Kleist’s “A Poet’s Letter to Another”

 

A new translation of Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” precedes a discussion of the author’s poetics. 

1.      A Poet’s Letter to Another

 Recently, when I found you reading my poetry, you went on with extraordinary eloquence about form and applauded me using the terms of the school where, you like to presume, I was educated.  You praised me in a way that made me feel ashamed, dwelling on the appropriateness of the underlying meter, of the rhythm, of the charm of melody and the purity and correctness of expression and the language in general.  Please allow me to say your mind lingers on those topics by your own choice.  It would have proven the greatest worth, had you not noticed these characteristics at all.  If I could grasp my heart while composing, detach my thoughts and present them to you without any further elaboration, you too, friend, it seems to me, would find nothing then lacking.  A thirsty person cares little about the bowl but rather is concerned with the fruits that are brought to him in it.   It is only because the thought, like certain evanescent, unrepresentable, chemical substances, must be linked with something more coarse and physical in order to appear visible that I use such devices when I write to you, and you then go looking for speech, language, cadence, and musicality.  Delightful as these things may be to the extent that they reveal the spirit, still, in and of themselves, when observed from this higher point of view, they are nothing but a genuine, if understandable and necessary, evil.  With reference to such things, art can only strive to conceal them as much as possible.  I take pains to do my best to give my expressions clarity, the verse form significance, and to lend grace and life to the sound of the words.  My goal is that the art should not appear at all but rather the thought alone which the words embody.  For it is a characteristic of all correct form to express the spirit instantly and without mediation while a deficient form, like a bad mirror, is constricting and can bring nothing to mind but itself.   If as your first impression, you praise the formal qualities of my little unpretentious literary works, you arouse in me quite naturally a concern that my poems possess altogether false rhythmic and prosodic associations and that your consciousness fastens on the melody or the pattern of the verses matters entirely removed from what had I had really cared about.  Otherwise why would you fail to respond to the spirit I took pains to put into words just as one would do in conversation, when I had hoped to encounter your spirit with my own without attention to the clothing of my thought?  Your insensitivity to the heart and essence of poetry and your highly developed responsiveness for form and the accidental (amounting nearly to disease) dominates your judgement as a result, I would say, of the school of thought from which you come.  Doubtless this is not the intention of that school which is as clever as any that has appeared among us, though not entirely without fault, considering the paradoxical mischief of its teachings.  But this insensitivity to the essence and core of poetry, with the irritability developed up to the point of illness, for the accidental and the formal, is a habit of your mind in general due to the school from which you come.   I have noticed that, when reading the work of writers altogether different from me, your eye cannot, to use a proverbial expression, see the forest for the trees.  When we take Shakespeare in hand, how unproductive are the interests to which your taste leads you in comparison to the great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances this splendid poet should awaken in your heart!  How could I be concerned about repartee and witty wordplay on the bloody field of Agincourt?  Or when Ophelia says of Hamlet “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”  Or Macduff of Macbeth “He has no children.”  What value then remains to the iambs, rhymes, assonances and such devices, to which your ear is always attuned as if nothing else mattered? - Farewell!

 

 

2.       

     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” is a manifesto of hyper-Romanticism, fetishizing the value of imaginative production and suggesting that artistic works carry content that is miraculously beyond language, though necessarily expressed in inadequate words.   With a kind of belated neo-Platonic weakness for the abstract, Kleist, a writer whose works consist of words and words alone, insists that the materiality of his discourse, the ink on the page or sounds in the air, is an unfortunate concomitant of its more essential ethereal message.  This latter and more significant burden of his poetry proves, however, ineffable. 

     What makes this claim all the more Romantic is the heightened value attributed to poetry when properly understood which for Kleist borders on religious revelation.  For him the thoughts welling from his heart are paramount.  Just what these are he does not say, but he boldly maintains that that his poetry is required for life, like fruit to a thirsty man.  Ideally, he notes, the reception of poetry might resemble a conversation in which the mind of the reader engages that of the writer, but such an encounter is precluded by the reader’s obsession with literariness itself which blocks the vision of the reality beyond the page the writer seeks to project.  Kleist’s correspondent, he complains, cannot properly appreciate poetry due to his allegiance to a particular misguided “school” with presumably some variety of an academic or neo-Classical view of art as craft.  Such a view, Kleist maintains, misses the poetry, perceiving only the poetic usages.

      He makes, then, two claims.  First, endows the aesthetic product with immense if ill-defined potential and second, he insists that literary reception must be unselfconscious and, in a sense, preverbal, a matter of mind meeting mind in which words are potentially obstacles.  Such claims might seem both arrogant and obscurantist.  Kleist certainly conveys no interest in the other poet’s work, yet the reader has only Kleist’s passion to certify that his vision and his poetry are at all superior to those of his correspondent.  These grand claims are as well undermined in part by Kleist’s concession that his work is weighed down from the first by the “coarse” material of language.

     This posture could be taken as an index of the poet’s enthusiasm.  Like a shaman he assumes the role of messenger delivering revelations from beyond, and, like the shaman, he depends largely on faith.  In a more modest way writers today assert similar authority when they say that a poem “just came to me,” that “I couldn’t help writing it.”   

      Many people, of course, apart from critics, consume art with a minimum of analytic attention to its machinery.  For centuries the art that conceals art has been praised, but that is a refinement of craftsmanship, the polishing that erases the marks of the constructor’s hand, the final flourish of skill.  Kleist’s disavowal of literary professionalism is something else altogether, more a matter of mysticism or spirituality than of art alone.  In the Platonic hierarchy philosophy always trumps poetry.

      Yet Kleist’s importunate assertion of the importance of his utterance, his desire to silence competing poets and hold the stage alone, does not really differ from what any artist must do, seeking to attract attention to a single voice in a vast cacophony of voices.  Whether the maker is modest or not personally, on the page or on the gallery wall each can only scream for attention just as we all did as infants.  And as for the literary devices, those are like to magician’s (and the shaman’s) bag of tricks, and the show would be ruined were all its secrets out. 

      Kleist’s letter could be read as well as a lament for the inadequacy of signifiers, a frustrated struggle to escape the fabric of discourse.  Since, even with the substantial enhancements of rhetoric, signifier is always to some extent incongruent with signified, the writer is condemned to a kind of eternal failure, never quite able to embody his consciousness fully and precisely in words, unable to program every reader with precisely the desired algorithm. 

