Thank you for coming. You've helped me to remind me to record. Right. So
what we have said so far, very simply, is looking at a biographical
approach to the oaths and saying that on the one hand, Keats' continual run
of tragedies meant that he tended to be pretty melancholic, as is quite
natural, and tended to view anything positive as just a prelude to
something bad that could happen. And on the other hand, importantly, he
went to see the Elgin marvels, the so-called the Carpenter marvels, in
March 1817, so before the month of the start of his great age. And that
started a very big interest in both. The Greek, ancient Greek culture, and
specifically the Greek deities, the Olympian deities, which to a large
extent separated him from the rest of the Romantics who were less
interested in these types of things. I really struck me in what you were
saying about the Gothic, I guess, and the reverence of the Greek and the
apologies. Yeah. I think it's also important to realise that the Gothic
people, were very much rejecting anything neoclassical. But the Romantics
were much more about incorporating classical culture into the mix. So we'll
see next week that there's a lot of Plato and things in Shelley. So, yeah,
I mean, we shouldn't see it as... It's not quite the same attitude,
nationalistic, sort of Germanic attitude that you get with the Gothic
people. And all of these people are hugely in love with Italy, anyway. So,
I mean, it just sort of makes sense. But no, I mean, there's a slight, if
you like, childishness about rejecting anything Latin on the part of the
more Gothic-y people. I suppose Bullrich is the person who's closest to
that attitude amongst the Romantics. And to some, of course. I'm like, um,
but, um. Well, I don't know. Wordsworth doesn't do very much that's very
classical. Certainly the second generation are much more in tune with the
classical one, I think. Right, but I mean, remember that, I mean, the
furthest Keats has been when he's writing this is sort of the Scottish
border. That's true. But still, I mean, but there's all sorts of people who
are travelling and et cetera, et cetera. So there is an interest there. Why
did Keats and his contemporaries consider him an unfulfilled poet when he
died? Not when he died. He seemed to have such great promise. Right. But
why specifically would they consider him a poet in the first place? In the
making rather than a great poet? What's the difference between Keats'
contemporaries and us? Or Keats' contemporaries or critics' contemporaries?
Right. But that's a different question. They just thought he was a bad
poet. Why would those people who liked him consider, or liked his work,
consider him an incomplete poet rather than a great poet as we consider
him? I don't believe it. Yes. One of the most interesting from the
discussion in this biography here in the Norman was, he was so brave of
losing his own voice and falling too far under the influence of others. So
he rejected it, frankly, as if they were shouting at him and really
criticized him strongly. But with Hunt, who had been a mentor, he tried to
steer away from him as well. I don't know if that would have been part of
the ability for him to lose his own voice. But I believe he did at the same
time. Right. But it's more about what does being a great poet mean for
these people? . Wordsworth, for example, focuses so much on defending this
poetry. What's the difference between Wordsworth and Keats? Right. There's
a sort of things. Keats has a lot of writing. Wordsworth has a lot of I
don't think he's probably exonerated. Barbara? Antonio? Help us? Okay,
right. So, firstly, yes, because he was young. He died two years younger
than Wordsworth had been when he and Coolwich wrote Europe of the Balance.
So that's the sort of starting point for Wordsworth being considered sort
of great. Then he was very, very young. When he died. But, to be a great
poet at this time, following on from the neoclassical period, meant that
you had written a long narrative poem. So, I mean, traditionally that meant
an epic. Now, something like the Prelude, Wordsworth's The Prelude, could
be, I mean, it's not, it's, that's some aspect of being an epic. It's part
of, maybe, you need to be an epic in another sense. But it is a long
narrative poem. Now, what's happened since then is that we find long
narrative poems really boring. Because it's actually why? Because we have
internet. No. Why do we not like long narrative poems anymore? Students are
sitting there hard. Well, they're not. In some sense, I mean, an ode can be
much more difficult. And a sonnet can be really quite cryptic. It's
supposed to kind of merge with just the brain aspect. Right. It's easier to
be fully having your brain and to think What's the difference between then
and now in terms of literature? What do we, if you talk about literature,
what do people, what's the first thing people think you're studying? The
great ones. Which great books? A little bit of something that's just going
to be changing us. Right, but what type of works do we... Novels. Novels,
okay. So, the fact is that the novel basically killed the long narrative
poem. We will see a text to revive it. I mean, Dojuan is a great work, but
it doesn't really properly fulfill the idea of being a long narrative poem
in one sense, because it's so much about how funny it is to be barren, if
you like. And something like Aura Lee, which we're going to see in April,
is a very valiant attempt to write a long narrative poem by Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. But it is, in some sense, a spell. I mean, it has
received quite a lot of attention in the last 25 years, 30 years, because
it was written by a woman and there are very few long narrative poems. But
it's just not as interesting as reading Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights or
Centred by Elizabeth Gaskell or whatever, because novels just, for that
size of things, for our mentality, work better. It's just to be worrying
