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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 God's Creatures (Letters12/21/1817).
This necessity for infusion into all creatures and things in order to achieve some sense of the poetical and "unchangeable"permeates Keats's Odes written in 1819, particularly "Nightingale"and "Grecian Urn."While Keats was writing the Odes, he could not be unaware of his own troublesome health, and at the same time, was entirely too aware of the recent passing of his brother Tom. Thus troubled, he composes "Ode on a Grecian Urn"in a dialogical attempt to find poetical existence beyond his too-short human lifetime.
As Keats tries to find some sense of permanence in an ever more apparently impermanent and fleeting world, he turns to those objects which he regards as outside of the temporality he, as a mortal man, experiences: the perpetuating, generationless song of the nightingale and the "cold Pastoral"ageless marble scenes on the Grecian Urn, considered by many to be among the "best"of his poetry.
His best poetry is composed largely of representations of representations, meditations "on"objects or texts that are themselves reflections of other artists' creative acts (Scott, xi).
The products of these artists are indeed timeless and eternal, something Keats was very aware, both in the presence of other artists works and in the absence in his own. As Keats tries to create for himself a place among these eternal artists, he employs a type of dialogical ekphrasis: that is he tries to perpetuate dialogue with both the past and the future by employing a genre that allows him to create a "work of art"by describing "works of art, to translate the arrested visual image into the fluid movement of words"(Scott 1). Scott, in his book The Sculpted Word, goes on to say that "Keats must achieve what the heroes of antiquity were given--namely their assured place in the cultural order"(Scott 1). This place in "the cultural order"is what Keats de sperately seeks, and it can only be achieved through ekphrasis and dialogism.
In a surprisingly similar set-up to Bakhtin's paradigm of existence as dialogue, Keats sets up a Spirit-Creation schema in his long letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written February 14-May 3, 1819.
These three Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart(as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the Worldor Elemental spacesuited for the proper action of Mind and Hearton each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity (Letters, 2/12-5/3/1819).
While not directly parallel, one cannot escape the similarity to the following Bakhtinian figure constructed by Michael Holquist:
The self, then, may be conceived as a multiple phenomenon of essentially three elements (it is--at least--a triad, not a duality): a center, a not-center, and the relation between them (Holquist 29).
Whether Keats heart or mind is comparable to Bakhtin's center, remains an ambiguity . A Lacanian twist on the paradigm would allow that the heart, perhaps, would be comparable to the center, or self, and the mind would be equivocal to the other that exists post-mirror stage. Holquist earlier states that "Existence, like language, is a shared event"(Holquist 28). This sharing is both external and internal. Keats, in his attempt to perpetuate his temporal existence beyond his ability to draw breath, employs this triad schema, as well as the Bakhtinian principles of relations and unity, to construct a permanent poetical (read dialogical) existence in "Ode on a Grecian Urn"that consciously perpetuates vagaries and questionings, allowing his voice to be heard in dialogues far over-reaching his own lifetime.
The ambiguities, uncertainties, and still remaining questions provoked by "Ode on a Grecian Urn"have generated thousands of pages of criticism. From the onset of the first stanza, the reader is probed with a series of questions issued by the poem's speaking subject. Keats, knowing ri ght from the beginning the inefficacy of human (particularly the English) language, probably as a result of his recent work on "Nightingale,"allows the urn to speak without speaking, to "express/ A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme."However, as Keats himself cannot get outside of the language that continually struggles with (see specifically "If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd") throughout his career, he issues a series of questions that he "expects"the urn, or those represented on the urn, to answer. Scott notes, "...the ode does not begin with the speaker's attempt to compete with the urn, but with an homage to its strange genealogy and to its paradoxical powers of eloquence"(Scott 135). However, both Scott and Vendler agree that Keats immediately become impatient with the urn's silence and seeks to impose his own dialogue on the existing dialogical surface of the urn. Andrew Bennett also notices Keats's desire to enter into the dialogue, saying that Keats "always seems about to burst into narrative"(Bennett 130). He seems right from the beginning to be questioning the urn, and then imposing his own answers. Then, in urn fashion, Keats becomes as willfully ambiguous as the urn, ultimately haunting readers at the end of the poem by questioning the nature of Truth as represented by this urn and by his poem. As Stillinger accurately notes in The Hoodwinking of Madelienethat the real question of the urn is "Who says what to whom at the end of `Ode on a Grecian Urn'?"(Stillinger 167-173).
