poem is about questions,
and not about answers. They are being asked to look for the dominant
punctuation mark in the poem, and to consider why the question mark
recurs so frequently; they are hearing about negative capability as
the cultivation of uncertainty; and they are contemplating the enigmas
of Keats's poem as an analogue for the urn that so perplexed and intrigued
him.
- In sending out the request for contributions to this volume, I suggested
a few general questions that respondents might consider: What sort of
balance do you strike in the classroom between formalist close reading
and historical contextualization? Do you teach the poem differently
in classes set at different levels? Does the poem's concern with "beauty"
and "truth" resonate with twenty-first century American college students?
I asked contributors to focus their remarks on how they talk about this
poem to the nonprofessional audience of our students, and not about
what they would like to say to an audience of their peers.
- I may have put the first question a bit too polemically. When I asked
whether "we replicate the problem that is often raised in other periods
of early modern studies, where scholars confess that while they are
New Historicists in their research, they often fall back into formalist
New Criticism in the classroom," this phrasing suggested to at least
one contributor that I was equating formalism with "bad faith." I saw
the question as more of a practical and logistical one. While it is
pretty much a demand of scholarly research that a critical analysis
of a literary text be accompanied by the placement of the work within
a coherent cultural context, and there is a high degree of expectation
that a new essay on a work as familiar as Keats's "Urn" should offer
some important new raw material about the poem's origin, teaching the
poem requires that we figure out how to get that material into the classroom,
and how to make sure that its inclusion sharpens the focus on the literary
text.
- What was most striking about these essays, on the whole, is the energy
with which the contributors attacked these questions. We are all too
familiar with the endlessly repeated charge from the cultural right
that college professors are no longer interested in teaching, and with
the refined versions of that charge: that we are only interested in
teaching our own specialized research, and that we no longer care to
teach the "great books." We know this is propaganda, but we hear it
so often that we may begin to believe that it is only an exaggeration,
and not an inversion of reality.
- The essays here suggest that the canon, and American college students,
have never been in better or more solicitous hands. The contributors
to this volume detail the close attention they pay to the text and to
their students, varying both the amount of contextual material brought
into the classroom and the style of close reading according to the class
level. While upper-division and graduate courses generally offer more
of an opportunity to explore the cultural context of the poem, there
is a recurrent stress on not allowing the poem to get lost in that context.
- The primary challenge of teaching the "Urn" seems to be, at every
level, to find a way of conveying the poem's resistance to being reduced
to a consumable meaning or a predictable narrative. Students sometimes
arrive at college believing, as one contributor put it, that "We did
this poem in high school." Nonprofessional readers want to believe that
once a text has been solved, like an algebraic equation, one needs only
to remember the formula in order to reiterate the answer. This problem
can be replicated at higher levels when the ability to provide a rich
cultural context for the poem can offer the temptation to make the poem
fully explicable through that context. The resistance to this semiotic
desire emerges in the ways that various contributors work to make the
daily lives of their classrooms as unpredictable as possible. Some of
the contributions suggest that the longer one is at this, the more radical
one's methods become.
- Our contributors suggest that many students do, eventually, appreciate
the idea that Keats's "beauty" and "truth" are neither ideological effects
nor transcendent truths, but markers of a strange, elusive desire. In
the best of cases, they discover that desire within themselves, and
they recognize its difference from the simpler, utilitarian desires
of their everyday lives. If any of our students' parents (or our deans)
are alarmed by media claims that professors no longer care about teaching,
they need only look at the evident fervor with which this random sample
of professors has approached what might look like the most routine pedagogical
exercise—"How do you teach the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn?'"—in
order to be reassured that their children's education is being treated
with a good deal more seriousness than they ever imagined.
- When I asked the contributors to this volume to focus on how they
taught the poem, I suggested that citations should be kept to a minimum,
and that familiar texts needed no citation. Some contributors have included
lists of Works Cited with their essays, while others have not. I have
added a composite list of Works Cited for the entire volume.
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