14/11/07 - English Literature - Byron

Byron was described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "Mad, bad and dangerous to know." He was the best-known man in all English-speaking countries. He was born into a colourful family. His mother was abandoned by his father. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School and then to Harrow and never returned to Scotland. In fact he was outspoken about his derogatory opinion of Scotland. His early life was one of disappointment and failure. He invested the family fortune in developing his estate house, only for it to be ruined by a water leak. He was not popular with university officials and never attended his work.

He began to write poetry as a student. In 1808 he wrote "Hours of Idleness" and in 1809, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in which he took voice against the establishment. He began "Childe Harold" around this time. The poem could be described as a veiled autobiography or as his attempt to create a public persona. In 1810 he swam the Hellespont, a potentially fatal feat. In 1812 he wrote speeches for the House of Lords, and they give us a sense of his early radicalism. He met his future wife and had several affairs, including the national scandal of his relationship with Lady Caroline Lamb, who was already married. He had an affair with his half-sister who suspiciously gave birth the following year. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke, who had refused his first proposal of marriage but later accepted. The marriage broke up in 1816, and Byron left England forever. He had an illegitimate child by Claire Clairmont. He published "Manfred" in June of the same year. In 1818 he published "Beppo." Shelleys then arrived in Italy and stayed with Byron for nine months. In 1819 Byron had an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli and wrote "Don Juan". In 1820 he rejoined politics, this time in Italy, and got involved in various scandals. After Carbonari was defeated, Byron moved to Pisa and wrote and published many works. Percy Shelley drowned in 1821. Byron got involved in a struggle between Greece and Italy, courageously rallied the Greek army, but died of a cold. "Don Juan" cantos XV and XVI were published posthumously.

"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" has great themes tied up in the life of the author. His art seems to be a working out of himself, for the great characteristics of his poetry are: (i) authorial self-invention; (ii) the itinerant consciousness; (iii) the birth of the Byronic hero (a dramatic type later absorbed by popular culture; and (iv) (anti)Romanticism - Byron could even be described as pre-Romantic due to his earlier Classical style and Augustan mode.

(i) Authorial self-invention
Byron's texts are inseparable from him. According to Foucault, Byron should come under the type of author "creator of discourse." Byron's transformative self is discussed by Pushkin. Byron always deals with transitional versus amorphic modes. Byron celebrates his own mutability, which Wordsworth never did. Here never returns to a more grounded self, he is always moving. Performativity plays a large role in Byron's poems.

(ii) The itinerant consciousness
There is a constant form of movement in "Don Juan". And also, Childe Harold is frequently concluded to be a surrogate for Byron himself.

(iii) Birth of the Byronic hero
The 'Byronic' hero was a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. He was passionate, anti-rationalism, a cultural outsider (Byron forsook his Scottish origins), in flight from society, deeply subjective, against the dominant moral code (Byron was outside of politics and engaged in more romantic episodes) and physically appealing.

The cult of Napoleon was brought in by Byron. The cult is unlikely to have happened after Napoleon's death, if it was not for Byron. Byron travelled in a gold carriage in pretence of Napoleon and signed documents with the initials 'NB', as he revelled in the fact that he shared the same initials as the great man himself. In fact, it would not be far off the mark to say that Byron was obsessed with Napoleon.

(iv) Against Romanticism
Byron frequently insulted popular Romantic poets. He wrote lyrics for parlour songs, but they were unpopular because of their supposed pettiness and lack of profundity. There is a 'new realism' in Byron's work, a return to the mundanity of everyday life, although his life was far from mundane.

There is much orientalism in Byron, although his was not the only work imbued with oriental references, for other poets did this too, such as Coleridge in "Kubla Khan." Byron's "Court of Ali Phasha plays on the imperial fantasy of the oriental 'other'. He objectifies the oriental 'other' in a classical way, as figures in a landscape. In a sense, Byron is conventional, however, there is another side to him. He was outspoken about the acquiring of other cultures' artefacts. In a poem about the "Elgin Marbles" he is strictly anti-imperialistic. It is difficult to nail him down politically.

An early death seemed appropriate for Byron. The British knew him as a poet who published cheap editions of songs. But mass tourism owed a lot to Byron, for he was much written about, for example by Bulwer-Lytton and Charlotte Bronte. The latter was shocked by Byron and advised others not to read the works of that "evil" man. Her warning probably had the opposite effect.

