Theatricality and Imaginative Failure in Keats
It is impossible to say just what I mean.
-T.S. Eliot
May one not say that the writer’s soul has mounted the chariot,
Has taken wing with the horses and shares the danger?
-Longinus
In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek writes that “sublimity gives us simultaneously pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to the thing-idea, but precisely through this inadequacy, it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the thing, surpassing every possible phenomenological, empirical experience” (210). Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn may be one of the language’s greatest poems, but it also contains some of poetry’s worst lines; the disjunction is not completely accidental.
Anyone who has tried to teach “the Ode” (as I will hereafter refer to it) to undergraduates will recognize the weak link in its poetic chain. If students tend to be a bit dumbfounded as early as “foster child of silence and slow time,” they perk up again by “Fair youth beneath the trees;” without fail though, whenever I introduce this poem, someone chuckles at “More happy love! More happy, happy love!” Why? There’s nothing funny about the line. Nothing sexual to giggle at, not even an amusing meter (as in a limerick). One student wrote a parody of the whole poem; her version of this line was “More sappy prose! More crappy, sloppy words!” Even the uninitiated cannot fail to notice the difference in tone and in literary quality this line exhibits compared with the rest of the poem. The chuckle of embarrassment comes from readers’ frustrated expectations: how could someone who writes as well as Keats does in the rest of the poem be responsible for such lines?
Dee Reynolds summarizes Kant’s notions of sublimity in “Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art,”
In the face of a spectacle which overwhelms the subject’s capacity to represent it, imagination is made painfully aware of its own limitations. Imagination’s serial mode of apprehension can continue to infinity, but cannot meet reason’s demand for ‘absolute totality’: discouraged, it sinks back into itself. 9
These lines are not mis-steps; they are failures, and, let me suggest the term active failures in Zizek’s sense, a kind of theatrical dive, meant to claim for the poet a documentable experience of the sublime. In what thereby becomes a discourse on imaginative limits, Keats discusses the form’s ability to “tease us out of thought,” connecting that lack of thought with silence, and ultimately to a breathlessness he enacts in these passages.
The theatricality is multi-faceted here: as the poet demonstrates the failure of the poetic faculty in the face of the sublime encounter --making a spectacle of the climb, failure, and recovery-- he also hopes to induce a similar reaction in his readers, attempting to move us out of breath and to the same pitch of delirium he has exhibited, to make his private imaginative environment a public one wherein his theatrical swoon is contagious.
Keats’ method in this poem is different than that of his fellow Romantics’. Wordsworth’s work essentially says, “I had a vision; where has that vision gone? If I could only remember it, and get close again, I’d be great.” Shelley argues that the act of writing necessarily takes place post-vision: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (531). The poetic approach in Keats is fundamentally different, tending more toward the spectacle, the exhibitionist. It says essentially, “my vision too is beyond the power of my telling it, but through this poem, I re-create (not remember) that vision in such a way that you can have it, too.” In this way, the poem becomes something closer to a script, intended to be performed later by the reader. Keats has forced an imaginative self-identification, has found a way to do better than to report the vision: having remembered the spell just right, he can now induce it. The spell comes from the urn’s central stanza.
Oh happy boughs that cannot shed your leaves
Nor ever bid the spring adieu,
and happy melodist unwearied,
forever piping songs forever new
More Happy Love, more happy, happy love!
As Thomas Vogler terms it, in Preludes to Vision, Keats’ “attempt to move from lyric to epic was an attempt to sustain and expand the intense happiness experienced in the moment of inspired vision” [italics mine] (117). Apt words, those. He continues, “The problem for Keats, even more than for Wordsworth, was a question of will, of achieving confidence in poetic vision as a valid and useful mode of perceiving reality and in the finished poem as an embodiment of truth” (117). Although terms like “embodiment of truth” are often overused when referring to poems, this is not one of those times. For Keats, to whom success was everything, the poetic project essentially consisted of giving body to the truths of his poems.
All of his descriptive powers have failed him in this moment, but, since it is only a description of a moment, he obviously had a chance to re-write it, or to make multiple drafts. Instead, he chose to depict this too-much-ness, this moment of creative failure as is, which is a way of saying, with Hamlet, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” I’m arguing that this stanza is Keats’ report from the underworld, his picture of an encounter with the sublime from inside it. The poem continues,
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
forever panting and forever young,
that leaves a heart high, sorrowful and cloyed
a burning forehead and a parching tongue.
