Keats' Ode to a Nightingale Project Prospecus

Jonathan,

There’s much thought and effort on display here; the project illuminates quite a bit about Ode to a Nightingale, though it also mystifies. I know you’ve wrestled quite a bit with imposing some kind of visual scenario onto Keats’s flighty poem, and some of your solutions (for there are several here – too many) are quite canny.

Charting Ode to a Nightingale’s weave between the real and the imaginary is often illuminating, though some questions get raised, which I’ll get to in a minute. At its best, this charting gives us a sense of how this poem conducts a fairly balanced exploration of polarities (while seeming spontaneous), and your introduction of Brown and the critics as tugs in either direction help point us to John Keats’s consideration of specified, representational audiences.

But there are a lot of abstractions flying around, with uncertain correlation to the audiences you’ve identified. For example, I end up being unsure about Keats’s address to Brown: does conceiving of Brown help Keats veer towards the ‘imagined’? If so, why does he leave Brown to compose poetry (kind of like the bird will leave him within the poem)? Conversely, does the suicidal release prompted by those nasty critics push Keats away from reality? I see a weave motivated by opposed audiences here, but I’m not exactly sure what causes the swerves.

Positing a third audience for those final questions is an intriguing way of resolving your presentation, but this step seems tentatively tacked on. The key makes claims about "us" being "sure-footed" throughout the poem until its end, when we’re "undermined." This is interesting, but not really graphically presented or conceptually developed. Why would we be so untroubled until the end? Is not being addressed a point of security for ‘us’?

The presentation seems to forget about this formulation, claiming, for example, of the first two stanzas that they “fall into an interim state, not fully imaginary nor real, they act as agents carrying us as audience in and out of the poem.” Since your chart positions the last stanza in line with where the first one was, I wonder what the real difference of address at the end is. I think you’re still on to something, sensing in those open questions an invitation for engagement missing from the rest of the poem. But this climactic point only gets fitful attention in the key, and less in the project.

As for the project’s packaging: a Powerpoint display does help you convey the sense of evolution in the poem (even as you seem to underplay motivation for the poem’s changes). But sometimes the interspersed images seem fairly gratuitous - sometimes as distractingly off as, say, terms such as “jettisoning.” Why Ansel Adams? Why rush hour Manhattan? Linked to the poem by the broadest of abstractions, such pictures seem to impose altered contexts on JK for no specified reason. Instead of demonstrating a truth about audience, they can seem like random window-dressing, at best competition in the Nightingale slalom. Here’s where your eagerness to represent the poem is getting in the way of analyzing its terms of representation.

Despite points of confusion and distraction, genuine immersion in Ode to a Nightingale allows you to make some nice points about the poem along the way, building to a sense of mutual forlornness, a paradoxical point of connection between audience and poet, at the end of the poem. I suspect your sense of John Keats’s maddeningly elusive birdsong will continue to sharpen, as you continue to supply the responsiveness that Ode to a Nightingale seduces.

In response to some of the criticisms:

1. You write, “there are a lot of abstractions flying around, with uncertain correlation to audiences.” Why does Brown influence Keats into the “imagined”, didn’t Keats leave Brown’s side initially to write the poem?

Response 1: Keats does not need to be right next to Brown to feel his support as a friend and avid reader of his poetry. In fact, what you claim to be “like the bird”, in so far as Brown flutters away from Keats yet stays in his mind may be closer to the truth. The reality is that Brown saved Keats’s work from being discarded, and ultimately was his closest friend and comrade for doing so. You may answer “true, but how does this explain Keats’s imagination?” Because Keats is constantly in Brown’s company, in his backyard at his house, knowing his friend is nearby when he divulges into the imagined vis-à-vis the nightingale; he feels a certain comfort in his friend. Keats feels a level of openness that he wouldn’t, say, around the critics. Brown is an outlet to Keats’s imagination

B. You find a second critique of audience, wondering why “those nasty critics push Keats away from reality”.
Response 2. Keats, disgusted by the critics, is forced back inside of himself to ‘recuperate’ from such a world not ready for his poetry. Obviously what other people said did affect him, and obviously the general tendency of those who did not know him (the critics and an unreceptive public), was a kind of reality for Keats. It is a reality he did not wish to partake in. I thought this and the last point were self-evident throughout my project and didn’t require any further sort of explanation. Here, you may be looking for more forms of audience to represent the two worlds I charted, yet this would have been too complicated and too much of a task.

