In the Spirit of John Keats

...His poems work to catch those unconscious reactions that so bemuse our rational selves...

...At the same time, no other poet speaks more poignantly of our melancholy at the brevity of life, the knowledge of how little light there is between the dark at either end...

...Oh for a life of sensations, rather than of thoughts...

...necessary for a poem...

...He can still remember the meadows near St...

...The poet's lyrical intelligence captures their movement in the enjambment of his lines...

...By now Keats was able to do without most of the devices that had previously seemed supremely poetic to him: mythology, history, overt literary allusions...

...Many of the better books about him have been written to defend him from slurs...

...Ay, where are they...

...An observation by Wallace Stevens, however, suggested to Vendler that they might well be considered a unity: "I began to see the odes as a single long and heroic imaginative effort, in which Keats examined, in a sustained and deliberate and steadily more ambitious way, his own acute questions about the conditions for creativity, the forms art can take, the hierarchy of the fine arts (including the art of poetry...

...Keats once wrote...

...Keats' extreme youth (dead at 25, with most of his poetry written a year or two earlier) and cockney background has provoked much condescension from critics over the years...

...Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, bourne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies...

...Keats learned to embody meaning through the sensation of sound...

...A more severe and disciplined approach in "The Fall of Hyperion" brought him up short once more against the indifference of Nature...

...To Autumn" celebrates this "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" by forgetting the nostalgic musings and immersing itself in the present: Where are the songs of spring...

...Plumly is careful to keep his own sensory impressions specific, to avoid overload...

...of a singing bird...

...His motto seems to be "There is almost nothing that does not signal loneliness,/then loveliness, then something connecting all we will become...

...This is illustrated by following the development of Keats' ideas about the role of the poet...

...Stanley Plumly is a poet much influenced by what Keats called "the knowledge of contrast, feeling of light and shadow...

...Plumly acknowledges his kinship with Keats in a poem that imagines the dying poet's journey to Rome...

...the relation of art to human life and death...

...My life list is one bird at a time long," he confesses in "Ground Birds in Open Country...

...Plumly refers, from time to time, to waking up in tears for no apparent cause...

...To Autumn" makes its peace with the limitations of the art of poetry, just as it accepts that ripeness is only a stage that will inevitably move on toward decay...

...In the birdbook, there where the names are, It is always May, and the thing so fixed we can see it, even the yellow margin halving the wing...

...Yet that leaves the poet a helpless spectator...

...The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft...

...it cannot reincarnate...

...He adds, "I am taught, and believe that even in light the mind/wanders, speaks before thinking...

...Cross, the taste in the air of apples, the tower and alms-square, and the River Itchen, all within the walk of a mile...

...Vendler is concerned with a more sophisticated attack...

...Plumly, a Keatsian poet, is adept at blending the two in his expressive lines...

...By admitting these hard truths, Keats freed himself to express complex nuances of thought with a sensuousness of language that has never been surpassed...

...In the "Ode on Indolence," he engages "in a fruitless and inconclusive dialectic" that refuses to answer questions at all...

...At this point in her demonstration, Vendler will have convinced all but the most pigheaded that the passage cited contains much more than mere scenic description: "A poem, Keats realizes, is not a 'picture...

...Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue...

...The seven months in 1819 when the 24-year-old poet worked on the odes followed a shattering period of upheaval for him...

...Nevertheless, both poets share a belief that emotions remain strongly connected to the object that inspired them...

...In Summer Celestial (Ec-co, 52 pp., $13.50), Plumly's lyricism conveys the oscillation with a fine ambivalence...

...In the "Ode to Psyche" he "still hopes that art need not be 'work' intellectually planned," so it reappears in "Ode to a Nightingale" as a natural warbling...

...He goes on to illustrate his sense of how experience intertwines with ideas: As one lonely morning, green under glass, a redwing flew straight at me its shoulders slick with the air, It was that close, and brilliant...

...Tryingto assimilate these events, and resolve the future course of his poetry, Keats turned inward...

...Tragically, the strain of travel proved too much for his weakened condition...

...Shifting images take into account that emotions are more fluid and contradictory than we like to confess...

...Unwilling to abandon any of the linguistic or symbolic resources [he had] so far discovered," he tried using them together in the "Ode on Melancholy," only to reject the result as" esthetically grotesque...

...Instead, his mind wanders back to the previous year when he composed "To Autumn...

...But Plumly's birds are never stationary as they flutter and dive in and out...

...These seven poems are commonly read as separate investigations of related themes...

...And gathering swallows twitter in the skies...

...Vendler presents the sequential progression of the odes as a series of tentative solutions, proposed, rejected, then used as building blocks toward the next...

...As Helen Vend-ler notes in her new book, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard, 330 pp., $18.50), his best poems "belong to that group of works in which the English language finds an ultimate embodiment," so that "each generation comes to them as Keats imagined generations of spectators coming to a Hellenic urn and finding, in turn, that it remained forever a friend to man...

...He was willing to try anything that might cure him enough to resume writing and free association with his friends...

...Poetry, as Vendler further says, is "not ordinary speech" designed to explicate, but rather the music of language...

...He had fallen in love with Fanny Brawne, his brother had succumbed to tuberculosis, he found himself unable to recover from a persistent sore throat, andhis Endymion, a work he hoped would bring him both fame and financial security, had been panned by critics as Cockney vulgarity...

...He has closed his eyes...

...Plumly responds intensely to Nature...

...When claims are made for the permanent value of art, Keats inevitably springs to mind: His immortal nightingale and immutable urn continue "in midst of other woe/than ours" to comfort with their beauty...

...it cannot 'reproduce' the stubble-fields it contemplates...

...In the poem it is Sunday, the middle of September, the light a gold conglomerate of detail— "in the way that some pictures look warm...

...Amy Lowell disproved, with hearty American scorn, British assertions that because he had not attended a university, he was an ignorant know-nothing, and an unpolished writer...

...The concept, though, struck Keats as oversimplified...

...One can tell that if Plumly had written the ode, he would have preserved the facts and physical surroundings Keats reported in his letters, but eliminated in favor of more generalized Romantic examples in "To Autumn...

...In a spell of intense creativity, he wrote six odes and "The Fall of Hyperion" (viewed by Vendler as a companion piece...

...The artist's work" as seen in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Vendler continues, thus "has a social purpose, and it is deliberate and arduous—the art of the sculptor's chisel, not...

...Despite its serene title, Summer Celestial strikes a mournful note...

...Plumly describes the coach to Rome passing through fall wildflowers—a beauty that the invalid can no longer take in...

...Ground Birds" is constructed less as a nature poem than as a contradictory evocation of the loneliness of open spaces and the panic of closed ones that the speaker associates with his memories of birdwatching...

...Keats' poetry is companionable because it reconciles the life of ideas with the feelings we experience, but usually cannot put into words...

...The polemic impulse from which this book began," she explains, "arose when I read Allen Tate's judgment that the ode 'To Autumn' 'is a very nearly perfect piece of style but has little to say.'" She finds the poem as profoundly meaningful as anything ever written, and proceeds to show us why by offering a new, albeit controversial, way of reading Keats...

...Posthumous Keats" portrays a mental state in which nostalgia must suffice, since any new sensation becomes "overwhelming...