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.