Emily Butler's Class Summary

Emily Butler February 10th, 2011 BRL

Class Summary for February 3, 2011

Class on this fine Thursday began with a reward quiz! The class, I could tell, was thrilled to share with Professor Foss all we remembered from reading Keats. After showing us how to upload files to the class wiki page, Professor Foss announced some disheartening news – today was our final day to discuss Romantic imagination and Romantic irony. Having enjoyed the Keats reading very much, I was excited to end our discussion of imagination and irony with his work. However, in both small group and large group discussion, I found Keats’ work the most perplexing to categorize of all the other writers we read. Through our discussion, it became clear that Keats invoked both methods of imagination and irony. I came to feel by the end of group discussion that while Keats may use elements of imagination in his work, it is most often used to highlight the constant mentioning of death and mortality, and is therefore used ironically, in conjunction with the more blatant ironic tone of Keats’ work.

We began our final discussion on Romantic imagination and irony with small group discussion. Each member in my small group brought up an initial impression of irony within Keats’ constant imagery involving darkness. We then brought into question Keats’ own life in the Romantic Era. From what we read of his biography, we discovered a disconnection of Keats from his fellow poets of the time, many of who were very chummy in their literary circle. This disdain for his peers played into our impressions of his writing approach as one that was very dark. Keats’ focus on the work itself rather than the transcendence aspired to by other Romantic authors more heavily grounded in imagination, also aided us in our opinion of Keats’ use of irony. It was when we approached the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that we acknowledged the complications in our assumptions of Keats as a writer solely grounded in his use of irony. Keats was definitely calling into question the merits of art (writing, such as his, included) while juxtaposing it with the necessity of imagination. Grecian Urn talked of humanity’s dissatisfaction with the ephemerality of reality, which rests upon our ability to imagine something more than what is in front of us. Art is often seen as a direct response to one’s use of imagination, yet Keats’ tone is still so saturated with a dark and biting sense of irony.

When we came to the large group setting, I felt as though Keats’ work truly did effectively employ both imagination and irony, but did not have a good understanding of to what result. As we began to talk about other pieces individually, it became clear that certain pieces leaned more heavily to one side than did others. We discussed an earlier poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” which was heavily focused on the power of human imagination. In this poem, exploring literature is compared to an astronomer discovering a planet, making it a testament to the power of imagination. We then moved to discussion of On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, a poem much more centered around man’s inescapable mortality. However, even within this darkness, the question of imagination is roused by the mentioning of “Grecian grandeur” offered by the marbles, as if despite Keats’ assertion of mortality, there is still some aesthetic wonder offered by art. This suggestion of art as a sort of transcendence, or perhaps at minimal, a temporary escape from our mortality, brings into question Keats’ motivations for dwelling on man’s shortcomings and imminent death. We then discussed “When I have fears that I may cease to be” in which Keats expresses his desire to be immortalized in his art. This view that literature is larger than man suggests that art can offer some transcendence. However, that Keats remarks on his own role as a writer and expresses his fears of his art surviving shows not a faith in imagination, rather a yearning. It is this yearning that speaks to the irony that as an artist, Keats could achieve a sort of immortality, yet it is at the whim of his fellow man and their appreciation for his art. The class discussed how the speaker was put in a more ironic position, for though he desires to gain fame and have love, he is overwhelmed by his fears that these will not be realized.

The class then moved to discuss the Odes written by Keats. Foss challenged us to juxtapose the poems as a way to investigate their uses of imagination and irony. Within the odes, it seemed that Keats employs imagination in his stylistic approach, yet his tone is still heavily ironic. We then as a group discussed “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” focusing on the speaker’s attraction to the preservation offered by urn, which correlates largely to Keats’ fascination with historical cultures and the effect of history in the modern day. The class seemed to find Urn a poem full of ambiguity concerning imagination and irony, with much question as to whom the poem was addressed. The largest question the class was left to ponder was if the urn represented art as an opportunity for transcendence or if the poem was more concerned with the irony of a frozen image preserved on the urn. In pondering this question I have come to the conclusion that ultimately in Urn, Keats writes ironically, for art and its necessary imagination cannot transcend an individual’s life, such as that of the poet. Rather, art can only preserve a sense of mankind and history as a whole. We then moved to discuss To Autumn, which is often seen as an end piece to Keats’ body of work. In this poem, Keats portrays a more accepting view of death and mortality, with the emphasis on the process, where autumn is the descent into death, rather than winter’s finality. However, the dark talk of death is prevalent, though subtle, and still no transcendence is offered. At most, imagination is used in this poem to suggest that a reader can move beyond concerns at times to appreciate the beauty of nature through the powers of imagination, yet ultimately, mortality prevails. We ended our class discussion of Keats with the final poem, “This Living Hand.” I took this at Keats’ final jab at the ultimate irony of art and death, his two most wrestled with themes. The piece seemed a testament to life, yet only so by the power of the written word in death. Keats is manipulating his reader to question the limits of life, calling upon their sense of imagining to literally see his hand reaching out to them, yet ultimately Keats is dead as this poem is imagined. Therefore, his use of invoking a reader’s imagination is used to emphasize and highlight his own mortality and death as a human inevitability.

The few weeks we spent on discussing the Big Six and their uses of Romantic imagination and Romantic irony, it was often difficult for the class to come to a cohesive conclusion. Both elements are integral to Romantic literature and often work alongside or with each other. Keats work often incorporated both elements, but his wielding of imagination as a tool to highlight mortality in the end assisted his use of irony in his works. (1222)