1. What does keats mean by calling the world a ‘vale of soul-making’? why does he think this constitutes “a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion?” (1389)
2. Why is he concerned for the salvation of Christian children?
3. Explain the reasoning behind Keats’s claim that developing a soul requires altering one’s nature (1390). Is this related to the issue of first and second love that we were discussing in Jane Austen?
1. Identify all of the different voices in the poem; how many are there? how to they interact (i.e., do they echo one another? undermine one another? both?)? What is the function/significance of these interacting voices? is this a poem of concentric circles rippling out to include the reader like “Ozymandias”?
2. Does this poem express a fear or resentment of women? why or why not?
This poem hinges on the superstition that virgins might receive visions of their future husbands on St. Agnes’ Eve. Here’s the brutal story of St. Agnes herself:
According to tradition, Saint Agnes was a member of the Roman nobility born c. 291 and raised in a Christian family. She suffered martyrdom at the age of twelve[2] or thirteen during the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, on January 21 304.
The Prefect Sempronius wished Agnes to marry his son, and on Agnes’ refusal he condemned her to death. As Roman law did not permit the execution of virgins, Sempronius had a naked Agnes dragged through the streets to a brothel. As she prayed, her hair grew and covered her body. It was also said that all of the men who attempted to rape her were immediately struck blind. When led out to die she was tied to a stake, but the bundle of wood would not burn, whereupon the officer in charge of the troops drew his sword and beheaded her, or, in some other texts, stabbed her in the throat. It is also said that the blood of Agnes poured to the stadium floor where other Christians soaked up the blood with cloths. She did not want to marry but wanted to have God in her life.
1. In stanza 2 Keats says of the beadsman, himself freezing and on the brink of death, that as he looks on the sculptures “his weak spirit fails / To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.” It’s as if the church sanctuary doesn’t console him but redoubles his misery. What is the significance of this radical bleakness in the poem’s opening scene?
2. In stanza 3 Keats writes “Northward he turneth through a little door, / And scarce three steps, ere music’s golden tongue / Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor; / But no—already had his deathbell rung, / The joys of all his life were said and sung / His was harsh penance on St. Agnes’ Eve: / Another way he went, and soon among / Rough ashes sat he for his soul’s repreive.” Why is he flattered to tears by the music he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy but instead goes to sit praying? This is also the concluding image of the poem: “The beadsman, after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for, slept among his ashes cold.” What is the significance of this as the backdrop and frame of the poem?
3. why does keats in stanza 5 write: “these let us wish away”?
4. what is the significance of the fact that Keats characterizes the superstition of St. Agnes’ Eve as an old wives tale, a “whim” and “fairy fancy” that “old dames declare” to “hoodwink”? Keats seems to dismiss the superstition but how could he dismiss it without thereby also dismissing his whole poem?
5. in stanza 7 keats writes: “But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere: / She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.” Why doesn’t she see her actual suitors? is it because her anticipation of “Agnes’ dreams” is sweeter than them, or is it that she’d rather dream of a fictional lovers than contemplate actual ones? is an answer suggested by the fact that Madeline dreams not of her future wedded life but of “all the bliss to be before tomorrow morn” (72)?
6. in stanza 10 we learn that Madeline and Prophyro’s families are rivals like those of Romeo and Juliet; how does this reference inform your reading of the poem?
7. In stanza 15, is Prophyro moved by the beauty of the thought of Madeleine praying itself or of what this might get him? in other words, does Keats show Prophyro to be enraptured in an ‘interested’ or ‘disinterested’ way?
“the egotistical sublime” vs. the “chameleon poet”
1. why does keats consider wordsworth an “egotist”? what “palpable design on us” does wordsworth’s poetry have according to keats (1352)? despite his objections to WW keats admits that “he is a genius and superior to us insofar as he can, more than we, make discoveries, and shed a light in them” (1353); so how does keats nonetheless imagine improving on Wordsworth?
2. why does keats say the poet has “no self…no character,” and even “is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has to identity” (1375)?
Byron’s materialism
In an August 1819 letter to his publisher John Murray, Bryon gives a two-pronged definition of the kind of artistic freedom – and by extension freedom per se – that he would express in and through Don Juan:
You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny: I have no plan – I had no plan; but I had or have materials; though if…I am ‘to be snubbed so when I am in spirits’, the poem will be naught, and the poet turn serious again. If it don’t take, I will leave it off where it is, with all due respect to the Public; but if continued, it must be in my own way. You might as well make Hamlet (or Diggory) ‘act mad’ in a strait waistcoat as trammel my buffoonery, if I am to be a buffoon: their gestures and my thoughts would only be pitiably absurd and ludicrously constrained. Why, Man the Soul of such writing is its licence; at least the liberty of that licence, if one likes – not that one should abuse it- it is like trial by Jury and Peerage and the Habeas Corpus – a very fine thing, but chiefly in the reversion; because no one wishes to be tried for the mere pleasure of proving his possession of the privilege.