Before I move on to the question of my “tacking” on a third kind of audience, I would just like to mention that a reality where Brown-as-friend and an imagined-world-of-harsh-criticisms seems an unlikely pair. Keats consistently throughout his lifetime was less comfortable in the public eye. Recall Coleridge’s (or was it Wordsworth’s) account of their walk together and the differences between, where Keats would shy away from Coleridge’s over exuberant mind. Keats here seems closest to a Dickinson-type figure, intensely introverted and susceptible to be seen as a hermit.

2A The question of swerving.

While I appreciate your questioning this part of my chart, I also think at least part of it is self-explanatory. The swerves that occur between the two worlds of thought happen at specific times. These transitory phases happen where either the real or imagined worlds begin to show less force on Keats and die down. For example, “reality” is less intensive and more prone to subside where the chart swings into the imagined and vica versa. Similarly, the question of change and transition occurs in the stanzas themselves. The chart’s motion, ultimately, is determined only by the words themselves and not a pre-determined idea. Read literally, the words follow their own order and flow.

C. Your third question on seeking an audience in readership: You say, “this step seems tentatively tacked on.” “Why would we be so untroubled until the end?”

3. The turn to audience at the end is nothing more than an appeal to critics and modern day readers for recognition and support. As you say “why would we be so untroubled until the end?” I would point to the fact that Keats’ development as a poet throughout his odes produces a self-consciousness and uncertainness that translates even into his readers’ own questioning. In other words, there is no doubt Keats is a developing poet with much of his poetic workings still ‘uncovered’, yet Ode to A Nightingale is an attempt at dispelling some of our mistrusts. His piece stands apart as a kind of hand-in-hand tour through the inner workings of the poet’s mind and consciousness, ‘jettisoning’ between his developing imagination and unstable reality, between the poet he wants to be and the poet he is, between his aspirations and his self-consciousness. After all is said and done, an audience that believes Keats to be a fully developed poet, even before Ode To A Nightingale was written, is simply a misinformed one. Keats himself would agree.

The ending is also meant as a response to those other poets and critics like Byron and Croker, in an appeal to their sympathies and basic human understanding. ‘Was it a vision or waking dream?’, ‘real or unreal?’ ‘was this not beauty and truth?’ ‘is this not true?’ ‘is this not a purer form of beauty’: all these are questions directed at a final form of audience in the last stanzas.

3a. What you claim to be only “fitful attention in the key” is understandable. Yet, was this project not to be a visual representation and not another snip or essay? Isn’t the point of this final assignment to allow viewers of the project to see for themselves as opposed to have to carry them step by step throughout—as, say, an essay might? Why then would we have a visual representation at all? On the other hand, my ending of ‘fitful representation’ in this third kind of audience seems closest to Keats’s original plan. His ‘rhetorical question’ and final ending that doesn’t provide an answer adds but another layer or kind of ‘filter’ to the poem. Similarly, my chart follows a scheme that parallels the original plans of Ode to a Nightingale.

D. Finally, you find the photographs ‘gratuitous’ ‘distractingly off’ and you wonder ‘Why Ansel Adams’?

4 If anything, the pictures I think were the best part of my project. In Ansel Adams and a vision of New York I add a modern reading of the poem bringing Keats’s metaphors to life through familiar scenes. Again, I fear our pre-project meeting may have gotten in the way of my final product. I fear your presumption of my simply adding these photographs as a means of ‘jazzing up’ my presentation is unjustified. They are elements of personal worth and nothing else. The pictures act as visual points of reference precluding each step-by-step analysis of the stanzas. They allow breathing room and reflection and make an otherwise opaque poem understandable. What you feel to be ‘linked to the poem by the broadest of abstractions’ -- I feel work quite well in context. If anything they are a representation of my vision of Ode to a Nightingale.

If I had to present an analysis of my motives I would simply say that I am from New York, and am someone who holds both the West and its sense of wilderness in a kind of reverence, similar to Keats’ reverence of the nightingale. The awe-inspiring pictures, for me, hold a similar mystery and immortality, as did the nightingale’s song to the poet.