Keats' Poems

WHat is an important deity in Keats’ work

Apollo - Ode to Apollo 1815, Hymn to Apollo 1816, APollo tp the graces 1818

Apollo as linking god of science and poetry

Hyperion date

1818 unfinished

HYPERION - how does Keats describe the Titans bodies, suggesting his anatomical knowledge of the human body? suggests something of human suffering evidenceing Keats’ experience in the medical wound - also ideas around heat of blood.

“horribly convuls’d/ with sanguine feverous boiling gurgle of pulse’

HYPERION - Why is the focus on the titans significant in terms of scientific focuses at the time

idea of them being superseded by the Olympians - HYperion and the titans as on the verge of extinction, as fossils. Oceanus as the Titan seagod, his domain associated with beginnings of evolutionary life and flux.

the fall of hyperion: A dream date

written right after Hyperion but published posthumoulsy in 1856

FALL OF HYPERION - what does Moneta ask to the speaker, suggesting arguments about the benfits of poetry in the world

“Thou art a dreaming thing;/ A fever of thyself”

FALL OF HYPERION - poet or sage 1.187-90

“surely a poet is a sage;/ a humanist, physician to all men’

FALL OF HYPERION - desire for dissection in Moneta. Also notion of brian as theatre and womb,

"I ached to see what things the hollow brain/ Behind enwombed”

FALL OF HYPERION - MOneta describing sensations perceived from external stimuli, brain

impression of undulation and fissures - important of electricity to cerebral function (Galvani aimal electricity described in print 1791). senses the external object as the agent of the verb = perception involved process. movement - brain as state of activity

“the scenes/ still swooning vivid through my globed brain/ with an electral changing misery”

Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Psyche date

1819

Richardson about Ode to Psyche

2006 - “evoking an embodied, emotive, ingenously inventive mind”

ODE TO PSYCHE - K describe mind unscientifically (priest)

priest building shrine in mind

ODE TO PSYCHE allusive description of brain - sense of structural oscillations of cerebral cortext, anatomy given significance by Gal and SPurzheim. outdoors and nature. suggesting poetic locus amoenus but also fibrous texture and structure - labour of imagination, not a comfortable act, sense of effort and pain.

“wreath’d trellis of a working brain”

ODE TO PSYCHE description of thoughts and cerebral blood vessels through locus amoenus phrasing. Ideas around the branching structure of the arbor vitae cerebelli. play w contrast of light an dark = idea of brain as an embodied centre of imagination reliant on sensory processing.

Also aural perception - assonantal pairings - suggest imagination cannot fill in all details.

novel combination of conventional poetic topoi (psychologised landscape and fanciful bower) and scientific notions of the brain-mind with lingering shadows of Keats’ familiarity with dissected brains.

“branched thoughts … dark-cluster’d trees”

“streams … a rosy sanctuary”

“steep by steep … streams, and birds, and bees … sleep”

ODE TO PSYCHE - final lines.

suggeston of brains permeability to world through eyes ad ears. Richardson (2006) says references fenestra rotundum of inner ear.

capitalisation of Love and nocturnal setting glances towards source material in APuleius’ Met V - Psyche raped by Cupid

“A bright torch, and casement ope at night,/ To let the warm Love in!”

Endymion date

1817

Swann - what the result of reading Endymion is

2006 - “Reading Endymion … we find ourselves adrift in the poetic medium”

ENDYMION - imagining the physiognomy of pain

Glaucus’ “convuls’d clench”

ENDYMION - crystal palace. sense of them as fossils?

“such thousands of shut eyes in order plac’d;/ such ranges of white feet and patient lips/ All ruddy - for here death no blossom nips”

De Almeida about crystal palace episode in Endymion

1991 - “Preserved like specimens in a Hunterian medical museum”

ENDYMION - harrowing glimpse of catastrophic change recorded by fossils in the depth. questins around how trauma is recorded - in poetry? in the body?

Endymion stunned that nature and history destroy in order to create.

“skeletons of man, of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,/ And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw/ Of nameless monster. A cold leaden awe/ These secrets struck into him”

This living hand, now warm and capable date

1819

Lamia date

1819

LAMIA - what does Gigante suggest is alluded to by the discussion of the rainbow

2002 - agreement between Keats and Charles Lamb at dinner party of Benjamin Haydon in 1817 that Newton’s science destroyed poetry of rainbow.

LAMIA - rainbow quote = science v poetry

scientific pursuit of epistemological certainty destroys the beauty of poetry. BUT TOO disavowal of science signals its retention over Keats’ mind.

“she is given/ in the dull catalogue of common things.”

ODE ON GRECIAN URN - De Almeida, Ode as celebration of stasis made possible by art in spite of life (science) - but also sense this isnt as good as life

1991 - “mimics but cannot capture life”

ODE ON GRECIAN URN - distance life and art (compare crystal palace?)

“For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d/ For ever panting, and for ever young;”

Sleep and Poetry date

1816

SLEEP AND POETRY - the goal of poetry (echoing soothing goals of science)

“be a friend/ To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man”