The Living Poetry Project: At The Heart Of It Is Keats
This semester, I’m going to attempt to teach the works of John Keats. In other words, I’m going to try to learn a little about John Keats this semester. As a big fan of Lyric poetry, it is easy for me to love John Keats—I sometimes wonder if such loves can be taught. Probably not. But maybe, maybe, poetry will inspire a love of poetry that is beyond teaching.
Well, I guess it is best to start with definitions. The Lyric is an ancient subdivision of poetry. One of poetry’s three categories, the others being Narrative and Dramatic. Lyric poetry is musical in nature, implementing rhythm and rhyming to expresses personal feelings through song.
The definition above is a very lame representation of Lryic poetry.
I love Gregory Orr’s Richer Entanglements that looks at the mechanics of Lyric poetry. Orr explains, “The nature of the disorder in a poem tells us what the poet’s human concerns are. The orders he discovers, creates, or imposes to respond to that disorder are his gift to the human community—a representative manifestation of the human encounter with disorder and a possible response to it.”
With the ideas of Richer Entanglements in mind, I think a better definition of Lyric poetry would be a poem that is deeply concerned with order and disorder—both within its pages and the world that extends beyond its binding.
For John Keats, the order and disorder manifested itself as beauty—beauty being capable of being orderly and disorderly simultaneously.
There is the echoing phrase:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
It sounds conclusive, doesn’t it? But there is no closure in poetry—only great landings in relentless attempt to fly.
I believe in beauty. I do. But what is it—beauty?
This is the question at the heart of The Living Poetry Project and my goal as a teacher—to investigate what beauty is for Keats, what beauty is for my community, what beauty is for my students, what beauty if for me.
If this is the last strand of faith in me, I’m going to follow it.
This week, I went to The Stained Glass Shop in Eagle Rock California—my old home. I love the glass shop; the people there are my found family. This place changed me—healed me—with color and care.
I melted some glass into a line from Ode on a Grecian Urn. JJ and I left it in a public window.
Maybe this is something beautiful, maybe?
Ode on a Grecian Urn
From Letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. *** The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning—and yet it must be—Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections—However it may be, O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is “a Vision in the form of Youth” a Shadow of reality to come—and this consideration has further convinced me for it has come as auxiliary to another favorite Speculation of mine, that we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated—And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation rather than hunger as you do after Truth—***—the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness—to compare great things with small—have you never by being surprised with an old Melody—in a delicious place—by a delicious voice, felt over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul—do you not remember forming to yourself the singer’s face more beautiful that for than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so—even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high—that the Prototype must be here after—that delicious face you will see—What a time!