     Kleist’s letter dramatically articulates the Romantic elevation of art to a virtually religious significance while at the same time undercutting itself by describing the artist’s failure to communicate his mental concept to his friend and fellow poet.  He balances this ambivalence by an homage to Shakespeare’s success, implying that his own effusions have something at least in common with that author’s sublime genius than with mere earth-bound literary theory. 

      I have always considered that in literary theory (as in politics) he who acknowledges a partisan position is more reliable than one claiming objectivity, for such a claim means only that the critic either does not recognize or does not care to admit bias.  Kleist’s idea that art is above calculation and craft is less a critical principle than a rhetorical figure similar to the love poem that says “words cannot describe her beauty.”  Surely he was himself conscious of the labor and skill required to construct literary works.  Thus this letter has more in common with twentieth century literary manifestoes, meant to provoke and attract attention more than to set forth and defend a set of contentions about the aesthetic text.

      In “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts While Speaking”) Kleist explicitly recommends emptying the mind as a strategy not merely for the proper reception of poetry, but for problem-solving in general.  He says that simply to begin speaking on a topic, without prior plan, will produce new insights and solutions.  Troping on “l'appetit vient en mangeant,” he says, “l’idee vient en parlant.”

      These ideas are presented more artfully and suggestively in the better-known essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Marionette Theater”).  There the acting of the puppets is praised over that of humans specifically because a pesky human consciousness will cloud the waters by introducing “affectation” (“Ziererei”).  The fifteen-year-old whose beauty captured a stranger’s attention in the baths can no longer maintain his charm once he is aware he is being observed.  Self- consciousness is the curse of the exile from Eden.  Here Kleist explicitly claims that thought leads not to wisdom and beauty but to their loss.  Enlightenment can only arise in its absence. 

      Kleist here provides a specific quasi-scientific image to illustrate his vision. 

  

We can see how in the organic world as reflection lessens and darkens, grace emerges and comes to the fore more brightly.  It is just like passing through the intersection of two lines to come out on the other side of that point after passing through infinity or the image in a concave mirror which, after vanishing into the distance, suddenly appears again right in front of us.  In this same way grace emerges when understanding has passed through infinity.  Grace will appear most purely in a human form with either an infinite consciousness or none at all.  That is, either in the puppet or in the god. [1]

 

 Whether there is any topographical meaning to Kleist’s figure I cannot say, but the question seems moot since the meaning is clearly that bipolar oppositions are ultimately unified as the extreme of one is transformed into its contrary.  The use of similar structures is common in mystical and apocalyptic thought and familiar in such Christian concepts as the mortal deity, the virgin mother, leaving the father to join the father, and death made eternal life.

   The reader of Kleist’s letter might then assume that the heart’s truth the writer is so anxious to deliver is simply that the individual might ideally attain through poetry a position of sublime wisdom from which one can see that, in the last analysis, contraries are illusory and one may in contemplation unite with the cosmos.  In art such an alteration of consciousness does not follow from systematic reasoning.  On the contrary, it arrives when one forgets oneself.  The vanishing ego suddenly is succeeded by an oceanic feeling. [2]  Kleist’s examples from Shakespeare demonstrate that, far from arising from philosophic disputation, this enlightened state of mind may be inspired by the sympathetic experience of strong, even tragic experience which he says creates in the soul “great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances.”

 

 

1.  The passage is sufficiently opaque that I include here the original German and an alternative translation. 

Wir sehen, daß in dem Maße, als, in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion dunkler und schwächer wird, die Grazie darin immer strahlender und herrschender hervortritt. - Doch so, wie sich der Durchschnitt zweier Linien, auf der einen Seite eines Punkts, nach dem Durchgang durch das Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der andern Seite einfindet, oder das Bild des Hohlspiegels, nachdem es sich in das Unendliche entfernt hat, plötzlich wieder dicht vor uns tritt: so findet sich auch, wenn die Erkenntnis gleichsam durch ein Unendliches gegangen ist, die Grazie wieder ein; so, daß sie, zu gleicher Zeit, in demjenigen menschlichen Körperbau am reinsten erscheint, der entweder gar keins, oder ein unendliches Bewußtsein hat, d. h. in dem Gliedermann, oder in dem Gott.

This is the rendering of Idris Parry published in the Southern Cross Review #9: "We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."

 

2.      Kleist is much closer to Romain Rolland’s original usage of the term than to Freud’s diminished meaning, though even for Freud this feeling fades as the separate ego develops at the end of breast-feeding. 

Not Quite a Jackpot: Erskine Caldwell's Short Stories

Whatever else may be said of him, Erskine Caldwell was prodigiously productive and wildly popular. Though his best-known works were early -- Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre -- he was the author of several dozen novels, something like a hundred and fifty short stories, and a variety of other works. Attempts to censor at least two of his novels resulted in considerable notoriety and sizable sales. For the next twenty-five years he enjoyed best-seller status with his work widely available in inexpensive trade paperbacks offered in the racks in bus stations and drug stores with cover art and copy promising erotic fiction. The formula worked so well that he sold eventually something like a hundred million books.

He received attention from the start as a regionalist at a time when the American South seemed almost as fertile a field for fiction as the Jewish Lower East Side, and he doubtless benefited from the vogue for the proletarian novel and perhaps from liberal indignation at the attempts to ban his work, yet his critical reputation never approached his enormous sales. Apart from his exceedingly successful career as an author of potboilers, his belief in the eugenics movement and his conviction that many of the “poor white trash” were irredeemably degenerate through some biological devolution eventually alienated many of his progressive supporters.

The weighty volume of stories titled Jackpot, over seven hundred pages, seems at times like a collection of improvisations. The language is simple, direct, and transparent, but not in the exaggerated way associated with Hemingway. Each piece is very short, no longer than it might take a front porch lounger to deliver a bit of neighborhood news, satisfactorily heightened to make an impact.

Some of Caldwell’s stories do sound like just such gossipy anecdotes, a few have the ring of regionalist tales like those of George Washington Harris. Stories like “Meddlesome Jack” and “It Happened Like This,” and “Hamrick’s Polar Bear” sound like anecdotes that might have been current in oral form. As much, though as Caldwell is identified as a close observer of poor and feckless white Southerners, he had little difficulty in switching to similar characters in rural Maine when he lived there.