In anthologies Byron has gone down the estimation compared to his contemporary poets. In "Palgrave's Golden Treasury" he comes last with only eight pages, and "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold" do not feature. By the Norton Anthology, Byron gets the most page space with 159, Wordsworth comes second with 155, Shelley 105, Keats 74, Blake is introduced for the first time with 57 pages, and Burns comes last with only 15. This shows that recently lyric poets such as Burns have not been credited as significant literary figures.

9/11/07 - English Literature - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Is it possible to write about death? Or arbitrarily, is it possible to write death? Poetry is obsessed with consolation and recuperating life. Among the Romantic poets, only Shelley grapples with death directly in his poetry. He is a unique poet, with an imagination unrivalled by contemporary poets. Radical and political philosophy are the objects of his discussions, and he does this by combining the power of imagination with the power of death.

Shelley draws equally between two intellectual traditions: the Enlightenment and the Romantic. Both were well established by the time he wrote his poetry. He was linked to both by (a) rationalism and scepticism (Enlightenment) from Hume and Godwin, and (b) irrationalism and organicism (Romantic) through Coleridge and Schlegel. According to the Enlightenment view: language is arbitrary signs of thought; history is contingent, with gradual improvement (Godwin); politics are radical, and about maximising representation; and writing is satirical irony, where content determines form. Conversely, the Romantic view is this: that language is the informing principle of thought; that history is necessary and in decline since the time of the Ancients; politics are quietist, problematising representation; and the writing is 'philosophical' irony, where form and content are mutually determining.

But Shelley cannot be pigeon-holed into either category. He has an Enlightenment scepticism and hatred of religious orthodoxy. He maintains the belief that humans can improve their own lot, so writing can change political circumstances. But also he believes that reason alone cannot do this; he thinks there can be an excess of rationalism. He believes that history is in decline, and thinks we have lost the sense of our roots, of organic unity. He thinks that we need to recover it through poetry. Shelley therefore moves to a Romantic idea of improvement.

So can poetry express imagination without the philosophical enquiry of Coleridge, or the quietude and passiveness of Wordsworth?

Shelley wrote his "Ode to the West Wind" while on war commission, after a time of great massacres and confusion amongst the police and military forces. He was furious about this, and the poem is a response to the massacre (his other responses are less direct). He can be read as a fatalist, but it would not be wholly true. The appearance of autumnal Paris is a source of inspiration to Shelley. The lyre is associated with Romantic poetry. There is an expression of powerful consciousness through the wind and lyre of the reawakening of spring. It shows originality; the ode is "to" the west wind, rather than "on" the west wind. It was a traditionally Greek or Roman trope to treat the wind as a deity. While Wordsworth and Coleridge were known for their lack of personification, Shelley's paganism is quite controversial. But he is sceptical of transcendentalism in the Wordsworthian sense and he takes on a sense of time in terms of death and regeneration which has little to do with individuals or consciousness. Shelley is obsessed with death, with the fundamental belief that the principle of all life is within matter itself. So he is a materialist, but also an idealist. He disconnects materialism from mechanism: reality is not like a machine. He takes this idea from Lucretius, the idea that a purely material universe may not run on things that are mechanical by nature.

For Lucretius the universe is wholly composed of atoms and void. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Matter is like "invisible winds."

"Therefore I say again and again, there are unseen bodies of wind, since in deeds and ways they are found to rival great rivers, which possess a body which can be seen. […]"
[Lucretius, De rerum natura, (‘On the Nature of Things’) 1st C. BC, Book I]

The soul is composed of atoms that reform outside the body after death; life is even dependent on death.

"For so many first-beginnings of things in so many ways, smitten with blows and carried by their own weight from infinite time up to the present, have been accustomed to move and to meet together in all manner of ways . . . . that it is no wonder if they fell also into such arrangements […]. [T]he world was certainly not made for us by a divine power: so great are the faults with which it stands endowed. […] Therefore, when I see the grand parts and members of the world being consumed and born again, I may be sure that heaven and earth also once had their time of beginning and will have their destruction. […] [T]he earth is diminished and is increased and grows again."
[Book V]

The last line states that the principle of life is death. The tendency of the universe is towards decay (we see empires falling throughout history).

