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SHROUDS:
NOTES ON
ROMANTICISM
Adam Fieled
facet of who Haydon is. Since motifs and games like this recur endlessly
in the early sonnets, it is easy for me to imagine that they are dotted with
ironic subtexts, and that twentieth century Romantic criticism was
abased, as was most twentieth century literary criticism, by a willingness
to stay on the surface, and read the surface as adequate in/of itself.
The better part of two centuries has gone by: has anyone dared to do a
substantial critical chiasmus between English Romanticism and French
Neo-Classicism? The vision (for instance) of Ingres's Odalisque with
Keats' odal Psyche- for me, it has to do with euphoria generated from the
apotheosis of aesthetic formality or (if you will) formalism- the most
perfect possible artistic forms (Keats' prosody, Ingres's color harmonies
and uniquely postured Muse), which innovate and conserve so
seamlessly (Greece to England, Greece to France) that what is ecstatic or
euphoric in the consciousness of the viewer or reader is the realization of
possibilities of "universe structures." That intended effect of aesthetic
beauty, of form, lost/corroded in the twentieth century via the perceived
desirability of aesthetic hovels (irony precluding euphoria), is shared by
the erotics of Keats/Ingres in such a way that, as they reach backwards
to the classical and forwards to us, we may understand why the twentieth
century lost its sense of possible ecstasy/euphoria in its myopic
insistence on "singular time."
When John Keats hits these notes in this order in the fourth stanza
of Nightingale:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards...
I have the feeling that, as an incisive point to make against his selfdiagnosis, his cognitive functioning has actually reached a rather
peerless apogee. This is not just on prosodic levels, but with the
realization that the most solid path to a euphoric state of consciousness
is the pursuit of a certain manner/form of textuality itself. This
contradiction- the sunken brain really manifesting the elevated or
"apogee" one- is something which comes up (sideways) in Apparition
Poem 1613, one subtext of which delineates the process by which
spiritual elevation is attained through surmounting a hill "constituted by
kinds of knives." A tangent metaphysics point to 1613 is that when one is
climbing this knife-hill, one may feel themselves falling backward even
during their ascension, so that even upwardly mobile movements seem
to invert themselves. This cognitive confusion- ascendant consciousness
feeling itself (falsely) to be descending, through the sharpness and
bizarre configuration of the kinds of knives complicating cognitive
movements- is where Keats is at in this fourth stanza. The "dull brain" is
the razor-sharp one; what's perplexed and retarded is that this sharpened
brain is blinded to its own ascension by the cognitive dissonance of
extreme psycho-spiritual anguish, which mystifies consciousness into
confusion, irresolution, and self-abnegation, even as Keats unknowingly
creates the ideal stage for his prosodic effects.
Keats clearly meant the Odes to be a rite of passage for his readers; a
marriage or consummation of some sort. Because Keats makes a fetish
of Eros and Psyche, and the sense Psyche has of being (before Eros) a
virgin or ingenue, one subtext I derive from the odal experience is that
Harmony and integrity between the body and the soul: that is the
Grecian ideal. I mean the Greece of Plato, Aristotle, and the like. What
John Keats taps into in his odal cycle is a desire to re-invigorate this ideal
with a new series of assignations and associations. What his
Muse, Psyche, is supposed to engender, both in his own psyche as he
writes and in his assumed audience, is a sense of complete, allabsorptive arousal- cognitive and physical arousal at the same time. The
ideas which animate Psyche as a presence for Keats- innocence,
virginity, purity, piety-in-Nature and Natural processes/forces, are
arousing for a brain looking to recreate these ideas as a basis for
cognitive satisfaction/euphoria; while Psyche, being physically
attractive, is also straightforwardly sexually arousing to him and his
audience, in the odal manner of being passionate, spontaneous, or (to be
a little flippant) "mad for it." Where this created integrity between body
and soul leads, in its ideal form, is into the achievement (as I have said)
of an apotheosis of artistic form- Keats' prosody.
