The Columbia History of British Poetry (100 page)

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Page 399
poet's and reader's mind live in the imagination at least until the moment of passing rest occurs. For five of these odes, Keats invented a ten-line stanzaa versatile hybrid from the logic of Shakespeare's and Milton's sonnets as well as from the richness of Spenser's stanza. Keats thereby creates the space and order for an English empirical drama in which questions multiply for feeling intellect to answer without more than the "half knowledge" of negative capability.
As Wordsworth indicated in a note to "Tintern Abbey," Romantic odes turn on transitions, different conjunctions
if, while, therefore
positioning the tricky subject at hand. By interrogating a symbolic object, condition, or figure from various perspectives, Keats's odes emphasize knowledge as interpretive activity. The epiphany of beauty is really a focal point of interpretive intentionthe silent "working" of the imagination that Keats tells his friend Bailey about in 1817.
As a "Cold Pastoral," the Grecian urn signifies dualities and paradoxes that "tease us out of thought" and deeper into experience. The poem enacts what the urn represents. The urn represents what the poem as process cannot achieve"eternity" or the closure promised by the last lines: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Similarly, in "Ode to a Nightingale'' the nightingale's song initiates the poet's comparison of the "here" of human desire and distress with the bird's "melodious plot" of tenderness and ecstasy. The ode's third and seventh stanzas particularize the historical, material conditions that make the "faery lands forlorn" to the speaker, who, either awake or asleep, has been a conductor for the music he passionately questions.
The vows taken to the mind in the "Ode to Psyche" are done in by the mutability of mind itself in the "Ode on Melancholy." We are had by life's best moments, "hung" among the "cloudy trophies" of melancholy's sovereign power over the fullest experience. Melancholy is a woman in this male allegory, a "she" who "dwells with Beauty . . . that must die," a feminine other who completes the logic of Byron's "she" who "walks in beauty, like the night." Keats gives us many darkening female faces, figures of forced oblivion like Lamia or La Belle Dame or figures of tragic total recall like Moneta.
The beautiful ode "To Autumn" signals an acceptance of poised natural oppositions"Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless"before "full-grown lambs" and "gathering swallows" occupy the horizon of "the soft-dying day."
 
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The surpassing of imagination in the odes thus produces moments of rest that signify moments of interpretive work in self-conscious Romantic poetry.
The particular acts of the imagination in Keats's odes serve, he writes in a letter of 1818, "to ease the Burden of the Mystery." He contrasts himself with Byron, who "says, 'Knowledge is Sorrow'"inverting Byron's Aeschylean "Sorrow is Knowledge'' from
Manfred
. Keats goes on "to say that 'Sorrow is Wisdom'and further for aught we can know for certainty! 'Wisdom is folly.'" Condensing the way the heroes of Byron's poetry know life as certainty, folly, and wisdom, Keats claims for himself the more difficult "task" of describing what he imagines. Byron only "describes what he sees," a distinction to question in reading Byron's representations of male experience in his culture.
In his many manifestations, the Byronic hero contains elements of Aeschylus's Prometheus, Milton's Satan, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Fielding's Tom Jones, Goethe's Faust and Werther. The hero may be an aristocratic outlaw who rebels against injustice and corruption. The object of speculation and gossip, he mesmerizes those with whom he comes into contact. He has a deep secret hidden in his past. Byron's description of Lara includes this summarizing statement: "In him inexplicably mix'd appeared / Much to be loved and hated, sought and feared."
The mix in the various Byronic heroes ranges from the explicable and two-dimensional to the self-reflexive and complex. In the latter vein "So We'll Go No More A-Roving" suspends the sexual will. The lyric's three quatrains try abstinence"it is now Lent," Byron writes to Moore in enclosing the lines from Venice at Carnival's endin a light but firm structure of consequence and connection: "So . . . So . . . Though . . . And. . . ." The measured tone about stepping away from desire depends on the rhetorical tension between logical movement and erotic withdrawal; the result is lyrical ease and thematic density.
In 1809 and 1810 Byron shaped events of his own travels in the Levant into the wanderings of Childe Harold, first called "Childe Birun"a "childe" being a squire of medieval times who is about to become a knight. In Spenserian stanzas Byron draws on Gibbon's ideas about the evolution of empires. He works in a topographical tradition that existed in Roman poetry and that is favored by Samuel Johnson, John Denham, and William Wordsworth. Travels lead to places that generate various sorts of meditation.
 
