A Few Considerations of a Vast Topic La conscience de soi est une nouvelle modalité du savoir, c est

A Few Considerations of a Vast Topic La conscience de soi est une nouvelle modalité du savoir, c est un savoir de soi, un retour de la conscience depuis l être-autre. -- French Wikipedia on Hegel During the nineteenth century, the figure of Hamlet underwent a shift from being the central character in one of Shakespeare s most ambitious and exciting plays to being, far more than any of Shakespeare s explicitly poet characters, an emblem of the poet lisant, as Mallarmé put it, dans le Livre de lui-même tour italy (reading in the Book of himself). What Hamlet represented to Mallarmé was man confronting his inner life. He burns with what Wordsworth called that inward tour italy eye / Which is the bliss of solitude. tour italy I think the central issue of Romanticism is the issue Rousseau calls conscience de soi : self consciousness. The poetry tour italy reaches far back into Christian modes of confession, as in Saint Augustine, and attempts to find ways in which consciousness, inwardness can be brought to light. This poetry includes tour italy both the intense desire for self-consciousness (as in Wordsworth) and the fear of it (as in Keats Lamia ). What does selfhood taste like? How can one describe soul ? There is also of course the demonic aspect of selfhood its manifestation as a powerful underground, as in Baudelaire or even Jack Kerouac ( the subterraneans ). One thinks of Coleridge s Ancient Mariner, whose terrifying self-awareness tour italy brings him to the anguished point of admitting his primal crime: With my crossbow / I shot the albatross. I agree with Paul de Man (a mentor of mine at Cornell) that What sets out as a claim to overcome Romanticism often turns out to be merely an expansion of our understanding of the movement and that Modernism despite its frequent explicit rejection of Romanticism is in fact a thorough-going example of it. In general Romanticism marks the shift from thinking of poetry as a craft (and of the poet as maker ) to thinking of it as a provoker of consciousness, even a creator of consciousness. From a historical point of view, the notion that poetry is the expression of the hidden tour italy self, of a deeper consciousness, was initially liberating: the sense that we each had an inner life that was different from our outer life, our life with people, and of poetry as expressing that inner life. Wordsworth could make the growth of a poet s mind his primary subject; Thomas de Quincey could make dreams his. Yet the notion of exactly what constitutes an inner life becomes extremely complicated during the 20th century. Various people (Freud among others) discover that some parts of the mind are completely unaware of what other parts of the mind are doing. The inner life of the 20th century is divided, complex, multiple and what we think we believe, what we assert with our egos, may well be colored by feelings and drives of which we are unaware. How can artists assert a fullness of mind? How can we allow those unrecognized areas of the mind to speak alongside the areas we recognize? If poetry is particularly the domain of the inner life, then it is precisely not the domain of the I. The notion that poetry is the domain of the I comes from the ideology of individualism a term whose etymology insists that we are not divided. If we are individuals, then of course we are most authentic when we speak from the point of view of our individuality, from the point of view of our I. But what if the I is in fact multiple, divided, full of many contradictory elements not all of which are even recognized? What if the I is not the unity that the word I presupposes it to be? What sort of poetry is generated by such a conception tour italy of the inner life ? What was the Romantic stance about such matters? The inwardness professed by the Romantics has many sources, but one of the most important is Shakespeare s plays. The many radical contradictions that haunt a play such as Hamlet suggest a consciousness at home in incoherence. tour italy Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn is not usually read in that way, but I think it s possible to do so. Keats begins tour italy with desire, sexuality: Thou still unravished bride.... The violence implied by the word ravished tour italy is immediately quieted, however, with an abstraction about quietness: ...bride of quietness. In the second line, foster child --a phenomenon of our world--is balanced against the abstractions silence and slow time. Each stanza--an Italian sonnet minus a quatrain--has a feeling of great formality: one expects abstractions and elegance from such forms, and Keats supplies them in abundance. Nothing tour italy is terribly real in this deliberately artificial context. The assertion that the urn can express...A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme is a graceful compliment the sort of flowery compliment one might pay to a woman one wishes to interest, not something anyone takes to be quite true. Something of the same thing can be said of Keats deities or mortals : we