Keats

And I thought understanding Frye was a stretch. I found some of the passages from several of Keats letters to be almost impossible to decipher. I don't know if it was the writing style of one ling sentence, without much real punctuation, the fact that they were merely excerpts from a larger whole, or what. But I found it very difficult to find never the less understand the point he was trying to make. I could only hold on to a few sentences here and there and I'm not sure if I even understand them correctly.

Well, there were a few parts of Keats' letters that I actually understood...I think. I do believe that this will be a piece that I will need to revisit over and over again. and possibly with the company of others, before I can really understand what Keats is saying.

"Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

This line however immediately set off my light bulb. This line echoes Frye, and especially Frye in his article The Archetypes of Literature. Frye's whole motivation to writing the article was to set the faulty critics on the right path. The critics who "broods" and "peacocks" his own interpretations of texts. Interpretations that are based on flakey values pertaining to opinions and personal feelings about the author of the Work. It's about the work, not the author, and definitely not the critic who only "wants to brighten the corner in which they are in".













"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with it's subject."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

This was actually a pretty big light bulb for me. Not too much in the sense that it directly relates to something specific from my previous readings (although I'm sure it does and I'm not seeing the connection), but it gives me something to mull over when I think about poetry. I used to always think of poetry as an organization of beautiful words that describe something, and I emphasized the pretty words more than the subject. Now when I look at poetry, I'll think about how effective of a description it is. If I can feel the sensation or see the scene. A poem is less about the author's ability to string interesting, beautiful, or provocative words together, and more about how they are stringed to embody it's subject. The poem is not about the beauty of the strategically organized words; "She sang beyond the genius of the sea", but what those words mean about the she, about the sea, and what it means when she sings "beyond the genius" of it. Are we actually talking about a girl singing quite loudly on a beach, so that the shrill tone of her voice carries over the deafening crashes and whooshes , or is there something deeper? A creation myth perhaps? Keats has another line that adds to this thoughts;








"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity--it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

Poetry should be a description of an experience that anyone has or could have experienced. But I'm having trouble with wrapping my mind around the concept of "fine excess". I'm not sure what that means. I get what he means in the last part, that poetry should describe an event/ thing as well as not overly describe in a scholarly or typically "poetic" way. But "surprise by a fine excess". Hmm. I wonder if I might need another day to ponder this.
Maybe fine excess really means details. Everything needs to be in a poem that surrounds the subject. But these details, these descriptive words, need to fine tune the beauty and truth of the subject. The reader must get the sensation that where were there; standing by that waterfall, reading that book, hearing those sounds, but at the same time these details cannot be so specific, so Singular to the poet and their experience that any random reader couldn't pick up the poem and really experience the subject of the poem without really being there themselves.