Ode to a Nightingale Flashcards

Romanticism and Empiricism

Romanticism: A philosophical revolution against the Enlightenment (Age of Reason).
Empiricism: Understanding knowledge through emotions, feelings, and imagination rather than intellect.
Rejection of Augustan Tradition: Unlike poets like Alexander Pope who focused on form and rational truth, Romanticism rejected these concepts.
- Pope's quote: "True wit is nature to advance, True wit is nature to advantage dress, Which oft was fought but never so well expressed."

Definition: The ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Death and Mutability: Tied to the concept of time.
Internalization of Death: Keats had internalized his own mortality.
- Family deaths from tuberculosis: Mother and brother.
- Exposure to tuberculosis: As a medic and living above an apothecary.

Bad Reviews: Keats felt metaphorically killed by negative reviews.
Blackwood's Magazine: Coined the term "Cockney School of Poetry" for Keats, Leigh Hunt, and John Haslett.
Conservative Critics:
- Attacked Keats' work as mawkish and bad-mannered.
- Called him an upstart, vulgar cockney poet.
- John Gibson Lockhart: Accused his work of being incongruous and unkempt.
- John Wilson Croker: Criticized the language and ideas in his poems.

Association with Love: Nightingales are often associated with love.
Medieval Literature: The nightingale acted as an allegory for courtly love.
Myth of Philomela: Turned into a nightingale after being raped and tortured, stressing melancholy and suffering related to love and beautiful song.
Inspiration from Coleridge: Keats was inspired by Coleridge's poems, "To the Nightingale" and "The Nightingale a Conversation Poem."
Nonverbal Beauty: Nightingale's song represents the music of nature and can be a metaphor for poetry.

Written During a Happy Time: Despite focus on mortality, it was written during an unusually warm spring.
Letter to Fanny: Keats wrote to his sister Fanny about fine weather, health, books, and contentment in May 1819.

Love for Fanny Braun: Keats was deeply in love with his neighbor.
Charles Brown's Account: Keats composed the ode under a plum tree after being delighted by a nightingale's song.
Not a Simple Description: An intense meditation on the contrast between human mortality and the immortality of the nightingale's song.
Poetry's Role: Considers poetry's ability to create a suspended state between mortality and immortality.

Stanza One:
- Speaker's Heartache: Declares feeling numb, as if having taken a drug.
- Addressing the Nightingale: Expresses sharing the nightingale's happiness rather than envying it.
Stanza Two:
- Longing for Oblivion: Wishes for wine that would evoke the country and peasant dances to disappear into the forest with the nightingale.
Stanza Three:
- Desire to Fade Away: Wants to forget the troubles that humans know, emphasizing mortality and impermanence.
Stanza Four:
- Following Through Poetry: Speaker tells the nightingale to fly away and he will follow through poetry, describing the forest glade and moonlight.
Stanza Five:
- Sensory Deprivation: Speaker cannot see the flowers but guesses them in the darkness.
Stanza Six:
- Attraction to Death: Speaker is drawn to the idea of dying and finds it richer than ever, surrounded by the nightingale's song.
- Immortality of the Song: If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, but he would no longer hear it.
Stanza Seven:
- Immortality of the Nightingale: The nightingale's voice has been heard by ancient emperors and is often charmed, opening magic windows in magical lands.
Stanza Eight:
- Return to Reality: The word forlorn restores the speaker back into himself.
- Imagination's Failure: Speaker laments that imagination has failed and questions the reality of the nightingale's music, wondering if it was a vision or a dream.
- Uncertainty: Ends with speaker questioning whether he is awake or asleep.

Fleeing Tragic Existence: Attempts to escape weariness and the threat of tragic existence through intoxication and imagination.
Dark World: The mind becomes lost in a dark world of fleeting sensations, suggesting death rather than escape.
Immortality of the Song: The nightingale's song is immortal.
Turning Point: The word "forlorn" shocks the poet into self-consciousness.
Imagination's Illusion: The poem dismantles its own illusion that imagination can create permanence and beauty, allowing transcendence.
Temporality: The imagination needs temporality to do its work and tantalizes with the desire to experience the eternity of beauty.
No Real Experience Apart from Time: Imagination seems to falsify.
Dismantling Illusion: The more the poet relies on imagination, the more questionable it becomes.
Truth Obscured by Impatience: The need to seek beauty and permanence in art stems from an impatience for truth.
Redemption Through Profound Comprehension: Art redeems experience through a more profound understanding of ourselves and the paradoxes of our nature.
Open Questions: Expecting art to provide certain closure only invites open questions or deeper inquiries.