Why "apotheosis" aesthetic forms are important to bring back, as
manifestations of Grecian or Romantic ideals of harmony between body
and soul, is very simple- to restore the natural, healthy vigor of pursuing
stimulation and satisfaction in major high art consonant art. The
Is the music enough? If the point of John Keats' Odal Cycle is to lead the
reader back to the vista that the prosody's the thing, can we accept, as
we would accept in Bach or Beethoven, that the rich formality of the
Odes is its own aesthetic justification and reward? If I can, it is because
(as I said) what we accept in Bach and Beethoven we should be able to
accept (also) in Keats. What I want to discuss here is that, in Grecian
Urn, Keats' stages a demonstration of melopoeia, poetic music, for its
own sake, in stanza three, and the achieved "mad for it" effect is clearly
meant to be euphoric ecstasy:
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
"You and I are gonna live forever," indeed. To me, stanza three stands
as self-conscious mimesis of pagan or tribal spirit, which is angled (as is
suggested later in the poem) against cognition and towards the passion
and the rapture of purgative, self-expressive celebration (whether in a
creative context, as with those who created the urn itself, or not).
Ultimately, whether magnificent prosody alone can justify the Odes is an
important question, specifically because how you answer is an accurate
barometer of how well you do or do not relate to forms and pure
formality in major high art consonant art. If form and formal rigor were
benched, as from a ball-game, in the twentieth century, it is for a reason
few suspect- superior formality in art is just as threatening and
dangerous as narrative-thematic levels, both to the unenlightened and to
conglomerate groups who would like to subject art to its dictates. It is an
expression of extreme and supreme individuality, and as such
encourages individuals who are moved by it to attempt to find an
individual voice for themselves. This, the twentieth century could not
abide. If a significant number of individuals go "mad for it" in the
twenty-first, once again the human race, at least in some sectors, can
come to terms with the vagaries of individuals who bother to do things
for themselves.
Shelley's conception of nature, as presented in Mont Blanc, hinges on an
essential perceived duality- what is sublime against what is "ghastly,
scarred, and riven." That the Ravine of Arve is referred to as "that, or
thou" is significant- "that," third-person nature, or "it" nature, can be
taken to signify the ghastly, scarred, riven aspect of this "clear universe
of things"; "thou," second-person nature, or "you-nature," can be taken
to signify the natural majestic or sublime, companionable and personal
against "it." Shelley has, at his disposal, models and/or conceptions to
gauge what best represents the Power or "secret strength of things"
which is seen to under-gird both nature and human thought- the mind's
musings on itself (self-reflexive musings), or the equally self-reflexive
pursuit of poetic/creative "ghosts," or a language/linguistic universe.
That Shelley opts for visible, material Nature, in its duality, as the most
workable model or synecdoche of this Power indicates that Shelley's
conclusions seem to follow an imperative drive towards the crowning of
empiricism or materialism over imagination, in a manner that Kant
might approve of. It is the streak of a scientific ethos in an aesthetic
context, and purifies Shelley's conclusions: re-affirmations of duality.
Keats, in comparison, likes things companionable all the way through.
He attempts to impose "thou" status on everything, and to live in, and
write from, a resolutely personal universe. Not just personal; a personal
universe tinged by imagination into an ultra-personal, or hyper-personal
universe. The first line of Grecian Urn, "Thou still unravish'd bride of
quietness..." gives (to some extent) the entire anti-empirical game away.
Oddly enough, Keats' connection to "that," to a third-person situation,
context, or universe, is manifested by the mysteries of his prosodywhere it comes from, its power and secret strength, how it manifests. It
is not, it must be noted, particularly accounted for by Keats himself; he
is, in Romantic terms (apropos here), the conduit or channel for it, and
absolved by this position from the rigors of having to account for its
empirical manifestation (or, as they said in Regency England,
"numbers").