Caldwell was capable of social realism as protest as well, displayed in stories such as “Slow Death” and “Knife to Cut the Corn Bread With.” He pulls no punches in the depiction of vicious and violent racism as in “The End of Christy Tucker,” “Blue Boy,” and “The Negro in the Well.” A sort of mute, unthinking violence lurks always near the surface of his action, breaking out in stories like “The Growing Season,” “The First Autumn,” and “The Shooting.”

He was, of course, best-known for sexual content, an appeal enhanced by paperback cover art by artists like James Avati and Hans Helweg. A good many of the stories in Jackpot describe the dawn of desire in adolescents who barely understand their feelings as in “The Strawberry Season” or “Indian Summer,” sometimes in a comic vein as in “A Day’s Wooing,” “Snacker,” or “Where the Girls Were Different.” Erotic desire may be mysteriously inexorable as in “Warm River,” “Crown-fire,” or “A Dream,” rudely imperative as in “Midsummer Passion,” or calculating as in “Maud Island.”

These last two stories also illustrate the characteristic mixture of sex and violence typical of an author who presents virtually no examples of real and mutual love. In “Rachel” the theme of adolescent sexuality is combined with excruciating poverty. The narrator glimpses Rachel’s “sinuous beauty” at the moment she begins to die from ingesting rat poison. In “Martha Jean” another indigent young girl is raped, and in “The Lonely Day” Katherine is led to her death by an irresistible siren call of naked frolics.

My copy of Jackpot, the 1943 Sun Dial Press edition, includes brief headnotes for each story in a bluff style presaging the author’s late career in men’s magazines with names like Gent, Cavalier, and Male. While stressing his identity as a writer, these regularly suggest the informal, almost chance character of his compositions and ridicule critics with authentic American anti-intellectual vitriol in terms like “bloated middleman.” Such critics, according to Caldwell, “make a profession of tearing flesh from bone” and, failing to understand a story, they may well ”set out to prove that the author was a jail-bird and a wife-beater.” Oddly, though his career was in fact launched by the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who published and promoted him after he had been recommended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Caldwell in these notes repeatedly ridicules a certain Prof. Perkins, making him the surrogate for all the pointy-headed critics who did not sufficiently praise his work.

Perhaps the truest note of Caldwell’s sensibility is suggested by a story such as “The Automobile that Wouldn’t Run” whose protagonist prefers to avoid work if possible and to sit in an engineless car serenading a lady with his banjo. According to another of his prefatory notes his wise grandfather maintained that “storytelling was a bastard art because it had been created by tellers of tales for the sole purpose of making laziness respectable.” The same sage, he says, rated every story “either a hum-dinger” or else “god-awful.” Substitute a typewriter for a banjo and one might approach Caldwell’s idealized version of himself. This insouciant image of the artist may not be wholly a pose. Once Caldwell learned how to sell his work, he turned out appropriate product in sufficient quantity to support himself. When he says that he does not read his own work the reader may guess that that policy includes eschewing revision.

An opinion that goes against the grain is often more engaging that a reinforcement of the general view of others. I am afraid I can only agree with the critics Caldwell feared. In the best moments as I read his stories, I was reminded of the unsparing though often comic portrayals of small towns in Huckleberry Finn where ignorance thrives and violence is never far off. The racial themes are reminiscent of Faulkner and the erotic ones of Nabokov, but simply mentioning these names emphasizes how far Caldwell fell short of the achievements of the American masters. Nonetheless, he has a place in the history of literature. These stories seem to me, however, less a jackpot than a modest trickling weekly allowance, dependable if never dazzling.

The Verbal Dance of the Blues

This is meant as the personal and theoretical introductory essay to a volume of analyses of blues lyrics. I had thought of using “The Poetry of the Blues” which focuses on W. C. Handy’s story of the genre’s origin in this place, but that has been rewritten to follow “The Verbal Dance of the Blues.” At present eighteen essays offering close readings of blues lyrics as poetry are already posted on this site.


