While I'm not very big on Wordsworth -- I love some of his poems and am indifferent to most of the longer ones -- I very much enjoyed this essay on _The Prelude_, Sally. You made me see that which I certainly missed back in grad school; maybe I will even revisit the whole piece one of these days. But at least this segment has opened in me memories that "lift me up when fallen" . . .
And yet, Sally, Keats focused on Milton — and not, say, Johnson — as the poet most antithetical to him. Maybe that's just the second wave of Romantics, but the 18th century had a run from Dryden to Pope that needs accounting for: the public voice we've spoken of before.
Yes, that's true. And maybe it's the very public-ness of that era's voice that I find so offputting, but that's just a matter of personal makeup, I suspect, not really a sound artistic judgment.
How so? I mean, maybe Keats just thought Pope et al. weren't in the conversation. (I'm thinking here vaguely of a point Jackson Bates makes in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet.) And so he had to go back before them to find a worthy opponent. But why Milton? The anti-Spenser?
Hm, possibly. I was having some vague half-baked thought about Milton's iconoclasm, but didn't Keats in the course of his letters first venerate MIlton (as second after Wordsworth in Keats's conception of the English poetic canon, and the most learned of English poets) --- then later decide that he was the antithesis of what Keats considered life to be? So Milton was clearly prominent enough in his mind to be a figure to pivot around, depending on where he was in his thinking. That at least would explain why it would be Milton and not somebody else.
Just coming back to this to say that I think Keats's deal with MIlton (from what I"ve been reading) is the long shadow of influence Milton cast over him --- that he seems to have felt that in becoming (he feared) too MIltonic, he was losing himself/his own voice. This maybe is what he meant about "the antithesis to life," or whatever exactly his phrase was. This sense, maybe, of being too enmeshed with an influential voice and mind seems different from Wordsworth's antipathy, as he articulated it in the 1802 Lyrical Ballads preface . . .
Wow wow wow! I so enjoyed this entry! I’m not very knowledgeable about the First Gen romantics, but as someone who has read “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” to my kids at least a hundred times while they munched their Cheerios, I see that both this section of the Prelude so eruditely laid out and that poem have the same preoccupation - that beauty and truth is hidden in those ‘spots of time,’ accessed by memory. More Wordsworth soon, please Sally!
I recently read The Prelude for the first time (I suppose I read some bits in sophomore English). I haven't yet written about it but all in all I'm not all that keen on it. There are passages I like a lot, mostly the more down-to-earth relation of experiences, like the one of rowing at night. I should have marked those. I don't care much for his mind-centric philosophizing.
I had just been rereading it for the first time since graduate school, on finishing the Adam Nicolson book I reference in the essay. While in general I come away with greater sympathy for Coleridge than for Wordsworth, and while I think a little of this "I contain multitudes" aspect of Wordsworth can go a long way, I still find it marvelously . . . human, I guess, even when I'm tired of it. But then I share with him a dislike of the Augustans, who just leave me cold. I would have hated to move in those satirical circles. I might have tired of Wordsworth's talk, but everything about him seems more congenial to me, against the backdrop of what came before.
But yes, I definitely love some passages of The Prelude more than others! And there sure is a lot of it . . .
Possibly --- probably! --- this is just a blind spot on my part. I love everything that comes before the Augustans. I love pretty much everything that comes after. Why not them? I really can't say . . . which tells me I should go back and re-engage with them.
Well, taste is taste. Yeats referred to "the hated 18th century." So you have company. Pope's work and Wordsworth's are so different that they're almost two different art forms.
If I have a good reason to make the effort, I can often at least appreciate things that I don't really like that much. Maybe someday I'll make the effort with Shelley, something besides "Ozmandia." Or maybe not.
While I'm not very big on Wordsworth -- I love some of his poems and am indifferent to most of the longer ones -- I very much enjoyed this essay on _The Prelude_, Sally. You made me see that which I certainly missed back in grad school; maybe I will even revisit the whole piece one of these days. But at least this segment has opened in me memories that "lift me up when fallen" . . .
