John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

Rochester, John Wilmot, second earl of (1647-80), lyric poet, satirist, and a leading member of the group of 'court wits' surrounding Charles II. He was born at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, his father was a Cavalier hero and his mother a deeply religious woman related to many prominent Puritans. In his early teens he was sent to Wadham College, Oxford, the home of the *Royal Society, and then went on a European tour, returning to the court late in 1664. At the age of 18 he romantically abducted the sought-after heiress Elizabeth Malet in a coach-and-six. Despite the resistance of her family, and after a delay of 18 months (during which Rochester fought with conspicuous gallantry in the war against the Dutch), she married him. Subsequently his time was divided between periods of domesticity with Elizabeth at his mother's home in the country (the couple had four children), and fashionable life in London with, among several mistresses, the brilliant actress Elizabeth *Barry, and his riotous male friends, who included the earl of Dorset (C. *Sackville) and the duke of *Buckingham. Wherever he was staying he tried to keep up the other side of his life through letters, many of which survive.

Although Dr. *Johnson dismissed Rochester's lyrics, their wit and emotional complexity give him some claim to be considered one of the last important *Metaphysical poets of the 17th cent., and he was one of the first of the *Augustans, with his social and literary verse satires. He wrote scurrilous lampoons—some of them impromptu—dramatic prologues and epilogues, 'imitations' and translations of classical authors, and several other brilliant poems which are hard to categorize, such as his tough self-dramatization 'The Maimed Debauchee' and the grimly funny 'Upon Nothing'. He wrote more frankly about sex than anyone in English before the 20th cent., and is one of the most witty poets in the language. Although his output was small (he died young), it was very varied. *Marvell admired him, *Dryden, *Swift, and *Pope were all influenced by him (he was Dryden's patron for a time), and he has made an impression on many subsequent poets—*Goethe and *Tennyson, for example, and in modern Britain, *Empson and P. *Porter.

Rochester is famous for having, in Johnson's words, 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness'. He became very ill in his early thirties and engaged in discussions and correspondence with a number of theologians, particularly the deist Charles Blount and the rising Anglican churchman G. *Burnet, an outspoken royal chaplain who superintended and subsequently wrote up the poet's deathbed conversion. It was the final contradiction in a personality whose many oppositions—often elegantly or comically half-concealed—produced an important body of poems. See Complete Poems, ed. D. M. Vieth (1968); Poems, ed. K. Walker (1984); Letters, ed. J. Treglown (1980). There is a life by V. de Sola Pinto (1953, 2nd ed. 1964); see also Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974) by G. *Greene.

The Libertine

—oOo—

E. E. Cummings

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:

E[dward] E[stlin] Cummings (1894-1962), born in Cambridge, Mass., after receiving his A.B. (1915) and M.A. (1916) from Harvard joined the service of the American volunteer Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps in France before the U.S. entered World War I, and in 1917 was confined for several months in a French concentration camp on an unfounded charge of treasonable correspondence. This experience provided the basis for his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), a prose narrative of poetic and personal perception. His first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), followed by & (1925), XLI Poems (1925), and is 5 (1926, substantially augmented in a reprint of 1985), clearly established his individual voice and tone. The poems show his transcendental faith in a world where the self-reliant, joyful, loving individual is beautifully alife but in which mass man, or the man who lives by mind alone, without heart and soul, is dead. The true individual Cummings praised, often reverently and with freshness of spirit and idiom, but the "unman" was satirized as Cummings presented witty, bitter parodies of and attacks on the patriotic and cultural platitudes and shibboleths of the "unworld." This poetry is marked by experimental word coinages, shifting of grammar, blending of established stanzaic forms and free verse, flamboyant punning, typographic distortion, unusual punctuation, and idiosyncratic division of words, all of which became integral to the ideas and rhythms of his relatively brief lyrics. These he continued to write with subtlety of technique and sensitivity of feeling and to publish in ViVa (1931), No Thanks (1935), I/20 (1936), Collected Poems (1938), 50 poems (1940), I x I (1944), Xaipe (1950), Poems: 1923-1954 (1954), 95 Poems (1958), and the posthumously collected 73 Poems (1963). His other works are him (1927), an expressionist drama in verse and prose, with kaleidoscopic scenes dashing from comedy to tragedy; a book which bears no title (1930); Eimi (1933), a travel diary utilizing the techniques of his poetry and violently attacking the regimentation of individuals in the U.S.S.R;  Tom (1935), a satirical ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin; CIOPW (1931), drawings and paintings showing his ability in charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor; Anthropos, The Future of Art (1944); Santa Claus (1946), a morality play; and i (1954), "six nonlectures" delivered at Harvard.



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Eimi, travel narrative by E. E. Cummings of his 36-day visit to the Soviet Union, published in 1933. This long prose work employs the techniques of his poetry and, like it, also celebrates the individual of the title (Greek, "I am"), and with wit and vigor attacks the regimentation of people in the USSR.




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E. E. Cummings (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia)


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A Leaf

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

So many selves

William Butler Yeats

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS  (1865-1939)

From the Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.):

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least two hundred years: his mother's, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. J. B. Yeats, his father, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precarious living. The Yeatses were in London from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland—to Howth, a few miles from Dublin. On leaving high school in Dublin in 1883 Yeats decided to be an artist, with poetry as his avocation, and attended art school; but he soon left, to concentrate on poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.

Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism—not in any strict chronological order, for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought. In middle life he elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a variety of sources, that enabled him to strengthen the pattern and coherence of his poetic imagery. The student of Yeats is constantly coming up against this willful and sometimes baffling esotericism that he cultivated sometimes playfully and sometimes as though it were a convenient language of symbols. Modern scholarship has traced most of Yeats's mystical and quasi-mystical ideas to sources that were common to William Blake and Percy Shelley and that sometimes go far back into pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. But his greatness as a poet lies in his ability to communicate the power and significance of his symbols, by the way he expresses and organizes them, even to readers who know nothing of his system.

