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I think the Keats would be fun (we've been rereading the Iliad & Odyssey, and I was just reading about the Keats poem somewhere, but I can't remember where*... :confused1: )

 

Jackie

 

*ETA: it was in The War That Killed Achilles, by Caroline Alexander.

Edited by Corraleno
brain fart remedied
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OK, here are my random thoughts:

What strikes you most?

First impression: It seems kind of stilted and awkward compared to his later poems.

Are there any words that jump out, or phrases that seem somehow more crucial than others?

 

The first line reminds me a bit of the first line from Shelley's Ozymandias: "I met a traveler from an antique land..." I think the contrast between the two poems is interesting, too: Shelley's melancholy view of antiquity as a forgotten world and a reminder of human mortality versus Keats' exhuberant discovery of a whole new world.

 

"Deep-browed Homer" is a lovely nod to Homeric epithets (grey-eyed Athena, white-armed Hera, swift-footed Achilles, etc.)

 

My favorite lines are: "Yet never did I breathe it's deep serene, Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold..." To me, that's the heart of the poem, as well as being the best written lines. "Breathe it's deep serene" is beautiful and original; some of the other imagery/phrases seem a bit trite (e.g. "realms of gold," "eagle eyes"). Interestingly, my most and least favorite phrases were apparently later additions: the breathe/serene line originally read "Yet could I never judge what Men could mean" (which doesn't work nearly as well, either linguistically or metaphorically), and "eagle eyes" was originally "won'dring eyes," which I like better.

 

I also don't like "watcher of the skies" (clunky, unpoetic) or "planet swims into his ken" (weird sort of mixed metaphor)

What parts are confusing?

Well, I had no idea what "Darien" referred to. In looking that up, I also discovered that Keats had confused Balboa & Cortes, and that the lines about discovering a new planet specifically referred to Herschel's discovery of Uranus. (Apparently Keats was informed of the Cortes/Balboa mistake, but left it in because the meter was better, lol).

 

Also, I don't think the first four lines are as clear as the rest of the poem. I think he's saying that he'd read other classical literature ("bards in fealty to Apollo"), but that reading Chapman was a complete revelation and allowed him to truly experience the power of Homer's poetry.

 

Jackie

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And oh help oh help, please somebody explain to me how to set off my comments from the quoted bit!

The easiest way is just to change the color of the text you've inserted, but you can also break up the quoted part into chunks — you just need to copy & paste the beginning & ending quote codes onto each chunk. But colors are quicker & easier. :001_smile:

 

Jackie

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This is an early poem, and I think part of what you see is his attempt to obey The Poetic Rules as the Romantics understood them, which included lots of apostrophied words to fit the meter and to be more "poetic." It's a legacy in part from the 18th century elite poets, who were drawing on classical learning and who valued elegance, elaboration, and complex syntax over more streamlined and/or more conversational styles, in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the growing ranks of amateur and hack poets.

Interesting — so the more stilted and unnatural the language, the more "poetic" it seemed and the more it advertised the writer's elite education?

 

The poem is a sonnet, too, and sonnets, although they can seem simple, are actually really really difficult poems to write because they must fit so much into so little. In fact, the constraints of the sonnet form and the tension of working with larger themes within those constraints often form the subject matter of sonnets themselves. That's true in this poem, with the governing metaphor of exploration and discovery, mention of planets, heavens, seas.

I don't think I follow this... are you saying that in this poem the constraints of working in the sonnet form are part of the subject matter? Or does this have to do with Chapman — did his translation resonate with Keats because he managed to fit Homer's ideas into a difficult (English) poetic form? Can you clarify what you mean?

 

Now the thing to consider is: how do the poetic elements work to construct that meaning through technique?

I don't know. :tongue_smilie: I'm sure it "read" quite differently 200 years ago, but for me, the constrained format, stilted language, and sometimes trite (to 21st century readers, anyway) imagery have quite the opposite effect — I don't get the feeling of a whole new world opening up at all. But I'd love to hear your thoughts! (And others — where'd everyone go???)

