With Keats a miracle was born. In 1821 Keats the man to dust returned, but the miracle that Keats was, lives on. I do not know of a student of English poetry whose heart does not ‘leap up’ at the very mention of this High Priest of Beauty.
I want to make a single point in the present essay: the feeling of beauty like all other aesthetic feelings has its being in the moment of perception. Cosmic time rolls into that blessed moment impregnating it with a divine thrill, the very quintessence of an epiphanic experience. It is of course true that beauty lies in the eye of the experiencer (the proverbial eye of the beholder) ; Its nonperception does not put its ontology in doubt, but only highlights perceptual opacity and experiential turbidity.
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It may even be said that what distinguishes Keats from some of the fellow romantic poets is his disinterested and inclusive love of beauty both inner and outer, or else he would not have emphasised the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His passionate plea is “Seek ye first” the ideal of beauty “and all other things shall be added unto you”. His ideal of beauty was akin to that of the Greeks, a perfect blending of the inward and the outward:
‘...or thy smiles
Seek as they were once sought, in Grecian isles, By bards who died content on pleasant sward’
Coming back to my earlier theme that for Keats beauty inheres in the moment, I venture to further propose that Keatsian aesthetics was, far from being an aberration, a deeply felt conviction which was itself premised on a profound insight into life very surprisingly so, considering his young age. The moment life as a microcosm is compounded of the twin elements of joy and sorrow, each owing its being to the other. The truth of the above analysis is best exemplified in Ode to Melancholy, the refrain of which is that fullness of joys is dependent on their sharpening into pains
Life is an experience that mankind has had to face since the beginning of time. In three short articles, we capture different perspectives of what life is to the authors. Life is can be a blessing or a curse some would say. In Hamlet 's Soliloquy, by Hamlet, the texts big issue is; Is it better to live with pain or end your life, because of the unbearable pain.
In a letter to his brother, the great painter, Vincent Van Gogh, once wrote,“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it”. In this quote, Van Gogh summarizes a subject great writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson has devoted entire essays to defining and explaining, and that is the subject of poetry. As it can be seen, a poet undertakes that almost impossible job of transposing what he or she sees in Nature on to paper for others to read. Only a true poet can be successful in an attempt. It is not just Nature a poet tries to capture into words, but also social experiences and human truths.
A thing that evokes one emotion, it has the opportunity to also evoke another: “sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy”. When seeking happiness one cannot achieve it. Being oblivious to the fate we follow is only made tragic once we are made aware, because or consciousness of what we will do isn’t going to change our path. Only acceptance of what is/will happen is a victory but an “absurd victory” at that. 8.
As one single poem can intrigue the everyday college student, one can imagine the obsessive nature that one poem can have on the mind. The poem, circulating, round and round in the mind, leaving one to ponder the day away all because one poem, as one can be left questioning, such as in "Prayer" by Galway Kinnell. However, even if someone were to be obsessed with one poem, there are ones who are intrigued by not just one, but two, maybe dozens of poems, all by the same author that had them intrigued since the first poem looming in their head. Nevertheless, as one may ponder across an entire work of a single author, this pondering may lead to one who is passionate about the entire work of an author to publish articles about someone and their work respectively. In the article, "Galway Kinnell: Transfigured Dread," by Edward Hirsch, the pondering over the entire works of Galway Kinnel are discussed in great detail.
Intro: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional short story “The Birthmark” and The Twilight Zone’s darkly romantic episode “Eye of the Beholder” both use gothic elements and delve into the realm of science to explore concepts of beauty and perfection. Through their contrasting characterizations of the scientist and employments of irony and allusions, each work comes to its own conclusions about how to define and treat beauty. Body #1: The Birthmark From the very first paragraph, Hawthorne’s story revolves around Aylmer, a scientist who supposedly gives up his career to marry the beautiful woman of his dreams, Georgiana.
Section I — Of Vanity and Reflection In Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Allegory of Prudence, the viewer is presented with a young woman who gazes at a mirror. The painting conveys a moment of prolonged reflection and self-evaluation that encourages the viewer to pause, if only briefly, and utilize a moment of reflection in art to turn the viewing inward upon the self. Prudence’s moment of prolonged reflection is created by line, compounded by the color and lighting of the painting, and reinforced by the interactions of shape that emphasizes focus on the mirror. The painting utilizes the interaction of line, color, and scale to display the subject’s moment of reflection, but also to question the fine line between self-reflection and vanity.