Yeats's childhood and early manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo; and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day; and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other characteristic figures of the 1890s. Here he acquired ideas of poetry that were vaguely pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more vigorous and earthy—a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism and, although often in disagreement with those who wished to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture. The three influences of Dublin, London, and Sligo did not develop in chronological order—he was going to and fro among these places throughout his early life—and we sometimes find a poem based on Sligo folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy poems written under the influence of the Rhymers' Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling in a lyric otherwise wholly pre-Raphaelite in tone.

We can distinguish quite clearly, however, the main periods into which Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism, which he learned from the London poets of the 1890s. Edmund Spenser and Shelley, and a little later Blake, were important influences. One of his early verse plays ends with a song:

The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.

About the same time he was writing poems (e.g. The Stolen Child) deriving from his Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore. A little later—i.e., in the latter part of his first period—Dublin literary circles sent him to Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland: Heroic Period, where he found the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history, and to George Sigerson's and Douglas Hyde's translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." Even when he plays with Neoplatonic ideas, as in The Rose of the World (also the product of the latter part of his early period), he can link them with Irish heroic themes and so give a dignity and a style to his imagery not normally associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess. Thus the heroic legends of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which is why even his first, "nineties" phase is productive of interesting poems. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, spoiled for some by overanthologizing, is nevertheless a fine poem of its kind: it is the clarity and control shown in the handling of the imagery that keeps all romantic fuzziness out of it and gives it its haunting quality. In The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland he makes something peculiarly effective out of the contrast between human activities and the strangeness of nature. In The Madness of King Goll the disturbing sense of the otherness of the natural world drives the king mad. (Such contrasts are common in the early Yeats; in his later poetry he tries to resolve what he calls these "antinomies" in inclusive symbols; e.g., Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.)

It is important to realize that Yeats had a habit of revising his earlier poems in later printings, tightening up the language and getting rid of the more self-indulgent romantic imagery. The revised versions are found in his Collected Poems, which, therefore, present a somewhat muted picture of his poetic development. For the complete picture one should consult The Variorum Edition edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957).

It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his autobiographical essays how he sought for a style in which to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image as did Hyde's translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which "nothing was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading Yeats, the passive love-poet, to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books prompted his search for a more active stance, a more masculine style. Looking back in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal. "Without knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty . . . We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, but only so fast as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." The result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen in the volumes of collected poems, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). The Folly of Being Comforted and Adam's Curse are from the former of them, and one can see immediately how Yeats here combines the colloquial with the formal. This is characteristic of his "second period."

By this time Yeats had met the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. The affair is reflected in many of the poems of his second period, notably No Second Troy, published in The Green Helmet. He had also met Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and she invited him to spend the following summer at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of the "country house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos and a symbol of the Neoplatonic dance of life. He expresses this view many times in his poetry—e.g., at the end of A Prayer for My Daughter—and it became an important part of his complex of attitudes. The middle classes, with their Philistine money grubbing, he detested, and for his ideal characters he looked either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them.

It was under Lady Gregory's influence that Yeats became involved in the founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1899. This led to his active participation in problems of play production, which included political problems of censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of "theater business, management of men." All this had an effect on his style. The reactions of Dublin audiences did not encourage Yeats's trust in popular judgment, and his bitterness with the "Paudeens," middle-class shopkeepers—who seemed to him to be without any dignity, or understanding or nobility of spirit—produced some of the most effective poems of his third or middle period. He was now becoming more and more of a national figure. Three public controversies had moved him to anger and poetry; the first over the hounding of Parnell (To a Shade), the second over Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and the third over the Lane pictures (September 1913). In each, the cause for which he fought was defeated by the representatives of the Roman Catholic middle class, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, Yeats moved to England. Then came the Easter Rising (Easter 1916), mounted by members of the class and religion that had so long opposed him. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders of the rising) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats himself returned. To mark his new commitment, he refurbished, occupied, and renamed "Thoor Bayllylee" the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land that was to become one of the central symbols of his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State and served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the Protestant landed class.

Meanwhile Yeats was responding in his own way to the change in poetic taste represented in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already begun to emerge in his poetry; in the volume titled The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor (the nineteenth-century poet who wrote some fine lapidary verse) and John Donne as masters. To the precision, and the combination of colloquial and formal, that he had achieved early in the century, he now added a metaphysical as well as an epigrammatic element, and this is seen in the later poems of his third period. He also continued his experiments with different kinds of rhythm. At the same time he was continuing his search for a language of symbols and pursuing and pursuing his esoteric studies. Yeats married in 1917, and his wife proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which for several years she produced (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937) and that he used in all sorts of ways in much of his later poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon. Some of Yeats's poetry is unintelligible without a knowledge of A Vision, but the better poems, such as the two on Byzantium, can be appreciated without such knowledge by the experienced reader who responds sensitively to the patterning of the imagery reinforced by the incantatory effect of the rhythms. Some criticism decries attempts by those who are not experts in the background of Yeats's esoteric thought to discuss his poetry and insists that only a detailed knowledge of Yeats's sources can yield his poetic meaning: but while it's true that some particular images do not yield all their significance to those who are ignorant of the background, it is also true that too literal a paraphrase of the symbolism in the light of the sources robs the poems of their power by reducing them to mere exercises in the use of a code.

The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), from which the poems from Sailing to Byzantium through After Long Silence have been here selected, represent the mature Yeats at his very best—a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words. These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they connected with Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality, but they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contraries that had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. Though symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age, of life and art, of madness and wisdom.

The Byzantium poems show him trying to escape from the turbulence of life to the calm eternity of art. But in his fifth and final period he returned to the turbulence after (if only partly as a result of) undergoing the Steinach operation to increase his sexual potency in 1934, and his last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. "I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my deathbed of all the nights I wasted in my youth," he wrote in old age to a correspondent, and in one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Son of Sixpence." When he died in January 1939, he left a body of verse that, in variety and power, makes him beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of the English language.

Marjorie Perloff on "Easter 1916"

 

 

 

 

—oOo—

The Life of Poet William Blake (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Walt Whitman - Whoever Your Are Holding Me Now in Hand

 

Walt Whitman

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,  
Without one thing all will be useless,  
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,  
I am not what you supposed, but far different.   