 

Jackie

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Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

 

Familiar with poetry and reality of Greece

 

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

 

Familiar with the wide sea that Homer wrote about, but finds new discovery and meaning in Chapman's interpretation (is this a new translation or someone's reading of the epic?)

 

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific -- and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise --

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

Stunned into silence by the upheaval and enormity of the discovery.

 

 

Why don't we first exchange immediate impressions -- what's going on? What strikes you most? What parts are confusing? Are there any words that jump out, or phrases that seem somehow more crucial than others?

 

I had to look up the pronunciation of demesne because it wasn't scanning properly (de-MAIN).

 

The turn in mood from the octave to the sextet is a tribute worthy of a love poem - yet this is written about a piece of literature.

 

It seems to be written to a select audience, a group who knows Homer, Greece, Chapman and will catch the reference to Cortez and Darien.

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I think a lot of kids (and adults) have difficulty with this kind of language in the same way that they have difficulty with prose writing dating back before the mid-Victorians or so, with very few exceptions. Have you looked at one of Locke's sentences lately? Or Johnson's? It does take a bit of exposure and familiarity to become comfortable with their elaborate, classically-influenced habits of long balanced sets of phrases, rhetorical techniques, multiple subordinate clauses, and LLOOONNNGGG sentences put together with colons and semi-colons. Even when you're more comfortable with it, it's still hard mental work.

 

Poetry is the same thing. If you grow up mostly with more modern poems that are written in more conversational, down to earth style, and/or that move outside the conventions of older poetic forms, you're going to struggle when you hit that older material.

For me, it's not the syntactical complexity of the poem (it's pretty straightforward for the most part), it's just the clunkiness and unoriginality of it. Some of his later work is more complex syntactically, yet (IMHO) so much more original, fluid, and beautiful.

 

So here we begin to see the connection with the triteness of the first four stanzas: until Chapman, everything was dusty, passive, cliched, trite.

Do you think that's really intentional, though? Would Keats purposely make the first four lines dull and unimaginative in order to covey that previous translations were dull? Shouldn't a great writer be able to convey that without being dull himself? How can we know that this is intentional, and not just the product of a young, unpolished poet?

 

"Watcher of the skies" is an interesting phrase too. I can see why it might appear clunky, but now we have the word astronomer, we have the language of astronomy; at the time, of course, the telescope William Herschel built was unrivalled and spectacularly new. I think with that phrase "watcher of the skies" the poem is trying to establish through language how what Herschel was doing was so new that there was no simple word tag to define it, so he has to fall back on "watcher of the skies" to even make it comprehensible. Does that make any sense?

I dislike "watcher of the skies" because I think it's plain & unimaginative: "watcher of the skies" = someone who watches the skies. IMHO it doesn't add anything, it doesn't really contribute to the metaphor he's trying to weave through the poem. For example, here are some phrases relating to night/stars/sky/etc. from other Keats poems: "night's starred face," "embalmed darkness," "winds of heaven were unbound," "space star'd and lorn of light" — calling an astronomer a "watcher of the skies" just seems rather lame and literal by comparison.

 

As for the planet "swimming" into his ken -- yes, that is definitely odd. Why would the poet pick that word instead of something that fit in more smoothly? It's meant to stick out; it breaks the pattern of cliches in the early lines, it's in active voice, it's a motion rather than stasis, and it links the astronomical discovery to the next one, of the new ocean.

I guess that's what I don't like about it — it's like "hmmm, I need a verb for the planet, there's an ocean in the next couple of lines — let's throw swimming in there." To me, it just doesn't fit. He could have used some metaphor related to sailing, for instance, which would have tied together the astronomer, Cortez, the western islands (3rd line), the Pacific Ocean, and the Odyssey. Swimming doesn’t have any connection with anything else going on in the poem, and the idea of “a new planet swimming” just conjures up (for me, anyway) an absurd image that I find silly and disruptive. And then there's "ken," which is Scots (from Old Norse), and also seems totally out of place here. Instead of connecting the astronomical discovery to the rest of the poem, the use of “swimming” and “ken” make it seem sort of shoe-horned in rather than being an integral part of the overall metaphor.

