Opening

I don't know how the title "What Does Keats Mean to You" came about.  My intended title is "Keats and Courage in Poetry".  Nonetheless by the end perhaps Keats will mean more to you.

 

A priest a rabbi and a poet are to be executed by guillotine...

 

I will now consider melancholy, John Keats's courage in using it and how to display similar courage in our own writing lives

 

1.

Eric G. Wilson in "In Praise of Melancholy" from The Chronicle Review online from The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the losses that face us today:  global warming, the attrition of the ozone layer, finance, etc.  and then writes:  "... there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous.  We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music.  We are annihilating melancholia."  He goes on to say, "I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life.  I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic..."  He laments the growing disregard for what he calls "the value of sadness."  The result is an ignorance of life's enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy , dejection and ebullience.  He quotes John Keats from a letter in 1819:  "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"  The melancholy fit brings rain and the rain brings nourishment.  Melancholy is  generative.

 

2.

Emily Brady and Arto Haapala in "Melancholy as an Aesthetic Emotion" an article that appeared in Contemporary Aesthetics discuss melancholy in great detail.  Early on they write, "Melancholy invites aesthetic considerations to come into play not only in well-defined aesthetic contexts but also in every day situations that gibe reason for melancholy to arise.  It is the special character of melancholy, and that which differentiates ir froj sadness, sorrow, despair, and depression, which distinguishes it as an asesthetic emotion."  "Melancholy is a mature emotion in which reflection calms a turbulent soul."  It is not a mental disorder.

 

3.

Melancholy is reflective in nature.  Wordsworth tell us :  "I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity:" To quote Brady and Haapala again:  "Melancholy's reflective feature lies in the fact that its objects are often indirectly experienced through memories, thoughts or imaginings related to an absent object."

     Let us not forget that memories even when largely accurate are incomplete and often quite spotty.  This is an advantage to the poet who in reflection has the opportunity for imaginative reflection and sometimes the memory itself is left behind.  This is essential to the creative process.  Brady and Haapala also note that melancholy is always a complex emotion and that it invariably overlaps with the sublime, citing Kant who describes the sublime as a complex feeling that combines both displeasure and pleasure.  Melancholy and the sublime share a high reflective element.  I melancholy we refuse to give into the urge to collapse and cry while in the sublime we never give in to the fear of (nature's) might.  Instead we feel exhilaration of our capacity to cope.  Quoting again, "The desire to prolong the emotion is strong, and yo indulge in the rich feelings by cultivating the mood and lingering in it."  The poet, especially, does this.

 

Melancholy may be described as a feeling inspired by celestial influences and eternal ideas but suffering deeply from human frailty and  intellectual finiteness.

 

The point of these remarks/reflections on melancholy is to point out that as poets we are melancholic, reflective, often sad.  We are at one with if not at home with our emotions.  We dare bare our souls.  We try to write them.  But this is both a gateway and a trap and I would like to address the trap.

 

     In his article Eric Wilson spends a lot of time talking about how we are deluged with books about how to feel happy.  Indeed the happiness business is booming even while the economy is not, perhaps especially while the economy is not.  There are counselors available to address our every angst and in the absence of other methods the drugs available to lift our spirits are legion and let us not neglect the spiritus fermenti-- wine, liquor and beer as well as a host of illegal pain deniers.  Wilson finds it not good that we go to such great lengths to avoid all unhappiness, pain and sorrow.  Keep in mind that he allows the reality of depression and other debilitations as genuine and needing treatment.  However, melancholy, as noted above, is not a mental disorder.

     The trap is that while we immerse ourselves in our pain, our soul-life, the great wrongs we suffer from, the bleak things we feel, we become too engaged with them and obsessively display them.   We bleed too freely onto the page and consider well-crafted honestly to be poetry.

     Going back to its Greek origins, melancholy translates literally into "black bile".

     Pablo Neruda in his Nobel Laureate lecture said poetry comes out of darkness and blood.

     John Keats wrote poetry while literally coughing up his own darkness and blood, his black bile.

 

4.  A short bio

Keats was born in 1795 and lived a life pock-marked with disease and loss.  In 1804 is father died from a fractured skull after a fall from a horse.  The next year his grandfather died and his mother who had remarried soon left her husband and moved with her four children in with Keats's grandmother.  In 1810 he nursed his mother while she died of tuberculosis.  In 1818 his brother Tom died of tuberculosis and by 1820, at age 25 John Keats himself showed signs of tuberculosis.  He succumbed to the disease in 1821.  All of his great odes were written in 1819 and published the next year year.

