Not only can be it said that art happens in history, but that history happens within each work of art. Art is kindled when the possibilities for body in history are realized within a medium and form, situated within its own history; and history itself is change, ordered, conceptualized, projected forwards and backwards. To say that humans are historical creatures is no different from saying … Continue reading 231. (Erich Auerbach)
This post is the first in a series of evolving sketches on “decorum” in poetry; it leads into the next post, on Emily Dickinson, both of which are much refined and restated in yet another post on Emily Dickinson (223). Through all of these posts, I’m writing against and with Donald Davie, the critic best remembered for Articulate Energy and Purity of Diction in English Verse. None of … Continue reading 221. (John Keats)
Some have felt with exasperation what Keats may have worried over himself: that his poetry can be attended by the thought that this is what it looks like for a person to play at being a poet. Hence Kingsley Amis: “Poetry was for Keats a matter of ‘O Poesy, of Apollo, the Muses, and inspired bards…According to Mr. Robert Graves (I cannot track this anecdote), … Continue reading 197. (John Keats)
On either side of John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” sit Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” and Tennyson’s “Vision of Sin.” All three are poems about encounters with pictures of strikingly alien people: Wordsworth’s, characteristically, about the imagination’s projection interfering with what is before him; Tennyson’s, characteristically, framed by an account of the vision’s arrival and dissipation. Wordsworth’s poem, then, founded on the conflict between … Continue reading 111. (John Keats)
The preference for the Keats of the letters to the Keats of the poems is more than the outcome of a critic’s desert-island fantasy. When Christopher Ricks remarks that he would choose the letters over the poems, but that he is glad that he does not have to choose, he is making a statement of principle: that the letters contain life as the poems, great … Continue reading 73. (John Keats)
I was mostly in my right mind when I blustered, a few years ago, that John Dryden was among the five great poets in English. The number five was arbitrary and probably a stretch, and rankings are adolescent indulgences; but adolescent indulgences can’t be given up without incurring some serious damage and my point, which I stand by, was that Dryden really was a great … Continue reading 22. (John Dryden)
