I find Keats' description of the Chameleon Poet (sorry, I can't spell it his way) relatable in my own attempts at writing, so I guess I'll look into that.
My own philosophy is that "personalities" for real people are a fiction - the illusion, character, is formed by a combination of natural desires with social rules that a person attempts to self-impose based on their experiences and their current setting. Those rules bend depending on where a person is, who they are with, etc. Like Keats, I find myself mirroring people I am around, to a degree. Basically, I think the illusion of personality would be one of the easiest parts of making an Artificial Intelligence.
So when I write a character, I take a limited selection of rules and desires of my own or of others, and jack the levels up, which in its oversimplification creates the illusion of a "personality" that seems more realistic than if I tried to document every contradictory fragment of my own mixup of desires and rules. They're also more fun in extremes - as Keats points out, there's "as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen."
How Keats seems to interpret this "no identity" experience is that I have been reflecting so many characters - every person I speak with or that I read through or dream through - that I lost track of my identity. This seems just as valid an interpretation as mine; in fact, maybe I like it better and will adopt it as my own from now on... : )
As to how Keats employed the feeling in his own work... it seems to work most clearly in the Lamia, where characters are continually shifting. The Lamia seems to have been a bodiless spirit, was cursed to become a snake (which sort of has that connotation of being treacherous...sorry, guys), then after her transformation into a woman shifts in character from nearly a goddess to a lover to a submissive wife - delighting in all her roles. When she is pinned down she is destroyed. Lycius also shifts from worshiper to lover to dominating husband, roles that he can't seem to reconcile with his former role as student. Apollonius never changes, but he shifts in the reader's eye from epic hero to epic spoilsport and murderer.
As far as the conception of the characters, the principle works as well because none of them seems to have a single motivation.
The only thing that seems strange to me is Keats' deeming the protean nature of a Poet "unpoetical," Why does the "Poetic" have to be unified? It seems there are often matters of high contrast that are poetic...
Monday, April 26, 2010
Regaining Meaning Through the Loss of Identity - Blog for Keats
The Camelion
I had to take a step back in order to think about Keats' view on the lack of identity of the poet. In context, I suppose Keats is attempting to get the reader to ponder the very question that all writers fear in their quest for creation: are the words on the page merely just a copy of what I deem the world through my eyes, or is my writing a construct of what I see at any given moment; therefore, making it authentic and true? This is my interpretation of Keats' purpose for calling a poet "the most unpoetic of all God's creatures." Keats' "Lamia" is a relevant example in considering this because the work as a whole seems to be dealing with the very nature of philosophy and its attempt to separate the life of reason (cold, destructive, fatal) against the emotional life (unreal) -both turn out to be fatal attempts as we continue on through the reading. If the Poet gives up his illusions he will regain personal identity, but losing them would destroy the very nature for his passion of creating in the first place. It is a trap -- a paradox. Perhaps this was the purpose of Keats' letter. Anyone who attempts to separate the two spheres will indeed be disappointed.
I had to take a step back in order to think about Keats' view on the lack of identity of the poet. In context, I suppose Keats is attempting to get the reader to ponder the very question that all writers fear in their quest for creation: are the words on the page merely just a copy of what I deem the world through my eyes, or is my writing a construct of what I see at any given moment; therefore, making it authentic and true? This is my interpretation of Keats' purpose for calling a poet "the most unpoetic of all God's creatures." Keats' "Lamia" is a relevant example in considering this because the work as a whole seems to be dealing with the very nature of philosophy and its attempt to separate the life of reason (cold, destructive, fatal) against the emotional life (unreal) -both turn out to be fatal attempts as we continue on through the reading. If the Poet gives up his illusions he will regain personal identity, but losing them would destroy the very nature for his passion of creating in the first place. It is a trap -- a paradox. Perhaps this was the purpose of Keats' letter. Anyone who attempts to separate the two spheres will indeed be disappointed.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Romantic Cookbook due 5/5
Due 5/5—to be read in class, last session.
Romantic Cookbook
Let’s take one last imprint of British Romantic practice by trying it out ourselves. Write a minimum of 500 words, prose or verse or a combination (for the latter, you might write a letter in, say, the Coleridge or Keats mode, mixing the two).
Use one or more of the moves listed below, bearing in mind that they often overlap and are articulated together—e.g., childhood with Nature with Imagination; e.g., the Sublime with liberty with Imagination, etc. 1-6 are structural nuclei. Following them you have a motifs menu.
