A poem that perfectly fits the melancholic acceptance that I have been feeling lately (no, I'm not dying; but autumn is here and she is lovely and she is lonely, too). Thanks for the wonderful explication; I had not known this was his last major poem. I think it is normal to wonder what a greatly talented man like Keats would have accomplished if he had lived longer -- but would he have been able to write _this_ poem that so perfectly catches the autumn of life and brings us to it so compellingly.
Wonderful poem, wonderful analysis. As a non English Lit pro, may I say that I have read “Keats - A brief life in nine poems and one epitaph” by Lucasta Miller and found it very entertaining and informative?
Oh, Adam, when I read your literary analysis, I usually think Brother! Close-bosom friend! (You saw I mentioned you on Matthew Arnold yesterday in my post on Ransom's "Dead Boy"?) But this. This.
Actually, we’re in the same chapter, if not on the same page, when you reject the reading that pure-aesthetic-perfection-makes-us-mute. And New Criticism’s kind of just-the-poem,-Ma’am is not fruitful enough, either (for all that Brooks points the title of his emblematic collection at the Grecian Urn ode).
But when I step outside the poem, the poet’s young illness — his dyingness, so to speak (badly) — overwhelms me. McCann’s kind of “political because not political” is just willful: If all is politics, then, by the opiate of the masses, ostensible non-politics must actually be politics. Roe’s kind of criticism at least tries to hook it to actual events. Still, I think death is death and will not be subsumed or deconstructed.
Of course you’re right that the sound of the poem is always worth pointing to, and I hadn’t thought of a point you make that I’m now quite taken with — that, as a small man, Keats’s sense of the human-sized, the objects mentioned as within the human experience, might also be small.
But, yowza, I think Hardt and Negri get us no forwarder in escaping the prongs of the aesthetic-vs.-political dilemma. I don’t know this stuff well, neo-Marxism not being my cup of tea, but the line you quote — “Multitude is a class concept, and class is determined by class struggle” — looks, to those of us in the outer dark, like a straightforward equivocation: “class” as a term in logic’s set theory conflated with “class” as a term in Marx’s sociopolitics.
Death, boyo. I think the thing we need to bring into the discussion is how brave the 23-year-old Keats is — not brave like a Stoic. Not brave like the socially demanded stiff-upper-lip of the heart-rending Victorian letters that Catharine Tait, the archbishop’s wife, has to write in reply to condolence notes she received as five of her daughters die of scarlet fever, one after another, in 1856. But bravery as the deep accepting of the human condition in a world of beauty.
Eloquent annoyance! As another Romantic put it, opposition is true friendship.
I don't think one needs to go all the way down the Hardtnegrian rabbit hole to take the broader point, that we are not in-the-world as isolated individuals -- not singular entities solitarily admiring the well-wrought-urn of art in a hermetic -- but members of a community, a family, a village, a group, a crowd: a multitude. I do think the poem positions itself in that way. And the communal experience of 1819, a time of poor harvests and economic depression when the government kept the price of bread artificially high by putting tariffs on wheat imports in order to placate the landowning classes, and where people starved, seems to me a relevant context to Keats's poem here. Talk of "class" may trigger an allergic reaction in you, but, again, without going full Marxian, some people are rich and some (many) are poor. With which group does Keats's poem align, from which perspective does it have more purchase? It's cottages not mansions after all. Gleaners not landowners. Peasants working the land. Vagrants wandering the countryside. But (and there's always a but) there is the question of death, which I agree is also here. And I agree with you that death is an existential as well as a political matter: that we inevitably die alone, that our individual death is the ultimate, mournful individuality, not to be evaded, or deconstructed. I'd agree that by 1819 Keats knew he was dying, as his brother had; and that this ode looks towards that. The swallows are gathering, ready to fly south for winter: but its swallows, together, not a single bird.
