LIBRARY NOTES
Aileen Ward
Keats: The Making of a Poet
Wednesday, May 6, 1998 at 5:30 PM
Members' Room; $60 per person
John Keats seems to have been a wonderful conversationalist as well as a great poet. His remark on conversation in a letter of February 1818 is a prose poem in itself: "Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbor, and thus by every germ of Spirit sucking the Sap from the mould ethereal every human might be great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furse and Briars with here or there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees."
We will share the "results" of our reading of a wide range of his writing drawn from his sonnets, epistles, odes, and narrative poems from Endymion and Hyperion to The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia, as well as a broad selection of his letters. Our conversation will move back and forth between close reading of his poetic texture -- diction, imagery, lyric patterning, and narrative structure -- to a broader discussion of Keats's ideas, especially in his letters. These contain some of the most memorable comments on poetry and the poet in English; they also offer remarkable insights into the human condition itself. We will trace his miraculous development from the tentative utterances of his first volume of Poems (1817) to the assured mastery of his annus mirabilis (from the autumn of 1818 to the autumn of 1819). Keats died at twenty-five in Rome in February 1821, convinced he was a failure; but he was closer to the mark in 1818 when he wrote, in response to some devastating reviews of Endymion, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Recommended texts are
Selected Poems of John Keats, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford World classics, 1996) and
Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford, 1978), but other available books will do.
This Conversations on Great Books will run May 6, 13 and 20, 1998.
Aileen Ward recently retired from New York University where she was Schweitzer Professor of Humanities. Her biography,
John Keats: The Making of a Poet, won the National Book Award in Arts and Letters and also the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction in London. Over the years she has published a number of articles and reviews on the English Romantic writers and is currently working on a life of William Blake.
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