Who is he that would become my follower?  
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?   

The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,  
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,  
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,  
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd,  
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,  
Put me down and depart on your way.   

Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,  
Or back of a rock in the open air,  
(For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,  
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)  
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,  
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,  
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,  
With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss,  
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.  

Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,  
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,  
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;  
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,  
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.   

But these leaves conning you con at peril,  
For these leaves and me you will not understand,  
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you.  
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!  
Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,  
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,  
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,  
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few)  prove victorious,  
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil,  perhaps more, 
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;  
Therefore release me and depart on your way.







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Este poema viene de Leaves of Grass.

Edgar Allan Poe, poeta irremediable

—Edgar Allan Poe, según la Historia Universal de la Literatura de Léon Thoorens:

El poeta irremediable

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), el "poeta irremediable", busca una luz fatídica y misteriosa para iluminar sus portentosas experiencias y para profundizar en los abismos del alma humana.

En 1842 publicaba uno de sus poemas, en que figuraba este fragmento:

En el cielo habita un espíritu
las fibras de cuyo corazón forman un laúd.
Nadie canta tan asombrosamente bien
como el ángel Israfel
y las indecisas estrellas —según dicen—
cesan en sus himnos, presas por el encanto
de su voz, enmudecidas....
...Si yo pudiera residir
donde Israfel
reside y se personifica en mí,
quizá no cantase tan singularmente bien
una melodía humana,
y una nota más intensa que ésta
 volara de mi lira hasta el cielo.

En este poema se reconoce en el acto un tono y una vibración espirituales ausentes en toda la versificación americana anterior.

Poe escribió, además, otros poemas, una novela, Las aventuras de Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), y numerosos cuentos y relatos, reunidos ahora bajo el título de Historias Extraordinarias, que Baudelaire comenzó a traducir a partir de 1848, aunque los críticos americanos seguían y siguen permaneciendo indiferentes a ellas. "Es un mal escritor, que debe su popularidad a un accidente pasajero", dice Yvor Winters, comentario que sólo concierne a Poe como poeta. Sus historias no son más que relatos populares. En cuanto al hombre en sí...  Dos días después de su muerte, el New York Tribune publicaba un artículo bilioso que decía: "pocos le echarán de menos, pues aunque tenía algunos lectores, contaba con pocos o con ningún amigo". En su opinión, la sociedad sólo estaba compuesta de canallas. No soportaba la contradicción. Ignoraba la delicadeza moral. En resumen, era un vulgar ambicioso, un hombre "diferente" y, por lo tanto, peligroso, en doloroso desacuerdo con su país, al que osaba juzgar y condenar.

Baudelaire presentía en Poe a un poeta de vida espiritual intensa en exceso, de una lucidez demasiado grande, para que pudiera acomodarse a "esta inmensa barbarie alumbrada con gas" que era América. En julio de 1856, los hermanos Goncourt descubrían su obra artística y declaraban: "Una literatura nueva, la literatura del siglo XX... Por fin la novela del futuro dedicada a contar más la historia de cuanto ocurre en el cerebro de la humanidad que lo que siente su corazón". Y más tarde, el francés-norteamericano Julien Green escribía unas frases que plantean de modo definitivo el caso trágico de un hombre que se sabía "poeta irremediable" en un país que negaba al poeta el derecho a profetizar.

"Me pregunto por qué su país se ha mostrado tan injusto con él. Los lectores norteamericanos le consideran morboso y a América no le gusta estar representada por tan malsano poeta. Y es rechazado con más ira todavía porque América lleva en su seno ese desequilibrio que el genio de Poe significa como una flor tenebrosa, un grandioso lirio nocturno entre los dedos de la muerte." 

 

Su vida es una novela trágica y desconcertante. Hijo de actores, huérfano a los tres años y adoptado por una familia burguesa de Richmond, recibe una educación distinguida en colegios ingleses y norteamericanos, y rompe al fin sus relaciones con su familia adoptiva. A los dieciocho años de edad se alista en el ejército, es sargento mayor apenas cumplidos veinte años e ingresa en la Academia de West Point, pero al fin es expulsado de allí. Comienza entonces una dolorosa existencia de vagabundo elegante, periodista, poeta y narrador de cuentos, perpetuamente borracho y quizá también entregado a los estupefacientes. Se casa a los veintisiete años de edad con una muchacha que sólo contaba catorce y, cuando ella muere diez años después, debe defenderse de vagas acusaciones de crueldad. Colabora en diversas publicaciones, alcanza el éxito e incluso la fama, pero se arruina, bebe incesantemente y cae en una manía persecutoria, intenta suicidarse, pierde cada vez más su equilibrio mental, si no el juicio, y muere de "delirium tremens" en el hospital de Baltimore el 9 de octubre de 1849.

 

Edgar A. Poe, un escritor maldito

Aun con toda su aridez, los citados datos biográficos señalan un destino: un hombre afectado por circunstancias particulares, pero que no logró hallar en la sociedad en que vivía las respuestas, los valores, el contorno que le hubieran permitido reconstruirse tal como él desearea: feliz y equilibrado, dueño de su vida y de su pensamiento. Se percataba de ello y en toda su obra intenta explicarlo: no deleitándose en la descripción de su infierno, sino poniendo de relieve sus esfuerzos para salir de él.

Poe navega contra la corriente literaria de su época. Hace justicia a Cooper y a Irving, aunque no crea en su genio, pero debate contra sus epígonos Cooke, Coob, Southworth, Holmes e Ingraham, simples románticos aficionados, que mezclan lo real, lo novelesco y los convencionalismos. A las "novelas-río" de moda, Poe opone "la literatura de revista", o semanario, cuyo éxito popular, según él, no significa, "como suponen algunos críticos, una decadencia del gusto", sino que es "un genio de nuestro tiempo, de una época en que los hombres sienten necesidad de cosas breves, escuetas y bien digeridas". En este caso no se trata simplemente de una estética de la concisión opuesta a una estética de la incontinencia verbal, sino del papel que debe desempeñar el escritor ante las necesidades del público.

