Critical Quotes Flashcards
Cairns (Grecian Urn & Melancholy - Time)
In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode on Melancholy’ the power of time is still felt, but the mood is not one of defeat. The sense of loss is balanced by the consolations of art and philosophy, or at least on attitude of mind.
Cairns (To Autumn - Beauty)
The poem communicates an experience of beaty that is simultaneous with a sense of acceptance of its transience. There is a moment of absolute ripeness: the culmination of the past balanced by a sense of future loss.
Hammond (Grecian Urn- Art and Communication)
If, as it is sometimes said, art has to do with communication then this art object must strike us as unsatisfactory, representing a form of experience that is mysterious and unintelligible.
Hollindale (Ode’s - Imagination)
The odes are poem of imaginative mediation, exploring the poets reaction to intense contemplation of an object, a creature, a mythical goddess or psychological condition, and all signify for the writer in helping him understand his own predicament as a human being and an artist.
Haywood (Confessions)
Many poems contain ‘confessional’ or personal outpourings of the poet. The poet speaks directly to the reader about his feelings.
Haywood (Bright Star- Ideal Experience)
‘Bright Star’ is yet another nocturnal encounter between the poet and ideal experience. Any attempt to transcend the ‘World of Pain and Troubles’ is rejected in favour of a conquest from within.
Holderness (Sensuousness)
The ‘sensuousness’ of Keats poetic language is a heroic attempt to stabilise and appropriate an elusive and ultimately reality.
Holderness (Romantic Period)
The romantic period was, like the Renaissance, an age of enormous discovery and creation, the enlargement of human possibility and power, an age which could be disabled by an inconsolable sense of rupture and loss.
Blades (Nightingale/ Grecian Urn and Autumn)
‘Nightingale’ and ‘Grecian Urn’ are concerned with art and imagination, morality and time, and ‘Melancholy’ considers artistic sensitivity and mortality, while ‘To Autumn’ is a highly sophisticated treatment of the themes of beauty and time.
Blades (Grecian Urn - Ideal Work)
The urn is held up by Keats as the ideal work, a timeless work, demonstrating as it does such a keen harmony between its chaste form and the sensuality of its pictures. So fine is the balance between its own beauty and realism that it emanates an almost palpable stillness, a timeless radiant stasis.
Blades (Grecian Urn - Mortality)
Keats tone is a fusion of delight in the teasing beauty of the immortal urn and melancholy at the reality of his own mortality.
Blades (To Autumn - Partings)
To Autumn is a valediction, a poem of partings - on the day, of the season, and behind this, a parting of life itself.
Colvin (Nature Poetry)
Keats is a master ‘in nature poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in delighted sympathy with her doings.’
Begg (Nature Poetry
‘Keats did, unquestionably, derive inspiration from nature… that inspiration came through association. That is, the natural scene itself, by the delight it created in him, was not the inspiration, but that which is suggested was.’