We’re a far cry from “the mind in creation is as a fading coal;” “still to be enjoyed” indeed. The speaker (and the reader, who are, after all, in the same sinking ship here) is not recalling a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, and is recollecting the memory in nothing like tranquility. The powerful emotion is happening presently, while he is writing, in a fever. In short, the Keatsian poetic model has become the anti-Wordsworthian.
Thomas Wieskel, a theorist of the Romantic sublime, set up a 3-part model to dissect encounters with the sublime in art; he describes phase 2: “ the feeling is one of on and on.” This is precisely the feeling I get by the fourth, the fifth occurrence of the word “happy.” Wieskel continues,
[one has a feeling] of being lost. The signifiers cannot be grasped or understood, they overwhelm the possibly of meaning in a massive under-determination that melts all oppositions or distinctions into a perceptional stream, or there is a sensory overload.
32
Later in the essay, he explains, “repetition of any excess of ‘substance’ in the signifier is a technique, familiar in architecture, music and poetry, for inducing a sense of on and on.” How else are we to explain this fourth stanza, which repeats both a pattern of rhythm and a word over and over, on and on?
Aside from this excess/repetition, what are the markers of sublimity as Keats paints them here? Since it is common knowledge that Keats was a trained surgeon, I won’t belabor the point, except to note how curious are his descriptions of the effects of sublimity on the body in this poem. He begins the stanza immediately following, “forever warm,” as though alive and sweating, and he continues the description, “forever panting,” as though one has just run a race and is breathing hard; “All breathing human passion…that leaves a heart high:” increased breath rate increases heart rate to “high,” and leaves one finally with “a burning forehead, and a parching tongue,” as though dehydrated and spent. Keats would come to know too well about burning foreheads before his short time was up, but for now, he is projecting. He is describing not simply “joy” or “rapture,” but an actual physical set of sensations—we might call them symptoms—with which the encounterer of the sublime is afflicted. Notice too the emphasis on breath as an agent of incantation.
This is the sort of work which must have been done before, and which I don’t care to repeat, but considering our progress, let’s notice the exhalations. In the ode, we see “O mysterious priest,” “O Attic Shape,” and “Ah Happy, happy boughs.” Sometimes, of course, an “O” can be a device to get the poem’s meter back on track; at others it can be a way of re-directing the address, as here, where the speech to Urn (General) has been re-directed to Urn-Figure-Priest (Specific) instead, but it is importantly like a breath. Of course, all Romantic poets do this. Wordsworth has “Oh the difference to me,” which reads more like a sigh, and Coleridge, “But Oh!,” which is just an exclamation, but in Keats, we readers already have a sense that our breath is being manipulated (147; 182). Look at the end of the first stanza:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Since “wild ecstasy” is exactly the thing he wants to convey, he’s chosen short, tight sentences in succession, which are significantly shorter, at 3.2 words per sentence compared with the very next sentence, which, as punctuated, goes on for the entire length of the stanza (45 words). They race along like a racing heartbeat to suggest the ecstasy present and to come both for the character/poet as he beholds the urn and now, for we readers aloud of the poem, as we turn it in our own hands.
If something strikes us as disingenuous in these “oh’s and ah’s” and quickened breathing, it is due to our built-in senses of the ironic, and it is the same thing that strikes Shakespeare’s Juliet:
Nurse: Jesu! what haste? can you not stay awhile?
Do you not see that I am out of breath?
Juliet: How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
to say to me that thou art out of breath?
Romeo and Juliet ii.5
Juliet is asking a preternaturally complicated and important question, and if we readers hadn’t thought to ask it of Keats, it is only because his spell is working too well.