El mundo norteamericano en erupción, creador y destructor, triturador de cuerpos y almas, hace sentir como nunca lo que la vida acarrea consigo de misterio, de desorden y de abismos aparentemente insondables. Describir y amplificar no sirve para nada e incluso perjudica y mixtifica. En lugar de dejarse arrastrar por las olas, es preciso dominarlas, explicar su poder y su pretendida fantasía. No es tarea fácil y el público se resiste a ello. A partir de aquí, lo fantástico, casi el mundo del ocultismo, los prolegómenos de la ciencia-ficción, permiten al autor expresar libremente —aunque esta libertad procura revestirse prudente y púdica de complejos simbolismos— cosas que de otra manera desencadenarían sobre él la reprobación pública y quizá la cárcel. El lector, por su parte, puede no comprender nada o fingir que no lo entiende, al propio tiempo que se divierte con la fantasía y la habilidad asombrosas del prestidigitador.

Siendo tan compleja la realidad y los medios de tener contacto con ella tan difíciles de dominar, el poeta compone "una crónica de sensaciones más que de hechos", como dice el propio Poe en Berenice, renunciando a analizar despiadadamente las sensaciones. En La esfinge, el héroe divisa un monstruo que desciende por la colina: es un insecto deslizándose sobre un cristal. Rasgo que bien pudiera ser una de las claves principales de la obra de Poe. Se le considera, además, acertadamente, como uno de los patriarcas de la novela policíaca clásica: aquella en que el autor expone un enigma aparentemente insoluble que resolverá más tarde, únicamente mediante la inteligencia y la lógica, y demostrando que, de hecho, el lector disponía, desde la exposición de los datos, de todos los elementos necesarios para para solucionarlo por sí mismo.

Su novela Doble asesinato en la calle Morgue encaja perfectamente en esta idea, si bien sus demás relatos lo confirman: Ligeia, El escarabajo de oro, La caída de la casa Usher, El corazón revelador, El gato negro, William Wilson, El descenso al Maëlstrom, La carta robada, citando a propósito los que el propio Poe señaló como mejores. Nada hay en ellos sobrenatural ni fuerzas ocultas o misteriosas al margen del espíritu y la voluntad del ser humano. El hombre es libre y su destino aparece siempre determinado por la calidad de su raciocinio. El El escarabajo de oro, el protagonista razona adecuadamente y es recompensado por el triunfo y la fortuna; en El gato negro no lo hace así y es castigado con la muerte. Poe intenta demostrar y demostrarse a la vez que el destino es un mecanismo; ahora bien, un mecanismo estropeado puede ser reparado. Con una audacia que no excluye el terror, sino que lo incluye, por sentise débil, vulnerable y desarmado. Poe se enfrenta con lo desconocido, se deja fascinar por ello y lo expresa, en consecuencia.

 

 

Se podrá argüir que se trata sólo de símbolos, pero éstos son a veces tan densos y abrumadores que el espíritu del poeta irremediablemente escapa al dominio del "racionalista irremediable" y la lógica matemática ya no basta. Entonces todo aparece blanco como en Gordon Pym. El blanco es el color del vértigo, y Poe explica en vano que es una ilusión óptica y el resultado aparente de la fusión de los demás colores cuando se mueven con mucha rapidez. También procura evadirse: en la poesía que con él deja de ser discurso coherente, versificación y juego lírico, para convertirse en ejecutoria de la locura; evasión en el alcohol y finalmente en aquella muerte tan evocada. Poe muere vencido, o quizá debiera decirse, más exactamente, reducido a la impotencia, aunque sin haber cedido: como lo había escrito simbólicamente en Gordon Pym, convertido en libro de lectura para jóvenes a consecuencia—como en el Gulliver de Swift—de un malentendido:

La cima de la catarata se perdía por entero en la oscuridad y en el espacio. Sin embargo, era evidente que nos aproximábamos a ella con espantosa velocidad. Podían verse, a intervalos, sobre aquella sabana, enormes grietas abiertas, aunque sólo momentáneas, y a través de estas grietas, tras de las cuales se agitaba un caos de imágenes flotantes e indistintas, se precipitaban poderosas y silenciosas corrientes de aire que surcaban en su vuelo el océano inflamado.

Podría considerarse a Poe como un "caso" literario y patológico, si fuera el único en navegar en esta misteriosa embarcación arrastrada por una misteriosa corriente hacia la inmensa figura blanca que no sabemos si representa a Dios o a algún abominable cero matemático. Pero Poe tenía otros compañeros: prácticamente, todos los grandes escritores de su época.

El Big Bang de Poe

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

From The Short Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89). In 1863 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he wrote much poetry, including 'Heaven-Haven' and 'The Habit of Perfection'. He came under the influence of the Oxford Movement and Newman, and in 1866 was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In 1868 he resolved to become a Jesuit and symbolically burned his poems, though he sent some copies to his friend Bridges for safekeeping. He was professor of rhetoric at Roehampton 1873-4, then studied theology at St Beuno's in North Wales (1874-77), where he also learned Welsh.

A new phase of creativity began in 1876. Inspired by the loss of the Deutschland in December 1875, which had among its passengers five Franciscan nuns exiled for their faith, Hopkins wrote his most ambitious poem, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. In 1877 he composed some of his best-known poems, including 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty'. After ordination he was sent to Chesterfield, then London, then Oxford, where he wrote 'Henry Purcell'. Work in various industrial parishes followed, including an exhausting spell in Liverpool (1880-1) where he was oppressed by a sense of his own failure as a preacher.

 

In 1884 he was appointed to the chair of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. There he became ill and deeply depressed, and wrote (mainly in 1885) a number of 'Dark Sonnets', powerfully expressing his sense of exile and frustration; these include 'Carrion Comfort' and 'No worst, there is none'. He also managed to produce in these last years less desperate poems, including 'Harry Ploughman' and 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire'. He died of typhoid.