over, you know, hundreds of pages to be worrying over your meter and all of
this type of thing is just, for us, a little bit sort of unnecessary, a
little bit bad. And I much prefer the focus that we get in novels. So, that
means that for his contemporaries, yes, this boy has some talents. This boy
could be something. And then he goes and dies. But, of course, for us,
short, sophisticated poems like Odes are the measure of a great poet. And
that is a major reason why Keats has gone from being somebody with a bit of
potential to these very tragic, sublime young, to being... possibly if
you're somebody like me the greatest of the romantic poets and that's a
huge sort of move if you like so I mean for example Severn in 1879 and I
mean if you think about it when we're talking about 1879 there's a huge
time period that so Severn was one of Peter's contemporaries he was
basically the last living person of Peter's contemporaries and just before
he died in 1879 he wrote that Keith was the poet of only five perfect poets
as far as Severn was concerned this is all he'd written and but I mean I
think the fact that somebody who knew Keith personally could be writing in
1879 so practically in the 20th century just shows you how much time was
lost in Keith's life how much if you try to think about what he could have
done it might easily have turned into a wordsworth and written all of his
great words in his youth spent the last 50 years of his life writing, not
writing just writing I'm sorry but doing what wordsworth did but still I
mean it's it is quite sort of tragic etc. So what is an ode? An ode It is
in order to something it's sort of celebrating or describing the essence of
of what? Something Right What does that something normally be? Could you
write but it's an external figure an external object typically so I mean
there are sort of specialist similar things which are written to people a
plegean I think is what well a plegean something like that when it's
written to a person but they tend to be a lyrical poem it should be
dignified, it should be of some length and it celebrates an external object
all of this is in the notes that I've written its characteristic figures
were apostrophe and personification what's apostrophe? oh you're directing
yourself to the idea or the object so if I say dear walking stick thank you
for helping me translate the work I might direct an image to my walking
stick personification is directly related to that, the idea of treating an
object as if it was a person or in many of these cases a symbolism not
exactly personification means that I am treating an animal or something in
nature or a thing as if it was a conscious person yeah so there's an
element of pan-centrism, the idea that there is consciousness in everything
which is becoming quite popular again in philosophy but I can actually have
a conversation with a Greek pot because in some sense it is conscious it
has some sort of spirit now that can be like animism in the sense that
there's some spirit dwelling in it or it can just be the idea that all
matter is conscious in some degree it's just the time scales and all these
types tend to be tend to be different so um so It is used as a way of
demonstrating your visionary imagination, so the fact that you are able to
perceive consciousness in objects, in the wind and all sorts of things, is
a reflection of your deep and great imagination. Beads' odes are more
Horatian than Pindaric because they are more meditative and personal in
turn. Pindaric odes tend to be more like public decorations and less
personal, if you like. Romantic odes typically attempt to solve either a
private problem or a general human one. Like the epic, which is its
narrative equivalent, it was prone to attract satire in modern times. So
odes have tended to become less and less common, like epics, because you
can easily be satirical about them in the same sort of ways. I mean, Elegy
can be a little bit like that. When Ben Jonson wrote his Elegy to My
Favourite Cat, I mean, he was clearly sad that his cat had died. But
there's also an element of comedy in the sense of the personification being
placed on the cat, as we all do. So, yes, odes often have a tripartite
structure. That is the estrophe, the antistrophe and the epode. Exactly. I
was personally just taking the argument through three phases. So the best
way for us to understand it, because it's the only one that actually does
it, is into autumn. So if into autumn you have this tripartite structure,
it starts off with creating one feeling and creating another feeling and
then resolving everything to some of them in the final works. Which, of
course, is quite ironic because we have Ode to the Nightingale, Ode on a
Grecian Urn, and then just Two Autumn. So, Two Autumn is not called an ode,
but it is the most ode-like of the three in many senses. We could argue
that Two Autumn is a bit short to be an ode. Usually, odes are a bit
longer. But nobody questions that Two Autumn is an ode. I mean, you can
call it an ode. Don't worry about whether you should call it an ode or not.
But it is quite a short ode. So the three poems that you have studied this
week belong to Keats's five great odes, all written in 1819. And in fact,
1819 is the year in which I think both of the Shelley poems that we read
were written. And I can't remember if it's the year that... Well, there's
always a problem, don't you? Every year. There's nothing special about that
year. Yeah, he just died. So it's a bit like 1819. It's called 19. But we
have the... And I think it was the first count of Dom Joachim, which was
written in 1819. So it was something obviously in the air in 1819. Most of
the best literature of Romanticism seems to have been composed in that
year. So what's up with the title of these three odes? What can we say
about the title of the first read? Can we say anything about that? What was
it called in the first version, in the draft portion? I don't know. It was
called Ode to... Oh, nice and long. Well, that is what it says here. Right.
