Chelsea D's Summary

Class started with promises of moving away from the question of Romantic Imagination versus Romantic Irony as we move away from the big six. While everyone contemplated what lay beyond this class (or perhaps were off on a random tangent their mind supplied them with) Foss started to tell us all the story of how he confused a stink bug for a bee in his British Victorian Literature class. Soon all of us got back on track with the topic of Keats and how he fit into the Romantic era. We further discussed how many of the writers in the Romantic period illustrate both Romantic Imagination and Romantic Irony in their works, but the class as a whole seemed to lean towards Keats having more of an Ironic side to his poetry.

After our daily reward quiz and introduction to bees in relation to Foss and our plans for after this class, we devoted some time to the wiki page where we learned how to put our summaries up on our class wiki. I guess if you are reading this right now it is a testament to how well Foss explained our wiki page. This took up about half an hour so when this was done Foss whisked us into small group discussions. My group consisted of three note-takers because two out of the 5 people (including me) were taking notes for our summaries and one person was the designated note-taker to hand in a page for Foss at the end of class.

In our small group we discussed the relationship between Keats' poetry and the other five of the big six's poetry. We came to the conclusion that though Keats fits into the category of a Romantic poet who exudes Romantic qualities, he tried moving away from the typical Romantic poetry and even felt contempt for some Romantic poets such as Wordsworth. He believed that Wordsworth had let an emphasis on the individual morph into a egotistic love of self which resonated throughout his poetry.

One way in which Keats differed from the other Romantic poets was that rather than looking at himself in time and space, he pondered how he would be seen after his death. He was afraid that he would not be recognized as the great poet he saw himself as, and I think he also wondered how people would think of him and his poetry after he was gone. Examples of this can be readily seen in “When I have fears that I may cease to be” where he admits, “When I have fears that I may cease to be/ Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,” and also in “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” where he emphasizes mortality making him weak (1-2). We learned in class that Keats' suffered through the death of his father at 8 years old and then his mother's death just a few short years later at the age of 13. This no doubt familiarized Keats with the concept of death and was probably the reason he devoted so much thought to what would remain of himself after his death.

We went on to talk about Keats' sad tone in many of his poems. More than a focus on his own death, he put a lot of emphasis on inevitable decay, and he showed a disconnect from the world around him. He does this by separating his writing from other Romantic poets by showing a less idealized version of nature. Even in “To Autumn” Keats shows morbidity, though many of his descriptions of nature itself are quite beautiful. He recognizes nature as beautiful (much like the Romantic poets before him), but he puts much more of an emphasis on the cycle of nature having death in it as well. The mere title of the poem suggests that life and nature is preparing for the hard times and death.

When our small group discussions were finished, Foss brought the whole class back together to talk as a big group for just a few short minutes. It sounded as though (from the brave students who raised their hands) the majority of the class were in agreement with the general consensus of Keats being more of a writer of Romantic Irony rather than Romantic Imagination. Keats, like the other Romantic poets, does exert both Romantic Imagination and Romantic Irony, but he focuses heavily on himself as a poet. His works are less about the imagery and more about the self. He breaks character in the sense that his poetry is not about entrancing the reader in a story or an image, it is more about looking in at himself, sometimes even mocking himself. Even in the poem “Ode to a Nightingale” which is full of vivid imagery and seems to linger in the realm of Romantic Imagination, Keats keeps bringing back the emphasis on himself and his fear of death. He enviously remarks, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” while he himself “might drink, and leave the world unseen,/ And with thee fade away into the forest dim” (61, 19-20).

Before too much more evidence could be said to either support or disagree with the Romantic Irony argument, Foss released us into the wild because class time was up.

Word Count: 886