Apart from work in anthologies (including Poets . . . of the Century, 1893, and Bridges's own The Spirit of Man, 1916), nothing was published until 1918, when Bridges produced his Poems; Bridges had judged the public not ready to receive Hopkins's 'oddity', but initial bewilderment was followed by steadily rising admiration. His poems, letters, and journals reflect his sense of vocation (sometimes conflicting) as priest and poet, his technical interest in prosody, and his search for a unifying sacramental view of creation. His concepts of 'inscape', 'instress' and 'sprung rhythm' have given rise to a large body of aesthetic theory. By 'inscape' he seems to have meant 'the individual or essential quality of the thing'; 'instress' refers to the energy which sustains an inscape, and flows into the mind of the observer. Both words were coined by Hopkins. 'Sprung rhythm' he considered less an innovation than a return to the rhythms of speech and of earlier forms of verse. But the great (though delayed) impact of Hopkins's work may be seen less in terms of technical innovation than as a renewal of poetic energy, seriousness, and originality, after a period marked by much undistinguished and derivative verse.


 ______________

 

Sprung rhythm  (or 'abrupt rhythm'), a term invented by G. M. Hopkins to describe his own idiosyncratic poetic metre, as opposed to normal 'running' rhythm, the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Hopkins maintained that sprung rhythm existed, unrecognized, in Old English poetry and in Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton (notably in Samson Agonistes). It is distinguished by a metrical foot consisting of a varying number of syllables. The extra, 'slack' syllables added to the established patterns are called 'outriders' or 'hangers'. Hopkins demonstrated the natural occurrence of this rhythm in English by pointing out that many nursery rhymes employed it, e.g.


Díng, Dóng, Béll,

Pússy's in the wéll

He felt strongly that poetry should be read aloud, but seems to have felt that the words themselves were not enough to suggest the intended rhythms, and frequently added various diacritical markings. Some critics have suggested that sprung rhythm is not a poetic metre at all, properly speaking, merely Hopkins's attempt to force his own personal rhythm into an existing pattern, or recognizable variation of one, and that his sprung rhythm is in fact closer to some kinds of free verse or polyphonic prose.

__________________

From Andrew Sanders,
Short Oxford History of English Literature
("High Victorian Literature"):

To Dickens and other Victorian progressives, the assertiveness of the Oxford Movement and the magnetism of the revived Roman Church seemed to be dangerous examples of 'Ecclesiastical Dandyism', an undoing of national history and a self-indulgent withdrawal from more urgent concerns. The career of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) might certainly have suggested the impropriety of such a withdrawal had the nature of his twin vocations to the Jesuit priesthood and to poetry been more widely known to his contemporaries. His conversion to Roman Catholicism at Oxford, and his decision to enter the Society of Jesus in 1868, efectively cut him off from the mainstream of contemporary English life. The failure of his Jesuit superiors to recognize and encourage his idiosyncratic poetic talent also severed him from the body of prospective readers to which he most earnestly sought to appeal. He burned much of his early work on his ordination and took up poetry again only in 1875 with the startingly radical 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', a poem which the editor of the Jesuit periodical, The Month, decided that he 'dared not print'. No representative edition of Hopkins's poetry appeared until 1918.

Hopkins was fortunate in the poet-friends with whom he corresponded, Richard Watson Dixon and Robert Bridges (1844-1930), the latter his literary executor and editor. These non-Jesuit correspondents were the recipients of the theories that he attempted to articulate and of the often extraordinary poems that were developed in relation to these experimental ideas. After 1918 his work found the wide receptive audience which it had earlier been denied, but Hopkins's experiments, like the culture from which they emerge, remain essentially of the nineteenth century. As his Journals reveal, he observed nature in painstaking detail, patiently examining flowers and leaves, intently noting the effects of light and shade, and delighting in gradations of texture and colour. Given the stringency of his Jesuit surroundings, his immediate culture may have been of aesthetic deprivation, but his habits of observation and recording had been long acquired. His attention to the exactness of things is indeed akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (if not to Pre-Raphaelite poetry) and his methods of analysis indicate a scrupulous Ruskinian apprenticeship. Hopkins's intellectual disciplines certainly benefited from his study of theology, and in particular from his somewhat eccentric (given the prejudices of his teachers) pleasure in the thought of the thirteenth-century philosopher Duns Scotus ('who of all men most sways my spirits to peace'). His poetry may have been far too idiosyncratic to appeal to the somewhat saccharine tastes of his contemporary co-religionists, but his structures derive from highly disciplined and often traditional ways of thinking, seeing, translating, and writing.

Most of Hopkins's surviving poems are distinctly God-centred. His is a God who resolves contradictions as the fount of all that is and as the Creator who draws all the Strands of Creation back to himself. Created nature is in itself immensely precious, for the glory and wonder of God is implicit in it. In 'Pied Beauty' Hopkins celebrates harmonized oppositions, dapples and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange' because they express the energy and vitality of the visible world, a world held together by a divine force that constantly regenerates it. Undoing, desolation, and the 'problem of pain' are however never eliminated from his most searching poems. At times it is humankind which mars the integrity of beauty by unfeelingly trampling 'the growing green', by felling the 'especial' sweetness of a line of poplars, or by caging skylarks, but Hopkins is never simply or naïvely 'green'. His poems also explore the presence of violence in the realm of the parahuman. Despite the wonder of it, the windhover's ecstatic swoop is none the less predatorial, breaking lines and straining words as it falls.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
  dom of daylights dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend; the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-beak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The windhover's beauty is 'brute', yet its 'brutality' is of the essence of its animal perfection. Hopkins's poem gasps at the wonder of a creature whose free movement and concentrated strength stir an awesome sense of the presence of the Creator-Redeemer (its subtitle directs it 'To Christ our Lord'). Elsewhere in his work, most notably in the complex theological framework of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and the parallel poem 'The Loss of the Eurydice', Hopkins ponders the mystery of human suffering by forging parallels with a paradoxical Christ, the Man of Sorrows, and the Suffering Servant who is, at the same time, the Divine Judge and the Merciful Redeemer. He pulls dissolution into resolution by seeing patterns, not simply in the seasons or in the forms of nature, but also in religious imagery, in the observances of the Christian calendar, and in the ultimate meaning of the universe. The very intricacy of his verse is an attempt to express and recvord something of the multifariousness of the visible and aural world. The very 'difficulty' and the contortion of his poetry, its intellectual leaps and its violent 'metaphysical' yoking together of images, offer a momentary statis and a fusion of divergent insights and impressions. Hopkins found order where other Victorians saw anarchy; he recognized purpose where many of his contemporaries begain to despair over what they presumed was an increasingly meaningless fragmentation. Even in his dark, straining, disappointing, despairing last sonnets ('No worst, there is none', 'To seem the stranger lies my lot', I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day', 'Patience, hard thing!', 'My own heart let me have more pity on') there still remains the conviction that somehow a barely comprehended God comprehends all things.