The origin of truth must in some way relate to who we identify as the speaking subject in the poem. "Ode on a Grecian Urn"was published three times--with three different versions of the famous last lines, controversy surrounding the use of quotation ma rks and certain capitalizations (or their absence). Considering that something or someone is addressing the readers (again both the urn's and the poem's readers) directly at the end of the poem, and that this someone is "a friend to man,"it is important to investigate the nature of the speaking subject in "Grecian Urn."There are several possibilities here: Keats, the urn, a separate unknown speaking subject, past voices as portrayed by the urn, and, possibly, Sosibios, the creator of the urn. We cannot neglect the excellent point that George Levine accurately illustrates in his article "The Arrogance of Keats's Grecian Urn;"that is, "As scholars of ancient Greek art have long been aware, it was fairly common for potters and painters to add inscriptions to their work"(Levine 39), a fact that Keats's good friend and artistic educator Haydon must have been aware. If we are to assume that Keats's sketch of a vase in the archives of the Keats-Shelley Memorial house in Rome is actually the "Grecian Urn"he wrote about, then we must look to the "Sosibios"inscription for the sculptor's voice, as well as the urn's, to come through in the first person utterance, "Sosibios made me."This inscription imbues the urn with two separate speakers--the creator and the created both speaking simultaneously. This idea of simultaneity is crucial in Bakhtin's ideas of existence as dialogue, because "Dialogism argues that all meaning is relative in the sense that it comes about only as a result of the relation between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space,"something that Sosibios here accomplishes (Levine 20). Levine sums up, saying,
Keats's decision, therefore, to imbue, his enigmatic urn with a quasi-animate presence and to make it speak forth directly to the viewer had its origins in a convention that was clearly and abundantly evident to anyone interested at that time in the relics of Greek antiquity (Levine 40).
Therefore, the urn itself and the sculptor himself, both, by nature of the urn's existence, as well as its inscription, "speak"to modern viewers, allowing them a voice in a "dialogue."The sculptor, more importantly, is allowed a "quasi-animate"existence beyond his own years; he can communicate with future generations without even breathing.
The sculptor, therefore, creates, with this vase, a Bakhtinian triad, similar to the one discussed earlier, with the Creator as self or center and the urn as an example of not-center. These "bodies"exist in an inextricable relationship with each other, but "there must be someone to grasp the nature of such a relation. . . . Bakhtin's observer is also, simultaneously, an active participant in the relation of simultaneity"(Holquist 21). Keats is the active participant that is viewing the interplay of "dialogue"between the sculptor and his urn, his desire and his creation, perhaps, to use Keats's terms, the mind and the heart. Keats, as an active participant/viewer will therefore construct his own "relation"to the vase. As Holquist accurately points out,
Relation, it will be helpful to remember, is also a telling, a narrative, an aspect of the word's meaning that Bakhtin will not ignore as he takes the somewhat unusual step of treating the relation of the self to the other as a problem in aesthetics (Holquist 29).
Keats, therefore, uses his relation to the urn to construct various narratives for the scenes that Sosibios and his urn were trying to relate. He sees the "happy"lover and the object of his desire, the piper, the trees boughs, the sacrificial procession. The urn's scenes, containing superficially innocuous and lovely scenes, are, nevertheless, ambiguous in their meanings, hence, Keats's insistent questioning throughout the first and fourth stanzas. He demands origins, names, specifics regarding certain represented events. These unanswerables are left open to the viewer's own construction by the sculptor. Keats, knowing that he cannot know, poses his own interpretations for what stories the urn reveals.
These details are not required for Keats's appreciation and "knowledge"regarding the urn to increase. Rather, Keats can never know exactly the true dialogue that Sosibios had with his creation--he can only speculate from the outside, and thus construct his own dialogical realit y with the remnant of the conversation that has occurred a thousand years before he was born. However, these questionings are key in dialogism.