     My familiarity with the blues began in childhood, though my home environment could hardly have been more distant from the country porches where the music was born. I grew up within a few miles of the dark and smoky Chicago barrooms where the leading exponents of electrified blues performed, but in a suburb, separated by race and class and culture from their music. I did have the advantage of a hip older brother who special-ordered 45s by John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Frogman” Henry and 33s by Robert Johnson and Robert Pete Williams at the little village record store. His taste may have surprised the clerks, but he was hardly unique. The folk music vogue was rising and, while some favored concert stylings of Anglo-American ballads or original topical material, I was one among many who found in the Mississippi Delta blues a beauty and a power unavailable elsewhere.
     When I was fifteen a slightly older friend and I drove east, stopping at coffee houses to hear what we could of acoustic blues live. I remember Fritz Richmond before he joined Jim Kweskin at the Gaslight and Skip James singing for a half dozen people at a little place within sight of Harvard Gate where a drunken student kept asking him to play “St. James Infirmary.” Back in Chicago my friends and I located live music venues that would not ask for i.d. such as the Club Alex on Roosevelt Road where Magic Sam led the house band. Now and then the Regal Theatre would host a “big blues extravaganza” featuring a solid lineup of now legendary musicians.
     Later as a student of literature and a writer myself I turned from impressionistic appreciation to critical analysis of the literary devices that allowed this music of the poor and oppressed to attain such sophistication and artistry. These essays arise from a lifetime of listening, but also from knowledge of poetry around the world and through the centuries. Perhaps my readings can make a modest contribution to the recognition of the place of American blues lyrics among the greatest achievements of twentieth century American poetry.
     In poetry as in language itself, complexity does not develop over time; it is present from the start. It is in fact an axiom in linguistics that the most complex grammatically languages, those richest in morphological possibilities, are the unwritten ones. With writing, standardization, and time languages seem to become simpler. Thus English has lost the three genders, the dual forms (meaning neither singular nor plural but two) as well as numerous sounds such as the fricative produced in the back of the throat and vestigially represented by the gh in words like light. Vowel sounds once distinct collapse toward a shwa, and dialectical variations fade.
     In the past folk song, like unwritten languages, was often considered “primitive,” rudimentary, and naïve. For the early advocates of such music the motive was often nationalistic as in the cases of Arnim and Brentano, Burns, and Dvořák. The texts of oral poetry were thought to be not so much the work of individual artists as a collective expression of the people as a whole. In the twentieth century folklorists like John Work, the Lomaxes and Harry Oster generally emphasized sociological rather than artistic implications of the material they collected.
     A more sophisticated view of unwritten songs developed with the understanding of oral literature that came with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry and Lord provided ample proof that each oral text is unique, the work of a specific singer, some gifted poets and others with lesser skills. They demonstrated that the use of conventions and formulaic phrases do not vitiate meaning and, in the use of a master, may increase a poem’s semantic density and subtlety.
     Poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha encouraged the treatment of traditional oral texts as works of art, provocatively suggesting that they share techniques with modern avant-gardists and vastly multiplying the readership of poems recorded by anthropologists most of whom (Dennis Tedlock was an early exception) thought of the contents of their field notebooks as scientific data rather than aesthetic objects.
     Such developments have laid a theoretical base for a literary treatment of the blues songs of the Mississippi Delta, a corpus preserved on commercial recordings as well as by folklorists and appreciated by generations of listeners far from life in the Jim Crow rural South. Expressions of enthusiasm such as “Blues are my religion!” while all very well convey nothing of the artistry of the songs themselves. The highly developed conventions and shared allusive language that links song to song resemble those of Greek epigrams, Troubadour cansos, and Elizabethan sonnets, producing a marvelously expressive verbal medium capable of producing beauty as striking and themes as profound as any poetry in American literature.
     In spite of the rarity of direct social comment in the blues, their vision reflects American racism in DuBoisian “double consciousness,” providing a natural “hip” insight to question and enrich each singer’s descriptions. In this it surely reflects a phenomenon evident as well in jazz and rap and more broadly in the musical prominence of the Gnaoui in the Maghreb who were likewise descended from slaves, as well as the Roma, musicians to all classes of Eastern Europe for centuries, though too often otherwise despised. How else has it come that so many important American writers have been Jews and so many contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arundhati Roy are bicultural?
     Blues songs address the strongest human passion of eros. Many directly confront mortality, sometimes with Christian apologetics, sometimes without the aid of revelation. A good many might be said to be philosophical expressing existential Angst or ebullient joy. Thus the blues lyrics engage with the most ambitious themes of world literature -- love death and god – no less than Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare.
     Though the blues have long had intellectual appreciators who never experienced, they have rarely received the sort of appreciative explication given writers in the accepted canon. Their manipulation of listener expectations through the use of conventions and set phrases means that these lyrics require close as well as appreciative reading.
     I present here close readings of some of the masterpieces of the Delta blues by which I hope to demonstrate the beauty, expressiveness, and efficiency of the form. Behind these interpretations is the dynamo of my love for the music, unchanged since I first heard these recordings as a schoolboy. Marooned as I felt in suburbia, singers like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson opened my vision every bit as much as Homer and Goethe. Several of these essays concern image clusters or points of blues history rather than stanza by stanza explication, but the thrust of my entire project is to make a case for this body of great American poetry.

On the Intrusion of Non-aesthetic Criteria in Value Judgements about Art

For thousands of years most people have believed a proposition that seems to me absurd on its face: the idea that art should inculcate good behavior, that good literature teaches morality, often accompanied by the fear that exposure to bad art can encourage unethical actions. This belief is widespread in spite of the fact that artists have no greater access to truth than others and lack even training in philosophy or religion. Few, I think, would suspect that poets, painters, or professors of literature have any more orderly lives than philistines, yet the idea of the value of art as moral instruction has persisted through the centuries. The fact is that poets are distinguished by their ability to manipulate words, visual artists for their facility with form, composers with patterns of sound, and for nothing else at all. Creativity has no correlation with morality.

It is no surprise that such non-aesthetic criteria are advanced by governments and churches, institutions that know nothing of beauty, but they also appear in critics who should know better. In fact the theoretical association between art and ethics descends from archaic times. Oral cultures transmit their myths and mores through song, drama, sculpture, and story which often embody largely unquestioned “truths” about prudential or god-pleasing behavior. Poetry for such people is the most effective coding of all sorts of knowledge including moral judgements and political theory. Early writers saw teaching people how to behave as one of their most important functions. Plato’s doubts about the moral reliability of poetry led him to advocate censorship (he was blind to the similar unreliability of philosophy). The didactic role of literature was eventually enshrined in a dictum so influential it has been called “the Horatian platitude”: poetry should “teach and delight.” [1] This notion was then maintained by Augustine’s tempered acceptance of poetry as a possible aid toward salvation. Sidney continued the notion that poets work “to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.” Shelley, too, thought “the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue” (though some of his contemporaries would have been skeptical of his right to that description).

This assumption persisted until the age of Romanticism when an exalted view of imagination allowed beauty to displace truth altogether in the old formula. Strengthened by the proponents of “art for art’s sake” in the late Victorian era, by the mid-twentieth century, one of the most prominent critics could flatly declare “Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality is intolerably vulgar.” Many critics would now agree that “Our very idea of art precludes adherence” to the association of poetry with morality. [2] Yet a considerable revanchment has occurred as well, primarily associated with feminism and soi-disant progressivism and associated with the critical schools labeled new historicism, cultural criticism, gender studies, and the like which too often fired with self-righteous indignation employ the crudest instruments of Marxism to reduce art to mere social data. In practice the moral responsibility of art has been extended to the maker as well. An immoral poet has been thought to produce necessarily unworthy work, while, by the same erroneous principle, the virtues of an upright writer may seem to enhance the value of what he writes. The entire framework is repeated in the realm of social, not personal, morality, which is to say politics. An ethically motivated critics would find a defender of slavery, say, sinful and therefore capable of producing only flawed poetry, while a progressive or revolutionary writer is likely to be celebrated.

These days we hear little about people being led astray by licentious literature, but this was the cry of philistines and bluenoses for centuries. Socrates, after all, was executed for corrupting the youth. Those who closed the theaters (not just in the U. K. in 1642, and in the United States at the time of its birth in 1774 and 1778) regularly maintained that attending plays fosters licentious behavior. In recent American culture the same impulse is evident in censorship of Joyce, Henry Miller [3], and Allen Ginsberg.

Sometimes the political and personal are so mingled they can hardly be separated. When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)

More recently, in a development disturbing to progressive aesthetes, those claiming to oppose racism and other oppression have turned against the easier opponent of art. Thus would-be critics in a popular and influential critical edition of Jane Austen’s Emma criticize the author for her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” and for her refusal to admit that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.” [4] Only a singularly obtuse reader would use such irrelevant and anachronistic language to speak of the novel.

