amimetobios

Last class of the term, on Keats.  Voyeurism in the Ode to Psyche.  The latest gods.  The faded Olympians like the faded Titans in the Hyperion poems.  The temple in the mind is for Psyche; the temple is the psyche.  Like the young Apollo, the new poet displaces the old tradition - the figure of youth as poet, as in Stevens.  Casements and other worlds in both poems.

We conclude our read through of The Triumph of Life, considering its relation to Dante and the pessimism of its view of human freedom as always perverting itself into the freedom to oppress ("signs of thought's empire over thought").  The beauty of the rhymes and the evocations.  Rousseau as Wordsworth again, and the terza rima version of the Intimations Ode.  A quick consideration then of "Music when soft voices die," as a poem about the residue of experiences, as an intro to the Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici, with which we conclude.

We go through about another 250 lines or so, discussing Rousseau's relation to Wordsworth and Vergil, and Shelley's to Dante; we consider what "Triumph" means, and who those nailed to the car are, starting with Napoleon and ending with Alexander the Great.

Adonais and elegy.  The structure it shares with Lycidas: the world is "empty and poor" now.  The dead person's absence makes the world into a world of absence.  But this is not a world suitable to that person.  So he's in a better place.  But I am born darkly, fearfully afar.  Echoes of The Eve of St. Agnes at the end of Adonais.  Neoplatonism.  Dante.  And so to The Triumph of Life.  Terza rima.  The question of how Triumph would have ended.  Abrams's distortions.  The opening of the poem.

Relation of The Fall of Hyperion to Hyperion.  Keats's narrator.  "When I have fears that I may cease to be."  His paralysis: overload.  Overload in "To Autumn."  Freedom into spareness and motion

What Keats was trying to do in Hyperion.  The background of the story. Miltonic comparisons.  The young Apollo.  Mnemosyne.  More on synesthesia.

Keats's characteristic style.  His synesthesia.  Related to his scopophilia.  Difference between Keats's looking and Shelley's.  Shelley always visionary in his looking; Keats always sensual.  Loading every rift with ore.  Sensuality of "The Eve of St. Agnes."  Brief look at "As Hermes Once."

The politics of the poem: intense subjectivity as what can be shared or communicated to others as well.  Demogorgon and the difference between "Almighty God' and Jupiter.  The poet as a masterpiece of nature, adding thereby to the perceptive experience and potential freedom of the later poet.  Shelley's hardheadedness (Plato, not Aeschylus).

More on Act I of Prometheus Unbound. Mercury's regret at his task.  Knuckling and buckling under power.  Power as corruption.  The dead and their language.  Earth as a character.  How she appears in "On hearing of the death of Napoleon."  The shade of Jupiter.

The first speech of Prometheus Unbound.  Relation of exposition to imminence in Greek tragedy and in Shelley.  Prometheus's asking for exposition is the beginning of the action that will unthrone Jupiter.  Some background on the relation of Christian mythology to the mythology of classical antiquity.  Prometheus as Satan and Christ.  Landscape and subjectivity.  Return to Mont Blanc and a quick exposition (for more detailed expositions see older podcasts, especially from the close reading course).