A poem that perfectly fits the melancholic acceptance that I have been feeling lately (no, I'm not dying; but autumn is here and she is lovely and she is lonely, too). Thanks for the wonderful explication; I had not known this was his last major poem. I think it is normal to wonder what a greatly talented man like Keats would have accomplished if he had lived longer -- but would he have been able to write _this_ poem that so perfectly catches the autumn of life and brings us to it so compellingly.
Wonderful poem, wonderful analysis. As a non English Lit pro, may I say that I have read “Keats - A brief life in nine poems and one epitaph” by Lucasta Miller and found it very entertaining and informative?
I haven't read that Miller book, but I'm glad to have the recommendation.
Well, I can't disagree with you about the excellence of this superb ode, but I may be compelled to annoy you with at least a defence of the "political" account of the poem: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/reading-ode-to-autumn-1819-e65c6db8db97
As Keats himself said, a thing of beauty is annoy forever.
Oh, Adam, when I read your literary analysis, I usually think Brother! Close-bosom friend! (You saw I mentioned you on Matthew Arnold yesterday in my post on Ransom's "Dead Boy"?) But this. This.
Actually, we’re in the same chapter, if not on the same page, when you reject the reading that pure-aesthetic-perfection-makes-us-mute. And New Criticism’s kind of just-the-poem,-Ma’am is not fruitful enough, either (for all that Brooks points the title of his emblematic collection at the Grecian Urn ode).
But when I step outside the poem, the poet’s young illness — his dyingness, so to speak (badly) — overwhelms me. McCann’s kind of “political because not political” is just willful: If all is politics, then, by the opiate of the masses, ostensible non-politics must actually be politics. Roe’s kind of criticism at least tries to hook it to actual events. Still, I think death is death and will not be subsumed or deconstructed.
Of course you’re right that the sound of the poem is always worth pointing to, and I hadn’t thought of a point you make that I’m now quite taken with — that, as a small man, Keats’s sense of the human-sized, the objects mentioned as within the human experience, might also be small.
But, yowza, I think Hardt and Negri get us no forwarder in escaping the prongs of the aesthetic-vs.-political dilemma. I don’t know this stuff well, neo-Marxism not being my cup of tea, but the line you quote — “Multitude is a class concept, and class is determined by class struggle” — looks, to those of us in the outer dark, like a straightforward equivocation: “class” as a term in logic’s set theory conflated with “class” as a term in Marx’s sociopolitics.
Death, boyo. I think the thing we need to bring into the discussion is how brave the 23-year-old Keats is — not brave like a Stoic. Not brave like the socially demanded stiff-upper-lip of the heart-rending Victorian letters that Catharine Tait, the archbishop’s wife, has to write in reply to condolence notes she received as five of her daughters die of scarlet fever, one after another, in 1856. But bravery as the deep accepting of the human condition in a world of beauty.
Eloquent annoyance! As another Romantic put it, opposition is true friendship.
I don't think one needs to go all the way down the Hardtnegrian rabbit hole to take the broader point, that we are not in-the-world as isolated individuals -- not singular entities solitarily admiring the well-wrought-urn of art in a hermetic -- but members of a community, a family, a village, a group, a crowd: a multitude. I do think the poem positions itself in that way. And the communal experience of 1819, a time of poor harvests and economic depression when the government kept the price of bread artificially high by putting tariffs on wheat imports in order to placate the landowning classes, and where people starved, seems to me a relevant context to Keats's poem here. Talk of "class" may trigger an allergic reaction in you, but, again, without going full Marxian, some people are rich and some (many) are poor. With which group does Keats's poem align, from which perspective does it have more purchase? It's cottages not mansions after all. Gleaners not landowners. Peasants working the land. Vagrants wandering the countryside. But (and there's always a but) there is the question of death, which I agree is also here. And I agree with you that death is an existential as well as a political matter: that we inevitably die alone, that our individual death is the ultimate, mournful individuality, not to be evaded, or deconstructed. I'd agree that by 1819 Keats knew he was dying, as his brother had; and that this ode looks towards that. The swallows are gathering, ready to fly south for winter: but its swallows, together, not a single bird.