 

I do get that this was one of his earlier poems, and pretty much the only one from his first book that's generally considered a success. But for me, other than the two phrases we've discussed ("breathed its deep serene" & "with a wild surmise"), the rest is just... meh. I don’t understand why it’s included so often in anthologies, other than for the historical value, in demonstrating the effect that the classical world had on 18th/19th C. European art & culture. And even then, Ode on a Grecian Urn is a billion times better, IMO. Compare:

 

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen

 

with:

 

Thou still unravished bride of quietness

Thou foster child of silence and slow time

 

The first pair of lines have a clunky, amateurish quality, IMO, whereas the second pair (written only 3 years later) take my breath away.

 

Jackie

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Totally intentional, absolutely...

<snip>

Poets have to pay attention to every word and phrase and punctuation mark and stress in such a compact, puzzle-like form as the sonnet.

I agree that that's the goal, but I'm still not convinced that Keats accomplished it in this poem. :tongue_smilie: The other poems he wrote at the same time were basically flops — his book didn't sell at all, and only this one poem was considered a success. So I'm not entirely convinced that he had the skill at that time to be quite so intentional.

 

Keats is deliberately working on throwing in the unexpected, giving our rhetorical expectations a twist. He WANTS words to not quite fit...

But how can we know that? Unless Keats himself explained his intention, how can scholars know what's intentional and what's not? Isn't that the core problem with all literary criticism?

 

I also think they are linked brilliantly with the idea of a small, contained ocean (the Mediterranean) and a kind of stasis or passivity, that perfectly fits the thematic idea of other translations he has encountered, but in which he has not found that sense of boundlessness and the overturning of convention that he finds in Chapman.

OK, I googled a copy of Chapman's translation, and now I'm perplexed by the description of this as boundless and unconventional — it seems to me that Chapman has rewritten Homer in a very conventionally English way, e.g:

 

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way

Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;

That wandered wondrous far, when he the town

Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down;

The cities of a world of nations,

With all their manners, minds, and fashions,

He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,

Much care sustained, to save from overthrows

Himself and friends in their retreat for home;

But so their fates he could not overcome...

 

I can understand why this would be revelatory to Keats — it's beautiful poetry in its own right (especially "that wandered wondrous far, when he the town / of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down") — but it strikes me as quite contrained & bound by English poetic conventions (iambic pentameter, AA/BB/CC rhyme scheme, etc.). So I get that, for Keats, reading Chapman's translation was as "gobsmacking" as Herschel spotting Uranus or Balboa seeing the Pacific for the first time, but I don't really get that the translation itself = something totally new and unconventional (indeed it was 200 years old when Keats read it). IOW, think perhaps the two images of discovery (seeing a new planet/ocean) are more about the shock of discovery, and being rendered speechless, than about Chapman's translation itself being new and unconventional.

 

Those lines from the Ode are indeed brilliant. But you're comparing apples with oranges here in terms of what the poet is trying to accomplish in each pair of lines. The point is that the first two lines of "Chapman's Homer" are not supposed to be striking, original, and gripping, because that comes rhetorically later, after the turn. The first part is a play on convention.

 

Lovely as the first lines of the "Ode" undeniably are, there are other lines I dislike probably as much as the earlier poem grates on your aesthetic nerves! Maybe you can tell me what you think of them:

 

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

 

Or this:

 

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought...

 

I can identify the rhetorical tools at work, see the intellectual reason for the repetitions and invocations. But they leave me absolutely untouched. I start feeling like he's throwing in exclamation points to do some of the work that his language should do. I am very ready to acknowledge that this is a personal quirk of mine and not a general reflection on the level of skill in the poem. I just don't happen to like this style, which seems overworked and overly dramatic to me.

Oh, there are definitely lines in all his poems that seem like clunkers to me, but in his later work, the clunkers are the exceptions, whereas (for me) in the current poem the nonclunkers (breathe the deep serene, wild surmise) are the exception. But clearly this is a matter of personal taste!

 

I really appreciate your explanation of why you prefer this poem to the later ones, though — hearing other people's perspectives makes me understand why it's included in so many anthologies.

