01733--closed couplet

Closed couplet is two lines of metrical verse in which the syntax and sense come to a conclusion or a strong pause at the end of the second line, giving the couplet the quality of a self-contained epigram. The term is applied almost always to rhyming couplets, especially to the heroic couplet; but whereas the heroic couplets of Chaucer and Keats often allow the sense to run on over the end of the second line, those written by English poets in the late 17th century and in the 18th are usually end-stopped, and are thus closed couplets, as in these lines about men from Sarah Fyge Egerton's 'The Emulation' (1703):

They fear we should excel their sluggish parts, Should we attempt the sciences and arts; Pretend they were designed for them alone, So keep us fools to raise their own renown.

00477--Polo forest photos, Gujarat

Wow!

Me

my colleagues; wonderful people

Had Keats seen this...

the boy

A proud member of the Polo forest

Art

If winter comes can spring be far behind

on the way to Polo forest

00238--Show how Keats succeeds in this Ode in giving concrete poetic expression to a theme that is abstract and profound. / Write an appreciation of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. / Comment on the evolution of thought in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. [English Literature free notes]

            'Ode on a Grecian urn' is one of the most remarkable poems by the great romantic poet, John Keats.  The poem reveals Keats great interest in Hellenic life and art.  In it the poet has also given expression to his philosophy of art.Audio Books

            The poem is said to have been inspired by the Elgin Marbles, a part of the sculpture of the temple of Athena in Greece which was brought to England and later sold to the British Museum.  Keats was however not inspired by one particular urn but by many of these sculptures.  The poet combines all these into one work of supreme beauty.  In the poem the urn becomes a symbol of art and permanence.  He compares art with real life and concluded Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.

            In the first stanza Keats stresses the superiority of art.  Through a series of rhetorical questions he brings to life the engravings on the urn.  These pictures are taken up in the subsequent stanzas, adding details which make them immortal.

            The wild ecstasy of the musicians at the end of the first stanza inspires the poet to say that heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.  In his imagination Keats listens to the sweeter unheard melodies which do not end and which are ever fresh and eternal.

            Keats then addresses a young lover pictured on the urn.  The lover is about to kiss his beloved.  The artist has arrested his further movement and so the lover does not even fulfill his desire.  The poet however consoles the lover.  Fulfillment takes away the expectation and thrill.  The lover will ever love and his beloved with always be young and beautiful.

            Here we have Keats philosophy of art.  Art is superior to life because it is not subject to growth and decay.  Trees on the urn never shed leaves, they are always in full bloom for the artist had pictured them in spring.  The piper never gets tired.  For each generation the piper sings fresh songs.  His music passes from the real to the eternal.  It becomes the everlasting music of the soul which one listens with the inner ear.

            There are other figures carved on the urn, all frozen in time.  There is a crowd of worshipers on its way to a sacrifice, there is a mysterious priest leading a fat sleek garlanded heifer to the leaf-decked alter.  Looking on the scene Keats lets his imagination fly beyond the visible into the little town which has been evacuated.  The streets are deserted and silent for all the people have gone for the sacrifice.  They will never return and the streets of the town will always be desolate.Audio Books

            The last stanza of the ode contains Keats testament of Beauty.  Keats has written that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.  The beauty of the urn and the joy it gives to the viewer are a joy for ever.  Time does not destroy this beauty, it is there for all age to give joy, and it is everlasting.  So Keats writes Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.  It is not only the urn's message to man but also the philosophy of Keats on Beauty and Art.

00217--Keats’ concept of Hellenism as revealed in the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. [English Literature free notes]

Keats usually drew his inspiration from two sources; Greek Art and Medieval Romance.  His acquaintance with the Elgin marbles and familiarity with Grecian urns inspired his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.  Greek art with its belief in absolute perfection of form fascinated him.  The word “urn” is an attractive one, and full of artistic significance, but Keats wanted to bring the very presence of Greece here, and therefore uses the word “Grecian” in the title itself.  He preferred this term to “Greek” because the latter signifies Greek language and the citizens of that great civilization.  “Arcadia” (known as the Switzerland of Greece) and “Tempe” (a synonym for a valley with cold shades and romantic scenery) are referred to by the poet as scenes pictured on the urn.  The sacrifice mentioned in the poem also is a common feature of Greek religion.  The word “Attic” in the concluding stanza again takes us to Athens, the centre of Greek civilization.

00205--'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' as a ballad [John Keats]. [English Literature free notes]

A ballad is a narrative song of love and adventure usually using a dramatic form of questions and answers.  Keats's famous poem  "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", has been written in the style of a ballad.  It tells the story of a knight who was enchanted by a beautiful lady who finally destroyed him.  In his poem Keats has followed the ballad style.  He uses archaic words and the metre of the poem conforms to the ballad style.  The subject matter of the poem is also a characteristic of a ballad.  The theme of most of the early ballads is a knight's love for a fairy, the deception and the consequent sad plight of the knight.  This poem is one of the few successful ballads written in English poetry. 