Dialogism's drive to meaning should not be confused with the Hegelian impulse toward a single state of higher consciousness in the future. In Bakhtin, there is no one meaning being striven for: the world is a vast congeries of contesting meanings, a heteroglossia so varied that no single term capable of unifying its diversifying energies is possible (Holquist 24).
Thus, the possibility exist in Keats's mind that the scene he describes in stanza two could be one either of rape or true flirtatious mutual passion. The permanent beauty of the trees is counteracted by the perpetually unfulfilled "burning forehead"and "parching tongue,"an eternity spent in the expectationof satiation--never the knowledge of it.
These scenes remain simultaneously knowable and unknowable. This seeming paradox is also one principle that contributes to the dialogical existence of this urn, for in order to be considered such, the events portrayed thereon must result in Bakhtin 's recurring phrase of "the unique and unified event of being (edinstvennoe i edinoe sobytie bytija)"(Holquist 24). The events, in relation to the viewer Keats, do indeed exist as both unique and unified: unique because Keats, as reader of the urn's scenes cannot bein those scenes--something his repeated questioning acknowledges. As Holquist comments that while uniqueness is shared, "We shall all die, but you cannot die in my place. . .I cannot be in the unique place you occupy in the event of existence "(Holquist 24). Can Keats relate to the scenes of unfulfillment placed before him? In light of his frustrating relationship with Fanny Brawne, his fiancé whom he will never be able to marry, I would have to argue that Keats indeed had the experiential knowledge of expectation and wanting without the fulfillment that should occur. The relation between Keats and urn is unified because these scenes, al though frozen and permanent by the hand of the sculptor, are in progress; that is, we only capture a single freeze-frame of the ongoing existence the characters experience. "They are never in any sense of the word alone. They need others to provide the stability demanded by the structure of perception if what occurs is too have meaning"(Holquist 24). Keats, in his unique role as viewer, provides that "structure of perception"needed to give both the scenes on the urn, and the urn as a whole, meaning.
As Helen Vendler comments, "Aesthetic experiences, as well as intellectual ones, ask us to exist in `uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'(Letters, I, 193) "(Vendler 130). Keats, probably one of the great imitators and students of the great masters, succeeded in learning an important lesson from the creator of the urn. By creating a poem, an aesthetic existence, based on the scenes he has viewed on the urn, Keats has developed a "relation"with each of his readers. We, as readers become, to Keats, the Keats that existed in relation to Sosibios. As Douglas Wilson notes, "The reader's relation to the ode is analogous to the speaker's relation to the urn"(Wilson 825). His construction of "Grecian Urn"is much the same as Sosibios'construction of the urn: Keats sees an event in life (in this case, the representation of several events) and freezes the action, allowing the readers to construct around the poem any possible meaning for its obvious ambiguities. Keats sees the need sharing his experience.
Sharing existence as an event means among other things that we are--we cannot choose not to be--in dialogue, not only with other human beings, but also with the natural and cultural configurations we lump together as "the world"(Holquist 30).
As the sculptor shares his existence, contextual or not, with the viewer of his urn, Keats to invites his readers to share his experience of viewing, thus entering into multiple dialogues occurring simultaneously with both the distant past, and now, the somewhat distant future. Keats has perpetuated not only his own existence through dialogue, but also the urn's and its creator. However, Scott questions Keats's ability to do this well:
Can the poet-observer tell the tale the urn tells better than the urn can? Can he counter the urn's silence, ravish it, turn it into writing and then dazzle us in the way the urn dazzles him? (Scott 135).
While Scott seems to question Keats's ekphrastic ability, one cannot deny the Keats's dialogic ability, as he, however ineffectual some may conceive it to be, is entering into the relation necessary for the completion of Bakhtin's schema. However, Scott seems to agree that Keats's attempt at ekphrasis is indeed successful, saying, "Keats performs a nostalgic reenactment of ekphrastic hope, only in the reified space of aesthetics"(Scott 150).
