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Full page photoA Road to Aesthetic StylisticsALLS 7(4):95-112, 2016
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judgment is the beholder of beauty, who gives reality its existence. Keats, in a sense, developed a distinctive style in the
Odes- a style characterized by
objectivity
, or what he has preferred to call
Negative Capability
, as noted in his letters.
Though romantic in sense and sensibility, the most revealing feature of Keats's Ode is the complexity and exuberance of
the stylistic texture.
The mostly static nominal groups, as has already been analyzed, with their
aesthetically distorted
language are still
paintings with words, which implicitly constitute an aesthetic value and arouse an aesthetic pleasure. This sense of
pleasure, in Keats's aesthetic experience in
Ode on Grecian Urn
, is pure of any such interests; it never links to real
desire and action. The experience in the Ode is parallel to the experience of beholding a beautiful sunset, as Kant has
put it in his
Critique of Judgment
. For Kant (quoted in Greene, 1957:377), "a judgment upon an object of satisfaction
may be quite
disinterested
, but yet
interesting
, i.e., not based upon an interest, but bringing an interest with it . . .
Judgments of taste, however, do not themselves establish any interest." In this light Keats's experience in the Ode is
disinterested; it is not about morality or politics, but aesthetics.
Beauty, pleasure, and imagination are the key concepts in the Romantic theory of beauty, whether for Kant or Keats.
Kant believed that " though the sense of beauty was grounded in feelings of pleasure, this pleasure was universally valid
and necessary" ( Holcombe, 2007). In application, Keats's Ode is charged with the words and nominal groups of
happiness and beauty, as in
wild ecstasy
,(9)
fair youth
,(15)
happy, happy boughs
, ( 21)
more happy , happy love
,(25)
and
fair attitude
( 41). Beauty, as envisaged in the urn in the shape of marble figures, is a disinterested pleasure: it is
an object of satisfaction
, which is
quite disinterested
, but yet very
interesting
. The divine process and cult envisaged in
the urn has nothing to do the ritualistic traditions practiced by the human generation(s), as is the case in the Buddhist
temples, Christian chapels, or Muslim mosques- they have their own aesthetic value since they are the creation of
imagination, the creation that gives pleasure to the perceiver's awareness. A thing of beauty presents itself as itself
without moral, ideological or political purposes. Still, the aesthetic judgment is fundamentally derived from the
experience, as in seeing a beautiful sunset or beholding a Grecian urn.
Keats's aesthetics in
Ode on a Grecian Urn
is universal in the sense it has nothing to do with subjectivity or individual
impulse; it is objective or, in Keats's words, it constitutes that
negative capability
. This may come closer to Kant who
believes that " no subjective purpose can lie at the basis of the judgment of taste"( ibid:393). It should be stressed here
and elsewhere that the subjectivity- objectivity dichotomy is omnipresent in the Romantic philosophical point of view,
whether in Kant or Keats. What seems to be contradictory rises from the fact that the two aspects of judgment come
from the same source, i.e. ,the thing of beauty, as in the sunset ( Kant), and the marble urn(Keats).
The style of the Ode is descriptive and impersonal – there is an aesthetic distance between the creator and his poetic
creation. The impersonality of the Ode's style gives the experience its universality as an imaginative creation, and this
copes with the Kantian world view of the judgment of taste. In addition, Keats, as his letters have shown, does not stress
only the intuitive spontaneous responses to different stimuli, but he also stresses the role of knowledge and experience
in comprehending the mysterious phenomenon of the universe. In the same process, Keats's Ode forcefully appeals to
the Kantian axiom of purposiveness. What Keats has portrayed is not a set of ideals to be practiced into a set of rituals.
On the opposite, the Romantic poet molded the visionary figures within the entirety of the marble urn, in a structure
parallel to the structure of reality. So, the
beautiful
is that which pleases universally, without a concept, as Kant has put
it (Greene, 1957:392). In terms of the aesthetic judgment, Keats's Ode gives pleasure to one's awareness since in it
resides its aesthetic value. The aesthetic experience, encoded into the grandeur of the stylistic fabric is what gives the
Ode its universality; it comes to be, let us borrow Kant's phrase,
the exemplary precisely of aesthetic judgment.
To judge the Ode as one entire aesthetic experience, let us consider the last two lines of verse:
' Beauty is truth, truth beaut,- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"(49-50)
The functional grammatical pattern of Keats's utterance is that of
Relational process
; a process of
being.
The central
pattern is that something is (Halliday, 1985:112). But the utterance, in spite of its intensity, is debatable, not because of
the philosophical impulse, but also because of its ambiguous punctuation. Based on this difficulty, certain critical
viewpoints have been circulated in the literature of romanticism. The twentieth-century critical theory, with the
diversity of penetrating views have tried to produce confineable criticism for this debatable epigram. The debate is
whether to decide the meaning of this one line and a half by studying the language or by investigating something
beyond the language, whether the aphorism is pure philosophy or not. Richards (1929:186-187) denied its philosophical
aspect saying that there are those " who swallow 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty. . .' as the quintessence of an aesthetic
philosophy, not as the expression of a certain blend of feelings." in the same lines, Wassermann (1967:13-14) believes
that the aphorism is " the abstract summation of the poem . . . But the ode is not an abstract statement or an excursion
into philosophy. It is a poem about thing."
Murray (1955:212), on the other hand, stresses the importance of the
context
in unraveling the meaning of the epigram,
so "my own opinion concerning the value of those lines
in the context of the poem itself
is not very different from Mr.
Eliot's." Brooks (1947), who also stresses the significance of the context, thinks that" 'Beauty is truth, truth' has
precisely the same status, and the same justification as Shakespeare's Ripeness is all." It is a speech 'in character' and
supported by a dramatic context." Finally, we listen to Sendry and Giannone (1868: 62) who read the one line and a half
as follows:
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