Poet #1 - Keats

The dynamic duo get some extra credit for tossing Lyrical Ballads as a polemic firecracker into an overly complacent and turgid poetic milleau, but when it comes to delivering the real goods, Keats had read his Shakespeare to better effect than Coleridge and knew the difference between poetry and droning on and on, a distinction Wordsworth did not seem to have a very solid grasp on.

Byron and Shelley are harder for me to come to terms with. Both wrote a pile of poems before kicking the bucket, and that pile is nowhere as easy to sift as Keats's much smaller output.

Shelley just grates on me, personally, because he so often succumbed to the sound-over-sense temptation - if it sounded ravishingly gorgeous, he'd puke it onto the page and never notice how weak and stupid it was. I find his gushing, relentless enthusiasm very off-putting, too. It ain't me, babe. I am not an enthusiast. This makes it very difficult for me to read Shelley at all.

Byron I can read. The problem with Byron is that his poetry is all posing. This is fine and dandy in a satire. So, Don Juan can be a masterpiece, as it came from Byron's deepest place. The incessant posing works against his love poems, so they fail in my view. They are just artful excretions of conventional sentiments. His story poems lack thrust and texture because they are always stopping to declaim conventional romantic sentiments. So, Byron's great, but only in patches.

Where Keats seems superior to me is that he had a far more integral mind than the others. His imagination was very active, but grounded in the physical and the actual, so when he reaches out for a far-flung thought he connects it back to reality and experience in a way that delivers up a whole idea - one you can really take on for yourself and think about. It gives his poems greater depth, color and shape.

Contrast that to Wordsworth, whose attention is glued to surfaces almost exclusively, and when WW does want to deliver a larger thought, he doesn't embody it in the imagery and language so much as he writes it in a telegraph message and inserts it - HERE IS THE THOUGHT.

Coleridge, as was apparent to everyone who knew him, just couldn't settle to his work. I believe he was better gifted as a critic than as a poet, but he was such a percipient critic that he was able to take his deep critical insights and make poems to illustrate them. The marvel is that these illustrations of theory were actual poems, some of them very great poems. But only a few.

Of course, the terms of comparison here are pretty limited, being confined to the academic Big Five of English Romantics.

Uh, disjointed post. Had more, but don't know what happened.

Short version:

I mostly agree with you about Coleridge. He couldn't keep his imagination in check, and this makes the longers ones a chore for me. I still think "Frost at Midnight" and "Kubla Khan" are his shining moments as a poet. They're short, imaginative, and sum up all of what I think is great about his wild imagination.

I don't have much exposure to Byron or Shelley, but I'll probably be reading Bryon's "Don Juan" in the near future, or at least try to. It looks intimidating with its length.

(There are a few poets who do this that I let slide -- Hopkins, say -- but even then it makes me feel dirty and highschoolish.)

Oh, and I consider the clumsy/old-fashioned metaphors as part of the territory, as he uses a ton of them.

A couple of questions:

A) Do you like any of the Romantic poets, aside from Byron?
B) How do you feel about Blake? (I can't believe they lump him in with the other Romantics -- he seems too idiosyntric for any categorization. Especially with works like "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", etc.)

Wordsworth was either inspired or not: he wrote an enormous amount of incredibly dull, stodgy verse, particularly (but not exclusively) later in life. Unfortunately the great stuff is not only often mixed in with the mediocre (especially in The Prelude) but doesn't work out of context. He is seriously diminished in anthologies.

Shelley is a philosophical poet: much of what he writes in his lyric poems is versified philosophy, mainly in the skeptical tradition of Berkeley and Hume (and, as with Keats, with a fair bit of neoplatonism thrown in). It isn't that he prizes sound above content, it's that the content is semi-allegorical, highly abstract and unfamiliar to most contemporary readers. The political poems need less explication but are much less beautiful and mainly appeal to people who think he is on the side of the angels.

Keats fits well with the orthodoxies of post imagist criticism. By contrast Shelley was badly duffed up, notably up by Leavis and Eliot, for the alleged faults Aimless describes. But these people had their own agendas, particularly an (understandable) need to clear the space for something new, and they overstated their case, in the same way the punks did in rubishing dinosaurs like Led Zeppelin. Their reasoning been rigorously dismantled by later critics. Harold Bloom had to do something worth celebrating in a long life, and his effort towards rehabilitating Shelley is probably it.

I don't think Coleridge suffers so badly from comparison with Keats until you take lifespan into account. Both their reputations rest on a handful of much-anthologised pieces. The Ancient Mariner is more successful than any of Keats's longer pieces, and so, arguably, is Christabel. Keats's shorter lyrics are generally finer than Coleridge's, but he has nothing as perfect (or as original) as Kubla Khan. But Coleridge lived a long life, and his output seems small in that context.

I don't generally like much Romantic stuff -- music, poems, novels, etc.

Blake has always seemed really opaque to me, but I haven't really tried to read much beyond the famous overanthologized pieces. I also don't really think of him as a Romantic, in the sense that Keats or Coleridge were, because of this opacity.

Sort of, but that is part of the thread isn't it? Not everybody is going to agree with me, and they'll post thoughts that differ from the way I see things (and some of it will get me to reevaluate). But don't worry, Keats is still a-okay with me, despite your stinging barbs....

I'd say this thread is a resounding success -- encouraging given it is the initial entry. And I appreciate all who've posted on it.

My next entry will be on Byron, and then I'll get out of the English Romantics directly after that. I'll read Shelley one of these days, but I'm in no rush to do so.

It's not that old a dictum, though, and it's somewhat anachronistic to apply it to the Romantics. If you only mean to say "I prefer a more modern approach", fine: if you mean to say "the Romantics should have shown more and told less" then I think you are expecting them to anticipate an aesthetic prejudice that would still have been regarded as "modern" 50 years later.

I've never really got to grips with Byron, although I admit I haven't tried very hard. I have tried with Blake, though, because particularly in my teens I felt I *ought* to like him. I read quite a lot of him before accepting that I just don't respond to most of his work. I'm always impressed by the enthusiasm of real Blake fans, but to me he's a minor painter and illustrator who wrote a handful of wonderful short lyrics (The Sick Rose and The Tyger especially) and a large quantity of long-winded, impenetrable guff.

I disagree with your notion that we have to read a poem the way that the author's contemporaries would have read it and with those expectations and contexts and none other: That maybe be a proper historical approach, which is fine and worth taking into consideration, but I'd rather read something for what esthetic values it has in my context. If you see what I mean.

Also I think you'll find plenty of pre-Romantics who were more about "showing" than "telling", at least in this context.

Show don't tell, as far I know, is a punchy expression (invented for creative writing students, I imagine?) of a critical principle that started to become fashionable towards the end of the nineteenth century. In drama, pre-Romantic or otherwise, show don't tell is inevitable: no-one is pretending that it was a late invention. But most narrative (and particularly the typical eighteenth and nineteenth century novel, was a mixture of show and tell, of the dramatic presentation of events and authorial commentary on them. It gradually became fashionable to excise the authorial commentary and became a critical precept that pure dramatic presentation was to be preferred. Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fictionis good on the history of this.

This has now become a crusty old critical shibboleth. It's what we have been trained to think of as "good": we may simply be fashion victims all the same. Applying a critical principle derived mainly from the late nineteenth century novel to early nineteenth century lyric verse still seems to me questionable. It's like criticising Bach for not having a backbeat.

I've been trying to give some time to the Romantics lately, with mixed results. I've been reading Blake chronologically from around the Song of Los, so I'm (sligly bogged down) in the middle of the Foar Zoas right now. I can't deny the impressive scale and scope of his mythology and visions. But so much of it is just too opaque. I find myself flipping back and forth between dictionaries of proper nouns and the poems, trying to parse who's who and what's what.

It doesn't help that Blake's poems are so fragmented and repetitious. In the Penguin edition, they keep all the variants in the text, which would be great for a close study, but only confuses a casual read. And the one thing Blake doesn't need to be is more confusing.

Out of curiousity: were the Romanics reading Blake? In his lifetime he was unknown--when did people start to recognize him? Bits of Shelley aside, no one in the early 19th century seems to respond to Blake.

One name that hasn't come up yet is Browning. He seems to have a more modern sensibility--especially in his willingness to keep at a distance from his subjects. In the character studies, sometimes there's a great ironic playfulness (Bishop Blougram's Apology), at other times a more genial humanitarianism (Fra Lippio Lippi). I've read excerpts from The Ring and the Book, and I'm excited to read the whole thing.

Of course you can. You can criticise Bach for not coming from Saturn, or the St Matthews Passion for not being a large detached house on the outskirts of Northampton. These may strike some people as non-sequiturs, of course, but screw 'em, you're entitled to your opinion.

There are no non sequiturs there.

Similarly:

1. [Same as above]
2. There could exist one person, who we'll call Sun Ra, whose esthetic prejudices means he only likes music from Saturn; other music bores him.
3. Bach comes from Eisenach, Germany, Earth, which is a few light-minutes away from Saturn.
4. That's just not close enough for Sun Ra's tastes, and so he doesn't care for Bach one bit.

That does actually have a non sequitur, in that you have to assume that there is something audibly different about music from Saturn, in the same way that there is something audible about a backbeat. Otherwise, how would he know?

Finally:

1. [see above]
2. There could exist one person, who we'll call Bob Vila, whose esthetic prejudices are such that he doesn't care for music at all, but really only likes detached houses on the outskirts of Northampton, the larger the better.
3. Well, the St Matthew Passion is music, not architecture.
4. So Bob Vila finds it totally weak.

Again, no non sequiturs there!

There really aren't any such non sequiturs in artistic appreciation: If you think music sucks, then to you, all music sucks. And if someone plays a piece of music for you, you can say, "it sucks". Why? Because to you, it sucks.

Now there's another approach, an academic one, where you learn what other people appreciate in the music or how it was appreciated in its context. With enough study, Bob Vila might be able to say, "Well, I don't like this St Matthew Passion, but I can understand why other people do like it, there are some very nice pieces of contrapunctal work. Still, I'd rather be in Northampton."

But I think most of us have had that liberating moment when we realized that just because there are reasons why other people enjoy something, that doesn't mean we have to. There is enough art to go around that we can be selfish about it.

These may strike some people as non-sequiturs, of course, but screw 'em, you're entitled to your opinion.

Depends on context, surely?