Ebook The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems, by Earl R. Wasserman
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The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems, by Earl R. Wasserman
Ebook The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems, by Earl R. Wasserman
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- Sales Rank: #6473445 in Books
- Published on: 1983-09-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .56" w x 5.51" l, .93 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 228 pages
Review
?Professor Wasserman's close reasoning ... will compel [readers] to reexamine their own views, and to realize how much remains to be said about Keats' poetic achievement.?-U.S. Quarterly Book Review
"Professor Wasserman's close reasoning ... will compel [readers] to reexamine their own views, and to realize how much remains to be said about Keats' poetic achievement."-U.S. Quarterly Book Review
About the Author
Wasserman /f Earl /i Reeves
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
One of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written
By rbnn
The title comes from a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey on November 22, 1817:
"...another favorite Speculation of mine, that we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated"
Although the focus of the essays in this book are on the interplay between mutable being on Earth and this "finer tone" within Keats poem, in my opinion these essays themselves partake of that finer tone. Wasserman's deep analyses of a few poems of Keats stands as one of the great works of literary criticism. He meticulously and scrupulously shows how Keats was not merely the emotive romantic he is commonly thought to be, but was informed and impelled by a rigorous aesthetic philosophy.
Tragically, Wasserman's style of close and rigorous reading of texts is completely out of fashion, not only in academia but even in the entire culture: nowadays, critics put themselves or their preexisting theories first, with the text being analyzed merely an afterthought. Although it is unlikely, perhaps if the forces of reason can regain their foothold in the academy, Wasserman's work will get the attention it deserves.
Now I'll discuss a bit more Wasserman's most famous essay, his treatment of Ode on a Grecian Urn. There has been a fair amount of critical reaction to this, the most famous was Leo Spitzer's article "'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or Content vs. Metagrammar", but I won't go into that.
In part i, Wasserman points out that the meaning of the trailing two lines of the poem must be understood only once the whole significance, or "grammar" of the other imagery can be understood.
Part ii introduces the Keats philosophy of "mystic oxymoron", which is not merely "paradoxical collocation of contraries" but the "mystic interfusion of those contraries", the contraries being the human/mutable and the immortal/immutable. He adduces a quote about Pan from Endymion mentioning the "bourne of heaven" which is where this interfusion dwells. Wasserman then notes how the first stanza emphasizes this interfusion, this blurring, with many examples.
One interesting argument is that "the only linkage between the frieze and the urn is made by the line 'What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape' and the paradoxical vagueness of the words 'haunts about' makes that relationship fluid, malleable, instead of fixed. The frieze is not superimposed upon the urn or juxtaposed to it; it is the spectral essence that is independent of the urn and yet at the same time is diffused through the urn's atmosphere."
Wasserman eventually concludes that "The key to a reading of the ode, then, is the perception of these triune movements in the first two stanzas: (1) the gradual emergence of the three images [trees, lovers, song], (2) the gradual absorption of the poet into the three images, and (3) the convergence of the immortal-essential and the temporal-physical towards a point of fusion where these categorical distinctions are blotted out."
The rest of the analysis mostly charts in detail how this "triune movement" plays out. I enjoyed particularly the grammatical analysis that discusses how the change in verb modality from the first to the third stanzas, from vocative and interrogatory in the first; to declaratory in the second; to exclamatory in the third, show how the second of the three movements above occurs, that is, reflects the "gradual absorption of the poet." (His analysis of the "still to be enjoyed" line is also rather notable).
He argues that the climax of the poem is in the third stanza, but the last two lines of that show that heaven's bourne cannot actually be obtained on Earth, and the reversion to the interrogative mood in stanza 4 shows that the poet is retreating from the absorption, that it is not actually possible to achieve perfect absorption on Earth.
Wasserman's analysis of the final two lines is extremely controversial. He argues that the "on" the poem's title means the ode is in fact a commentary, and uses other parts of his argument to argue that it is not the urn, but the poet, who speaks the lines "that is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know"; and that the "that" here refers to the entire previous sentence, i.e., beginning with "When old age...".
Anyway, what is most important for modern readers about Wasserman's analysis is not so much its conclusion. Instead it's the critical process Wasserman used:
(1) extremely close reading of the poem, trying to make sense out of every choice of word, of tense, of mood, of rhyme;
(2) reading of all related texts by the poet, and
(3) a clear impetus to understand the underlying philosophy and motivation of the poet in order to form a cohesive structure out of the poem.
Of course, in modern literary criticism, none of these usually occur, and all of them at once, virtually never. Modern critics mainly care about their pet political philosophies. Even critics who are generally considered to be close readers, like Harold Bloom, rarely concentrate on one poem any more, but discuss hundreds at once. By contrast, Wasserman spends fifty pages just on the one short poem; and a whole book on five of them.
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