The Fates of Men

 

—oOo—

Wordsworth (Oxford Companion)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

WORDSWORTH, William (1770-1850), born at Cockermouth, Cumbria, the son of an attorney; he attended (with Mary Hutchinson, his future wife) the infants' school in Penrith and, from 1779 to 1787, Hawkshead Grammar School. His mother died in 1778, his father in 1783, losses recorded in *The Prelude, which describes the mixed joys and terrors of his country boyhood with a peculiar intensity. He attended St John's College, Cambridge, but disliked the academic course. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of France, the Alps, and Italy, and returned to France late in 1791, to spend a year there; during this period he was fired by a passionate belief in the French Revolution and republican ideals, and also fell in love with the daughter of a surgeon at Blois, Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter (See E. Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, 1922). (This love affair is reflected in 'Vaudracour and Julia', composed ?1804, published 1820, and incorporated somewhat anomalously in Book IX of The Prelude.) After his return to England he published in 1793 two poems in heroic couplets, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both conventional attempts at the *picturesque and the *sublime, the latter describing the Alps. In this year he also wrote (but did not publish) a Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (see WATSON, R.) in support of the French Republic. England's declaration of war against France shocked him deeply, but the institution of the Terror marked the beginning of his disillusion with the French Revolution, a period of depression reflected in his verse drama *The Borderers (composed 1796-7, pub. 1842) and in 'Guilt and Sorrow' (composed 1791-4, pub in part in 1798 as 'The Female Vagrant'). In 1795 he received a legacy of £900 from his friend Raisley Calvert, intended to enable him to pursue his vocation as a poet, which also allowed him to be reunited with his sister Dorothy (above); they settled first at Racedown in Dorset, then at Alfoxden in Somerset, where they had charge of the son of their friend Basil *Montagu. The latter move (aided by T. *Poole) was influenced by a desire to be near *Coleridge, then living at Nether Stowey, whom Wordsworth had met in 1795. This was a period of intense creativity for both poets, which produced the *Lyrical Ballads (1798), a landmark in the history of English *Romanticism (See ANCIENT MARINER; IDIOT BOY, THE; TINTERN ABBEY.) The winter of 1798-9 was spent in Goslar in Germany, where Wordsworth wrote sections of what was to be The Prelude and the enigmatic *'Lucy' poems. In 1799 he and Dorothy settled in Dove Cottage, Grasmere; to the next year belong 'The Recluse', Book I (later *The Excursion), 'The Brothers', *'Michael', and many of the poems included in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads (which, with its provocative preface on *poetic diction, aroused much criticism). In 1802 Wordsworth and Dorothy visited Annette Vallon in France, and later that year William married Mary Hutchison, his financial position having been improved by the repayment of a debt on the death of Lord Lonsdale. In the same year he composed *'Resolution and Independence', and began his ode on *'Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', both of which appeared in Poems in Two Volumes (1807), along with many of his most celebrated lyrics. To the same period belong the birth of five children (of whom the eldest, John, was born in 1803), travels with Dorothy and Coleridge, and new friendships, notably with Sir W. *Scott, Sir G. *Beaumont, and *De Quincey. Wordsworth's domestic happiness was overcast by the death of his sailor brother John in 1805 (which inspired several poems, including 'Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle', 1807), the early deaths of two of his children (one of which inspired his sonnet 'Surprised by joy', 1815), and the physical deterioration of Coleridge, from whom he was for some time estranged, and with whom he was never entirely reconciled. But his productivity continued, and his popularity gradually increased. The Excursion was published in 1814, The White Doe of Rylstone and two volumes of Miscellaneous Poems in 1815, and *Peter Bell and *The Waggoner in 1819. In 1813 he had been appointed stamp distributor for Westmorland, a post which brought him some £400 a year, and in the same year moved from Allan Bank (where he had lived from 1808) to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he lived the rest of his life. The great work of his early and middle years was now over, and Wordsworth slowly settled into the role of patriotic, conservative public man, abandoning the radical politics and idealism of his youth. Much of the best of his later work was mildly topographical, inspired by his love of travel; it records journeys to Scotland, along the river Duddon, to the Continent, etc. He was left a legacy by Sir George Beaumont in 1827, and in 1842 received a Civil List pension of £300 a year; in 1843 he succeeded *Southey as *poet Laureate. He died at Rydal Mount, after the publication of a finally revised text of his works (6 vols, 1849-50), and The Prelude was published posthumously in 1850. His prose works include an essay, Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal . . . as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809), castigating the supine English policy, and A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England, written in 1810 as an introduction to Wilkinson's Select Views of Cumberland.

De Quincey wrote of Wordsworth in 1835, 'Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant.' Early attacks in the *Edinburgh Review and by the anonymous author of a parody, The Simpliciad (1808), were followed by criticism and satire by the second generation of Romantics; *Byron and *Shelley mocked him as 'simple' and 'dull', *Keats distrusted what he called the *'egotistical sublime', and *Hazlitt, and later *Browning, deplored him as *'The Lost Leader', who had abandoned his early radical faith. But these doubts were counterbalanced by the enormous and lasting popularity of much of his work, which was regarded by writers such as M. *Arnold and J. S. *Mill with almost religious veneration, as an expression in an age of doubt of the transcendent in nature and the good in man. A great innovator, he permanently enlarged the range of English poetry, both in subject matter and in treatment (a distinction he would not himself have accepted).