"So therefore the walls of the mighty world in like manner shall be stormed all around, and shall collapse into crumbling ruin […] nature does not supply as much as is necessary. Even now the power of life is broken, and the earth exhausted scarce produces tiny creatures, she who once produced all kinds […]."
[Book II]

Atoms are clustered together, according to Lucretius, because of "swerving." He offers no explanation for swerving; it cannot be comprehended. In Shelley's poem is a simplification of Lucretius' theory. The wind pulls apart and creates at once. There is a central paradox in the poem: it is an affirmation of the power of imagination affecting political change, yet it assumes that human nature is fundamentally passive. Shelley is optimistic but restricted to non-violence. The power of imagination is life the decaying power of the wind, the power that is within everyone. The old order must decay to allow a new society to be reborn. Shelley can be linked with feminism in a proto-feminist way, as beings are subverted into a dispersal of atoms, rather than based on a phallic central view like Wordsworth. This puts Shelley in contact with the female concern of birth. He comes to terms with something critics say Romantics deny:

"[‘The Triumph of Life’] warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence."
[Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured: 'The Triumph of Life'," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (1979)]

Shelley internalises death and the full negativity of life. But he is not politically nihilistic. Shelley attached unjust systems of life.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
[‘Ozymandias,’ 1817]

In Ozymandias Shelley is deceptively ambivalent. Lucretian imagery is still at work: in the sands of history sweeping away the vanity of kings. Their vanity is therefore atomised and dispersed. This is usually described as Shelley's way of escaping temporality, and suggests we see the poet as an immortal being also. But this is a misconception.

"[T]he mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness […] when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet."
[A Defence of Poetry (1821), Norton II, pp. 798-99]

Here are the Lucretian winds once more, and they are even decaying poetry. Poetry and poets are therefore not immortal in the eyes of Shelley.

In conclusion, in his desire to affirm materiality and political change, and to do this as an imaginative being, Shelley uses a non-transcendental and non-radical form of Romanticism. Chaos of order must exist in order to create enlightenment. This view leads to something new: the rejection of both the Enlightenment view of historic progress and of the Romantic view of historical decline. It is a decay and rebirth system. This power of contingency is a secret power of creation and destruction, symbolised by winds. There is a power in Shelley's work that is strangely impersonal, but it is explained by this Lucretian theory. Shelley attempts to redefine the human. He is thus the only Romantic poet to directly discuss death.

7/11/07 - English Literature - Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

In the 1810s people began to question how it was possible for people to make a rational decision about the world. How could one tell what was natural? It was an issue much debated in literature, interestingly enough, manifested through Gothic language.

"Deprived of the old Government, deprived in a manner of all Government, France, fallen as a Monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and terror of them all. But out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist, except on the principles, which habit rather than nature had persuaded them were necessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinary modes of action."
[Edmund Burke, ‘Letters Addressed to A Member of the Present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France’]

Here the French revolution is described as a kind of Frankenstein's monster. The monster is "against nature." Burke blamed philosophers for the revolution, and said its supporters were unnatural because they were creatures of habit rather than nature. They think in social and conventional ways. And note also that Burke's monster is female.

"But, by the habitual slothfulness of rust intellects, or the depravity of the heart, lulled into hardness on the lascivious couch of pleasure, those heavenly beams are obscured, and man either appears as an hideous monster, a devouring beast; or a spiritless reptile, without dignity or humanity."
[Mary Wollstonecraft, The Origin and Progress of the French Revolution]

Wollstonecraft uses the same language as Burke but she takes the opposite view, when opposing the French royalty rather than the supporters of the revolution. She thinks royalty cannot think properly because it is obscured by luxury. Paine discusses his view that the inheritance of property to the oldest child is like a monster also, like a "cannibal feast."

The possibility of knowledge was consistent and natural. The "wisdom of nature," according to Burke. The reformers wanted new forms of knowledge but Burke reacted against this, saying that knowledge must be passed from generation to generation, and that the reformers were monstrous.

Wollstonecraft had said that women were deflected from knowledge by social pressures.