And it's generally considered... No, sorry, the other way round, yes,
sorry. I was originally owed to the nightingale, it's now owed to a
nightingale, which perhaps makes it more naturalistic, it's like one
specific bird rather than the concept of the nightingale, that he's
actually talking to one particular bird. It's the same time. It's the same
time, but it does shift his emphasis back, and our expectations. So the
change implies a subjective interaction with a specific being, a personal
and intimate encounter at a specific time and place. Moreover, the to, as
opposed to on, acknowledges the subjectivity of the bird and emphasises
Keats' engagement with a living being. So if he said, oh, he's on a
nightingale, he's sort of describing it and talking about himself. He's
owed to a nightingale, he is having a conversation with the nightingale.
And then in the seventh, it seems to really flow back out. Oh yeah, yeah,
yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. What is this transformation? Yeah, sure.
He moves away from specificity but that is his starting point. Whereas, I
mean, it could just be talking about nightingales. What about Ove on a
Grecian iron? What can you say about that title? The iron, I think it's
interesting to say, too, which is the normal type of an oad. But I kind of
progressed away from that. Can we say anything about the on? Aren't English
prepositions? I think it's interesting. Right. So, the first possibility of
understanding it is it's literally on. In the sense that he's treating the
imagery, the low freeze imagery around the bas-relief, that's what I was
trying to say, bas-relief imagery on the oad as the oad itself. So, the oad
is the bas-relief of these pictures. The other thing that's on could mean
is that It's about it, rather than talking to it. It's a way, if you like,
of camouflaging, at least in the first instance, the fact that he's talking
to a pot. Generally speaking, we are more forgiving, I think, if we talk to
animals, beings, than if we talk to created objects. So if you talk to your
cat or you talk to your dog or you talk to an animal that you encounter in
the forest or whatever, that is more acceptable. It might be slightly
eccentric, but it is much more acceptable than if you talk to your...
Fridge, like the protagonist of Shelley Valentine, for example. Shelley
Valentine talks to her fridge in that wonderful play. And so if you say,
oh, on a Grishnan, it seems I am describing this Grishnan and using it to
talk about other things, rather than saying, hi, Grishnan, how are you? How
are you? Hi. I think he pulls out the images on the air and they are
completely totally not. So it seems like that would be unnecessary. Yeah,
but... I mean, it's great if you're an Anglo-Saxon, because if you're an
Anglo-Saxon, then you just don't give a title. But in later poetry, when
you give everything a title, then it's necessary to give everything a
title. Unless it's hugely descriptive poetry or theatre. That is a primary
influence, something which creates expectations. And after you've created
those expectations, you can play around with those expectations. But they
are quite important. And if you create the wrong expectations, then you're
fighting to get back from the wrong expectations the whole time. Whereas if
you create just the right level, then you have half your battle won, as it
were. So it's sort of important in that sense. What about two or three?
What can we say about the title of To Autumn? Right. Okay, so there was a
verb at the time, To Autumn, and To Autumn meant which meant to ripen. So,
to mature. So, if you say, if you write something that's structured as an
ode, you probably don't need to write ode, and you can be more creative
with your title. If you've written Ode to Autumn, then it's an ode to what
the Americans call fall. That's for the season. But if you write just, it's
just called To Autumn, then you can have all sorts of games with it. And
one of them means, could be, that idea of reaching maturity, in the sense
of the verb To Autumn. as a preposition, we are enjoying our prepositions
today, To can also mean progression towards. So, if this poem is written in
mid to late September, for most of us, certainly in Madrid, that's still
summer. Summer apparently starts in March now. That's another question. So,
you could argue, I mean, obviously it's summer. The Edinburgh people call
summer. In England, it's so much shorter than it is in Spain. But even so,
um, September should be harvest. Yeah, it's a harvest festival, et cetera,
et cetera. So, it should be still late summer. But, To Autumn, at the end
of the year, means that we can get out of that pedantic worry. Now, if it's
saying towards autumn, yeah, progressing towards autumn, then we don't have
to. We don't have to worry so much about that. Interestingly, Blake wrote a
short poem called To Autumn with some of the same themes in his political
sketches of 1783. So, whatever that is, 25 years earlier. How is liminality
reflected in Keats and Williams? Liminality? ... Because it's played all
the time with reality and imagination. Where have we sort of seen that
before? Well, between reality and imagination, right, does anything have
any other liminality? Remembering and forgetting. Remembering and
forgetting, okay. Night and day, good. So this is a twilight period. The
twilight, by definition, is liminal. It's twice between night and day.
That's what twilight means. So we have the idea of human beings' primary
sense is vision. As in these visions, when one of those nights is falling,
then you are increasingly in a solipsistic context. And of course, if the
primary way of communicating to the nightingale, like with many birds, you
don't have to see it so much, you hear it, that relationship intensifies as
our visual capacity is reduced. Where have we seen this situation of
writing a poem about twilight and nightfall before? Where have we seen
writing a poem about the prospect of death and nothingness and oblivion as
night falls? Could I have a quick look at the whole of it? Yes, please.
Thank you. So, Thomas Graves, Elegy, Written in a Country Church. Why?
What? Well, I'm just saying that I don't think it's over the... Yeah, with
that whole... We're going to get a job! Okay. Not a great experience,
right. But yes, I mean, it's very much that sort of feeling around this,
which again makes sense, but it's actually pretty romantic and this is
clearly romantic. So we have joy and sorrow being compared and synthesised
to some extent. Of course, we might want to connect that with... Yeah.