Much has been done in the realm of reader-response theory, particularly of note is Susan Wolfson's The Questioning Presenceand Douglas Wilson's "Keats's Urn: Death in Arcadia,"and will continue to be done, as it seems that reader-response is a natural extension from dialogism, considering the issue of relation discussed earlier, because "its very subject is the responding mind engaged in the interpretive process "(Wilson 824). This necessity for reader and relation seems to be spawned by the seemingly rhetorical conclusion issued in the final lines of "Grecian Urn."Andrew Bennett takes note of the concluding lines and claims that they are what creates the "dialogical"presence of Keats in the poem.
The inciting nature of the `Urn'poem's final couplet is the enticement generated in the poem's readers by the conclusive nature of the lines, a finality emphasized by other forms of rhetorical closure--parallelism, chiasm, aphorism, paradox, enigma, and apparently meaningful hints about the nature of life and art. It is becauseof this finality--rather than in spite of it--that so many critics have responded so quizzically to the last couplet: it is the urn's silence that teases us into and out of thought (Bennett 137).
It is Keats's use of rhetorical devices that keeps him and the object of his creation, a poem, in the mind of the reader. It seems ironic that again a schematic triad can be implemented in the discussion of this poem--this time, the rhetorical triangle. Keats and his purpose are inextricably tied to the audience by nature of his textual creation. Within various critical contexts, both author's and audience's purpose var y but all are tied together by the permanence of the written text--a written text whose multiple versions and variations only further compound the critical discussion that exists.
As we read "Ode on a Grecian Urn, we engage in a dialogue with Keats in a similar manner to Keats's ekphrastic engagement with the urn. As Wilson notes, "Keats signals the reader to conform to the speaker's projections and to make strategic adjustment to its demands of fictional play"(Wilson 825). Just as Keats speculates upo n the scenes on the urn and demands answers from that urn, we to speculate about the nature of the scenes described, demanding answers from a poem just as frustrating to definitive narrowings as the urn was to Keats's interrogative mind. Wilson later goes on to discuss how we as readers of the poem become readers of the "fictionalized"urn as well, thus the Keats's future meets Keats's past. Wilson will later note, "A psychocritical reading of the ode induces a dialogue in the reader's consciousness between the urn's exterior figures and their implicit ghosts"(Wilson 827).
Thus in an ekphrastic, dialogic, and rhetorical sense, Keats has established, in a sense, what he seemed to strive for, "to be placed among the English poets"and to avoid what he feared, "that his name would be writ in water."As Wilson states, "`Ode on a Grecian Urn'requires an awareness of the entire communication process: poet, poem, and reader all inextricably play their parts in the reading act "(Wilson 824). This process is ongoing, even to this moment. As reader of the poem, we become readers of the urn. In reading both we maintain life in both Keats and the sculptor, even if only in a "quasi-animate sense. "Since the reader must `build his own bridges'between these temporal [read historical] levels, `gaps are bound to open up, and offer a free play of interpretation for the specific way in which the various views can be connected with one another'(Iser 11)"(Wilson 831). As Iser says, a reader must "build his own bridges; "Volosinov, a dialogic theorist would state the following, "A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee"(Volosinov 58). Words, and dialogue, connect the listener with the speaker; the reader with the author; the past with the present and with the future. As Bakhtin remarks,
...there is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue. At any present moment of the dialogue there are great masses of forg otten meanings, but these will be recalled again at a given moment in the dialogue's later course when it will be given new life. For nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival (Bakhtin 373).
This interplay of simultaneity in dialogue, in conjunction with Keats's ekphrastic activity creates a timelessness in the poem that gives Keats an eternal existence.
Bennett, Andrew. Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthmous Life of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. London: Rouledge Press, 1990.
Keats, John. The Collected Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1982.
Keats, John. The Letter of John Keats: 1814-1821, 2 vol., ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Levine, George R. "The Arrogance of Keats's Grecian Urn."Essays in Literature.
Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994.
Stillinger, Jack. The Hoodwinking of Madeleine and Other Essays on Keats's Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Volosinov, V.N. "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language"in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
Wilson, Douglas B. "Keats's Urn: Death in Arcadia."Studies in English Literature, 25 (1985): 823-844.
Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.