Article.
Nataliia Romanyshyn DOI
10.31558/1815-3070.2018.36.13 УДК
821.111.09"18"(092) ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF
NATIONAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT IN JOHN KEAT’S POETRY: THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN POET
AND MOTHERLAND У статті розглянуто специфіку художньо-естетичних засобів відображення
антропологічних параметрів національного універсуму у поетичному дискурсі
англійського поета-романтика Джона Кітса. Проаналізовано особливості поетичної
концептуалізації основних націєідентифікаційних концептів БАТЬКІВЩИНА, МОВА.
ПОЕТ та ПОЕЗІЯ. Ключові слова: Джон Кітс, романтизм, англійська література, поетика,
художній концепт. The
statement about close proximity of poetry and philosophy (Gadamer, “Aktualnost
prekrasnogo” 116), about the specific value of a poetic word [ibid. 118], its
ability to attract senses, to hint at a many-voiced interpretations has become
axiomatic and has been proved by poetic practice, researches within the domain
of aesthetics and literary art. The complexity and multilateral structure of
poetic text semantics, a unique character of its elements and their unity
determine the synchronization of poetry with different historic epochs, its
constant renovations with the course of time (Gadamer, “Philosophia i
literatura” 132). Thus, the text presupposes different ways of interpretation
and calls for various ways of interpretations that cannot be exhausted by a
single comprehension, but on the contrary, enrich the sense of a poetic work
and simultaneously enrich the interpreter himself. This
uniqueness and unfathomable depth pertain to the poetic heritage of John Keats,
the youngest among the cohort of English romantics, whose short life and work
closed too abruptly. And although the officially recognized completion of
romantic epoch occurred much later, and the poets of the romantic school
continued their activity, traditionally the personality of John Keats is
considered as such that with his poetic achievements marked off the final chord
of romantic polyphony in the English literature. But at the same time he made
the opening of a new poetic system, since the modernization of poetic art, its
aesthetic advancement and development of conceptual and lingual dominants were
conceived within the artistic resources of Romanticism (Bieliy 226;
Tolmachov; Urnov; Hartop)
with its priorities of humanistic values, consistency of general European
literary traditions that extended the boundaries of local national system of
worldview (Pavlychko 204). According
to W. Ulmer, Keats started his poetic career in the time when British
literature intensively nourished new cultural traditions and stereotypes, laid
the foundations of national cultural legacy
and entered the period of controversy in literary receptions and assessments
which was a delayed effect of a great scale modernization of British society
and culture (Ulmer). Literary-aesthetic principles of Keats’s
worldview were created in the context of Coleridge’s ideas about the cognitive
potential of art and poetic imagination able to create the world, about the
unity of form and content as necessary conditions of artistic merit, about the
world as a reflection of its creator; in the context of Wordsworth’s empirical
sensual conceptions about the exceptional value of associative abilities of
cognition and their role in the creative processes, his aspiration towards the
renovations of formal and meaningful aspects of the poetic art; in the context
of controversial positions of both poets concerning the objective, social basis
of poetic imagery, either its gravitation or repulsion of tragic conflicts of
reality. These principles were developed in the context of notions of historic
character and universal nature of art as an expression of poet’s involvement in
the world processes, understanding of contemporary problems, their imagery
refining, aspirations to subject the poetry to moral and political education of
nation and humanity in the whole, advocated by Byron and Shelly (Diakonova,
“Keats i yego sovremenniki”). The
dramatic character and specificity of Keats’s poetry lies in its
interconnection with all trends of English Romanticism, which caused
controversies in its adaptation and interpretation in world and domestic criticism
(Roe; Ulmer; Diakonova, “Keats i yego
sovremenniki”; Diakonova, “Angliyskiy romantism”; Yelistratova; Fermanis; Rzepka; Levinson; Haverkamp). In the ambition to formulate his own
existential and artistic values Keats in his poetry attempted to achieve a
certain independence of “eternal” art from a surface, temporary manifestations
of life, nurturing the cult of perfect poetic forms, harmony of sensually
saturated images, embodiment of absolute artistic “beauty-and-truth” conception
– with the attention to the sources of European civilization, the context of
Antiquity and European Renaissance as well as the national cultural background.
Adaptation of this poetic mission made Keats a creator of a unique poetic
world, determined by its own principles, linking in one context the past and
the present, interlocking different chronotopes and realia, applying the
principle of intertexuality that impregnate textual representatives of
different cultural codes with universal symbols and semantic diversity,
implement in the text such morally oriented points that foster its endless life
and topicality. This artistic synthesis enabled, transferring poetic experience
outside the boundaries of national context, to provoke a new sense creation of
extraordinary emotional, spiritual and social power, elaborate his own poetic
principles that outpaced the canons of the time (Vitkovskiy). Despite the great number and diversity of researches, dedicated to the
development of Keats’s poetic and aesthetic system, artistic qualities of his
imagery resources, sources of creative inspiration and relation of his poetic
themes to philosophic ideas, peculiarities of adaptation and interpretation of
mythology in his poetic works (Sandy; White; The Challenge of Keats; Victorial
Keats; Nagar, Prasad; Cambridge Companion) the question of poetic
conceptualization of national identity in Keats’s discourse has not been
addressed in literary criticism and poetics. The purpose of the paper is
to reveal the peculiarities of interpretation, creation, implementation and
retranslation of fundamental categories of national identity as a phenomenon of
human existence in the context of national environment within John Keats’s
literary artistic system. The purpose is achieved by analyzing the dynamics of
poetic, semantic, pragmatic, aesthetic, conceptual and artistic textual
resources interrelation as a unity of form and content. The research is carried
out within the framework of linguo-poetics with application and integration of
linguo-cognitive, cognitive-semiological and cognitive-poetological principles.