Yeah. Good. We have ease. Ease in the sense of relaxation and pain. Again,
sort of synthesised. Intensity of feeling and numbness. Numbness is like
paralysis. Wakefulness and sleep, which we mentioned. Dream and reality,
which we mentioned. Mortality and immortality. Life and death. So, and of
course the fundamental rhetorical question of this poem is do I wake or
sleep? So there's that idea of liminality there. Lots of boundary blur. The
demarcation of boundaries between these binary opposites is dissolved as
Keats emphasises. So it emphasises with the bird and responds to its song.
There's a certain amount of liminality in the fully grown labs in 2. Also,
why? Right. So, it's sort of just semantically fully grown lab is liminal.
It's almost an oxymoron. What else is liminal about a fully grown lab? What
happens? What happens to fully grown labs in the autumn? Here's one. Well,
that would be a bad thing to do. No, not only that, that doesn't say
anything. Yeah, but they tend to be killed for food. So, these fully grown
labs are in a sort of pre-dead state. They're halfway between being ...
living, conscious beings and being meat for those people who eat meat. So
they are sort of liminal also. Heath is always interested in the liminal
and into autumn. He examines the limits of late summer, a period of
abundance, and as it advances to autumn, a period of dying. So again,
autumn by its very nature is a transitory season, a little bit like spring.
Of course, we could say that all the seasons are transitory, but there is,
because there is in the solstice seasons there are extremes. So summer is
an extreme, winter is an extreme, and the equinox seasons are, therefore,
can be more convincingly seen as transitory than the extreme seasons. But
you could, of course, argue that What is negative capability and how is it
relevant to Peter's words? When you are saying that you try to explain
using reasonable knowledge. You try to explain using reasonable knowledge.
And you try to explain using reasonable knowledge. Or you don't try to.
When you don't try. When you don't try to explain Very good. Okay, so
negative sounds negative to us, but what it really means is the absence of
certainty or conclusion. So it basically means retaining and enjoying the
mystery. You can learn about something without trying to control it and
form a conclusion about it. With generally speaking, we think in terms of
knowledge these days in terms of learning a subject, controlling that
subject and then saying ticking that subject off. Now I understand that
subject. I can move on to something else. It's fundamentally not about
that. So Coolridge writes about the drive to find absolute truth. Coolridge
wants to know about absolute truth. Pete rejects the idea of searching. for
a grand, unified knowledge. For Keats, by contrast with Coleridge, the
sense of beauty should be the goal of the poet. Beauty perceived by the
feelings rather than its analysis through reason. It's about feeling, it's
not about knowing. We have to do it once again. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean,
to some extent this is a fulfillment because Coleridge is also a romantic
but of a different type in this sense in terms of his idea. I suppose
ultimately it's to the ownership. The idea that there is an end point where
you know is different from what Keats is looking at. Keats. Do goths
consider romantics or just, like, contemporaries? I don't know. To some of
the... I'm not a witness. Yeah. But there is no division. No. There's not a
heart division, certainly. Which is, you know, why you can have something
like lyrical balance with what is, as far as anybody should be concerned, a
gothic, gothic poet in it, despite the fact that it's the great,
terrifying, foundational work of English Romanticism. But, I mean, I think
it's a sort of way of seeing the world. So, when I'm being serious, I write
in a romantic way. When I'm being... letting my hair down and relaxing and
enjoying myself, I write in a gothic way. If there's somebody doing both
things, that's likely to be their attitude. And the fact that... I mean, in
the end, that would explain why Wordsworth, taking himself so seriously, is
not willing... does not want to have anything to do with the gothic, even
though he probably does enjoy reading it when nobody's looking. But, yeah.