So Byronic freedom requires 1) materials but not a plan; i.e. it must be improvisatory, spontaneous; but the criterion of spontaneity, or the “liberty” of the “license” is 2) transgression (or “reversion”): i.e., freedom isn’t a matter of conforming to expectations of free behavior but of testing or even defying such expectations, so that it is all but indistinguishable from “madness,” buffoonery,” ” and “pitiable absurdity;” but what makes genuine liberty avoid conformity on the one hand and madness on the other is that it 3) “takes with the public;” i.e., that the public learns to like what initially appeared as a ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ transgression against its own standards and expectations. So in short freedom = a kind of craziness that society officially renounces but secretly or unknowingly actually likes. This already suggests part of why Byron associates freedom so closely with sex.
As we discussed on Friday DJ’s Dedication and first Canto take the poetic and political elite of Byron’s time to task for falling far short on these counts. In particular Byron faults them for what he characterizes as sexless obscurantism: the “mysteries,” “explanation-begging explanations” of “emasculated,” “intellectual eunuchs.” They make up boring, impotent theories of freedom rather than doing it; convincingly showing us what it’s about. I explained this contrast by referring to Nietzsche’s account of “clumsy lovers” from the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil:
SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman–what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women–that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien–IF, indeed, it stands at all!
By contrast, Byron like Nietzsche casts himself as an expert lover who rather than “importunately” and “clumsily” trying to force truth to obey dogmatic theories instead tries to seduce truth with bravura displays of poetic and intellectual finesse. In other words Byron doesn’t try to vanquish truth’s elusiveness–to brutally claim it as an object of knowledge–but to match it with his own poetic nuance; to erotically resonate with it rather than defeat it. So as we discussed his use of language tends to evoke the intense materiality and unpredictability of sensuous experience.
In a another (perhaps offensive) letter (written to his friend Kinnaird a little later in the same year) , Byron goes so far as to literally equate rather than just (like Nietzche) figuratively liken this materiality (or “the thing”) to sex and in particular female sexuality:
As to ‘Don Juan’ — confess — confess you dog — and be candid — that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing — it may be bawdy — but it it is not good English — it may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? — Could any man have written it — who has not lived in the world? And tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a Wall? in a court-carriage? in a vis-a-vis? — on a table? — and under it? I have written about a hundred stanzas of a third Canto – but it is damned modest – the outcry has frightened me. – I had such projects for the Don – but the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt – now a days, – that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighted the worth of both monosyllables – must be lost to despairing posterity.
Byron claims that although we might fear to admit it, his poem compels us to “confess” that writing that moves beyond the easy but vacuous legibility of one monosyllable to the truth of the other may be dangerously ‘bawdy’ and ‘profligate’ but this is precisely what allows it to do justice to life and to be worthy literature (or “good English”).
Byron’s historicism
Yet although Byron claims his method subordinates any “plan” to spontaneous engagement with “materials,” Don Juan does have a plan; in fact in a way it has about the most ambitious plan imaginable: to retell all of European history in the manner just outlined: not by schematizing and rationalizing this history but by seducing the ineffably subtle subterranean material truths of each stage of its development. This plan helps explain Juan’s defining feature which is his passivity. Byron adapted this character type from his favorite novelist Walter Scott, the inventor of the historical novel (another key innovation of the romantic period which we unfortunately didn’t have time for this semester; but Don Juan can give you an idea of what you’re missing). Scott’s principal technique for retelling history was to do so through the eyes of quite unremarkable and passive characters who randomly happen to find themselves in the midst of historical individuals and events. Their passivity makes such characters particularly realistic lenses through which to view history unfolding in the moment because it makes us see history happening to them, without pretending to have any magical access to the minds of the great and storied individuals themselves who ‘make’ history. History thus appears as an opaque force of material circumstances rather than as the expression of the subjective designs of historical demigods a la Napoleon (so in CH Byron celebrates Napoleon more for how he sacrificed himself to history than how he shaped it). And this is arguably what historical literature per se should do: if historicism is the idea that people don’t write themselves into history through great acts so much as history writes itself through such acts, then literature should represent history not as what people plan but what gets imposed on them (despite their plans) by inscrutable material circumstances.
