(DOWNLOAD) "The Time of Beauty (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: The Time of Beauty (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 216 KB
Description
POLITICS IS AMONG OTHER THINGS THE WORK OF TIME--PUNCTUAL OR durational, falling with a fine (or terrifying) suddenness or nurtured in silence and slow time. Perhaps only the most utopian or messianic forms of political thought have sought to unmoor themselves from temporality; their credibility as political models has been brought into question to the extent that this is the case. But Keats's orientation in time from the beginning of his writing career was vexed. I refer not only to the legendary briefness of the poet's life, his emulation of distant literary precursors, or even his remark (both admission and boast) that "I never know the day of the Month." (1) To these temporal complications one must add Keats's intense fixation on the posthumous life of writing--a condition well analyzed in Andrew Bennett's work, and more recently evoked in Stanley Plumly's experiment in biography. (2) Keats records in his writing life the conditions of being both "too late" (too, too late for the fond believing lyre) and "too soon" (to cease upon the midnight with no pain). As in many of the Odes, Keats in Hyperion makes this condition of uneasy suspension, between the too-late Titans and the Olympians to come, his first and--until rewriting the poem as The Fall--encompassing subject. The poet is at once "'belated," in both Bloomian and broader historico-political terms, and makes his home in Derrida's l'a-venir, the future-to-come. Oriented toward the inaccessible past, ever watchful of the shadows that futurity casts upon the present, Keats is fundamentally an untimely poet. In what sense-or tense--is he then a political one? One early, influential attempt to answer this question came from the poet's close friend, mentor, and (later) memoirist, Charles Cowden Clarke. In the 186I "Recollections of Keats," first published in the Atlantic Monthly, Clarke affirmed Keats's moral and political commitments with reference to the statement which, at least since it adorned the Art Treasures Palace of the 1857 Great Exhibition in Manchester, had become the slogan of the poet's work. Clarke writes: "His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his political creed:--'A thing of beauty is a joy forever" [sic]. (3) Like the nightingale "not born for death," the beautiful object is oriented toward, if not in itself possessing, eternal life. Beauty persists in defiance of time, bestowing "unto" us, in Keats's insistent preposition from the prologue to Endymion, a shadow of plenitude that our own lives conspicuously lack. (4) The life that "life" does not or cannot afford may yet be available in the luminous forms of art.
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