And yet, Sally, Keats focused on Milton — and not, say, Johnson — as the poet most antithetical to him. Maybe that's just the second wave of Romantics, but the 18th century had a run from Dryden to Pope that needs accounting for: the public voice we've spoken of before.
Yes, that's true. And maybe it's the very public-ness of that era's voice that I find so offputting, but that's just a matter of personal makeup, I suspect, not really a sound artistic judgment.
Meanwhile, I can imagine ways that Milton, especially, might have felt to Keats like his own opposite . . .
How so? I mean, maybe Keats just thought Pope et al. weren't in the conversation. (I'm thinking here vaguely of a point Jackson Bates makes in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet.) And so he had to go back before them to find a worthy opponent. But why Milton? The anti-Spenser?
Hm, possibly. I was having some vague half-baked thought about Milton's iconoclasm, but didn't Keats in the course of his letters first venerate MIlton (as second after Wordsworth in Keats's conception of the English poetic canon, and the most learned of English poets) --- then later decide that he was the antithesis of what Keats considered life to be? So Milton was clearly prominent enough in his mind to be a figure to pivot around, depending on where he was in his thinking. That at least would explain why it would be Milton and not somebody else.
Just coming back to this to say that I think Keats's deal with MIlton (from what I"ve been reading) is the long shadow of influence Milton cast over him --- that he seems to have felt that in becoming (he feared) too MIltonic, he was losing himself/his own voice. This maybe is what he meant about "the antithesis to life," or whatever exactly his phrase was. This sense, maybe, of being too enmeshed with an influential voice and mind seems different from Wordsworth's antipathy, as he articulated it in the 1802 Lyrical Ballads preface . . .
Wow wow wow! I so enjoyed this entry! I’m not very knowledgeable about the First Gen romantics, but as someone who has read “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” to my kids at least a hundred times while they munched their Cheerios, I see that both this section of the Prelude so eruditely laid out and that poem have the same preoccupation - that beauty and truth is hidden in those ‘spots of time,’ accessed by memory. More Wordsworth soon, please Sally!
I recently read The Prelude for the first time (I suppose I read some bits in sophomore English). I haven't yet written about it but all in all I'm not all that keen on it. There are passages I like a lot, mostly the more down-to-earth relation of experiences, like the one of rowing at night. I should have marked those. I don't care much for his mind-centric philosophizing.
I had just been rereading it for the first time since graduate school, on finishing the Adam Nicolson book I reference in the essay. While in general I come away with greater sympathy for Coleridge than for Wordsworth, and while I think a little of this "I contain multitudes" aspect of Wordsworth can go a long way, I still find it marvelously . . . human, I guess, even when I'm tired of it. But then I share with him a dislike of the Augustans, who just leave me cold. I would have hated to move in those satirical circles. I might have tired of Wordsworth's talk, but everything about him seems more congenial to me, against the backdrop of what came before.
But yes, I definitely love some passages of The Prelude more than others! And there sure is a lot of it . . .
I read "The Vanity of Human Wishes" for the first time a year or two ago and loved it. :-) Kind of have a yen to read Pope's Essay on Man.
Possibly --- probably! --- this is just a blind spot on my part. I love everything that comes before the Augustans. I love pretty much everything that comes after. Why not them? I really can't say . . . which tells me I should go back and re-engage with them.
Well, taste is taste. Yeats referred to "the hated 18th century." So you have company. Pope's work and Wordsworth's are so different that they're almost two different art forms.
If I have a good reason to make the effort, I can often at least appreciate things that I don't really like that much. Maybe someday I'll make the effort with Shelley, something besides "Ozmandia." Or maybe not.
Well, yeah, Shelley . . . whew. I have to admit I don't adore him, either . . .