This brings me to a question that has bugged me ever since I read Keats’ letters. If the poet lacks autonomy and agency in his own work, who is the reader in dialogue with when reading poetry, or observing any art? Rather than understanding a poem as a poet conversing with the reader, we must interpret it as a direct confrontation with the character itself. The poet becomes the unfortunate middle man who transcribes subjects that the reader is unable to see without assistance (like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”). According to Keats, as the readers, we no longer have to consider the poet’s motivations or underlying emotions in poems because we can take the poet’s faithfulness for granted. Instead, our analytical questions should focus on how the poet chooses to encapsulate the truth of his subject. Recalling our Week 18 discussion on certainty and honesty in subliminal themes, I believe that the way this truth manifests will reveal an artwork’s leaning towards either wonder or the sublime.
Eye of the Beholder, Lens of the Poet (1/3): A Keatsian View of Poetic Responsibility [Dashmi Singh]2/7/2024 This mixed-media work illustrates Keats’ understanding of poets and artists as having “no identity” other than “filling some other Body” (17, 21). His job is only to channel external ideas and entities rather than imbue his own character in his art. Keats pointedly rejects the “egotistical sublime” of Wordsworth to explain that he is of no significance in his writing, other than acting as a vessel for other agents (9). To me, this gives the impression of the poet being a servant to his own craft and to the “poetical Character” (7). While the world he hopes to convey and the words he writes are wondrous and brilliant (denoted by the quill that rests in his hands), the poet is bound by his work and to the soul of another character (pictured here has his hands in chains). The “wretched” life he mourns is depicted by the deep black and white coloration of his own hands and his chains, while the beautiful, free quality he ascribes to the Character is contrasted with the colored feathers and gold ink of the responsibility he is tasked with, channeling “Beauty & Truth” (28, 5). Keats’s words paint a very somber image in my head of the ironic limitations placed on the poet as he writes about themes as free as a singing nightingale.
This brings me to a question that has bugged me ever since I read Keats’ letters. If the poet lacks autonomy and agency in his own work, who is the reader in dialogue with when reading poetry, or observing any art? Rather than understanding a poem as a poet conversing with the reader, we must interpret it as a direct confrontation with the character itself. The poet becomes the unfortunate middle man who transcribes subjects that the reader is unable to see without assistance (like Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”). According to Keats, as the readers, we no longer have to consider the poet’s motivations or underlying emotions in poems because we can take the poet’s faithfulness for granted. Instead, our analytical questions should focus on how the poet chooses to encapsulate the truth of his subject. Recalling our Week 18 discussion on certainty and honesty in subliminal themes, I believe that the way this truth manifests will reveal an artwork’s leaning towards either wonder or the sublime.
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My creative project was inspired by John Keats's letter to his brothers George and Tom in December 1817. This letter is among the most intellectually thrilling of any I have read. In dissecting the letter, I noticed that Keats bounces carefree like a butterfly from one idea to another while examining the processes of his intuition and beautiful mind until he suddenly lands serendipitously upon a magnificent sight of perception. Keats then remarks about an idealized creative state of mind, the one in which a poet displays "Negative Capability." The Oxford English Dictionary identifies Keats' complex term as a "quality of a creative artist." However, Keats refers to it as the ability to lose himself in the "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (Keats 1). Negative Capability is a state of being—receptive and open to all—where the poet perceives his surroundings while taking part in a host of life experiences that occur in unison with his own. This ability to expand the self by losing oneself in an empathetic receptiveness, a broad-mindedness of the actuality that excludes emotion and denies personal perspective to expand all understanding, makes the concept complex and enthralling. The irony of it all is that when I read Keats' novel concept (Negative Capability), I had the irrational need to offer a close analysis of his ideas to make rational sense of the term; however, it soon dawned on me that my urge for a definite definition contradicted the very essence of Keats' concept. No definition, no matter how extensive, will ever satisfy the depth of Keats' timeless and inconceivable vast concept—the core of his creative genius. In the same letter, Keats suggests that Samuel Coleridge is unwilling to allow mystery or doubt to remain unadulterated. Instead, Keats claims that Coleridge indulges in an unrelenting search for knowledge when he should be seeking to contemplate beauty and truth (a "verisimilitude") attained serendipitously from the innermost core of mystery ("Penetralium"). Keats' intuitive experiences expose his creative genius by nullifying that which has originated from the rational mind or, as Keats so elegantly wrote, "a great poet['s]... sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" (Keats 1). A negative capable individual is fluid and yielding, immersing himself in experiences in tandem with his own. It is a receptive and passive individual, whose self withdraws, as it allows the substance of its subject to exist within, thereby collapsing the walls that divide the poet and