 

5. 

     It is fair to say John Keats had sufficient cause to collapse to the ground and lament his sorrows.  He could have written beautifully about them.  Rather, he pursued the art of poetry, worked to create beauty which he found in the melancholy-sublime polarity.  He tok poetry to be the art it is and granted it his detachment from his own lamentations, sorrow and melancholy.  This is a courageous thing although I doubt he saw it so.  To sacrifice oneself to art, to the creation of beauty is courageous and can be seen as grace under fire.

     The ancient Greeks saw poetry as the highest merging of form and content.  THE HIGHEST MERGING OF FORM AND CONTENT.  This is an art of considerable responsibility.  We often hear that the art is on loan to us.  I think it is the opposite-- we are on loan to the art and thus our responsibility to it demands courage and tremendous hard work to measure up.  And still, as Randall Jarrell reminds us, we still need to be struck by lightning.  Again I don't think Keats would have seen it so.

     Part of the challenge we face today is our tendency to wait to be struck and thus we spend too little time preparing for the bolt.  George and Ira Gershwin wrote music every day and gave us a few great works.  Some of their work was not so great-- I have a CD at home of player piano rolls written by George.  If they had not practiced their art daily could they have measured up to the lightning?  For all his production, Keats practiced without ceasing.  Keep this in mind.

 

So, here we have a poet who spends most of his productive life dying and knowing it.  His letters are touching, honest, not terribly sorrowful and not often things of beauty.  His poems soar with the best ever done in the language and they soar because of the detachment from his own life that lets him see the firmament and witness to it in all its melancholy and sublimeness and he gives us both.  He recollects, reflects and chronicles the black bile as if it were just a fact of life among other facts and transforms these mere facts into unsurpassed beauty by way of the art and craft of poetry.  And he never lets us off the hook.  Call it what you will, agony and ecstasy, darkness and light, heaven and hell.  They co-exist and inform each other.

 

Here is the Ode on Melancholy

 

Ode on Melancholy

NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,	5
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.	10
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,	15
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.	20
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight	25
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.	30

 

So, alive with death, Keats tells us how to engage melancholy and the sublime that coexists with it.  But, leaving the meaning aside, this is a poem of extraordinary beauty, craft, poetic accomplishment.  It's a staggering achievement.  Its sound brings joy.  This is joy while telling us that joy will die.  It is not masochistic.  It is simply joy.  Except that joy will leave, immediately.  In fact, in some ways it was never here, not alone anyway.

 

In the poem, look at the perfect balance, the contrasts and the ambiguities in the final line.  The poem resolves perfectly but with a grand ambiguity-- quite an achievement.  Reading the poem many times fails to exhaust the meaning.  This is in part due to the ambiguities (just as Frost's poems drive us (me) nuts with ambiguity and counter claim upon counter claim) and also each time we re-read the poem we come to it with more experience that affirms the truth of the poem.  Here we have not only courage but genius.  Lightning in an urn if I may use a displaced pun.

 

A note on nightshade

This plant comes from a family that includes Datura (Jimson weed), mandrake, deadly nightshade (belladonna), capsicum (paprika, chili pepper), potato, tobacco, tomato, eggplant and petunia.  Within the word we have that which feeds and that which kills, nurture and death, melancholy and sublime.  Additionally, nightshade is thought in its flowers to resemble the rays of the sun.  Yet it does not thrive in sunlight.  The images are potent and both overtly and latently reinforce the central polarity of the poem.

 

6. 

The meaning of the poem is clear:  Do not dull ourselves to the "wakeful anguish" of our souls if wwe are to make the most of our souls.  Joy and sadness co-mingle, indeed, co-habit.  Finding beauty, that is the sublime, we become its victim even as we succeed in achieving it.

     For a moment let us see the poem as about poetry, a lesson in writing.

          The first stanza tells us to approach the process openly, soberly, without dodging sadness (melancholy) with death or drug.