"Everything new appears to them wrong; and not able to distinguish the possible from the monstrous, they fear where no fear should find a place, running from the light of reason, as if it were a firebrand; yet the limits of the possible have never been defined to stop the sturdy innovator's hand."
[Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women]

She says it is possible to think new thoughts, while Burke thought this was false. Women could not think new thoughts because they were told that the alternative to conventional thinking was monstrous.

Is it possible to think new things for yourself? Shelley is ambivalent about the value of reason. Frankenstein seems to value to monster's independent thinking. When the monster hears Saffy reading to her mother he applies her words to himself; he therefore has innate reason.

"But 'Paradise Lost' excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy, and prosperous, guarded by, the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me."
[Frankenstein]

But the last sentence indicates that he can only understand the reason in terms of himself. Elsewhere, he has to learn how to apply Paradise Lost to the world. Shelley subverts the novel's notions.

"Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend."
[Frankenstein]

The problematic result of this in the monster is that he cannot recognise who is who; he identifies with both Adam and Satan. He cannot work out the difference between good and evil. Like Eve he was created out of others' body parts.

"I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers--their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity."
[Frankenstein]

The monster knows what he looks like. The passage is a reference back to Paradise Lost, when Eve admires her reflection in a pool of water.

As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleas'd I soon returned,
Pleas'd it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self..."
[Milton, Paradise Lost]

Both Eve and the monster "start back." Shelley wanted to take away the original sin that blames Eve for the Fall, as did Wollstonecraft.

"We must get entirely clear of all the notions drawn from the wild traditions of original sin: the eating of the apple, the theft of Prometheus, the opening of Pandora’s box, and the other fables, too tedious to enumerate, on which priests have erected their massive structures of imposition, to persuade us, that we are naturally inclined to evil."
[Wollstonecraft, The Origin and Progress of the French Revolution]

Shelley does this by saying that good and evil can be contingent, not fixed. Modern Enlightenement thought and reason are commingled with the murdering nature of the monster.

The same also applies to Victor. He is single-minded, using science to achieve his goals. He sees the world only in terms of himself. He wants to reproduce himself in his monster. Both Victor and Walton are narcissistic. Victor also holds the idea that women are his possessions. If anyone compliments his wife he takes it personally because he sees her as an extension of himself. "I pursues Nature to her hiding places": Shelley plants pointers towards Victor's project, which is patriarchal and misogynistic. He ea second monster, but after his work is done he lists a number of problems with creating a female monster. He believes she will lack provocation in murdering; she will lack reason; she may not compact with her creation, i.e. she may not marry the male monster, "they might even hate each other"; and ugliness in women is far worse than ugliness in men. His final reason is that his female monster might desire him rather than his monster. He is afraid of female sexual autonomy and female reasoning. All the female characters die by the end of the novel. Left behind is an all-male community, the mutual dependence of Victor and the creatures. Victor is in love with his creature in a narcissistic way. His father even thinks he has neglected Elizabeth as if he is having a love affair. Well, in a way, he is. The ending is written like a Romantic novel, with a touching reunion of a man and his creation. Victor is a solipsist and for him, women are basically replacements for each other.

Does Shelley resolve the issue? She is interested in the mutually supportive bourgeois family. Children are mutually supportive and obedient to their family. There is something coercive in this enlightenment ideal; the family violently drive away the monster. If is difficult to say how people can react rationally to the world. Shelley debates the issue but does not offer a resolution.

5/11/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and Anti-Humanism

Nietzsche wrote about modern culture and art. His work radicalises issues that were commonly thought to be common sense, such as What is thought for? What are values? Is morality innate or historical?

Nietzsche discusses 'nihilism', in which he thought modern society was fraught. Nihilism is the sense of emptiness or nothingness in a culture which has lost faith in its values, but which cannot find new values to replace them. This is a western cultural problem. Post-Christianity, people lacked the creativity to make a new moral system.

"They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more to Christian morality."
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 80]

This links to his statement about the death of God.

"The greatest recent event - that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes - the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means - and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown in it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending - who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?"
[Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 279]

Nietzsche here uses overwrought rhetoric. There is the same sense of gloom in Marlon's thoughts about London at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Reactiveness is a nostalgic reference back to a transient system of moral value by which to live. So by losing faith in Christianity, people go back and live by it even more closely. Ideas raised above life which are transcendental are looked to, and made to become the new moral system. So by looking back, we also look up.

"Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology; one must already know what it is about to derive profit from it.”
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 66]

But morality is a mode of translation. It is a collection of symptoms, referring back and judging present behaviour according to past values. Activeness is just such imposing of a strong interpretation on others.

Nietzsche divulges how we might respond to nihilism.

"What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking; the character of existence is not “true,” is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into this world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 13]

He says that when people perceive the death of the moral system, they question the meaning of morality, and even of life. People struggle for success of authority over their own perception of the world. One perception is that of the priests: that Jews and Christians took those values that were anti-aristocracy and made them into a new vision of life that was about passiveness, charity, meekness and introspection. In a word, everything that the aristocracy was not. Nihilism arises when we consider moral perceptions to be historical and mere interpretations. Perceptions of life are only strong or weak, but all are false because they derive from only one point of view. People soon realised that all judgement can be challenged. Think how perception in Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner is conveyed: all belief systems are shown to be false. Hogg forces the reader to take responsibility for the meaning of his own novel. We must determine the truth of the novel. As Nietzsche says,

"'Truth' is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered – but something that must be created and that gives a name to the process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end – introducing truth, as a process in infinitum, an active determining – not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the 'will-to-power'."
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 298]

So one's creative view cannot be subtracted. There must be an 'active determining' on each individual's part.

Blake talked of something similar to Nietzsche's 'will-to-power' in his poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

"Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason; Evil is the active springing from energy.
Good is Heaven; Evil is Hell."
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 105]

Blake thinks that love and hate, good and evil, are both necessary to life. All life is a universal struggle. Blake picks up this struggle and makes it reactively codified.

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or geniuses, calling them by the names, and Adorning them with the Properties, of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslaved the weak by attempting to realise or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood – choosing forms of worship from poetic titles.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast."
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 111]

Here he expresses proto-Nietzschean sentiments. He believes in a premoral and prereligious perception of life. He says that people named the gods; the gods did not name the people. The ancient poets had seen strong human capacities and exteriorised them by giving them name and calling then divinities. They created the world for themselves. So morality is the radical forgetting of human and inhuman potential.

Virginia Woolf gives the reaction of one person to the loss of truth and reality, which is like a blank space in a picture.

"With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it – a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers – this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention.”
[Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 148]

2/11/07 - English Literature - Keats and History

How can Keats be studied historically? He is not a historical writer.

There are three models of history - Enlightenment, Romantic and Hegelian. Keats would have been familiar with the former two. Enlightenment historicism takes the view that history is linear, progressive and universal. Hegel argues that particular events contribute to history in an organic relationship. Both Enlightenment and Hegelian historicism assume the universal value of truth. But Romantic historicism tries to uncover this truth; it is a recuperative theory. Hegel's historicism actually makes truths, and so it assumes that history just is. Romantic historicism, on the other hand, has been seen as anti-history for the past twenty years. Romanticism tries to escape history, tries to transcend it. Keats' poetic reputation did not suffer in the early twentieth century like Wordsworth and Byron's. Brooks's book, Well-Wrought Urn is about New Historicism (or Formalism) and he used Keats's poetry as exemplifications of his theory, and even took the title from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Keats's poetry does lend itself to historicist reading.

Hume was confident that there was universal truth outside of history.

"It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations."
[David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)]

Implicit in Hume's theory is the assumption that inner reflection is all that is needed. Rousseau found problems in this, however.

"Before art had new moulded our behaviours, and taught our passions to talk in an affected language, our manners were indeed rustic, but sincere and natural; and the difference of our behaviours in an instant distinguished our characters. - ’Tis true, that human nature was not then any wise better in the main than now: but man found a security in the ease with which he could dive into the thoughts of man; and this advantage, on which we seem to set no price, exempted them from many vices."
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Arts and Sciences (1751)]

Here is the consideration of 'improving' history. Rousseau suggests that perhaps history is not an improving force; perhaps we have even lost something in our progression through history. So maybe there is not an 'absolute' outside of history.

Scott's Waverley is shaped by events, it does not shape the events itself. In Romanticism there is a sense of disappointment in history.

Jerome McGann talks of history as a recuperative, healing division and refers to this as 'Romantic ideology.'