Rulers wreak more havoc than obtuse critics, though, when they conflate of art and morality. Apart from its centrality in literary theory until recent times this confusion in its political form has, not surprisingly, been an assumption of authoritarian regimes of all sorts. The very same erroneous standards appeared in the hunt for heretics by the medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church, Nazi condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art, the Stalinist imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932, and fundamentalist Islam’s disapproval of images and music. Each of these represents an attempt by the rulers to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values. Such misguided and reductive judgements take place in somewhat democratic societies as well. Last year San Francisco was asked to remove the WPA murals by Communist painter Victor Arnautoff in George Washington High School with the excuse that they should be replaced by “more positive” images. These pictures were targeted specifically because they did include representation of the genocidal attacks of native people and the viciousness of slavery.

All such critics cannot be condemned as know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.

Should the work of a poet or painter lose stature because its creator beats his wife? No more than one would refuse the attendance of a celebrated surgeon if one found he supported Generalissimo Trump. Clearly a person may excel in one arena of life, in a profession, for example, while misbehaving badly in others. Skill does not excuse a vicious person, but neither does the creator’s immoral behavior invalidate or weaken the work.

Of course, ethics and politics have an important role to play in making human life livable, even sometimes civilized. I by no means discount the importance of morality in evaluating societies and individual character, but these have nothing to do with aesthetic value. Government and non-profit agencies may naturally make social betterment a goal, but they should not then pretend that their decisions are determined by artistic considerations. Without exception, every one of the most recent recipients of NEA grants, announced in January of 2020, was associated with a social group identified as oppressed or underserved. [5] Just as in higher education admissions and hiring, diversity is a worthy goal which might be well-served by affirmative action, but academic or artistic strength must remain the primary criterion for judgement.

In evaluating art, politics and morality are irrelevant, popularity should play no role, nor should historical influence. An author’s colorful notoriety or exemplary propriety should never lead the reader either toward or away from his work. Each poem, song, or picture must earn attention through its beauty, broadly understood as reflecting elements of both form and content. Questions of ethics are most assuredly central to our shared humanity, and there are better and worse systems of government and virtuous and vicious forms of behavior, but that is because our political and social practices impact on our well-being. In general, an immoral person is one who causes suffering to others while a moral one displays benevolence. An exploitative social system likewise increases human pain and a more just one relieves it. These effects are evident in lived experience. In contrast, the effects of art occur in the consciousness of the consumer and the unique reward art may offer is beauty, a quality which would be wholly amoral were it not that some acts are attractive and some repellent. A few words in the air, a curving line, a succession of musical tones, how could these be morally good or bad? A work of art can do no more than to offer amusement and distraction and glimpses of beauty. If a work fails, we will not be so harsh as to call tiresomeness a sin.



1. The Epistula ad Pisonem (or Ars Poetica) repeats the idea in several forms: "Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae" (The poet aims to benefit or delight, or to be both pleasing and serviceable in life at once), "miscuit utile dulci" (a mix of useful and sweet), and "delectando pariterque monendo" (delighting and warning).

2. The first quotation is from Fearful Symmetry A Study of William Blake (p. 121) and the next from Tzvetan Todorov and John Anzalone, “Poetry and Morality,” Salmagundi, No. 111 (Summer 1996).

3. Tropic of Cancer was not legally published in the United States until 1964.

4. See the devastating and detailed critique in James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, p. 63-4. 5. The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.

5.  The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues. 

Watching The Birth of a Nation Today

for the memory of Daniel Krogh who taught me about film sixty years ago


Now, when so many Americans are looking at American racism and rising in righteous protest, it is useful seek to understand the history of white supremacy in this country and why it has been so persistent in spite of its false and destructive nature. Viewing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation provides a view of the centrality of racism in the United States and the shell-game dodges by which some ordinary people may be convinced of its lies.

There is no doubt that D. W. Griffith is a master of film, not only for his fundamental contribution to the visual vocabulary of the medium, but for his creative shaping of the norms of popular culture in his narratives and characters. The vicious racism of The Birth of a Nation is so undisguised as to be likewise undebatable.

The film dazzled viewers when it came out in 1915 to great fanfare and a series of special premieres in various cities with substantial ticket prices, a thirteen-page program, and a storeful of other souvenirs. It was over three hours long not counting the intermission, with a grand orchestral score and no end of hype. It remained the highest-grossing film well into the sound era, until another fable of Southern history -- Gone with the Wind -- was released in 1939.

The publicity prominently featured the apparent endorsement of the federal government. President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected president since 1848, the man who resegregated federal agencies, is quoted in the film’s titles in praise of “a great Ku Klux Klan . . . to protect the Southern country.” [1] Wilson invited Griffith and Thomas Dixon, Jr. who had written The Clansman, the popular novel and play from which the film was made, to show the movie in the White House. It was then exhibited to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice Edward Douglas White proudly recalled his own Klan membership. This showing was also attended by cabinet ministers, almost a hundred members of Congress, and other high government officials.

The propaganda value of Griffith’s version of history was evident. Dixon bragged to the president, “This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy.” [2] The pernicious effect of The Birth of a Nation led to the formation of the Lost Cause defense of the Confederacy, most obvious in the rebirth of the Klan itself which had become moribund but which surged after William Joseph Simmons viewed the film and decided to reorganize the terrorist group, designating himself as Imperial Wizard. In this new incarnation the Klan became hugely successful, gaining many members in the Midwest and the North and committing acts of violence and vigilantism while presenting itself as a benevolent patriotic fraternal organization.

Griffith, the son of a Confederate colonel, was doubtless pleased at his reactionary role. Yet there are significant signs that he felt uneasy about the hatred he was inspiring. The film anticipates controversy, opening with “a plea for the art of the motion picture” against censorship and associating the new art form with literature, the Bible and Shakespeare. Another title card states disingenuously that the story is purely historical and not meant to characterize any race or group in contemporary American society.

He strove as well to displace the true theme by claiming in another title that the work’s theme is not race but actually “the ravages of war.” At the end grand allegorical scenes depict a suffering humanity below a mounted war deity succeeded by Christ presiding over a peaceful utopia, “a golden day when bestial war shall rule no more.”