But again, we're generally speaking about labels which were largely
invented after the time, and so they're going to be not very good fits to
the real world because of that. But interesting, there is, I mean, it's
interesting, again, this interest in beauty in Keats, because the standard
concept of romantic poetry is that it's all about the sublime. If we have
this dichotomy between books, this Berkeley and Berkeley dichotomy between
beauty and the sublime, most gothic, sorry, books, most romantic poetry is
targeted towards the sublime. The sublime is the big thing. The Keats isn't
really that interested in that. It's much more intimate and small scale and
to some extent personal, although it's not necessarily. It's not
necessarily all about himself. I mean, the first poem, Ode to a
Nightingale, is about himself, but the other poems are much less so. So
Keats argued in a letter dated 19th of February 1818 that it was more
important to be receptive to stimuli than to be constantly searching for
knowledge or meaning. This aligns with Wordsworth's concept of wise
passiveness. So you can be contemplative and you can receive lots of
information without moving towards that resolution of the information. So,
I mean, one of the ways of understanding what Keats was talking about with
this term negative capability is that he gave the example of how Newton had
destroyed the poetry of a rainbow by reducing it to a prism. If you
understand that, it's just physics. It's the same as if I take this piece
of rectangular, triangular, whatever, glass, I can create a rainbow
whenever I want. And that just kills the beauty of a rainbow, the fact that
it's a difficult light effect. That would be an illustration of the
difference between negative capability and this type of really sort of
neoclassical thinking, I suppose, enlightenment thinking. So again, there's
this sort of this false dichotomy, if you like, between the neoclassical
and the romantic there's a lot of things that can be accepted from the
classical world by the romantics but there's less of an interest in the
known elements of science. Some of the cutting edge elements of science
like was the result of the Shelley obviously are fascinating things that
could be are interesting. Things that we just now we understand, now we
know what is, now we know how light works etc are not poetic and therefore
not interesting but the fact that science could at some stage do something
is fascinating because that is a thought experiment and in the thought
experiment there is the interest for the romantics not the concrete cold
knowledge right how does Keats link consciousness, the imagination and
identity consciousness, the imagination and identity consciousness, the
imagination particularly maybe there's this concern of the flux between
being aware or remembering or gaining you know, waiting to sleep night and
day so I think that and for him it seems like it's like oh these are
policies that he's supposed to find as you say and we'll find that we don't
have enlistments in policies so it's really the imagination that allows you
to have access to some grass where you have no other option I mean honestly
it reads a lot like you said to me so I can but sort of that appealing that
to the room there just if that's not a consciousness you are actually
accessing reality through your imagination. It's more real than physical
and external. Right, so there's very much this neoplatonic idea of seeing
the false reality as our perceived reality, our visual reality. But
basically Keats equates thinking consciousness with sorrow. So to be
conscious is to suffer. Again, because of his experience. Negative
capability can relate to the capacity to lose oneself and one's identity in
what one is contemplating. Now that sounds like a nightmare if you're
wordsworth to lose yourself. But if you live in a very painful world and
you're beginning to cough up blood, etc., etc., like Keats, then losing
yourself is actually quite attractive. Well, it's probably good. It's just
sort of becoming part of the infant. So to make, to be... I mean, everybody
has read A Nice Stroke of... Anyway, there's a book which is written by a
neuroscientist who's called something like Elizabeth Bolt Taylor, I think
she's called. And it's A Nice Stroke of... Anyway, this is the first time
that a neuroscientist had a stroke. Do you understand what a stroke is?
Like thrombosis. And survived. And so she is able, from her scientific
point of view, to describe intimately the processes that she's going
through. Sorry, what's it called? A Nice Stroke of Insight. It's the first
three or four chapters are the 50 or 60 pages, the 50 or 60 of the most
interesting pages you could possibly read. The rest of the book is about
her recovery and is much less interesting for me. But her description of
the processes of... of the stroke, the perceptions of the stroke are
absolutely fascinating and as other people without the scientific knowledge
have described, there's a loss of self, the limits of self start to go
beyond, you know, sort of hands and face and body and all these types of
things and there's a sort of feeling of oneness which is very, very
romantic and so, you know, there is very much a real feeling, now this may
just be synapses and stuff, I mean, I'm not, I don't want to be too
thorough, but I mean there is this sort of oneness of the romantics is
something that you do actually feel in certain near-death experiences. So,
I mean it is a real perception even if that is not really what's happening,
that is very much what people feel. You can feel it's happening in those
types of situations. So, it is a characteristic of someone who can remain
in doubt, who does not immediately reach for certainty and conclusions. You
enjoy the mystery of things, you enjoy the uncertainty. As we approach the
essence of our individuality, what we find is that individuality showing
its irreductible connections. So, the more we find... our core selves, the
more we see how our core selves are connected outwards to the context of
the world and backwards in time to invisible origins. So, Keats suggests
that consciousness is anxious and interruptive and drags us back into the
real world. If you can actually lose yourself, you can be in this sort of
dream world which is much less oppressive. Fantasy is liberating, reality
is oppressive. Keats had a great ability for imagining what it would be
like to be something else. In a letter he even once imagined what it would
be like to be a billiard ball rolling across a billiard table. That takes
quite a bit of imagination. The experience of the imagination can negate
identity while freeing up the mind. the mind to a new intense experience.
The sublime becomes an intense experience of negation of self. And notice
that there is no I in Ode on a Grecian Urn or in Two Mortals. You can
understand that there is a person behind Two Mortals, or a person behind
Ode on a Grecian Urn, but there's no direct reference to that. How were
Keats and Shelley's attitudes to society and religion different? So Shelley
wished to achieve immortality by transforming society. Shelley saw himself
as a great revolutionary. Keats wished to protect himself from the miseries
of the world. It was a much more intimate type of poetry. Shelley attacked
Christianity. Keats ignored it, seeking solace in classical mythology. So
really, although they knew each other, they were friends at some stage,
they had quite a different world view, if you like. What is the importance
of time in these Odes? What can we say about time? These Odes... Right,
there it is. I'll accept that, but you don't say you won't, right? So, it
will very much be associated with the Ovidian concept of Eos and Graces,
which I don't quite understand, but we're in the chat. Eos and Graces. What
does that refer to? sorry, E-H-E-U, sorry, a new word, F-U-G-A-C-E-S.