"[I]deology […is] a coherent or loosely organized set of ideas which is the expression of the special interests of some class or social group."
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983)]

Marx and Engels see Romantic ideology as an illusion of thought. Life is not determined by the consciousness, but the consciousness is determined by life. With Marx and Engels, reason and thought is combined with feeling and imagination.

"Ideology is a process which is indeed accomplished consciously by the so-called thinker, but it is the wrong kind of consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to the thinker; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or illusory motive forces. […] He works exclusively with thought material, which he accepts without examination as something produced by reasoning, and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of reason; indeed this is a matter of course to him, because, as all action is mediated by thought, it appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought."
[Frederick Engels, letter to Franz Mehring (1893)]

Keats's odes, point at one point to be universal, can be studied using historicist and formalist theories. William Walsh was writing at a time when New Historicism was at its height. He wrote that the ode of Keats was aesthetic and autonomous, and that it achieved impersonality and objectivity. McGann also wrote of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and said that it was historic, deriving meaning from social and historical situatedness, i.e. material conditions, not form. All these speculation leads back to considering what a poem is. Is it words on a page or a historical work?

"There are three sorts of statement used in the ode: address, question, and something vaguer which I shall call generalization or reflection. These three modes of statement are alike in this, that they all direct the flow of attention on to the object and away from the speaker. […] This poetic use of syntax brings to Keats’s rich language the authority of a more than subjective validity. It is also an example of what Matthew Arnold spoke of in Keats as ‘character passing into intellectual production."
[William Walsh, ‘John Keats,’ The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (1957)]

Walsh praises Keats's so-called objectivity. He places emphasis on syntax, technique, and the value of impersonality and objectivity. For Walsh, the meaning of the poem is self-contained.

"What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?"
[John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ (1819)]

Walsh's response to this passage was:

"‘Legend’ suggests first the mythical content, a development this of the sense latent in ‘historian’; but legend also implies the intricacy of the carving - it is to be read, to be interpreted and not just seen; the lightness of sound of ‘legend’ is carried on in the aerial and ghostly ‘haunts about thy shape’. And evokes the fineness and delicacy of the carving, a suggestion which is strengthened by the muted and exact rhythm of the whole phrase and by the sense in ‘haunts about thy shape’ of hardly touching the surface; the work ‘about’ involving a slight labial effort in speech and with a full and open sound rounds out for us the circle of the vase’s shape."
[William Walsh, ‘John Keats’]

Again, language is his main interest in the poem. His take on the poem is textual. He tries to do for Keats what Keats does for the urn: he treats the poem as an object, as something in itself of perfect form. But the urn is more about sexual violence and is a part of Keats's imagination rather than a real object. We are left wondering what the urn would be life if considered in a more historical context. The poem instead posits its own contemporary view of aesthetic value onto the urn, so the poem is shaped by context. It is not objective.

McGann attacks New Historicism in his introduction to The Romantic Ideology.

"[T]he scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations."
[Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983)]

McGann tries to reveal poetry's involvement with history, which is inescapable. The poem is beautiful to McGann because of its historical content, and he detracts from Formalist interpretations of poetry. He looked at the same three lines of the poem that Walsh did, and noted that it does not matter whether the urn is real or not. It is the poetry that matters. However, McGann wondered where the poem was published and when. The poem was printed in a journal to try to promote appreciation of Greek art, which was held to be the most singular and complete beauty. Probably Keats had some real urns in mind, conveyed in the word "legend," a pun meaning an inscription or a classical myth. The vagueness of the phrase "leaf-fring'd legend" could also mean illegible words.

"[T]he poem [i.e. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’] itself insists that we react to its historical dimensions, and in so doing it forbids that we understand its ‘universality’ outside of the ode’s special historical context. To see this elementary point more clearly all we need to do is imagine that the poem was written before or after 1819. It would make a difference."
[Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (1985)]

The poem cannot speak to us outside of history. All this adds up to the fact that our view of the poetic form is based on poetry as an autonomous, formalist, and therefore romantic entity. But also historicism comes out of Romanticism, because people had to know where the poetry came from, they had to know its context, an idea taken up by historicism and demonstrated in early critics' fruitless search for the urn in the poem. These ideas of Romanticism and historicism come together in Keats's poem.