Clare, Keats, Shelley

Question 1

What does Stanley Plumly call ‘To Autumn’

Answer 1

‘perhaps the purest poem in the English language’

Question 2

When was Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ published?

Answer 2

1820

Question 3

What is the only imperative Keats uses in ‘To Autumn’?

Answer 3

‘Think not of’ the ‘songs of Spring’

Question 4

What does the Soul consist of, according to Keats in a letter to his brother George in October 1818?

Answer 4

‘atoms of perception’

Question 5

What does Keats say about composition in a letter to John Taylor in February 1818?

Answer 5

‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’

Question 6

When was ‘When I have fears’ written?

Answer 6

January 1818

Question 7

When was Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ published?

Answer 7

1820

Question 8

What does the wind carry in ‘Ode to the West Wind’?

Answer 8

‘The winged seeds’

Question 9

When was Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ published?

Answer 9

1821

Question 10

What metaphor does Shelley use for creativity in ‘Defence of Poetry’?

Answer 10

‘the mind in creation is a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness’

Question 11

What is poetry like, according to Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’?

Answer 11

‘root and blossom of thought’

Question 12

Though creativity is transient, what are creations, according to the ‘Defence of Poetry’?

Answer 12

‘immortal compositions’

Question 13

When was ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ published?

Answer 13

1819

Question 14

What does John Taylor say in a letter to John Clare, March 1826, about revision of poems?

Answer 14

‘What in me is low, Raise & refine’

Question 15

What does Clare say about people who enforce grammar?

Answer 15

they ‘cut it into classes and orders as the student does the animal or vegetable creation’

Question 16

What does Clare refer to his thoughts as in ‘The Flitting’?

Answer 16

‘weedlings wild’

Question 17

What line in ‘The Flitting’ exposes the paradox of writing about nature?

Answer 17

‘een this little shepherds purse / Grieves me to cut it up’

Question 18

What poetic sketch from 1808-9 shows Clare’s anxieties about assumption of the identity of poet?

Answer 18

‘To fancy one that dug in ditches / Might work on mount parnassus’

Question 19

What is peculiar about Clare’s poem ‘On Labour’?

Answer 19

It doesn’t depict any acts of labour, just observing

Question 20

What does Eric Robinson say about John Clare that needs interrogation?

Answer 20

He is ‘the most accessible of poets’

Question 21

What does Keats say to John Taylor in a letter in February 1818?

Answer 21

‘It is a sorry thing for me that any one should have to overcome Prejudices in reading my Verses’

Question 22

What is the first kind of pleasure, according to Clare?

Answer 22

‘one arises from cultivation of the mind’, which is ‘least liable to change’

Question 23

What is the second, more common pleasure, according to Clare?

Answer 23

‘the more common pleasures are found by the many like beautiful weeds in the wilderness’, ‘they are of natural growth and tho very beautiful to the eye are only annuals’

Question 24

What does Sara Guyer say about editing Clare and claims of authenticity?

Answer 24

‘No position within these debates can do without positing Clare’s authentic voice as the grounds for their claim. Their ethical force depends on this fiction of voice, this act of presentation.’

Question 25

What word is conspicuously edited out of the second stanza in Keats’s manuscript of ‘To Autumn’?

Answer 25

‘harvest’

Question 26

What does Heaney say about the revision of local phrases?

Answer 26

‘Once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it’

Question 27

What does Helen Vendler note of Keats’s metaphor of harvest for poetic production in ‘When I have fears’?

Answer 27

In order to produce the ‘high-piled books’, his mind must be made ‘empty and stripped’

Question 28

What is extrinsic to the ‘atoms of perception’, in Keats’s conception of poetry?

Answer 28

‘identity’

Question 29

What does Jonathan Bate say about Clare in the introduction to his selected edition, which seems at odds with his own editorial practice?

Answer 29

‘Clare’s art was to tell it as it is’

Question 30

What does Bate say about punctuation in terms of accessibility?

Answer 30

‘Punctuation is a ladder we need to in order to climb to Clare’s level; once we have got there we can throw it away’

Question 31

What did Taylor refer to editing as?

Answer 31

‘slashing’

Question 32

What does Helen Vendler say about the natural objects in ‘To Autumn’

Answer 32

‘mostly, the things in the poem (flowers, grain, apples) are metamorphosed into their harvested form of honey, wheat, cider.’

Question 33

What does Clare say in ‘Sketches in the Life of John Clare’ about learning as harvest?

Answer 33

‘my pride fancyd itself climbing the ladder of learning very rapidly, on the top of which harvests of unbounded wonders was conceived to be bursting upon me’

Question 34

What painting is used as the cover for both the Penguin Classics of Clare and the Oxford World Classics of Wordsworth?

Answer 34

John Sell Cotman’s ‘The Shepherd on the Hill’ (1831)

Question 35

What does Robert Southey say in the preface to ‘Lives of Uneducated Poets’ in 1836?

Answer 35

John Jones’s verses ‘contained abundant proof of a talent for poetry that, if it had been cultivated, might have produced good fruit’

Question 36

What does Christopher North say about the influence of the Cockney school on Clare in an 1835 review of ‘The Rural Muse’?

Answer 36

‘We hope they will not meddle with Clare’

Question 37

What does North (Wilson) say about Clare and James Grahame in his review of ‘The Rural Muse’?

Answer 37

‘They are two of our most artless poets’

Question 38

What does North (Wilson) say about Clare, labour and poetry in his review of ‘The Rural Muse’?

Answer 38

‘a lot of labour from which his own genius – and we believe the kindness of friends … have set him free’

Question 39

What does Wordsworth say in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1802 regarding growth as a metaphor?

Answer 39

‘Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity’