Selected Poetry: Keats and Wordsworth

I like poetry. I honestly do. There is a strange connection between the physical representation of words, rhymes, syntax, and so on, and the abstract feelings that are universal to all humans; joy, sorrow, passion, desire, madness. Poetry, as opposed to prose, involves a very personal and ceremonious communication of our world. The poet meticulously chooses each word. The brevity of this genre of literature provokes us to reflect and to introspect; to unplug from whatever we are wired to; to hit the pause button. Poetry, hopefully, inspires us. By kindling new feelings or introducing new perspectives, poetry provides us an opportunity to reevaluate ourselves and the world we live in.

Maybe if everyone read poetry, life would be pretty good.

But enough of my abstract musings. I like two of Keats poems: "When I have fears that I may cease to be" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

"When I have fears," if I remember correctly, was actually on the passage analysis section of the 2008 AP English Literature test. I don't recall what I wrote, but reading this several years later, the poem's last lines still stand out to me:

 Of the wide world I stand alone and think,

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

 

Keats eloquently describes the impermanence of our world. In the first part of the poem, he describes all of his worldly ambitions as a poet and as a lover, but ultimately ends with these final two depressing lines.

The fear of death, I think, can be conversely described as an anxiety about freedom. Keats laments the fact that time limits his ability to reach a full potential; mortality is a deplorable human condition. Can there be hope, can there be freedom, when humans are unable to achieve what they can before they die? I do not think that this is a depressing question at all, rather it's entirely relevant to our knowledge of what defines us as humans. To turn the question around: what will we do, what choices will we make, to maximize our potential given this limited amount of time?

On a separate note, the last lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are perhaps Keat's most famous:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'; that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

There are numerous interpretations of these last two lines. I honestly think that these last two lines are annoyingly cryptic partly because Romantic poetry never intended to be concrete or straightforward. Instead of reading too much into what it means, I think it can be agreed that all other interpretations are just as valid as any other. One interpretation could be that Beauty is the same as Truth, and the implication is that we should stop dwelling on the Truth aspect; if we live life happy, then Truth can be understood and attained. Or another interpretation would be that Beauty and Truth are the same, but the pursuit itself of Truth limits our understanding of Beauty--which is in fact precisely the opposite of what Keats is demonstrating by describing the Beauty of the Grecian Urn. Or perhaps we can apply the same reading we did to "When I have fears," that Beauty is impermanent, and so Truth becomes superficial and irrelevant. Thus in a postmodern sense, although Keats posits that Truth and Beauty are impermanent and superficial, the events depicted on the urn are frozen in time, permanent and worthy of poetic reflection.

Reading poetry is an immensely private activity, but at the same time, poetry contains universal themes and issues everyone can relate to. Each person views the poem through his or her own narrative lens, while the poem itself is in fact representative of the poet's narrative lens--hence its element of novelty comes from being a lens within a lens. However, the poet's lens is rigid and unchanging, while our personal narrative lens are always in flux as long as we are conscious. At any rate, poetry lets us discover shared human perspectives through the poet's narrative voice, and with each new reading, we invariably gain deeper insight into our reasons for being.