understand that these are literary or artistic figures figures, not people though the sexuality of still unravished is now given greater emphasis: What maidens tour italy loth? / What mad pursuit?...What wild ecstasy? The second and third stanzas gave us light paradoxes which are not meant to be thought of too deeply or challenged in any way. Are unheard melodies sweeter than heard melodies ? What is an unheard melody anyway? Keats assures tour italy us with a cliché: an unheard melody is something addressed not to the sensual ear but to the spirit. Again, we are not to question too much. We are in some sort of vague version of idealism some sort of conception in which the ideal is to be preferred to the real. And the urn seems to express that idealism. Nothing is ever consummated we are still in the realm of the unravished bride but, on the other hand, desire is never quenched. Such a state, Keats argues lightly, is better than a situation in which consummation occurs. Had the scene on the urn presented forever an image of Blake s gratified desire, Keats poem would have been profoundly altered: instead of perpetual desire we would have had perpetual orgasm a state which is not so easily identified with idealism. Doesn t Keats have a body? He does, and it surfaces a few lines later. He attempts to put the best face possible tour italy on his assertion about the desirability of a state of perpetual sexual frustration by linking tour italy it to a state of eternal springtime a state of paradise, though not quite the paradise of Genesis. He remains in a Classical context: Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu . The happy melodist reminds us of the shepherd of pastoral poetry the kind of thing both Spenser and Milton wrote. Yet the moment human passion is mentioned, the poem suddenly takes on a quality it has not had before. These lines are not fanciful, artificial or playfully paradoxical; they are utterly real: That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, tour italy A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. That burning forehead and parching tongue might well be characteristics of a frustrated tour italy lover, though they also suggest tour italy human diseases with which Keats was certainly familiar. It is as if the poet s own sexual frustration, which he has been attempting to disguise as idealism, suddenly bursts forth in the form of bodily tour italy illness. But like the earlier phrase foster child, the lines touch of reality is only momentary; the poem is not yet ready to take on such questions. In relief perhaps, Keats turns to another side of the urn and attempts to regain the balance and control of the opening lines: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead st thou that heifer lowing at the skies ? Yet, coming after assertions of intense bodily distress, the word sacrifice and the heifer s noisy lowing at the skies have overtones they would not have had under other circumstances. Doesn t disease cause the sacrifice of people? Wasn t Keats, who had been trained as a doctor, aware of such sacrifice? The feelings of desolation, of pain and sacrifice which have entered the poem almost against the poet s wishes suddenly have a new place to express themselves. The town the people leave which isn t even represented on the urn is suddenly seen not merely as empty but as desolate: And, little town, thy streets for evermore tour italy Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e er return. Death, says Hamlet, is the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns. Death (and perhaps a reference to Hamlet) has suddenly entered Keats poem: not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e er return. The artificiality of the paradise Keats was trying to describe protects us against death. Yet that paradise utterly shatters against the actual presence of death in the poem a presence which both we and Keats know to the bone and which is linked to sexual frustration, tour italy itself a kind of death. To paraphrase Keats Ode to a Nightingale, the word desolate is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self to the very mortality the poet has been trying to escape by writing the poem. The fancy, he complains in the Nightingale Ode, cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do. What began as simple description this is what is on the urn, it s only a description has suddenly turned upon him and revealed the very sources which the poem existed to evade. Keats didn t know why he was writing the poem, and the poem s language is now telling him something about his own consciousness manifesting conscience de soi . He has nowhere to go but back to a confrontation with the urn as a whole with this enigmatic thing which, like Poe s raven, has brought him news of his own death. In the last stanza the urn is called a silent form, though in the concluding lines it speaks : thou say st. Perhaps the most telling phrase of the stanza is Cold Pastoral! At this point the urn is almost a tombstone, something which extends beyond the life of the humans who constructed it and extends as well into the m