Cook it up your way--spicy hot, subtle and elegant, whatever your taste--but try to give it unity.
2 options:
1. Give it a title, a date, a dedication, and a literary style as if you are writing it back in 1798, 1807, 1818.
2. Or move it into today’s context and idiom. That is, write it in a postmodern voice/style.
Structural nuclei
1.Out-in-out: outward view of an aspect or object in Nature appearing lifeless; inward turn to feeling and imagination regarding the object; return to outward view of Nature as animated, flowing with mind and feeling, offering unity, joy, the divine, a “revolution” of mind and spirit.
2. Story of les miserables: description of a peasant, beggar, one of the world’s forgotten and humble people, followed by a deepened appreciation of the person’s worth, what the person teaches about things like oppression and liberty, love and generosity, nature and imagination.
3. The child: the child or one’s own childhood lost and then found again, serving as avenue to recovering imagination, “the innocent eye,” nature, joy.
4. The Sublime: gazing upon the high mountains, the raging sea, or pulled into some vortex of trance or dream, the sublime as avenue to supercharging the sense of imagination and nature, as avenue to escaping the bonds of mental and spiritual imprisonment and breaking through to liberty. Or it moves into the Gothic Sublime—terrifying materiality and mechanical repetition, vacancy, abyss, engulfment, dissolution rather than transcendent-organic synthesis.
5. The journey or quest to wild lands, the sublime in the mix but Oriental and other faraway- Gothic strains accompanying the quest.
6. A pair of contraries are run through their paces and then are resolved/synthesized or brought to a point of impossibility.death/vacancy/disaster.
Motifs
Snakes
Poet
Flowers
Monster, exile, wanderer
Moon and Sun
Clouds
Fire
Dynamics: very soft, very loud
Winds
Revolution
Cataracts, waterfalls
Lovers
Reflections--water, echoes, etc
Mountain top
Journey to the strange, crisis and transformation.
Exclamations
Ruins
London
Hellenism, images of the ancient world
Fog and mist
Nightingale or other bird
Shadows
Fountains
War
Sleep, dream, swoon, trance
Ship
Strings, harps, lyres, flutes
Ghosts, phantoms, fairies
Death
“Orient,” arabesque, non-Western
Guilty thing
Common man
Liberty
Woman—beloved, lost or imprisoned girl, femme fatale.
Imagination
Sorcery, forbidden knowledge, science
Inter-- (fused, etc.)
Vacancy, blank, abyss , oscillation
Absorption, dissolution
Romantic Cookbook
Let’s take one last imprint of British Romantic practice by trying it out ourselves. Write a minimum of 500 words, prose or verse or a combination (for the latter, you might write a letter in, say, the Coleridge or Keats mode, mixing the two).
Use one or more of the moves listed below, bearing in mind that they often overlap and are articulated together—e.g., childhood with Nature with Imagination; e.g., the Sublime with liberty with Imagination, etc. 1-6 are structural nuclei. Following them you have a motifs menu.
Cook it up your way--spicy hot, subtle and elegant, whatever your taste--but try to give it unity.
2 options:
1. Give it a title, a date, a dedication, and a literary style as if you are writing it back in 1798, 1807, 1818.
2. Or move it into today’s context and idiom. That is, write it in a postmodern voice/style.
Structural nuclei
1.Out-in-out: outward view of an aspect or object in Nature appearing lifeless; inward turn to feeling and imagination regarding the object; return to outward view of Nature as animated, flowing with mind and feeling, offering unity, joy, the divine, a “revolution” of mind and spirit.
2. Story of les miserables: description of a peasant, beggar, one of the world’s forgotten and humble people, followed by a deepened appreciation of the person’s worth, what the person teaches about things like oppression and liberty, love and generosity, nature and imagination.
3. The child: the child or one’s own childhood lost and then found again, serving as avenue to recovering imagination, “the innocent eye,” nature, joy.
4. The Sublime: gazing upon the high mountains, the raging sea, or pulled into some vortex of trance or dream, the sublime as avenue to supercharging the sense of imagination and nature, as avenue to escaping the bonds of mental and spiritual imprisonment and breaking through to liberty. Or it moves into the Gothic Sublime—terrifying materiality and mechanical repetition, vacancy, abyss, engulfment, dissolution rather than transcendent-organic synthesis.