          The second urges us to stay with the melancholy reflectiveness, the darkness, the shroud, the rain that ultimately will nurture.  Not only stay with it but let ir rave.  Let us pause here to ponder that.   Referring to the earlier comment that memory is not only inaccurate but often left behind during recollection and reflection we understand that imaginative reflection will often, very often, takeover-- this is the essence of the creative process, one we are not necessarily in control of and, in my opinion, one we are better off not to be in control of.  This is the mistress we must let rave.  We must ride the storm out and "feed deep" upon it.  We must,must let her rave else we will not reach the feast.  The problem then is to put the content to form.

 

 

7.

          The result of the pursuit of beauty, the sublime that comes out of our surrender to melancholy will be "aching pleasure" that turns into poison, that very thing we are urged to shun in the first stanza.  In fact, in the end, we are dead.  We are trophies hung on a wall.  Yet, we are never more alive than in the creative process.  We live by dying and die by living.  I call to mind Andrew Wyeth commenting on the seasons:  "I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show."

 

8.

 

Now on to what we can learn from Keats and our own reflections.  Key words from "Ode on Melancholy":

     "strenuous tongue" and "palate fine"

          These words imply work, study, preparation, practice, all the attributes of the wine taster.  Grape appears twice in the poem and is thus of some importance.  Again, considering the polarities of the poem, the only way to get wine is to crush the grape, to destroy it.  The only way to have a palate fine is to cultivate it.  The wine taster always notes the finish on the palate-- does it linger, is it pleasant, is it full or felt in the front, upper, back, lower, mid-palate?  But the focus is on the fact that the wine finishes.  Only those whose strenuous tongue can burst joy's grape on palate fine will see melancholy residing in  Delight's sovran shrine.  Only the poet who is ready and practiced as the Gershwins, will harvest the fruit of melancholy.

 

GO FROM HERE TO THE PRACTICAL WORK--  The reading of 14 poems (Molly Peacock) or of reading one poem fourteen times, etc.

 

9.

 

Having come this far it is now time to look at what we can learn from Keats's work that will help our own.

 

A.  Detach ourselves from self and dedicate ourselves to artistry.  that is, when we bare our souls andponder our pain, rather than let the pain be the soul of the poem let the pain be the vehicle that transcends itself into imaginative reflection on the greater world the pain inhabits.  This is not to disavow the pain but to honor it.  In the writing, the act of writing, remain conscious of the art of poetry in its expressive nature:

     Sound, content, form poetic devices, theme metaphor, language, beauty, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, repetition, long and short vowel sounds, consonants, consonance etc.

 

B.  More tangibly, prepare.  Molly Peacock says to read fifteen poems for each one you write.  Good advice.  Better advice is to read one great poem fifteen times for every one you write.  Study HOW it means not what it means.  Why each word?  Why each line break?  Why each stanza break?  Why write the poem?  Identify the sonic elements-- meter, rhyme, assonance etc.-- all the poetic devices.  Read the poem aloud.  As the wine taster does, notice the mouth feel.  Does the poem read better silently?  Listen to the poem read by another.  (Do this with your own poems.)  Read it a month later, a year later-- how has it changed?

 

C.  Memorize poems.  Knowing poems is a wonderful thing.  It makes them live and they become part of you.  Write them out in long hand.    This will teach you much and impress the poem upon you.  As you work with poems, studying an memorizing, they become you, part of what consciously and subconsciously informs your work.  The more you have to draw from the more you have to draw from.

 

D.  Practice daily and practice specifically.  Keats and Leigh Hunt spent afternoons in sonnet competitions-- they knew the forms, by heart.  Charles Wright was the poet who impressed me the most with the logic of writing every day.  Of course I knew I couldn't do it but when I realized that the concert pianist practices hours at an art no greater than my own I tried a lot harder to write more often and have in fact written almost every day for periods as long as fifteen months.

 

E.  Work you poems.  Revision is a word so over-used it is largely meaningless.  We need to bring it back to life. First understand that we tend to revise for meaning and understanding.  This must change for it enslaves us to what we want and not what an art demands.  Dedicate revision as well to HOW the poem means.  This means conscious applications of the elements of the poetic art to your poems.  Learn the craft.  Learn the craft.  Learn the craft. 

 

The more you write, the better at revising in service to the art, the easier it will become to write more realized first drafts.  Emerson in his essay "Poetry" speaks of "meter-making argument".  Notably "meter-making" is hyphenated, making it an adjective modifying "argument".  Thus he is tel;ling us that the right "argument" will yield, come to us, in its own preferred form.  This gets easier the more you know about poetry and poetics, the more poems in your memory, the more time spent "feeding deep upon her peerless eyes".  The zone will be more efficiently productive and revisions will be quicker.