What Juliet levels here is the sincerity charge: she knows that the nurse is playing at being breathless for some effect, and, preferring her experiences less full of artifice (and her news quick) she says something like “oh come off it, I know you’re only doing that to get a rise out of me.” This is the charge a post-modern reader levels, consciously or otherwise, when she begins to feel tricked. We know enough about the writing process to realize that the poem could not have properly been written during the moment of vision anymore than a dream can be recorded while dreaming. Actually to write out the characters “o” “h,” as though swooning at the thought of one’s own story feels manipulative to our sensibilities—essayist Alan Jacobs refers to this response as the need to assure ourselves that we are not “imaginative adolescents: the fear of being caught believing what others have ceased believing”—and poets have tried various ways to excuse themselves from it (42).
Wordsworth describes his own biological responses to a moment of sublimity in “Tintern Abbey:” “even the motion of our human blood/ almost suspended, we are laid asleep/ in body, and become a living soul,” and later refers to “all its aching joys... and all its dizzy raptures” (44-46; 84-85). People become dizzy when they’re not getting enough oxygen to their brains. For Wordsworth, the sublime encounter can only be seen from a distance, whether it is a distance of time, or of memory. He can say, “I remember it was almost like my blood was frozen,” but only from the safe vantage of having regular, flowing blood again; in the 1805 Prelude, he describes the same sort of feeling, again from a vantage: “That spectacle, for many days my brain/ worked with dim and undetermined sense/ of unknown modes of being; In my thoughts/there was a darkness, call it solitude,/ or blank desertion” (1.418-422). He couldn’t write while dizzy in rapture, and if he could, what quality would be present in a composition made by a brain of “dim and undetermined sense?”
Now let’s remember that Keats had just been telling us about encounters with sublimity, and how breath is affected therein: how blood is struggling to move around the body, and the heart to keep up, causing dehydration and a lack of oxygen to the brain. Here’s Wordsworth again: “In such strength/ of usurpation, in such visitings/ of awful promise, when the light of sense/ goes out in flashes” (6.532-535). As we have seen, Wordsworth claims that his mind essentially doesn’t work during sublime encounter, and we would do well to consider that he may be telling the truth; he may actually be hyper-ventilating. The poet has become, in any case, essentially thoughtless.
In his late-18th century essay, “On Picturesque Travel,” William Gilpin describes a similar effect, though regarding natural, rather than artistic encounters.
But it is not from this scientific employment that we derive our chief pleasure. We are most delighted when some grand scheme, perhaps of correct composition rising before the eye, strikes us beyond the power of thought—when mental operation is suspended. In this enthusiastic pause of intellect, this delirium of soul…
47
Speaking to the urn, Keats says “Thou silent form doth tease us out of thought as doth eternity, Cold Pastoral!” He knows two things capable of teasing a person out of thought, making him effectively brain-dead: the urn’s form and the notion of eternity, and he holds both of those things up for our contemplation here. Why? First, he has us watch with him as he turns the urn over and over in his hands, telling us its story, detailing its decoration with an archivists’ detail, though a poet’s imagination. By this point, “thou silent form” (the urn itself) has become the object of our readerly contemplation as well. The other half of the simile is “as doth eternity,” which is apt, considering that one of the poem’s main projects is to contemplate the effects of time on eternal objects. So he intentionally puts his and our minds to the necessarily impossible task of comprehending eternity in lines like “when old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain;” to what end? He is trying to cast over us the same spell that was cast over him.
Describing the post-modern sublime in the preface to Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy writes,
from the moment when representation comes to know itself to be such and comes to present itself as such (that is, also to criticize, distance, deconstruct, or destroy itself) a moment which constitutes the history of modern art and thought, it takes up at unknown cost a question, at once traditional and unheard of-- of presentation. viii
Nancy is right to call the question “traditional;” he’s even right to reference modern art, if by “modern” he means a certain thing. This is the poet making a public spectacle of his private imaginative experience.
Keats is doing the opposite of Wordsworth here, who describes events as necessarily past tense. He is writing a musical score for a later performance which is also a record of this, the artifact/poem’s first performance. This theatricality creates a third man, in the Derridian sense, because it assumes a cast featuring 1) the poet/character, entranced by the urn, 2) the reader, entranced by the poem and 3) the poet, aware of the reader and the poem being made, who anticipates its reception and reacts preemptively to it.