            Like most traditional ballads the poem begins with a question.  The poet finds a knight equipped with his weapons loitering about alone in the woods.  He looks sad and pale.  It is the autumn season and even the weeds of the lake are dried up and no bird sings.  The poet asks the knight why he is roaming about alone in the dull season of the year when the corn has been reaped and even the squirrels are not found moving about the fields as they are stored enough grain for the winter.  He further tells the knight that his face is as white as a lily and his forehead is covered with drops of perspiration resulting from some inward pain.  His cheeks are bloodless and dry like a rose which is losing its colour and withering quickly.

            The knight tells the poet his touching story.  While roaming about in the meadows he met an extremely beautiful lady.  She looked a fairy child.  She had long hair and walked nimbly.  There was wildness in her eyes.  The knight was so much enchanted by her beauty that he plucked flowers and made a garland for her head and bracelets and sweet smelling belt.  The beautiful lady did not speak a word.  From her look and sweet melancholic manner the knight thought that she loved him dearly.  He took her on his horse and they rode the whole day.  In his extreme love for the lady, he did not notice anything around him.  While riding, the lady bent sideways and sang some fairy song.  At last they reached a strange place.  The lady offered him delicious food.  She spoke in a strange language.  The knight thought that she was expressing her love for him.  She then took him to her fairy home and there she lulled him to sleep.  In his sleep he saw a nightmare.  He felt that he was lying on the side of a cold hill and there he saw a number of princes, kings and warriors.  They looked very pale.  They told him that they had been deceived by the beautiful lady.  They were her early Victims.  When he woke up he found that he was lying alone on the cold hill.  The lady had deserted him.  In his sad plight he is roaming about the dreary hill in that dull season of the year.   

00201--Summary of Ode On A Grecian Urn [John Keats] [English Literature free notes]

Stanza 1.  The poet addresses the Urn. Looking at the urn the poets imagination conjures up the ancient life and worship suggested by the sculptured images and he speculates on the abstract relation of art and life.  These figures are unpolluted by the hand of man and not destroyed by time.  Time which destroys everything has preserved it like a foster child.  Scenes from rustic life are depicted on the urn.  It is also if some historian had recorded ancient Greek life.  The engraver has succeeded in giving it permanence.  A poet could not do this better.  The scene is pictured with an ornamental border of leaves.  It tells the tales of gods and men in Tempe or the valleys of Arcadia in Greece.  The poet now asks a few questions.  We are these men or gods?  Who are these women feigning coyness?  Why do the men or gods pursue them madly?  The poet wonders how they elude their pursuers.  Pipes and timbrels are playing and the whole scene is filled with exquisite rapture.

            Stanza 2.  In the second stanza the poet emphasizes the permanence of a moment captured by art.

            Songs heard in reality are sweet, but those unheard, those which dwell in the realm of the ideal are sweeter still.  From the real world the poet takes us through the world of art into the pure realm of imagination.  So the pipes he seems on the urn play on not to the physical ear but to the ears of the soul and we hear the harmonies of eternity.  The poet addresses the sculptured figure of the young man who cannot stop singing.  The trees under which he is standing will be ever green, Both the youth and the trees have passed into the realm of eternity through art.  The lover is about to kiss his beloved.  The consoles the lover.  His beloved is always young because as in real life the lover and the girl do not grow old and lose their beauty. 

            Stanza 3.  On the urn the trees are even green.  They cannot shed their leaves because it is always spring for them.  The piper standing under the tree will keep on signing fresh songs.  The lovers on the urn keep on loving.  They are always happy.  The fleeting passions of real life do not affect them.  They are never surfeited.  They do not suffer from the agonies of thwarted love.

            Stanza 4.  The poets curiosity is aroused watching the figures coming to the sacrifice.  Who are these men and women?  Who is this mysterious priest who leads the young sacrificial cow to the grassy alter.  The poet hears the pitiful crying of the cow.  Looking beyond what he seems before this eyes the poet visualizes the empty stress of the little town.   All the people have gone to the sacrifice.  They will never return and the streets of the city will ever be silent and desolate. 

            Stanza 5.  The beautiful shape of the Grecian Urn raises in the mind of the poet the ideal of Beauty which he equates with Truth.  The sculptured figures of men and women and the pastoral scene raise thoughts which baffle the poet.  They are as mysterious as eternity.  When men of this age are crippled by old age the urn would whisper words of comfort Oman of succeeding generations.  Beauty is truth, truth beauty.  Beauty and truth becomes one and the same thing.

00191--Tradition And Individual Talent by T.S.Eliot

Tradition and the Individual Talent

                                           T.S. Eliot

I

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at mo.st, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of so-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to. English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

 Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ''more critical" than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to. insist, when we praise a poet, upon tho.se aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the mo.st individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality mo.st vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ''tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lo.st in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value-a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: It appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe-the mind of his own country-a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind-is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my program for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus3 of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of,"personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulfurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came," which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality:

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light-or darkness-of these observations:

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself

For doting on her beauty, though her death

Shall be revenged after no common action.

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors

For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships

For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

Why does yon fellow falsify highways,

And put his life between the judge's lips,

To refine such a thing-keeps horse and men

To beat their valors for her? . . .

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or fiat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere

which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be 'Conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal”.  Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few- know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach his impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious; not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

                                       The End