 

Jackie

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We can take it as intentional because the set-up and manipulation of rhetorical expectations is and has always been a core element of poetic technique, and Keats was a passionate student of poetic technique. It's rock-bottom basic: a poet sets up a prevailing meter, then emphasizes or draws attention to crucial words or phrases by deviating slightly (or wildly) from that meter; a poem establishes a particular use of language, then draws attention to the significance of particular words by separating them from the way the rest work. ... I don't see how it's possible to imagine that the poet wouldn't be obsessively focused on his own literary style and technique as well.

I don't think I'm expressing myself very well. :tongue_smilie:

I think we may be using the word "intentional" in two different ways. I understand that of course Keats intended to write a technically excellent sonnet, and that he intentionally chose the words that he did. What I'm questioning is whether he chose rather pedestrian and unoriginal words and images in the first four lines as an intentional imitation of other translations of Greek literature, or whether the lack of more fluid/original/"poetic" language in those lines reflects his youth and inexperience as a poet, and that perhaps we're reading things into it that he did not consciously put there. Ditto whether he chose odd/disruptive words like "swim" and "ken" in the last lines to intentionally mimic the disruptive effect of Chapman on him. If he'd first read Chapman in 1819, when he was a much more mature and polished poet, instead of 1816, would he still have chosen those words?

 

My point is that I don't think there's really any way to know that. And that's what I find problematic about literary analysis, especially when it moves from "to me, these words have this effect" to "the poet intended these words to have this effect," kwim? But that's a whole different philosophical debate!

 

Jackie

Edited by Corraleno
clarity
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I don't think I'm expressing myself very well. :tongue_smilie:

I think we may be using the word "intentional" in two different ways. I understand that of course Keats intended to write a technically excellent sonnet, and that he intentionally chose the words that he did. What I'm questioning is whether he chose rather pedestrian and unoriginal words and images in the first four lines as an intentional imitation of other translations of Greek literature, and chose odd/disruptive words like "swim" and "ken" in the last lines to intentionally mimic the disruptive effect of Chapman on him, or whether the lack of more fluid/original/"poetic" language in those lines reflects his youth and inexperience as a poet, and that perhaps we're reading things into it that he did not consciously put there. If he'd first read Chapman in 1819, when he was a much more mature and polished poet, instead of 1816, would he still have chosen those words?

 

My point is that I don't think there's really any way to know that. And that's what I find problematic about literary analysis, especially when it moves from "to me, these words have this effect" to "the poet intended these words to have this effect," kwim? But that's a whole different philosophical debate!

 

Jackie

 

I get what you are saying, Jackie. It may be the only part of this discussion that I have truly understood.:tongue_smilie: I spent the last six months working with my high school junior to help him write decent, not brilliant, but decent literary responses. I repeatedly had to tell him that he did not know what Mathew Arnold thought, felt, or intended unless my son had actually read a primary source document where Arnold said, "This is how I felt when I wrote Dover Beach."

 

I know I said that I was in for this analysis, but I feel overwhelmed at the level of the discussion. My oldest son wrapped up his year of Brit Lit through an online school by doing the Romantic poets, followed by the Victorian poets. The level of analysis was so basic that I am finding it difficult to shift gears. The students in this class were all seniors except for my son. After reading the discussions where the kids had to respond to the poetry and support their answers, I felt immediate sympathy for their future college professors. There were maybe three students out of thirty that could handle the basics of the required response with any level of competence. My son went kicking and screaming all along the way as I made him write longer, more complete, yet succinct responses. He could not see why he had to do more than the other students. When the methodology spilled over into chemistry and he started receiving 12/10 points, he changed his tune.

 

Doodler, I want to be able to respond in an intelligent fashion; I just don't know where to start. I am going to print the thread and go back with a highlighter to try and sort out my thoughts.

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As much as I've enjoyed this discussion, I feel like I've monopolized and derailed the thread. :blushing:

 

To steer it back to the topic of writing essays... I'd like to know what options a student would have if he or she were asked to write an essay about a poem. I can think of these approaches:

(1) formal/stylistic analysis

(2) historical/biographical context

(3) personal response

Are there other options?

