Keats - Garden, Originality, Inspiration, Sublime

Question 1

Introduction

Answer 1

• Romantic emphasis upon originality presented a departure from neo-classicist aesthetics
• Emphasis stems from Edward Young’s ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’ (1759)
• -> George Macfarlane notes the “exasperation with imitation” and the belief that “true literature was uninfluenced” that became an essential part of Romantic ideology
• Percy Shelley wrote to William Godwin in 1818 in his “despair of producing anything original”
• John Gibson Lockhart similarly slammed the ‘cockney school of poetry’ who were, he claimed, ‘unacquainted with the face of nature’ and so had no right to discuss the ‘green fields’, ‘jaunty streams’ or ‘o’er arching leafiness’
• Keats, like Shelley, displayed anxiety about his interaction with sublime beauty and its reproduction in his poetry
• As Lockhart had claimed, he could not regularly interact directly with sublime beauty, due to his socio-economic and professional position
• As such, Keats’ means of interacting with the sublime was through semiotic chains of referentiality.
• Whilst this on the one hand provided him with the means of experiencing natural beauty, it also drives him towards “negative capability”, and an overarching pessimism around the nature of original experience

Question 2

P1 - Garden as poetic form

Answer 2

• For Keats, a London-based surgeon, with various financial pressures, the opportunity to directly interact with the sublime was limited.
• As such, his garden operates as the site of his poetic creation
• Locating himself within a “rosy sanctuary” in Ode to Psyche (1819), he notes his “gardener’s fancy”, planting rich imagery in various corners of the poem, including the “cool rooted flowers” and the “blue silver-white”, whilst in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) he notes his position within a “melodious plot” and the “beechen green”, “sunburnt mirth” and “blushful Hippocrene” that surrounds him.
• For Keats, poetry did not merely reflect nature but it became nature
• In ‘To Autumn’ (1820), he notes how the ‘vines round the thatch-eves run’
• Whilst in Ode to Psyche, the repeated deixis in ‘far’, ‘around’, and ‘there’ emphasises the continuous physical construction of the garden within the “untrodden region” poet’s mind, stemming out as the “branched thought of imagination”
• In the final stanza, momentarily, the lines indent uniformly, emphasising a temporary alignment of natural and poetic beauty, for they are allowed to exist with Keats’ psyche, constrained within his imagination and not within the bounds of reality.
• The relationship between the natural world and the poem encapsulates what Helen Vendler terms the “transmutation of nature into art”, as they both combine, and the poetic form is able to reproduce external beauty.
• Allows Keats to rationalise and reproduce external beauty

Question 3

P2 - Aesthetic reproduction

Answer 3

• Keats’ construction of the garden within the form and imagery of his poem enables this beauty to be reconstructed within the mind of the reader
• Vendler’s ‘transmutation of nature into art’ is expanded by Gillian Beer into an ‘interplay of various forms of art’
• This artistic reproduction emphasised in ‘To Autumn’ (1820), which displayed a chain of referentiality, depicts how the lambs ‘loud bleat’ before the ‘hedge crickets sing’, then the ‘red breasts whistle’ and the ‘gathering swallows twitter’.
• This chain of recreation leads into the formation of the poem itself as the ‘fruit vines’ extends out and grow.
• Through this chain of artistic recreation, Keats can experience original beauty through infinite extensions of referentiality and so experience original beauty within his imagination and poetic form