5. The journey or quest to wild lands, the sublime in the mix but Oriental and other faraway- Gothic strains accompanying the quest.
6. A pair of contraries are run through their paces and then are resolved/synthesized or brought to a point of impossibility.death/vacancy/disaster.
Motifs
Snakes
Poet
Flowers
Monster, exile, wanderer
Moon and Sun
Clouds
Fire
Dynamics: very soft, very loud
Winds
Revolution
Cataracts, waterfalls
Lovers
Reflections--water, echoes, etc
Mountain top
Journey to the strange, crisis and transformation.
Exclamations
Ruins
London
Hellenism, images of the ancient world
Fog and mist
Nightingale or other bird
Shadows
Fountains
War
Sleep, dream, swoon, trance
Ship
Strings, harps, lyres, flutes
Ghosts, phantoms, fairies
Death
“Orient,” arabesque, non-Western
Guilty thing
Common man
Liberty
Woman—beloved, lost or imprisoned girl, femme fatale.
Imagination
Sorcery, forbidden knowledge, science
Inter-- (fused, etc.)
Vacancy, blank, abyss , oscillation
Absorption, dissolution
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Blog due 4/29: The Camelion Poet, The Sparrow, Negative Capability, and the Vale of Soul Making
Keats inhabits the Romantic dialectic in a perhaps different and quite striking manner. What might be Gothic about all of it? Could it be that Keats, refusing the Wordsworthian "egotistical sublime" and its recuperations, travels the unstable, metamorphic trails of the Gothic Sublime?
Consider Lamia in this light, for a start. Is it only a lesson in the dangerous feminine, or might it be a study in passion--hunting, haunted, losing every gain?
For a blog--due 4/29--consider one of the readings in light of one or more of the formulations below, drawn from Keats' letters:
The Camelion Poet
As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosp[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatures
The Sparrow
I think Jane or Marianne has a better opinion of me than I deserve - for really and truly I do not think my Brothers illness connected with mine - you know more of the real Cause than they do nor have I any chance of being rack'd as you have been - You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, - you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away - I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness - I look for it if it be not in the present hour, - nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.
Negative Capability
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The Vale of Soul Making
Call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say "Soul making" Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it--that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible--I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--"
Consider Lamia in this light, for a start. Is it only a lesson in the dangerous feminine, or might it be a study in passion--hunting, haunted, losing every gain?
For a blog--due 4/29--consider one of the readings in light of one or more of the formulations below, drawn from Keats' letters:
The Camelion Poet
As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosp[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatures
The Sparrow
I think Jane or Marianne has a better opinion of me than I deserve - for really and truly I do not think my Brothers illness connected with mine - you know more of the real Cause than they do nor have I any chance of being rack'd as you have been - You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, - you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away - I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness - I look for it if it be not in the present hour, - nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.
Negative Capability
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The Vale of Soul Making
Call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say "Soul making" Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it--that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible--I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--"
Friday, April 16, 2010
African Embraces: Voodoo and Possession in Keats's Lamia
http://books.google.com/books?id=f9LEVHkCLukC&pg=PA123&dq=keats+lamia&lr=&cd=25#v=onepage&q=keats%20lamia&f=false
A really interesting piece here--a great example of resourceful new-historicist work. Long, but the first section alone is worth a look.
A really interesting piece here--a great example of resourceful new-historicist work. Long, but the first section alone is worth a look.
Monday, April 12, 2010
New blog for Shelley, due 4/17
How about a straightforward blog?
About 200 words--
Track with examples and discuss the significance and function of one of the following in Shelley's Alastor and "Mont Blanc" (the two odes also may offer some possibilities):
Silence
Solitude
Vacancy
About 200 words--
Track with examples and discuss the significance and function of one of the following in Shelley's Alastor and "Mont Blanc" (the two odes also may offer some possibilities):
Silence
Solitude
Vacancy
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Changes and reading asgmts for Shelley
Some changes (reductions) to our readings, coming into Wednesday (maybe) and into next week:
Shelley, for next week.
Monday
1. Alastor
Wednesday
2. Mont Blanc
3. Ode to the West Wind
4. To a Skylark
Shelley blog topics are on the way.
Shelley, for next week.
Monday
1. Alastor
Wednesday
2. Mont Blanc
3. Ode to the West Wind
4. To a Skylark
Shelley blog topics are on the way.
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