So throughout DJ Juan plays this role of a more or less passive spectator as the poem progresses through the various stages of European history, from the barbarism of the shipwreck episode to the commercial manners of the final English cantos. A key question to raise about the poem (or a question that the poem raises about itself) then is: how well does it manage to engage the opaque “materials” of history that abstract “plans” disguise?
I suggested on Friday that DJ’s account of Juan’s and Julia’s mutual submission can be seen as evoking the materiality characteristic of what Byron saw as the hypocritical culture of moral and intellectual ‘platonism’ of his own historical period, a culture that Donna Inez (standing in for Byron’s estranged wife) emblematizes. In a phrase like “pure Platonic squeeze,” the onomatopoetic sensuality of the word squeeze represents a complete subversion of the platonism it supposedly (in the mind of Inez’s protege, Julia) expresses. The poem speaks to us on the same level of sheer sensuality that we noticed in the alliterations of “Darkness,” and indeed the subversion set in motion by “squeeze” retrospectively extends to the alliteration of “pure Platonic.” Thus, rather than a vehicle for representing meaning the phrase comes to embody something more like the self-deconstruction of such representation: the claim to platonic conceptual purity becomes the conduit of an utterly non-conceptual sensuality of ‘p’-sounds in our mouths and squeeze feelings in our bodies. This is Byron’s way of telling the unwritten actual history of the hypocritical culture of moral and intellectual piety that Donna Inez emblematizes: rather than clumsily and importunately compelling history into analytical categories, he uses ‘seductive’ poetic technique to make us virtually feel it. So it is crucial that, although this ‘feeling’ subverts the Plantonism that attempts to conceal it, it doesn’t do so arbitrarily: rather Byron’s point (the point of Byron’s historicism) is that this sensuality is specific to the hypocritical Plantonic culture in which it operates: it is a historically specific phenomenon; it is the materiality in which alone historical specificity registers, is felt, as such.
The limitation of Byron’s historical materialism?
Although we don’t have time to read it all I want to draw your attention to a section of the poem that might indicate the limit of Byron’s method, or of his application of his method. Canto 9 centers on Catherine the Great whose modernized court typifies something about the social structure of Europe’s developing nation states in the eighteenth century. Byron here it might be argued tips the balance of his writing away from seductive technique and toward importunate explanation. Byron makes Catharine’s overwhelming sexuality “epitomize” the primal cause of human history per se; Byron posits Catherine’s monstrous sexuality as a timeless explanatory ground. But in order to prop up this picture of female sexuality as the prime mover of history, the poet arguably abandons his seductive finesse for clumsy dogmatism: it becomes more important for Byron to decode the plan of history, to harness it as an object of knowledge, than seductively to engage its materials. At a particularly remarkable moment, the significance of which Byron underscores by breaching his customary third person decorum, the poet himself addresses an apostrophe to Catherine’s genitalia:
55
Oh, thou ‘teterrima Causa’ of all ‘belli’—
Thou gate of Life and Death—thou nondescript!
Whence is our exit and our entrance,–well I
May pause in pondering how all Souls are dipt
In thy perennial fountain—how man fell, I
Know not, since Knowledge saw her branches stript
Of her first fruit, but how he falls and rises
Since, thou has settled beyond all surmises.56
Some call thee ‘the worst Cause of war,’ but I
Maintain thou art the best: for after all
From thee we come, to thee we go, and why
To get at thee not batter down a wall,
Or waste a world? Since no one can deny
Thou dost replenish worlds both great and small:
With, or without thee, all things at a stand
Are, or would be, thou Sea of Life’s dry Land!57
Catherine, who was the grand Epitome
Of that great Cause of war, or peace, or what
You please (it causes all the things which be,
So you may take your choice of this or that)—
Catherine, I say, was very glad to see
The handsome herald, on whose plumage sat
Victory; and, pausing as she saw him kneel
With his dispatch, forgot to break the seal.58
Then recollecting the whole Empress, nor
Forgetting quite the Woman (which composed
At least three parts of this great whole), she tore
The letter open…
Byron turns Catherine, into the “Epitome” of what he calls the cause of all things, or in the master pun of this passage, the great (w)hole itself. This is Catherine as Woman per se, and as such the cause of all Man’s fallings and risings. But in making her genitalia stand for the scene of “our exists and our entrances” Byron also underscores the hollowness of his conceit, since whereas the we who exit isn’t gender specific, Byron implies that men alone constitute the we who enter. The potential problem is that Byron is making a serious claim here that goes beyond his typical ironic play: a claim to identify what he in the letter calls “the thing” that makes the world defy all attempts at explanation and that thereby also licenses his poetry’s ironic play. Byron exploits Catherine’s notorious heterosexuality in order to make the uncontainable female sexuality she epitomizes into a symbol of unproblematized passion as such, the element of pure unintelligibility. You could say he did the same thing with the word ‘squeeze’ but the comparison reveals the key difference: whereas Byron’s poetic technique functioned to allow us to feel the squeeze in a way opposed to its meaning, here Byron points out the thing order to know it as such. This would seem to amount to exactly the kind of de-eroticizing dogmatism Byron condemned: sex here has become an object of knowledge, ‘the thing’ as the prime cause to which we can rationally retrace events, not the spontaneous eruption of inexplicably but seductively sensuous ‘squeezes’ in Byron’s text.