 

Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,

And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast.

Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans

To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;

Although your rudder be a dragon's tail

Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony.

Your cordage large uprootings from the skull

Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail

To find the Melancholy—whether she

Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.

 

This is a wisely discarded opening stanza to "Ode on Melancholy".  Even the great ones have to do the work.

 

10.

 

Poetry is a demanding art.  The courage of Keats resides in his ability to dedicate himself to an art while waatching the blade descend.  His miselry was not his art and he made no art of it.  Poetry was his art.  Melancholy was in his life yet his "Ode on Melancholy" is at once melancholic and sublime.  As art it is only sublime.

 

The only way to do justice to our passions is by courageously dedicating ourselves to the art of poetry.  Our passions are not unique.  All people feel and hurt as much as we.  The art alone can set them apart.  Take your place on the guillotine; lie face up.  As the blade descends, tell me what you learn.  Remember:  Write as if the blade is descending.  After all, it is.

 

 

As you work with poems, studying, memorizing, they

become yours, part of what consciously and subconsciously informs your work.  the more you have to draw from the more you have to draw from.

 

 

 

Don't leave out:

     As you read, study, understand and memorize poems they become part of you-- you own them.  Their artistry and workings become yours. they become you and yours.  this heightened awareness then informs your writing process thus improving your poetry and your poems.  The magic, then, is that the knowledge of poetics will inform your content as your content informs your poetics thus setting up a creative rhythm not altogether in your control.  Have the courage to ride out this storm, to surrender your control and let the art happen.  You become a tool, a participant.  You often hear that the art is on loan to you.  I prefer the opposite,  I am on loan to the art and if I serve it well it will serve me.  Keats served the art, courageously did not serve himself and did not think the art served him.

     Remember too that even with great courage, with the rigorous application of all I mention here and all you bring to the process there is no guarantee you'll ever write a great poem, or even a really good one.  To do so you must also be struck by lightning and part of the mystery is that we are not likely to be aware

when it is happening.  Again, this art takes courage and part of that is the courage to repeatedly fail-- but to fail beautifully.

As Wayne Gretsky says, "You miss one hundred per-cent of the shots you don't take."

 

 

 

 

---

16 January 2009   Andrew Wyeth died today.  Most readers recognize the iconic images of Robin Hood and King Arthur and poor David Balfour clinging to a shattered ship in a stormy sea, etc - all painted by Andrew's father, NC Wyeth.  Andrew Wyeth's own artistic legacy seems assured to me, though his reputation ebbs and flows according to the politics of his critics.  In this, of course, he has much in common with John Keats.

However, I mention Wyeth's death because of a statement he made in an interview years ago: "I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.  I think anything like that — which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"

 

 

"The ruby grape of Proserpine"-- She is Demeter's daughter and is the queen of that which closes over and ends.  Her flowers in the myth drop from her skirt, are hidden in the ground and then re-grow as well.  There is much written and much said by and about Keats regarding the endless co-presence of the melancholy and the sublime in the same moment.  The grape, mentioned twice in the poem, is a complex metaphor for experience and on reflection is found inexhaustible as the best metaphors are.

 

Keats's courage reveals itself partly in the revising.  Look at the difference between his final opening stanza and this discarded one:

 

 

 

 

 

One of the ways in which we can get more couragous in our own writing is to look more closely at the sonic features of our poems, especially in revision.

Rhythm, meter, end rhyme, internal rhyme, near rhyme, alliteration, repititions-- we tend to revise for meaning, not for sound and beauty.  This is often the result of wanting to make sure our language is fresh, new and full of impact because what we are saying is so damned important when how we say it is at least as important as what we say, maybe moreso. 

 

Another example of courage is Emily Dickinson's writing:  Look at her poems and imagine them without the dashes, the hyphens.  They were original published without them, the editor having removed them.  Many of these poems become sing-songy when read straight without the dashes.  The sonic value of the meter is less than the sonic value of the poems read with the hyphens and the meaning is far more dramatic.  This at a time when good editors did indeed look for rhymey-dimey stuff and the public did too.  And let us not forget that Ms. Dickinson was a woman.  Still, the sacrifice for the art won and the creation of beautiful verse resulted in great poems.