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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