Starting at line 5 and going to line 8, Keats imagines love as something written on the night sky. He starts by personifying the sky, in line 5 he says “..the night’s starred face,” which allows him to connect the sky to a person or in this case a human emotion. He brings the emotion of love and the concept of romance into his poem in line 6, “..symbols of high romance,” and in the following two lines he shows how unreachable love is if death is to come to him sooner rather than later. By placing the love he, and everybody else, longs for in the night sky, and vast and mysterious place, he makes the journey to finding love a long hard one. A journey that could never be fully accomplished if death was to come too
The primary theme throughout the piece is that of the mystery of suffering, of pain and sorrow, and of its universality. People from all walks of life must endure it, money has no weight in its
Besides the author and the reader, there is the ‘I’ of the lyrical hero or of the fictitious storyteller and the ‘you’ or ‘thou’ of the alleged addressee of dramatic monologues, supplications and epistles. Empson said that: „The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry”(Surdulescu, Stefanescu, 30). The ambiguous intellectual attitude deconstructs both the heroic commitement to a cause in tragedy and the didactic confinement to a class in comedy; its unstable allegiance permits Keats’s exemplary poet (the „camelion poet”, more of an ideal projection than a description of Keats actual practice) to derive equal delight conceiving a lago or an Imogen. This perplexing situation is achieved through a histrionic strategy of „showing how”, rather than „telling about it” (Stefanescu, 173 ).
Through this query, Oates succeeds in reminding her audience of both their need to give significance to meaningless subject matter and that nature falls into the former category. Her use of quotations on the word “creativity” in and of itself debases her audiences’ self esteem because it could make them rethink how that word really applies to them. Through her mocking tone, Oates dismisses the instigators of the reverence of the natural world. She lost this deference to nature a long time ago she lost through separate and traumatizing encounters with
Last Christmas, I had the opportunity to experience the fireworks show in Disney World. The theme park’s magic and wonder fascinated me and thus compelled me to choose Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall as my building of study. Both its exterior and interior uphold a quote mentioned in Professor Speck’s lecture by Abbot Suger, “Man reaches contemplation of divine through the senses.” In other words, an individual is able to understand a deeper meaning through use of the five senses. Therefore, every person that passes this building goes through a unique experience when his/her eyes first detect the building.
In his documentary film “why beauty matters” English philosopher Roger Scruton introduces the idea of beauty is disappearing from our world. The philosopher implies, that Art has become ugly, as well as our physical surroundings, manners, language, and music. Nowadays, the main aim of art is to disturb and break moral taboos. It has now lost its initial duty and is used to show solely the ugliness of our world, instead of taking what is most painful in the human condition and redeeming it in the work of beauty. What according to Scruton is the main purpose of art.
“A Memory of Youth”: Yeats and Erotic Experience A cloud blown from the cut-throat north Suddenly hid Love’s moon away. The “cloud”—amorphous and obstructing—cuts into the scene, as well as the poem, with a sudden violence, in order to block the image of “Love’s moon”. The cloud itself cannot have definite dimensions, as it exists to only hide the moon, casting the speaker of the poem, his love and the cloud itself in a continuous darkness. It is in this darkness that the speaker of the poem finds his own perception and experiences clouded, indicating his blind submission to erotic love in lieu of a more illuminating, comprehensive “Love”.
Although Coleridge reflects on nature as being that “one Life within us and abroad “in most of his other poem, but coming In “Dejection: An Ode” we see more of the dialects between the imagination’s role in creating perception and nature guiding the soul. In the opening stanzas of “Dejection” the flipside to the romantic celebration of nature –the romantic emphasize on subjective experience, individual consciousness, and imagination. If our experience derives from ourselves, then nature can do nothing on its own. Beginning with the fifth stanza, Coleridge suggests that there is a power –personified joy that allows us to reconnect with nature and for it to renew us and that comes both from within and from without: “the spirit and the power, / Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower / A new Earth and new Heaven” (67–69).
M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: romantic theories and the critical traditions is one of the most influential books in the field of western criticism. It was published in the year of 1953. The title of the book refers to the two contradictory metaphors used to portray the artist – one comparing the artist to a mirror which reflects nature as it is or perfected whereas the other compares the artist to a lamp that illuminates the object under consideration. Professor Abrams in his book illustrates the transition of the perspective of the theorists on the artist from one to the other and the ramifications of the latter in aesthetics, poetics and practical criticism. The essay “Orientation of critical theories” is the first chapter of this book.