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Canto I introduces the hero as "a shameless wight / Sore given to revel and ungodly glee." Isolated even in the crowds of revelry, however, the Childe leaves his home feeling: "'My greatest grief is that I leave / No thing that claims a tear.'" Following the Childe to Lisbon, Cintra, Seville, and Cadizall significant sites in the Peninsular War (18081814), the narrator of the poem begins Canto II meditating on the past glories of Athens. The ruins of the Acropolis serve to link the past and present. The Childe reappears traveling to Albania, where helike Byronis received by Ali Pasha.
In his self-imposed exile from England, Byron published Canto III in 1818, taking the Childe"the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind"and the narrator, who has not "loved the world, nor the world me," to Waterloo, to the Rhine, and to Lake Leman and the nature of Wordsworth, Rousseau, and Shelley. In a letter of 1819 Keats reports that four thousand copies of Canto IV have been sold even before the work has appeared in print. Standing on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, the narrator suggests that "states fall, arts fadebut Nature doth not die." Finally, it is the ocean that remains for the pilgrim Childe and for the consciousness that pens the tale: "Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow."
To create Childe Harold is to "live / A being more intense." In the figures of the Turkish Tales, Conrad the Corsair, Lara, the Giaour, Selim of
The Bride of Abydos
, Byron shapes beings that embody the intense notion of maleness that so fascinated nineteenth-century readers.
Manfred
, a "dramatic poem" of 1817, seems obsessed with autonomous male power. "Power" and two cognates are spoken over forty times in an insistent debate within and about Manfred's mountainous individualism, as John Martin's watercolor
Manfred on the Jungfrau
(1837) heroically illustrates. In the death scene Manfred faces down infernal spirits that try to claim him for having knowledge they can't comprehendwon "by superior science . . . and skill / In knowledge of our fathers."
Both rumor and Manfred's own search among weird realms for oblivion or forgiveness indicate that he crossed into incest, which killed his sister Astarte. Appearing as raised premonitory phantom, Astarte is the only human female figure in
Manfred
. The tyrannous spirits that harangue Manfred's tortured freedom revert to the devils of morality plays. By 1821 Byron was proclaiming Shakespeare "to be the
worst
of models," but an epigram from
Hamlet
precedes this poem, and its
 
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rhetoric slips into that of the Shakespearean stage"We are the fools of time and terror." Blank verse scenes and rhymed choral insets, however, make Manfred's controlled excess the key to Byron's construction of man's individual will and its wide consequences.
The possibilities for man's exercising of his will in life, love, and war are developed and satirized in the figure of Don Juan. Among the reactions of the English friends to whom Byron sent the first canto of
Don Juan
was: "It will not be possible to publish this." Reactions of readers to the cantos of
Don Juan
, which appeared from 1818 through 1821, encompassed the extremes of hostility and admiration. To Douglas Kinnairdhis banker, business advisor, literary agent, friend, and staunch defenderByron wrote: "As to 'Don Juan,'confessconfessyou dogand be candidthat it is the sublime of
that there
sort of writingit may be bawdybut is it not good English?it may be profligatebut is it not
life
, is it not
the thing
?"
A treatment of the hero in love and in war,
Don Juan
explores epic, literary, political, sexual, religious and moral codes and pretensions. The narratorwhom Byron characterizes in an unpublished preface as a Spanish gentleman with a jug of malaga and a "segar"drifts in and out of the poem to tell of Don Juan's exploits after being driven from Seville by an irate husband. A shipwreck washes Juan up on an island, whence he is driven by an irate father, who finds him making love to his daughter. Sold into slavery, Juan arrives in Turkey, participates in the siege of Ismail, and goes to Russia and England. Along the way Juan is besieged with women who find him irresistible: his mother's friend Donna Julia; Haidée, daughter of the pirate Lambro; Gulbeyaz, the Sultana along with her three maids, Lolah, Katinka, and Dudú; Catherine the Great; and three English womenthe fierce Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, the innocent Aurora Raby, and the knowing Lady Adeline Amundeville.
In 1821 Byron wrote:
To how many cantos this may extendI know notnor whether (even if I live) I shall complete itbut this was my notion.I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy and a cause for divorce in Englandand a Sentimental 'Werther-faced man' in Germanyso as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of those countriesand to have displayed him gradually
gâté
and blasé as he grew olderas is natural.But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hellor in an unhappy marriage,not knowing which would be the severest.The Spanish tradition says Hellbut it is probably only an Allegory of the other state.
 
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Don Juan
has proven particularly receptive to contemporary criticism's emphasis on poetry as self-reflexive linguistic production within cultural and political contexts. In assuming the right to talk at length and with ease, Lord Byron has serious fun with English rhymes and puns, with the argots of meditation, seduction, and warfare, and generally with speech of many kinds. In his open-ended epicin which he wants to "giggle and make giggle" at all forms of moral and literary closureByron deploys the eight-line, ottava rima stanza that endlessly builds up and inevitably comes down.
Don Juan
uses the most ample genre"my poem's epic"and claims the most room of any Romantic poem. Byron takes a long, laughing view, his sense of possibility and futility in the world ever responding as he writes himself into and around young Juan's readiness for all experience. It is the poem in which Byron succeeds most in renovating the Swiftean, Shandean intersections of reader, writer, and written.
The narrative of Don Juan's experience in the world is perhaps the poem that Shelley "prophecized" for his friend in a letter of 1821: "You
will
write a great and connected poem, which shall bear the same relation to this age as the 'Iliad,' the 'Divina Commedia,' and 'Paradise Lost' did to theirs."
Byron died in a war of national liberation, Shelley in a boat more daring than practical, and Keats in a family plague of tuberculosis. "A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory," Keats wrote to his brother George in 1819, and went on to deny such allegory to Byron, who "cuts a figurebut he is not figurative."
We tend to disagree with Keats as we make him, Byron, and Shelley figures of writers in the world as well as in literary history. Like Adonais they "beckon" to us from Romantic sureties of will, love, and imagination tempered by comedy, skepticism, and memory.
Further Reading
Bate, Walter Jackson.
John Keats
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Bloom, Harold.
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
. New York: Doubleday, 1961.

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