Overdosed on...

Well, I don't know if that is possible. But I may have overdosed on books about Keats. I enjoyed reading the poems so much but even with the helpful notes in my edition, I feared I wasn't understanding enough. In Edward Hirsch's beautiful introduction to the poems, he recommends 4 biographies of Keats. I found 3 of them used pretty easily and I started reading the one by Walter Jackson Bate a couple weeks ago. Like most of us, I don't have much time to myself these days so I was reading the biography at the expense of reading the poetry. I learned a lot and it was helpful but truthfully, it wasn't quite as inspiring. Well, Keats' life itself is actually very inspirng, but reading a biography wasn't the same beautiful rush as reading the poetry. Of course it wasn't.

When I went back to the poems it was like opening the window and letting a fresh gust of air in. And I'm starting to sense that, in a way, the poems themselves will teach me how to read them. If I let them. If I read them aloud to myself, a few lines at a time, and really listen to the words, allow the pictures to form in my mind, quietly reflect, and keep rereading. I may not always understand everything, but if I give it enough time and space I will actually know what the poem means anyway. And that I guess is the magic of it. The language itself tells you what it means, and in a very different way- on a different level- than prose does.

This is not to say that I won't keep reading the biographies, because I will. I want to learn as much as I can. But I also want to allow myself to experience words and their meaning the way poetry teaches us to, which is very different from what I've trained myself to do in life. Keats believed that the imagination was the way to truth, the only way to know the truth. It's so foreign to me to think that way. But I'm drawn to it.