Wordsworth's Poetical and Prose Works, together with Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, ed. W. Knight, appeared in 1896, and his Poetical Works (ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols.) in 1930-9 and 1952-4. Letters of the Wordsworth Family 1787-1855 were edited by W. Knight in 1907, and Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (ed. de Selincourt) appeared in 1935-9. His biography by M. Moorman was published in 1968 (2 vols), and a long-lost collection of letters between Mary and William appeared as The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth, ed. B. Darlington (1982). See also Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth (1989).

—oOo—

John Keats (Oxford Companion) - NIVEL AVANZADO

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Keats, John (1795-1821), the son of the manager of a livery stables in Moorfields, who died when he was 8; his mother remarried, but died of tuberculosis when he was 14. 

The oldest of the family, he remained deeeply attached to his brothers George and Tom and to his sister Fanny. He was well educated at Clarke's school, Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid, and in 1810 was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. 

His first efforts at writing poetry appear to date from 1814, and include an 'Imitation of Spenser'; his school friend Cowden-*Clarke recorded the profound effect of early reading of *Spenser. In 1815 Keats cancelled his fifth year of apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital; to the same year belong 'Ode to Apollo' and 'Hymn to Apollo'. 

In 1816 he was licensed to practise as an apothecary, but in spite of precarious finances abandoned the profession for poetry. In 1816 he also met Leigh *Hunt, who published in the same year in the *Examiner Keats's poem, 'O Solitude', and in the course of a survey of young poets in the same journal he included Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. Keats met *Shelley and *Haydon, began to plan *Endymion, and wrote 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill' as a first effort towards that poem. 

His first volume of poems was published in March 1817. It included, among sonnets, epistles, and miscellaneous poems, 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill' and 'Sleep and Poetry'. There were at first some pleasing reviews, but public interest was not aroused and sales were meagre; and in the autumn came the first of *Lockhart's harsh attacks in *Blackwood's, labelling Keats and his associates as members of the so-called *Cockney School. 

He finished the first draft of Endymion and during the winter of 1817-18 saw something of *Wordsworth and *Hazlitt, both of whom much influenced his thought and practice. In December Haydon gave his 'immortal dinner' whose guests included Wordsworth, *Lamb, and Keats. Endymion, dedicated to *Chatterton, whom Keats greatly admired, was published in the spring of 1818, and *'Isabella, or the Pot of Basil' finished in May. 

With his friend Charles Armitage Brown (1786-1842) Keats then toured the Lakes, spent July and August in Scotland, and included a brief visit to Northern Ireland. He had travelled frequently in southern England but he had never before seen scenery of rugged grandeur. It moved him deeply and he made full use of it when he came to write *Hyperion. Bitter attacks on Endymion came in the autumn from Lockhart in Blackwood's and from the *Quarterly Review. For the time being Keats concealed his pain and wrote to his brother George that, in spite of the review, 'I think I shall be among the English poets after my death', but his friends believe the wound was very deep. Meanwhile his brother Tom was very ill and Keats spent much time with him. 

When Tom died in December Keats moved into his friend Brown's house in Hampstead, now known as Keats House. There, in the early winter, he met Fanny *Brawne, with whom he fell deeply in love, and with whom he remained in love until his death. During the course of the summer and autumn of 1818 his sore throats had become more frequent and persistent. Nevertheless September 1818 marked the beginning of what is sometimes referred to as the Great Year; he began Hyperion in its first version, abandoning it a year later; he wrote, consecutively, *'The Eve of St Agnes', 'The Eve of St Mark', the 'Ode to Psyche', *'La Belle Dame sans Merci', *'Ode to a Nightingale', and probably at about the same time the *'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 'Ode on Melancholy', and 'Ode on Indolence'; *'Lamia Part I', *'Otho the Great' (in collaboration with Brown); the second version of Hyperion, called The Fall of Hyperion, *'To Autumn', and 'Lamia Part II'. During this year he was beset with financial problems, both his own and those of his friends and relations, and intensely preoccupied with his love for Fanny, to whom he became engaged. 

In the winter of 1819 he began the unfinished 'The Cap and Bells', but he became increasingly ill with tuberculosis and his great creative work was now over. His second volume of poems, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820, and included, as well as the title poems, the odes, Hyperion, 'Fancy', and other works. The volume was generally well received, gaining much praise in some quarters, with criticism from Blackwood's much muted, but the sales were very slow. 

Shelley invited Keats to Italy and in September, after sorting out his copyrights and financial affairs, Keats set off with his friend *Severn. They did not go to the Shelleys, but settled in Rome, where Keats died the following February.

Keats has always been regarded as one of the principal figures in the *Romantic movement, and his stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion. *Tennyson considered him the greatest poet of the 19th cent., and Matthew *Arnold commended his 'intellectual and spiritual passion' for beauty; in the 20th cent. he has been discussed and reconsidered by critics from T. S. *Eliot and *Leavis to *Trilling (The Opposing Self, 1955) and Christopher Ricks (Keats and Embarrassment, 1974).

His letters, published in 1848 and 1878, have come to be regarded with almost the admiration given to his poetry, to which many of them act as a valuable commentary. He wrote fully and revealingly to Fanny Brawne, to his brothers and sister, to Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Haydon, Severn, and many others, mixing the everyday events of his own life with a lively and delicate interest in that of his correspondents, and displaying wit and high spirits as well as his profoundest thoughts on love, poetry, and the nature of man. T. S. Eliot described the letters as 'certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet' (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933). The major biographies are by W. J. Bate (1963), R. *Gittings (1968), and Andrew *Motion (1997).

