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."

Negative Capability

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

Key Concepts in Keats' Poetry

• 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.

Criticism and the Cockney School of Poetry

• 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.

The Nightingale in Literature

• 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.

Ode to a Nightingale Context

• 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.

Inspiration

• 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.

Summary of Each Stanza

• 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.

Key Themes and Interpretations

• 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.