Again, it's in the notes, so don't worry too much. This comes from a line
from Ovid where he talks about the decay suffered by all living things. And
so the idea that everything falls apart, if you like. Everything ultimately
disintegrates. There is a general tendency towards attrition and, what's
the word? I can't remember what. But yeah, things tend to disintegrate.
Nothing is permanent, if you like. So, Keats was keenly aware of... death
and disease because he had watched most of his family die one by one, and
had worked as a surgeon. Both the Nightingale and the Urn offer a release
from time. So the Nightingale cannot die because the Nightingale is not
conscious of death. If you're not conscious of death, you can't die. And
while the Urn exists, it's... it is immortal, if you like. Right. So there
is that. We'll come back to the question of stasis in a second. So, Keats
makes reference to the time of day, the seasons and eternity. So that
cyclical nature of time is important. That is something which can protect
us from death, if you like. So, we can, as so often, we can draw a
relationship, if you like, between Tennyson's green nature and red nature.
And if you remember, red nature, the nature of red and tooth and claw is
the nature of carnivores and the nature of the death of the individual.
Green nature is the regeneration of the community, and it is related to
death. plants and things which are reborn on a yearly basis and of course
there is a huge amount of world mythology which is related to all of this
which was collected together brilliantly in the middle of the 20th century
by what's his name Frith in Edinburgh University in the Golden Bough and I
strongly recommend that you read the Golden Bough it's quite long but it's
fun which is basically just shows how there is to some extent a universal
human mythology of sacrificing a god in order to have the continuation of
the community. In most of the versions in his own life he managed to say
this is what the Egyptians did set and this is what these people in the
Anderson do with their god and this is what these people in Borneo do with
their god the idea of killing a god so the community can continue. He
managed to draw all of the obvious conclusions that that's what
Christianity is doing without saying it's getting into trouble for a long
long time. I think the first edition was 1920 so I mean he wasn't he wasn't
going to be tried under blasphemy but he could have been he could have not
been invited to some dinner parties yeah yeah atheism agnosticism and
non-acceptance of conventional Christianity has I mean a large part of the
people who went to America from the British side went for Christianity and
they went for Christianity and they went for Christianity and they went for
Christianity and they went for Christianity and they went for Christianity.
precisely because they wanted to go to a more religiously strict place than
staying in England. England has for a long long time been rather not very
interested in religion shall we say so yes that is that is linked to all of
these ideas but as you say the unfortunate other aspect of that is stasis
it's all very well for the nice girl to have mindfulness as we would say
today But it's not fully conscious of the meaning of life. And ultimately,
through the various modes, Keats, I think we can say, reaches the
conclusion that you can only fully appreciate life because of death. Death
is the silver plate in the back of the mirror which allows you to
appreciate life. So that process of decay is actually fundamental in terms
of understanding the process of life. And, of course, more specifically in
the case of the figures on the Grecian island, they are in spaces. So if
you like, for example, the lovers chasing each other, they are in a
wonderful moment of anticipation of a kiss, et cetera. And so, and again,
of course, this is very, very much, there's a lot of similar sorts of ideas
in metafiction, if you like. There's the idea of a character being trapped
in a story such as the character being trapped in a story. And so it's
constantly just repeating the same story because... Oh! Yeah, I mean, to
some extent all characters are trapped in a story. And that's, there is
the, and they have their teleological paradox because of that. Have you
read the first scene in a series like just before? No. The books, the, I
mean, in this particular case, what we have is, of course, a piece of
literature commenting on a piece of art, a piece of plastic art, visual
art. So, our possibilities here are for comparing this to... ... My Last
Duchess by Robert Browning which you will see in April or something is the
description of a portrait of a woman so it is just possible, not very
likely it is just possible that if people attend it in their new artistic
phase because they are now interested in the art of people like Blake etc
may want to talk about this poem in relation to this kind of play somewhere
where is it yeah I mean because it's not a lot to read in a second language
it's sort of intensely short there is a sort of natural but I mean I think
but reading a novel reading a novel in a second language is quite daunting
until you've done it but yeah I suppose yeah it doesn't really matter but
somewhere in my notes there is the specific term for a piece of literature
describing a piece of a visual art and as I say it's just an art it's just
possible if I do some sort of comparison what is the symbolism of
Nightingale perfect good start you don't think about what I did right Okay,
well, the most basic association is with melancholy. So the Nightingale is
right up Keats' street, shall we say. But from Virgil's Gregorics, I don't
know how you say it in Spanish. Las Gregoricas? In Virgilio, La Gregorica,
Las Gregoricas. Gre, Gregorica. Oh, no, it doesn't matter. One of the
longer poems by Virgil, he associates Nightingales with melancholy. And in
the English tradition, that idea was very much continued by Ili Peninsular
or by Milton. So one of the shorter poems by Milton also has this idea.