1. what’s the significance of the dedication to Southey? how/why does Byron contrast him with Milton?
2. how does Byron’s critique of Castlereagh compare with Shelley’s in “The Mask of Anarchy”?
3. why do S.T. Coleridge and Wordsworth earn Byron’s ridicule?
4. that the title of this poem is not pronounced in the conventional way is made clear when it’s rhymed with ‘true one’ and ‘new one’ in stanza one of canto one. what’s the significance of the fact that Juan takes his name from these particular characterizations? how do you make sense of the fact that in the same stanza he’s also associated with “pantomime?”
5. Like STC and WW, Donna Inez is accused of fostering mystery; what’s Byron’s problem with mystification exactly? does Byron offer an alternative to it?
6. is Byron sexist? or, more specifically, misogynist? for instance in his ridicule of “ladies intellectual” (I, 176)?
7. pay particular attention to Byron’s use of the images of the sun and ocean; what function and/or significance are they given? can an image have a poetic function but not a determinate significance?
1. Byron’s early lyrics “Fare Thee Well!,” “When we two parted,” “She Walks in Beauty,” and the stanzas from CHP (1812) seem to elevate love to a metaphysical principle: a force that transcends even life and death. So the sorrow of lost love is “deeper than the wail above the dead” (p. 851, lines 29-30). Byron seems to suggest that in love (whether with an actual or lost beloved) we inhabit a heightened reality of which a life without love is a ghostly shadow. Do you think that Byron is saying something philosophically interesting here or just giving poetic expression to something like Marianne’s early simplistic opposition between the ecstasy of love and the corruption of actual social life? Are these poems telling us something important about the existential experience of love or are they rather just self-dramatizing (and vindictive) effusions of a beautiful soul? According to what criteria and evidence should we make this judgment?
2. It seems sometimes that what matters most to Byron is what he cannot control and cannot say: he’s constantly referring to himself as cast about by external circumstances – “I am as a weed / Flung from the rock on ocean’s foam” – and by internal vexation – “Words from me are vainer still; / But the thoughts we cannot bridle / Force their way without the will” (p. 852). What is the significance of compulsion for Byron?
3. The official aim and rationale of CHP is articulated in Canto III, stanza 6:
'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou, 50 Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix'd with the spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth.
So the point of poetry like CHP is to live a being more intense by endowing our fancy with form; by doing so we gain the life we imagine, says the poet, “even as I do now” as he writes this stanza. But whereas the stanza begins by presenting this gain as relative – gaining a being “more” intense – it concludes by suggesting that it this is an all or nothing proposition: that it is only through poetry that the nothingness and dearth of the poet’s self may become anything whatsoever. What’s the difference between saying poetry adds to life and poetry creates the only life there is? either way, according to Byron exactly how and why does poetry give us back “the life we image?” what does it have to do with what he in the next stanza calls “bear[ing] what time cannot abate / and feed[ing] on bitter fruits without accusing fate”? or, later, the “very life in our despair” (298)?
4. What is the lesson that Byron/Harold takes from Waterloo?
5. After the stanzas on Waterloo Byron has a set of emphatically Wordsworthian stanzas (72-75), and then a set of stanzas devoted to Rousseau (mainly 76-81; especially 79 and Byron’s note); what is the connection between Napoleon, Wordsworth and Rousseau?
6. In stanza 115 Byron basically dedicates this canto to his daughter; can you make sense of this poem as a communication from father to daughter, or does it make more sense to read this invocation of the daughter as another figure of the poet’s self-representation?
romanticism 