Back To Keats

My reading these past two weeks has meandered over the place.  I read Lee Siegel's Against The Machine after reading Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times.  I might talk about it here later, but for now I'll just say that he has some interesting things to say about the place and the meaning of the Internet in our lives.  It's especially thought-provoking for someone who has just started to write a blog.  

Next, I read a little bit of The Meaning of Sunglasses.  The author is sharp and very witty, maybe too witty.  I just tip-toed through it and returned it to the library.

Then I read a few early poems by Hugh McDiarmid but I can tell that's going to be a whole new project so...

It was time to go back to Keats.  When I first started reading Keats, just on my own with nothing but the limited notes in the back of the book to guide me, there were 4 poems that seized me immediately.  One of them was Ode to Psyche. Again, this wasn't an experience of completely understanding what I was reading and more one of the words themselves having an effect on me deeper than what I could explain.  This week I really studied Ode to Psyche, looking both at what Bate's biography had to say about it and also reading in Keats' letters. 

I gather from Bate's remarks that the Ode to Psyche is considered by critics to be the weakest of the odes.  I will have to study the others as intensively before I can know if I agree with that.  To me, the reader unburdened by any knowledge of poetry, it stood out as the most immediately accessible.  (And I don't think it's because of Scritti Politti, though this is still one of the greatest albums of my lifetime.) 

No, it's a feeling I got from the language, the words, whatever the alchemy of poetry is.  I did completely relate to the underlying subject matter even though at the time I didn't know what that was in any concrete way.  I especially loved the lines:

        A rosy sanctuary will I dress
    With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
        With buds, and bells, and stars without a name.

       
One of the things that makes Keats such an inspirational figure to me is that he was largely self-taught.  He came from a lower-middle class background without many advantages.  Poetry and an artistic life were not handed to him.  Since discovering poetry I have so often wished that I could read the way I used to listen to music growing up- with a consuming adolescent ferocity, bedroom door shut tightly against all distractions, against a hostile world.  But I'm not young anymore.  I can't do that.  There are others beings entrusted to my care and so I am part of the world.  I have to read and study in stolen moments, in fits and starts.  But I will.  I do.  It means so much to me.

 Another of my favorite lines from the Ode to Psyche is this: "I see and sing by my own eyes inspired."  Edward Hirsch writes, "Keats offers us the very model of a self-directed artistic development as a life well lived." Yes.