Indeed, the Latin name. And for the Nightingale, Lucimia means melancholy
singer. So, I mean, it's there from the very beginning, this idea that the
song of the Nightingale is melancholy. What else can we say about the song
of Nightingales? Well, they're widely considered to have the most beautiful
song of all songbirds. But it is also the most complex. The song does not
just express pleasure and pain together. But it is very nuanced and
complex. And there are staves, basically. So it's not, I mean, a lot of
birds just go, and that's it. Whereas this has the harmonic different
staves, different sections of music. John Krebs determined that the song
contained more notes than Mendelssohn's violin concerto. Which is pretty
damn impressive for a bird. Yeah. Moreover, what is another aspect of the
Nightingale is that the season of the Nightingale song is really quite
brief. It lasts only from mid-April to late May. So there is a connection
there with the brevity of life, the brevity of song, etc. When Keats
imagined a dystopia in La Belle dame sans merci, it was one in which no
birds sing. And I think we can all probably relate to that. A world without
birdsong is pretty dystopic. Keats had been an enthusiast of nightingales
most of his life. He had listened to them in the woods near his school in
Emptiness, we know. He would listen to them on Hampstead Heath where he
spent a considerable amount of his time. And his first talk of the
conversation when he went walking on Hampstead Heath with Coolridge was
nightingales. Hampstead Heath is a sort of really a very long, relatively
mild story. It's a sort of slope of a park, largely sort of, if London is
down by the river, then there is this huge slope of greenery in the north
of London, just going up and up and up. It combines with Parliament Hill
Fields. It's actually really beautiful, nice part of London, especially
Parliament Hill Fields, which I particularly like. It's very sort of
poetic. It's very poetic in one sense because you are in effectively
countryside, very open countryside, it's not like wooded countryside, it's
open countryside, but it's England, so it's very green. And because it's
sloping with London sort of at the bottom, it has some very interesting
views of London below, so it's sort of a very good place for a poet to be
doing his walking together if he is trapped in London. As would be the
case. It's a sort of attitude, most. Is that why he is so that he thought
that Nietzsche was the father of all of these things? That really struck me
like criticism of the youngest people. I don't know, I mean, it's just,
this is, the criticism is almost 100% pure classism. It's just because he's
not one, he's not one of us. And even, I mean, I'm sure there was even a
little bit of that with Shelley and with Byron. But, you know, I. Thank
you. they were of a different class and I mean however much wanting to be
quite socialist there is in Shelley and wanting to be very bohemian there
is in Barrow there's still class there and so I mean the fact that the
criticism was the whole idea of the that is I mean it's very much like
saying sort of the idea of associating with a working class culture and
therefore not really understanding higher things because of his class I
mean you don't the we don't really have serious inroads into literature by
the working class I mean it's fascinating because there's so much focus on
women when women starts to write what they're allowed to write this type of
thing but it's actually it's almost I think really it's later that class
barriers are breaking down you begin to have somebody like T.H. Lawrence is
one of the very very early really working class people in the 20th century
who's writing in the it's kind of a yeah sure sure sure I mean you have
yeah exactly that's the mistake you have Virginia Woolf worrying about
having a woman around but I mean you need you need the time as well you
need space you need all sorts of things so yes I mean that's if you I mean
it's almost because because we're so focused these days on identity rather
than class those sort of aspects of things tend to have been forgotten so
there'll be much more interest in gay literature or anti-literature or
women's literature all these kinds of things but the actual process by
which the against enormous resistance the working class could actually gain
access to the world and literature is pretty damn slow it has to be said so
yeah whenever you I think it's quite a healthy exercise whenever you're
talking about breaking into the male domain, the male privilege of literary
circles when we're looking at literature to realise that we're talking
about middle and upper class male privilege of these circles. It's as
exclusive of most men as it is of women etc. I'm not mistaken. No, no, it's
not so. But that's really what I'm saying. Even the idea that working class
women have something to say is post Second World War. So it's, I mean it's
almost a sort of slightly forgotten side of literature which is I think
quite interesting and if I had time I would explore it but I'm doing other
things at the moment. Right, so Keith mentions Nightingale or the
personification of Philomel in many poems including To Some Ladies, Bards
of Passion and of Mirth, Calidor a Fragment to One Who Has Been Long in
City Pent. That's very romantic, the idea of being pent in the city, being
trapped in the city and In the Eve of St Agnes. So there's Nightingale's
crop up again and again in his poetry. He likes Nightingale's poems.