The third man does two things principally: he harrows and explains the despicable stanza as an active failure by announcing it as a demonstration of unmediated perception. His is a way of saying, with Bottom Weaver in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”
I have had a most rare
vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go
about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there
is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and
methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if
he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream iv.1
Notice the terms the weaver uses to explain his inability to explain: he is afraid of being “a patched fool,” and “an ass:” he is afraid of being thought an imaginative adolescent.
It is the mechanism of the Kantian system, which was everywhere in the artistic air of early 19th century Britain, to drive imagination to failure. Keats has been contemplating just such a move here in the poem’s narrative, in his attempt to move himself and audience “out of thought.” He takes it one step further. Through his public demonstration, Keats acts out his own giving up of self-consciousness, and attempts to enact a similar experience in his readers.
The poet has lost control of the poem, it appears; the Sun-god is no longer driving the chariot. We know this because any poet in his right mind would never pen lines like “More Happy love! More Happy, Happy Love!” But that’s the point; he isn’t in his right mind at all; he’s lost in the world of the urn.
My claim is that Keats not only does this poetic posturing and theatrical swoon for our benefit, and as an incantation towards our own swoon, but that, recognizing the device of the drive to failure, calls attention to his own device in the manner following. Here’s Michel Deguy on the sublime: “the deluge, the sublime simulates the origin in reproducing it” (11). We can see why this approach would have been attractive for Keats. He is trying to do exactly that, simulate the origin of his brush with the sublime in reproducing it. Keats, in acting this way, claims for himself a documentable experience of sublimity, which will remain in midst of other woe even than his own. Deguy continues, “ the re-ascension to the postulated sameness can only be accomplished in the re: (reproduction, repetition) in the knowledge of the difference and the awareness of the mechanisms (ruses, turns of phrase and pen: technique) for feigning forgetfulness of difference and its differentiations (11). In the Ode, Keats does all these things: feigns forgetfulness, and calls attention to his mechanisms through repetition in order to reproduce his experience. His role changes midstep from the temple priest interpreting the vision, to that of Cassandra herself.
Reynolds writes about similar representations of absence, or active failures, and grounds them, as I have, in the Kantian sublime.
What is peculiar to the experience of the sublime, however is that this very lack of presentation itself functions as a ‘negative presentation’ of what lies beyond the power of imagination to present. The mind feels itself raised by the awareness of the unpresentable produced by the recognition of its own powerlessness. In this way, the imagination undergoes an extension of itself. Its telos is the reflexive consciousness of the subject, which recognizes its own failure thereby producing a split consciousness where the breakdown of imagination itself can be objectified. 10
This objectification of imaginative failure is what Keats demonstrates here; he might say “look at how the poetic faculty breaks down – Look at my inability to paint a concrete image in the face of the sublime!”
“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” the poem asks. Reynolds’ quote offers an answer, suggesting that it’s the imagination itself tied to the pyre. The failure suggests that there are some things that poems simply can’t do, but which, by that failure, they end up doing—a way of launching the thing higher than it can go.
We know that Keats was reading Homer around this time, so it may be useful to invoke Longinus’ note on The Iliad, “we are made to feel, by analogy, that Homer has experienced the same stress, that he has as it were survived the violent onslaught of Hector and is now not merely representing those energies, but taking them over” (qtd. Hertz 27). Keats’ third man then, following Homer’s example, has subsumed the romantic drive toward sublimity, the re-creation of that experience, and its failure as part of the presentation.
Having sacrificed poetic quality for the sublime, what has Keats gained? In this case, the poem as record of the struggle, the dream left burning in his brain long after the angel has re-ascended the ladder.
References
Burke, Edmund; ed. Adam Phillips. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ed. Nicholas Halmi. Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. trans. Alan Bass. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1978.
Longinus; trans. G.M.A. Grube. On Great Writing. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991.
Hertz, Neil. “A Reading of Longinus,” The End of the Line. New York: University of Columbia, 1985.
Keats, John. The Complete Poems. New York: Random House Publishing, 1994.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. New York: State University of NY Press, 1993.
Reynolds, Dee. Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ed. Donald Reiman. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton, 2002.
Vogler, Thomas A. Preludes to Vision: The Epic Adventure in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart Crane. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Wieskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Text of 1805). ed. Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford UP, 1964.
---. The Major Works. ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