___________


Endymion, a poem in four books, by *Keats, written 1817, published 1818. The poem tells, with a wealth of epithet and invention, the story of Endymion, 'the brain-sick shepherd-prince' of Mount Latmos, who falls in love with Cynthia, the moon, and descends to the depths of the earth to find her. There he encounters a real woman, Phoebe, and giving up his pursuit of the ideal he falls in love with her. She, however, turns out to be none other than Cynthia, who, after luring him, weary and perplexed, through 'cloudy phantasms', bears him away to eternal life. With the main story are woven the legends of Venus and Adonis, of Glaucus and Scylla, and of Arethusa. The poem includes in Bk I the well-known 'Hymn to Pan', and in Bk IV the roundelay 'O Sorrow'.

In his preface Keats describes the work as 'a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished'. It is a work, rich in luxuriant imagery, of an immature genius, the product of sensation rather than thought. The allegory, which is sometimes obscure, appears to represent the poet pursuing ideal perfection, and distracted from his quest by human beauty. The work was violently attacked in the *Quarterly Review and in *Blackwood's, in which *Lockhart described the poem as one of 'calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy'.


Hyperion: A Fragment and The Fall of Hyperion, fragments of epic poems by *Keats written 1818-19. Hyperion was published 1820, The Fall of Hyperion not until 1856. In 1818 Keats gave up the effort to finish Hyperion, then began to rewrite and recast it as The Fall of Hyperion, but once again the effort was abandoned.

In the first version, written as direct narrative, the tremendous figure of the fallen Saturn, conquered by Jove, mourns the loss of his kingdom, and debates with his fallen fellow Titans, in their craggy lair, how he may regain his kingdom. They conclude that only the magnificent Hyperion, who is still unfallen, will be able to help them. In Bk III the golden Apollo, god of music, poetry, and knowledge, speaks to the goddess Mnemosyne of his inexplicable anguish; then, at the moment of his deification, the fragment ends. In the second version, the poet is in a luxuriant garden, where he drinks an elixir which induces a vision. He finds himself in a vast domed monument, then proceeds with pain and difficulty to climb the stair to the shrine of the priestess Moneta. Together they find the agonizing fallen Saturn, and with Mnemosyne and Thea they speak to him of his pain and loss. In despair he leaves with Thea to comfort his fellow Titans, while the poet and Moneta watch the magnificent, but much troubled, Hyperion blaze into the west. The precise meaning of the allegory is not always clear, but both poems have as their general theme the nature of poetry and the nature and development of the poet. It is not known why Keats abandoned what was to have been his great work, but one of his fears, expressed in a letter to his friend *Reynolds, was that his writing was too Miltonic.


'Isabella, or The Pot of Basil' ["Isabella, o la maceta de albahaca"], a narrative poem by *Keats, written 1818, published 1820.

The poem is based on a story in Boccaccio's *Decameron. The worldly, ambitious brothers of Isabella intend that she shall marry a nobleman. When they discover her love for the humble Lorenzo they lure him away, murder him, and bury his body in a forest. His ghost then appears to Isabella and tells her where he is buried. With the help of her old nurse she finds his body, severs the head, and places it in a pot with a plant of basil over it. Her brothers, observing how she cherishes the plant, steal the pot, discover the mouldering head, and fly, conscience-stricken, into banishment. Pathetically Isabella mourns her loss, pines away, and dies. The poem reflects a contemporary fashion for the macabre, and *Lamb pronounced it the best work in the volume of poems of 1820, but Keats himself very soon came to dislike it.


'The Eve of St Agnes', a narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas by *Keats, written 1819, published 1820.

The poem is set in a remote period of time, in the depths of winter. Madeline has been told the legend that on St Agnes's Eve maidens may have visions of their lovers. Madeline's love, Porphyro, comes from a family hostile to her own, and she is herself surrounded by 'hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords'. Yet he contrives to steal into the house during a ball on St Agnes's Eve, and with the aid of old Angela is secreted in Madeline's room, where he watches his love prepare for sleep. When she wakes from dreams of him, aroused by his soft singing, she finds him by her bedside. Silently they escape from the house, and fly 'away into the storm'. With its rich and vivid imagery, its heightened atmosphere of excitement and passion, the poem is generally regarded as among Keats's most successful works.

'La Belle Dame sans Merci', a ballad by *Keats, written 1819, published 1820, which describes a knight fatally enthralled by an elfin woman. Although Keats himself spoke of it lightly, critics and biographers have written of it at length, many concurring with Robert *Graves (The White Goddess, 1948) that 'the Belle Dame represented Love, Death by Consumption . . . and Poetry all at once'. It was much admired by the *Pre-Raphaelites and William *Morris asserted that 'it was the germ from which all the poetry of his group had sprung.'

La Belle Dame sans mercy is also the title of a poem translated from *Chartier, attributed at one time to *Chaucer, but now thought to be the work of Sir Richard Ros.

'Ode on a Grecian Urn', a poem by *Keats, written 1819, published 1820. 

While he describes the various pastoral scenes of love, beauty, and joy illustrated in the urn, the poet reflects on the eternal quality of art and the fleeting nature of human love and happiness. The last two lines are particularly well known and their meaning much debated:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

'Ode to a Nightingale', a poem by *Keats, written 1819, published 1820.

Keats's friend Charles Brown relates that a nightingale has nested near his house in Hampstead (now known as Keats House), and that on e morning Keats sat under a plum-tree in the garden composing his ode on 'some scraps of paper'. Briefly, the poem is a meditation on the immortal beauty of the nightingale's song and the sadness of the observer, who must in the end accept sorrow and mortality.

 

 

'To Autumn', a poem by *Keats, written Sept. 1819, published 1820. It was his last major poem, and although usually included in a discussion of the Odes (see under ODE), it was not so labelled by Keats himself.

The poem, in three stanzas, is at once a celebration of the fruitfulness of autumn (lightly personified as a figure in various autumnal landscapes) and an elegy for the passing of summer and the transience of life, and its mood has been generally taken to be one of acquiescence. The association of autumn and early death in the mind of Keats is poignantly revealed in a letter to Reynolds (21 Sept. 1819), written immediately after the composition of the poem, in which he says, 'I always somehow associate Chatterton with the autumn'.

Ode on a Grecian Urn: Study Guide