One may learn the important lesson from a recessional time: not to
overestimate the human race. I am, myself, learning not to overestimate
the human race. Also: to consider why the major Romantics chose to
incorporate, both into their literary endeavors and their generalized
consciousness, energies from without the charmed circle of the human
race, rather than within; to forge a workable relationship, worth writing
about, with trees, mountains, rivers, birds, flowers, and the like. One
answer is painful, but simple: the consciousness of a Keats or a Shelley
has more in common, both in its intentions and in its creative capacities,
with what inheres in natural objects (trees, mountains, etc) than with the
average human being, and with average human consciousness. It's a
byproduct of both age, and experience; to understand, on a profound
level, how middling most human consciousness is, how involved in
delusion and duplicity, and then to see how this charmed, or not very
charmed, circle might be broken. If you can access higher realities in a
meaningful way, there would seem to be no reason not to do so. In terms
of a lesson from Romanticism worth learning, that is one, though it may
or may not be the most salient.
What Modernism and post-modernism gave us, where literature is
concerned, is the sense that these relationships, between the human
mind and the Otherness of nature, are silly, adolescent, frivolous. The
problem is that most human consciousness is, in and of itself, silly,
adolescent, and frivolous, and to stay within the charmed circle of the
human (or, to get even more narrow, the charmed circle of textuality) is
to stay a child, repeating ad infinitum that we are the center of the
universe, and that the human race should be homogenized the right way.
A homogenized human race manifests no individuals, and if there is
nothing outside the text, the cosmic egg is both cracked and unusable.
Why Keats and Shelley are older than those who followed and inverted
them is that they bring to the surface how wildly uneven both the human
race, and human consciousness, are, and that higher consciousness,
when it manifests, needs to recognize both this variability (rather than a
vaunted homogeneity) and the means to transcend it, sometimes within
the charmed circle of the human, sometimes not. The ditsy quality of
Modernism and post-modernism takes what makes Romantic poetry
superior and pretends it is the pursuit of unreal phantoms; it's just that
the human race, more than nature without us, has a problem with the
unreal and with phantom systems of government, and when
consciousness cannot attach to higher realities, it falls into a trough of
stale ironies, incomprehensible symbols, and perverse lecherous
inversions of lowliness into sublimity and cacophony into harmony.
Shelley, in Adonais, has a way or manner of referring to both John Keats,
and Keats' poetry, as flowery, or flower-like, or even just Keats-as-aflower and his texts ("melodies") as flowers as well. Shelley's most
grandiose moments, especially within the elegy Adonais, tend towards
perversity or twistedness; just as Keats' apogees lean towards the
straightforward or earnest. But the question I'd like to raise is a tangent
to Shelley's designation of Keats and all things related to Keats as
"flowery," and it has to do with a substitution of sorts: let's say what is
"flowery" in serious art or poetry could also be called "ornamental."
That is, meant to heighten sensation, especially sensations of
enjoyment/euphoria, without changing or challenging the substance of
human thought or consciousness. Does Shelley find Keats to be, in his
life and art, ornamental? Is prosody, the melodic richness of language,
merely ornamental or an ornament? As I have said before, but it bears
repeating in this context, if you eliminate Keats here, dismiss his
prosodic achievement as merely ornamental, you have (also) to take out
Bach and Beethoven. By Shelley's definition (it would seem), all music is
"flowery," ornamental. If I cannot accept this designation as more than
a half-truth, it is because what music, in poetry or in its more purified
form, does for human consciousness, as a conduit to rendering the most
heightened forms of emotion as palpably as possible, is substantial, and
adequate to evince the seriousness of the narrative-thematic levels of
literature which have more gravitas for Shelley. Little but music teaches
us how we feel, and that the importance of emotion is permanent.
So, when Keats sings to us of Psyche, his sadder but wiser girl, it is built
into his achieved aesthetic balance that what is flower-like gives us more
than half of Keats' earned gravitas, but by no means the whole thing;
while Shelley's music is adequate, but does not display the emotional
fluency or dynamism of Keats'. Then, it follows that the narrativethematic levels which predominate draw us back to his texts, and the
emotional heft of Shelley's best verse is twisted into a taste we may have
for the gnarled or ghastly (and scarred and riven). This is why, at the end
of the day, artists of consequence will have a difficult time choosing
Keats over Shelley or vice versa; they are so distinct from each other,
each the creator of his own universe or consciousness-world, that the
comparison has the quality of being apples and oranges. Shelley's
condescension, in Adonais, is one of the attitudes that is gnarled in/from
him, or twisted, or perverse; just as Keats does, in fact, make a fetish of