Griffith took pains to insist that the skewed fantasy of his film was nothing but the historical facts. A number of titles note his research into history books and photographs to make his scenes completely authentic, and in interviews he justified one incident after another by pointing to what he claimed to be their factual basis. Nor was he singular in his depiction of the period. A similar view of Reconstruction was advanced by many academic historians, perhaps the most influential of whom was William Archibald Dunning at Columbia.

The film emphasizes the peculiar fascination with sexuality that lies at the root of American racial attitudes. Gus, the wicked “renegade” pursues Flora, the sweet little sister who plunges over a cliff to her death rather than submit to his embraces, and then the “mulatto” Silas Lynch tries to force himself on Elsie Stoneman. One cannot avoid thinking of the trumped-up rape accusations that often were the excuse for lynching, and the sexual mutilation of victims. Even a rumor or hint of forward behavior might trigger violence as the case of Emmet Till.

At the end of the film the Klansmen ride triumphantly into town with the young Cameron and Stoneman women at the head of the column. Griffith defended his movie as "an influence against the intermarriage of blacks and whites"; indeed, he claimed in a letter to the New York Times that he had made the movie "for one reason only—because it opposes the marriage of blacks to whites and whites.” He ridiculed the NAACP as "the Negro Intermarriage Society." [4] This irrational obsession with racial purity (in spite of the mixing through rape and sexual coercion) was so psychologically powerful that in 1967 when the Supreme Court ended the miscegenation laws sixteen states still outlawed interracial marriage.

Thus, a racist system that aims in fact at maintaining power and economic advantage of one group over another masquerades as a moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan reinforced this identity by supporting the cause of Prohibition and sometimes directing vigilante action against those thought to be immoral: loose women, unfaithful husbands, gamblers, and wife-beaters, some of them white. Tyranny and reaction has always tried to claim the moral high ground. One may think of Nixon’s attempt to characterize protesters as drug-users or common reactions to early AIDS activists. The continuing success of such tactics is evident in the strong evangelical support for right wing policies that in fact violate Christian principles.

The Birth of a Nation is quaint in many ways. Quite a few of Griffith’s Klansmen seem to be wearing toilet plungers on their heads instead of the better-known pointy dunce cap hoods. Though real African-Americans appear in crowd scenes, Griffith used white actors in crude makeup to play leading Black roles, causing the faithful Cameron servants to appear as grotesquely ridiculous as his villain Gus. Whereas in minstrelsy blackface was associated with comedy and light-hearted good times, here it seems explicitly ugly and sinister. The broad and artificial language of gesture of pre-cinematic stage actors is as dated as the stylized melodramatic plot line.

Like Leni Riefenstahl’s work, Griffith’s film will always be studied by students of cinema, but it deserves attention as well from those who despise its hateful theme but wish to investigate the foundations and the supporting myths of American racism. As always the artist is the one who records attitudes with the most precise detail and the strongest passion. In writing Sexual Politics, Kate Millet examined not feminist authors but D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, knowing that their works contained the clearest statement of the codes that enable patriarchy.

The viewer can appreciate the epic grandeur of the crowd scenes and applaud Griffith’s exploitation of the medium in new ways, pioneering close-ups, fade-outs, tracking shots, parallel action sequences, crosscutting and a host of other innovations. (The iris shots and tinting of certain sequences will please fewer today.) Yet one cannot forget for a moment the sinister deceitful message the great director meant to bring to America, a mission in which he succeeded all too well. The current demonstrations indicate what little progress has occurred in the last century.



1. Other quotations from Wilson’s The History of the American People included in the film are these. “The Policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.…in their determination to "put the white South under the heel of the black South.” "Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile, and use the Negroes.…In the villages the Negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.”

Griffith did not use all Wilson’s racist comments by any means. This, for example, is in the book but not the film: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”

2. Letter quoted in John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, 20-21.

3. How odd that he should have been given that name.

4. These quotations are available by looking no further than the Wikipedia article on The Birth of a Nation. Original citations are available there.

Tristan’s World

This view of Tristan was written after I recently read the great romance in A. F. Hatto’s Penguin translation. Many years ago in graduate school I had slogged through the text in MHG. I cannot bring myself even now either to discard or to reread the voluminous notes I made at that time, but these comments make no scholarly pretense. I do not claim familiarity with the critical literature either, but this approach is, so far as I know, new. Parenthetical numbers refer to the Hatto paperback.

The study of literature I think would be enriched if more common readers were to record their reactions. Scholars might suggest ideas outside their areas of expertise. I suspect that even professors could learn a few things from non-specialists. Alas, I am afraid that no one today could make a living writing about literature as Edmund Wilson did without a university appointment.


     Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan is in part a hero in the old style: peerless physically, able to win every competition or single combat, a potent fighter in war. Yet he is far more an Odysseus than an Achilles, and his expertise at artifice is evinced by his cunning, trickery, and disguise, but also by his chivalry, elegance, and good taste. Tristan appears as a mysterious trickster, a shape-shifter, almost but not quite able to transform the tragic reality into which he is born. Tristan assumes disguises as a merchant’s son and as Tantris the minstrel, just as his mother Blancheflor had disguised herself to gain access to his father Rivalin. While the somewhat similar figure of Melville’s Confidence-Man plays hide-and-seek with the reader and remains wholly elusive in spite of the solid reality of the river boat, Tristan is wholly engaged in human suffering. Rather like Jesus, but lacking the promise of restorative justice after death, Tristan, a courtly elitist, a refined connoisseur among heroes, achieves his end through a love-death after enduring to the utmost the most ordinary of passions: love-longing, frustration, and mortality.
     The hero’s end, misled into thinking that his beloved is not arriving, affirms the sadness his name suggests while underlining the central motif of signs improperly interpreted, of counterfeit and genuine, deceptive and truthful, generating a scintillating play of appearance and reality. Different readings of Tristan are then unsurprising. One might read the epic as a post-modern spectacle with participants identifying themselves with conventions or ironic tropes on conventions to pass the time like Estragon and Vladimir though in Gottfried the setting may be a palace or a field of war and in Tristan a great deal happens, though the events generally seem governed by chance and guess-work and error. For all the sententiae dealt out here and there, Gottfried seems a profoundly skeptical man.
     The story itself is decentered. Unlike many authors of fiction until well into the nineteenth century, Gottfried does not claim that the story is true, only that it is of the sort that can uplift and entertain “noble hearts.” He notes the multiplicity of versions and promises to provide the very best using Thomas as his principal source, and, indeed, he does not wander far from his predecessor in the narrative. At various points in the telling, he emphasizes his own deviations from others who had told Tristan’s story. Beginning with an invented story current in many variations, he gives then his own reworking of what he considers to be the best of its past storytellers. It is a free play of fiction, governed by taste.
     Again and again along the way Gottfried stresses ambiguity and ambivalence. Tristan is above all else a lover. Yet a glance at the beginning and end of the narrative suggests that this status is dubious. His affair with Isolde begins only with the external chance of their accidental consumption of the love philtre. Then, at the end, Isolde’s double, Isolde of the White Hands, causes him to reflect. “Tristan was in two minds about whether he wanted Isolde or not . . .’Do I desire her or don’t I,’ he was constantly asking himself. ‘I think I do not, and then I think I do.’” (294) He marries the new Isolde, but does not make love to her and finally Tristan dies after she misinforms about the sail indicating the arrival of the Irish Isolde. His amatory career is thus muddied by chance, uncertainty, and lies, none of which affected his martial prowess.
     He realizes the inadequacy of language and declares “I do not know how to begin.” (108) He proceeds only after imagining a prayer to Apollo and the Muses and throughout the poem frequently pauses in self-reflection, commenting on his authorial decisions, asking himself such questions as “What fresh matters will I now set in train?” (121)
     In his prologue Gottfried sets forth his dialectical program, saying that, though his goal is distraction and entertainment to soothe the burden of life, his story is not for the many who value pleasure alone but for a more sophisticated audience that appreciates the “bittersweet.” (42) The hypnotic couplet of the prologue is a meditation on duality as much as an announcement of the author’s topic.


A man, a woman; a woman, a man;
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.


     He goes to say “Their life, their death is our bread” (44) Surely this means not only that his contemporaries could relish the story but also that such polarities define our everyday reality. The realization that such oppositions as joy and pain, male and female, truth and lie form the fabric of the human experience is transformative. Thus Tristan’s father Rivalin in his passion for Blancheflor not only learns that love is sadness; this insight so affects him that it “changed his whole cast of mind.” He “became quite a different man, since all that he did was chequered with strangeness and blindness.” (53)
     Even Christianity provides no reliable truth in Gottfried’s world. In one of the most-discussed figures of the story, Gottfried declares, upon Isolde’s success in the ordeal of hot iron that Christ is “pliant as a wind-blown sleeve.” (248) There could hardly be a more powerful statement of the uncertainty in which people live than to claim that Christ, in Christian ideology the central focus and bedrock of reality, is no more stable than a passing breeze. Indeed through the story Christ is consistently assumed to take the part of love with little regard for the church’s traditional moral doctrine.
     The oscillation between possibilities is evident in the hero’s identity and disguise, in the multiple versions of the story, in the limitations of language itself, in emotions, even in the divine. In this story in which the heroic knight is a trickster and an artist, valor is assumed and refined taste is the criterion of value. Yet Tristan must function in a world of disguises, misinterpreted signs, and contradictions. Whereas some have regarded Gottfried as the founder of a religion of love, it seems more accurate to say that he portrays a world of chance, ungovernable compulsion, and impenetrable obscurity in which one must, like Tristan, blindly grope forward until the end without the benefit of revelation. Along the way is magnificent pageantry, beauty, pleasure, and constant hazard into which our hero has no nobler choice then to throw himself fully into the game, rather like an existential “man of action,” and we, the readers, pass our time by following along as the hero makes his way in the “darkling plain.”

Every Reader's Keats

This is the thirteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In the Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

The poems discussed follow the essay.


     I hesitate to write about John Keats, for to me he is like a youthful romance, somewhat embarrassing while inspiring what I still experience late in life as ingenuous heart-felt affection. Keats, more than any other single writer, attracted me to poetry with his dedication to beauty, his clearly cut concrete imagery, and his lovely melodies.

     His appeal may have been enhanced by his biography, an exemplary Romantic life. Born to parents of modest circumstances – his father had tended horses in a stable attached to an inn which he later rose to manage, but he died when the author was eight. His mother sent him to school where he acquired the reputation of being a bit wild, indolent, and prone to fist-fights, but it was there that he attained a love of Classics (though not a scholar’s expertise) and a dedication to literature, winning an academic prize at the age of thirteen. The following year his mother died and he was sent to live with his grandmother who promptly apprenticed him to the family’s medical practitioner. Successfully completing the apprenticeship, Keats went to something like a residency in London well on his way to qualifying for the Royal College of Surgeons. Yet the more he wrote and entered into a literary scene, the more he resented the time he had to devote to medicine; he ultimately abandoned that work for the dubious career of a full-time poet.

     “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is perhaps the best-known sonnet from Keats’ earliest collection, but to me a little-praised piece provides a clearer model of the poet’s sensibility. The sonnet beginning “Give me a golden pen . . .” was an occasional impromptu written in a matter of minutes toward the conclusion of a social visit. It is nothing but a series of images, each if which renders more precise the subjective experience. Keats begins with the pen, as memorializing the pleasant hours in verse fixes their memory and enables their lasting significance. The pen is golden because of the value of such preserved felicity, the adjective suggesting as well the gap between real and ideal which for Keats only art can bridge. With characteristic extravagance Keats then imagines himself leaning “on heaped-up flowers.” The experience, while sublimed by aesthetic distance (“in regions clear, and far”), sounds almost hedonistic in glad sensuality. The poet proposes beginning with “a tablet whiter than a star,” a vision of the absolute immediately succeeded by a series of concrete images, a more palpable version of the beauty Keats experiences as semi-divine. Having asked for a “tablet” on which to write, he moves to a different art, his poetry now figured as the heavenly music of the blessed. For Keats the mention of celestial song is too vague, he renders the idea photographic, specifying the angelic hand at a particular moment, “the silver strings of heavenly harp atween,” and then goes on to add “a pearly car,” and then “pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar.” Just as he is only just trying his artistic abilities, the presumably newly minted angel has “half-discovered wings.”