the other. This ability to become another gives the poet a view of life and a perception of existence equal to none. Nevertheless, it does come at an extreme personal cost. As a negative capable poet, Keats could not choose which feelings he let in while surrendering himself to the full intensity of the experiences within creatures, people, and nature. As such, he drowned himself in fear, bliss, pain, elation, desperation, awe, madness, sublimity, and distress. My pencil and watercolor painting is my original interpretation of Keats' Letter to his Brothers, George and Thomas, portraying the role of Negative Capability in the creative process. The figure in the upper left side is the poet Keats himself. His portrait is done in pencil—the black-and-white tones contrast starkly with the colorfulness of the other sections. This dichotomy is intentional: Keats' portrait represents the poet without Negative Capability, while the colorfulness represents "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" that one experiences when in the state of Negative Capability (Keats 1). The transmutation from faded pencil portraiture to a faceless watercolor silhouette represents the transformation Keats undergoes when writing—he must allow himself to exist in a state of Negative Capability. To do so, he loses all of the defining characteristics of self, hence the featureless face extending from the portraiture. This poet self, the one that experiences Negative Capability, is able of "obliterat[ing] all consideration" because of his control over "the sense of Beauty" (Keats 1). Therefore, the nebula spiral at the bottom of the painting represents what one can perceive and experience when in a state of Negative Capability. Space is infinitely expanding and viewed with sublime emotions, comparable to the experience of being in a state of Negative Capability. It is my artistic rendering of Keats' contemplative state free from logical or scientific knowledge thrusting himself into the chaos of uncertainty, confusion, and paradox that reveal the depth of perception invisible to those who aspire to attain certainty. Here, the world and its moral framework are no longer relevant, giving the poet creative license to pause and exist in his characters' bodies, experiencing their full intensity and range of emotions. Therefore, when Keats mentions that he, as the Poet, "has no Identity," this lack of identity does not have a negative connotation (Keats 2). In class, we understood the Poet to be nothing more than a vessel or mirror, which takes away from Keats. However, my focus on Negative Capability reveals a new interpretation: the Poet's lack of identity allows him to experience the state of Negative Capability, allowing him to release his creative genius. Keats can access Negative Capability only in this absence of identity, where the Poet becomes "The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women" (Keats 2) or mirrors others' identities. As such, the Poet is no longer a negative, parasitic entity but instead a state of being capable of maintaining creative tension to engage in an imaginative rendering of its subject while maintaining an openness to the subject as it reveals the truth of itself.
Analysis from Katharine B.
I combined the ambiguous characteristics of the poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by romantic poet John Keats and painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. In doing this I took portions of the poem in order to create an image of the knight in the setting of the wanderer. The lines, “Her hair was long, her foot was light and her eyes were wild” (15, 16), “I made a garland for her head… she looked at me as she did love” (17, 19), and “And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dream’d — Ah! Woe betide! The latest dream I ever dream’d On the cold hill’s side” (33-36) were inspirations for a drawing of the poem. These lines didn’t necessarily inspire change in my interpretation of the poem, but they inspired my mind to paint a picture of a scene. I made this drawing so that the knight becomes the wanderer, wandering through his thoughts, through dreams, and through the world. I saw the lines, “And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dream’d — Ah! Woe betide! The latest dream I ever dream’d On the cold hill’s side” (33-36) as an introduction for a different kind of dream than the one described by Keats. Instead I saw him alone and pondering in his head. In creating this into something real and something I can look at it made me realize that all the different interpretations of this poem should be focused on the knights interpretations instead of the readers. I believe that as poems are read, or literature in general, the reader focuses on how to interpret what the author wrote but there is something more important to do. It is important to consider what the different characters, even if made up, would be considering and interpreting if they had the mind to think so. This will make it so the reader is more personal to the characters because they are comprehending and interpreting the world together. Drawing this romantic period poem into a romantic period art form allowed me to realize that interpreting the world as the characters would do is helpful to comprehension of literature. This drawing depicts the knight wandering and pondering the world around him and the impression this fairy has upon him, as displayed through her significant presence in the sky. If the reader would go through interpreting these things through his eyes, they will progress to the same conclusion along with the characters. Works Cited Keats, John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2012, pp. 845-7. AP Literature Spring 2022, Stanford Online High School, University of Stanford, Jan. 2022. Accessed 10 Feb 2022. Friedrich, C. 1818. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Oil on Canvas. |
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