Keith's friends and contemporaries came to fully identify him with the
bird. When Keith left for Italy Lee Hunt wrote optimistically, Thou shalt
return with thy friends the Nightingale. Of course he didn't but that's a
nice story. Have either of you been to Rome? Have you been to the Keats
Museum as well? It's basically the two rooms that he lived in. It's just by
the Italian steps, sorry the Spanish steps. In Italy they would not call it
the Italian steps. Just by the Spanish steps, just literally by there's
normally like a sort of back with a picture of Keaton. You see it very
quickly, but it's very, very carefully preserved. It's very beautifully
preserved by little old English expatriate women who were sort of in
charge. But they tell you a lot about it, and you can see some sketches of
them and things like this from that time. It's all quite sad. But one is
absolutely fascinating and wonderful and if you go to Rome, I very much
recommend it, is to go to the Proscene Cemetery. Because Rome is the
eternal city, because it's the center of Catholicism, Protestants could not
be buried within the city. So just outside the city walls, I don't know,
but just outside the city walls in the basically southwest, there is the
Proscene Cemetery, and it is beautifully preserved. A lot of the romantics,
one of Shelley's son, infant sons, and Trevelyan, and all sorts of people
like that are buried there alongside caves. It's full of cats, if you like
cats. And they're very well looked after by cats. But it's really
beautifully done. And it's a fascinating place because next door to it
there is a pyramid. And you think, what the hell is a pyramid doing here?
And what idiot modern sort of Donald Trump-like person built a pyramid
here? But it's amazing. If not, this pyramid was built in Roman times by
the Roman government of Egypt in about the 1st or 2nd century. When he
died, he liberated all of his slaves who were Egyptians. And to say thank
you, his slaves built this pyramid for him. So it's actually a Roman-age
pyramid. And it's not like the pyramids you see, but it's a big, bloody
pyramid. It's not a small thing. And it's fascinating. It's actually also
what is, I mean, in terms of the sort of slightly more heterogeneous
tourism that I do in a place like Rome, it's just by the station that you
take to Ostia. And Ostia is fascinating because it's like a normal Roman
city without volcanoes having come into it, etc., etc. But it is, you can
just see an entire Roman city laid out in front of you. Wonderful. Thank
you. and it's also, you don't have to go to Mekos which is nice but the
ceremony the cemetery is very very nice. Do you know what happens to
Protestants who died in Spain in the 17th and 18th century? There was
something in Mologa with English cemeteries There was one in Siberia in a
county of Extremadura called Siberia and there's another one in the Costa
de la Morte in Galicia but before that what they would do is they would
take the Protestants at low tide when the sea was out and they would bury
them with their head still out of the ground looking towards the sea
because Spain was Catholic territory so they could not bury Protestants So
when it was going well under the sea at low tide it didn't count as being
in Spain and so you'd have all of these basically this bottle with their
heads sticking out and then the sea coming over it's quite romantic but so
yes presumably as relationships improved with America and Britain in the
19th century they decided there was a better solution than this to deal
with such national society but I plan to have this this happened to me when
it happened ah I found my word it's ekphrasis E-K-E-K-P-H-R-A-S-I-S yeah
it's described in the future alarm two minutes right more questions um so
what is the um context of the ode on the Grecian well so to some extent
it's um it's in the tradition of the odes of Anacreon a Greek, who were
debating the powers of the sister arts. So when you're talking about this
is what's good about painting, this is what's bad about painting, this is
what sculpture is good for, this is what sculpture is bad at, et cetera, et
cetera. In 1817, Wordsworth published a sonnet in Annals, which praised the
plastic art's power to alter, so sorry, to halt time. Keats apparently
countered that the only poetry can give life, warmth and breath to the
plastic arts. So the idea for Keats is that the plastic arts, yes, they can
halt time, but they're cold. The Greek noun is cold, if you like. In an
essay on gusto, which sounds fun, an essay on gusto, but I imagine that
means gusto in the Spanish sense, gusto in modern English means, sort of
bravura, means force and vitality. But I imagine that this on gusto is,
that action, this on gusto or on gusto by Hazlitt is more about taste in
art. And basically what Hazlitt had argued was that the art of the Italian
Renaissance offered warm and fleshy verisimilitude, whereas Greek
sculpture, which was the ideal of spiritual by their beauty, they are
raised above the frailties of pain and passion. By their beauty, they are
verified. Now, having said that, of course, that was all part of the
misunderstanding about Greek sculpture. Well, we have this idea that Greek
sculpture is cold and perfect because we see it in white marble. But we now
know that it was always cold and perfect. That was all painted. That was
all painted in realistic colours. And of course, for most of us, we, if you
actually see a painted version, and it's very easy to do with a computer
now to paint it, you think that's awful. That looks like something in the
window of the Court of Glyphs. But we value the fact that it's white marble
and that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense, sort of platonic. It's like a
platonic but perfect form. But, actually it wasn't that's just the paint
fell off Keith seems to seek for synthesis offering first passion and pain
in the initial stanzas and then stanza 4 or 5 is metamorphose metamorphoses
into the ideal but inhuman artifice has its essence blah blah blah context
to composition so we are seconds away from the alarm there's a bit more
about the context of the composition of 2 Autumn it's in one sense it's
very highly conventional and lots of the ideas come from the current nature
from September 1890 in the examiner very very similar images etc there's a
very strong Latin tradition the lexical set can be compared very closely
with something in Paradise Lost so the images are quite conventional but
the philosophy of the thing and the beauty of the poetry is what makes this
poem stand certain amount of enjoyment. I really don't know. I just don't
know. I haven't really thought about either question, so I'm afraid I don't
know. Find out when I see you. Okay. Bye-bye people online. Huh?