 

I can imagine that #s (2) & (3) could easily fit a standard essay format: intro, 3 (or more) key points supported by quotes & references, conclusion. But I'm not clear as to how one would structure a stylistic analysis, since there seem to be lots and lots of little details.

 

Doodler, can you explain how you would approach that? How would you group the sort of details you've mentioned into paragraphs? Would you go line by line (or section by section), or group them by theme (words relating to vision; words relating to geography/worlds; etc.), or some other criterion?

 

Jackie

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I don't think I'm expressing myself very well. :tongue_smilie:

I think we may be using the word "intentional" in two different ways. I understand that of course Keats intended to write a technically excellent sonnet, and that he intentionally chose the words that he did. What I'm questioning is whether he chose rather pedestrian and unoriginal words and images in the first four lines as an intentional imitation of other translations of Greek literature, or whether the lack of more fluid/original/"poetic" language in those lines reflects his youth and inexperience as a poet, and that perhaps we're reading things into it that he did not consciously put there. Ditto whether he chose odd/disruptive words like "swim" and "ken" in the last lines to intentionally mimic the disruptive effect of Chapman on him. If he'd first read Chapman in 1819, when he was a much more mature and polished poet, instead of 1816, would he still have chosen those words?

 

My point is that I don't think there's really any way to know that. And that's what I find problematic about literary analysis, especially when it moves from "to me, these words have this effect" to "the poet intended these words to have this effect," kwim? But that's a whole different philosophical debate!

 

Jackie

 

I see what you're saying also. And I think this is a valid concern.

 

I think that it is appropriate to say that word choice in the first part of the poem emphasizes the well-worn feel of the other experiences he's referring to with previous readings of Homer. But I would have to agree that it can be overreach to discuss a poet's intentions/goals unless you have quite solid evidence.

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I'm going to throw out one more quibble about literary analysis. (ETA: This isn't meant to argue with anything Doodler is putting out. I actually think the 10 point list for the essay is very helpful.)

 

I think that background knowledge of a poet's situation, life experience, and influences are very important. It would be hard to understand In Flanders Fields, for example, without knowing that it referred to bloody fighting in WWI. And the fact that so many WWI poets died before the end of the war adds something to the poetry.

 

I spent weeks on William Carlos Williams in college, without ever learning that he was a doctor who would scribble poems on his prescription pads between patients. That little bit of information, learned years later, gave a whole new level of sense to the sparse style he uses.

 

On the other hand, I think that poem still has to stand as a poem in it's own right. There is some tipping point where a poem is propped up by the background knowledge rather than just further illuminated. It's sort of like the contemporary dance routines that only have meaning if you know they are supposed to be about breast cancer, or homelessness, or war in Darfur.

 

Not identifying this as a problem with the Keats poem in particular. Just that I think it's possible to write a poem that draws much of its meaning from context rather than from the actual text of the poem. And when that is the case, you can lose a lot of that meaning and impact as you get more distant from the events referenced.

Edited by Sebastian (a lady)
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It does go both ways, of course. The William Carlos Williams example comes from my own college days.

 

I also remember having the sudden realization that Faulkner was filling families with people who met the Adult Children of Alcoholics archtypes. I mentioned this to the prof, who refused to consider it as a paper topic. Irritated me enough that I went and looked up alcoholism in a couple Faulkner bios. His father was not only an alcoholic, but young Faulkner used to go stay with him in rehab - which was supposed to be instructive for the lad.

 

I do find that it is challenging to write a full essay on one sonnet. I would far rather compare two.

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...note resources for more information, etc. So when your student gets stuck, even if you don't know the poem well, you can suggest ways to get past that block, or help your student take observations and turn them into a thesis statement.

 

A couple of other resources that I found/am finding helpful are SWB's The Well-Educated Mind and her audio lecture on teaching lit. analysis. TWEM gives not only summaries of genres, but also sets of questions (at increasingly deeper levels of discussion, if one wants to help a student to dig more deeply) to ask of each genre. I was reading through the poetry chapter a few weeks ago, and got inspired that perhaps analyzing poetry wouldn't be as intimidating as I used to think. As well, the lit. audio teaches you how to come up with essay questions. TWEM poetry analysis questions could also be used.

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