     He is then able not only to hear the music of the spheres, but to transcribe a part on his page. Amazed at the sublimity he has attained he exclaims, “For what a height my spirit is contending!” just before the final line reminds the reader that this extraordinary afflatus has been attained simply by passing the evening among sympathetic friends. His reliance on his fancy, and his idealistic aspiration toward the sublime are clear and enthusiastic, and his method of reasoning through images already established.

     A similar pattern is discernable in “Sleep and Poetry” in which, after repeating the familiar sentiment “life is but a day,” Keats proceeds also to identify life with “A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way/ From a tree’s summit” and then, even more extravagantly to “a poor Indian’s sleep/ While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep/ Of Montmorenci.” This fatalistic description is then immediately succeeded by more positive images: “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” “the reading of an ever-changing tale,” “the light uplifting of a maiden’s veil,” and “a pigeon tumbling in the summer air.” He then concludes the series with an altogether optimistic figure “a laughing school-boy, without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.” Note however, that the burden of mortality is never denied, the rose, the story, the maiden, the pigeon, even the “laughing school-boy” each must come to an end, and Keats was acutely aware that he, too, shared that fate toward which one may cultivate an enlightened acceptance, but which one cannot escape.


     Keats’ odes are likely his best-known works, and of them surely the popular favorite is his meditation on a Greek vase of the sort that fills many little-visited galleries in the great museums of Athens and Paris and New York. The ode had evolved in English literature into a far more flexible form than it had in antiquity. (Pindar possesses sufficient complexity that a reader might think he is “free-styling,” to use an almost contemporary idiom.) Keats here devised an original form though he used a traditional name which to him signified strong emotion and a certain looseness of structure.

     The poem is an ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of art. He begins writing not about the pictured scene as much as about his lack of knowledge of what is before his eyes. What does the scene represent, he asks, who are represented, what is going on?

     One might be tempted to reduce the poem to the neat concluding apothegm.


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


     While this may seem to declare an unconflicted aestheticism, wholly satisfied by the rapt contemplation of an objet d’art, such a reading would ignore the balancing complaint that runs through the poem, a lament about mortality and the transience of things, painful facts that lead the poet to seek solace in the art of antiquity. Ancient Greece, fetishized in Europe since the Renaissance, was particularly valued by the Romantics (many neo-Classical writers having a taste for Rome), and Keats hopes to escape the terms of human existence, what Marvell called “the iron gates of life,” by contemplation of the clay object. The boughs are “happy,” because they exist outside of time. Of course, their happiness is a construction of the human observer as is their beauty.

     The survival of a beautiful work of art promises a sort of immortality, though at the price that it remain a perpetually “unravish’d bride,” a “cold Pastoral,” while those who appreciate it weep and laugh and celebrate and sicken and die. The poem may, in fact, be said to be about the gap between the feeling, desiring, temporally limited subject and the perfect, timeless object. This opposition, present from the start never develops or changes; there can be no honest resolution. The questions of the first stanza return unchanged in the fourth, while stanzas two and three praise the incorruptible perfection of the scene. What Keats appreciates on the vase the love, the “mad pursuit” and “wild ecstasy” are the very things which in human life he seeks to transcend: the “heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,” the burning forehead” and “parching tongue” all of which evidence strong emotion.

     Keats’ ode “To Autumn” represents another attempt to come to terms with the evanescence of beauty. While springtime is a common theme since the earliest poetry, the autumn, he rightly suggests, is comparatively unappreciated. He invokes no eternal work of art, but rather celebrates the fullness, the perfection of the full maturation of the harvest season, followed though it is by the death of annuals and the chill of winter. In a lush elaboration of Shakespeare’s formula from King Lear “Ripeness is all” Keats details the country scene. The first stanza notes the beauty of the season’s fruit and nuts and suggests people’s joy at collecting this bounty, surely a strong emotion since prehistoric times, but the second stanza is decidedly more Romantic, almost decadent.

     Autumn is personified as a languid, dreamy, “careless,” “half asleep,” as though “drows'd with the fume of poppies,” and the theme of soporific intoxication is echoed by the mention of the “cyder-press.” This suggestion of anaesthesia allows the observer, perhaps, to feel satisfaction in the moment like the bees who “think warm days will never cease,” and to ignore the inevitability of approaching death and barrenness.

     Yet the final stanza defines the music of the season first in the “wailful choir the small gnats” mourning and rising among the “sallows,” or willows that grow by the river. Willows are a common gravestone motif, but the next image, the bleating lambs, is less funereal, and the lambs are succeeded by the sound of the crickets, the robins, and the swallows. The poem ends with this chorus asserting the value of life despite the shortening days. In nature, of course, the cycle continues, the new will replace the old, assuring a sort of immortality, while the individual human subject will come to an end.

     Keats developed a passionate attachment to Fanny Brawne to whom he wrote "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. . .Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you." He reworked a sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” he had composed earlier to express his love.

     Again, his focus is the gap between the temporal and the eternal absolute he identifies with her and likens to a star. The first eight lines, the octave, portray her as “stedfast,” “eternal,” “unchangeable,” gazing passively over earth, in fact, not unlike the “Grecian urn.” He can participate in this divinity through his love. “Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,” he can feel himself “awake for ever in a sweet unrest.” In this condition of aroused passion he feels in part at least redeemed. If he must die, it will be in a “swoon” of love at which the lover could hardly complain.

     Keats’ literary career was frustrated by low sales – the four volumes published during the poet’s lifetime sold less than a few hundred copies. Apart from the praise of Leigh Hunt and other friends, the critical attention his work attracted was fierce and scathing, more political and social than literary. Keats and his circle were condemned as the “Cockney school” of poetry. The poet had asked that his epitaph be simply “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” but his friends added a protest against his treatment by critics which they maintained contributed to his death. “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies.”

     Keats remains a poet to whom I can return repeatedly for his lovely melodies and pregnantly suggestive images. In a certain mood I find Shelley is often airy and abstract, Wordsworth plain in language though sometimes tangled in meaning, Coleridge philosophical, and Byron casual and hasty. While, readers may perceive Keats’ weaknesses, I for one have a prejudice in his favor. In a letter he defined “Negative Capability” as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is in art that meaning may be constructed without revelation or positivism. Keats, whose life was difficult in a number of ways, managed to build an imaginative world true to his experience yet lit with joy.




Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heaped-up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
And let there glide by many a pearly car
Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
And half-discovered wings, and glances keen.
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres:
For what a height my spirit is contending!
'Tis not content so soon to be alone.




Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."




To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.