The
object of the research is national identity as linguo-poetic phenomenon which
is a product of artistic cognition and comprehension of fundamental existential
categories reflecting individual and collective perception of national
environment. The research subject is the specificity of poetic
conceptualization and verbal-imagery representation of national identity in
Keats’s poetry. The notion of poetic conceptualization of national identity
covers the correlation of anthropocentric and spacial literary concepts that
arose in the result of cognitive, creative and aesthetic activity of the poet
as a representative of a certain epoch and nation. The main task of this research is to reveal the
dominating tendencies of Keats’s poetic discourse in representation of national
identity by reconstruction of interrelation between imagery-symbolic,
narrative, conceptual and verbal planes of the poetic text. The applied
methodology is based on the cognitive-semiological and hermeneutic approaches
to the interpretation of literary text semantics as multidimantional
synthesized unity. They determine complex systemic analysis that integrates the
acheivements of linguo-poetics, cognitive poetics, linguo-cultural and literary
studies and the development of analytical vector: from definition of genre and
stylistic parameters of the analysed texts, the general ideological and
aesthetic peculiarities of author’s mentality and artistic principles,
delimitation of author’s individual conceptual system, specification of
literary concepts of national identity; to the explication and description of
their verbal-imagery representation. To
achieve this task the following methods are applied – conceptual analysis,
contextual analysis, narrative analysis, lexico-semantic and stylistic
analysis. The
researchers of Keats’s poetry claim that irrespective of some scarce explicit
expressions of political ideas concerning civil, patriotic, social issues the
author tended to oppose the blunt didactic and morally imperative function of
poetry (Diakonova, “Keats i yego sovremenniki” 63). Nevertheless, Keats firmly
believed that the poet for the sake of the art should be able to absorb all
manifestation of the reality no matter how greave and unattractive they could
be, deepening in this way the understanding of artistic devotion to the truth –
from the sense to emotion, from emotion to passion that encompasses his whole
moral and intellectual being (Hartman). Nationally
and socially specific concepts do not constitute the complete artistic system
in Keats poetry. Several chrestomathy samples from the poem Isabella and the introduction to the
third book of Endymion (often in the
context of quotation from poet’s letters to his friends and close associates)
are traditionally interpreted as his expressions of hatred to any forms of
violence, exploitation, the struggle against oppression on the ground of state
and status, riot against the existing system of social benefits and advantages,
against the society built on the principles of commerce (Yelistratova;
Bromwich). Alongside
with the transparent images, created by a combination of different stylistic
devices and expressive resources of language, direct lexical meanings
reflecting corresponding physical processes, actions, states, results
(articulating the ideas of slavery work, physical exhaustion, etc.) in the
mentioned texts there are numerous implicit symbolically-associative poetic
forms, employment of connotative semantic components of words, evaluative
meanings that embody the ideas of social
injustice and inequality: There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel:
who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
From human pastures; or, O torturing
fact!
Who,
through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd
Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe
Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight
By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns, and turbans. With unladen breasts,
Save of blown
self-applause, they proudly mount
To their spirit's perch, their being's high
account,
Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their
thrones--
Amid the
fierce intoxicating tones
Of
trumpets, shoutings, and belabour'd drums,
And sudden cannon. Ah! how all this hums,
In wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone--
Like thunder clouds that spake to Babylon,
And set those old Chaldeans to their tasks.--
Are then
regalities all gilded masks?
No, there are throned seats unscalable
But by a patient wing, a constant spell,
Or by ethereal things that, unconfin'd,
Can make a ladder of the eternal wind,
And poise about in cloudy thunder-tents
To watch the abysm-birth of elements (Endymion:
Book IІІ). The
determining feature of Keats’s text creation lies in the transference of
socially and ideologically meaningful information into the subtext, symbolic
level, where contextually sensitive lingual and aesthetic elements irradiating
slightly perceptible and varying axiological impulses hide deeply personal,
civil and ethical experiences – the fundamental questions of life, good and
evil, the problem of individual and collective identity. For example, the mist
covering the mounting tops to the line of horizon, steep bulky stones are the
imagery elements that reflect the real landscape and symbolize physical and
mental obstacles on the way to penetration to the sense of the human existence. The
techniques of socially significant concepts symbolization are realized in the
development of acoustical, colour, sense perception, tactile sensing images
contextually united in a single sense-line, as in the sonnet Written In Disgust Of Vulgar Superstition
that embodies the idea of inevitable evolution of collective mentality (the
toll of chirch bells – blooming flowers = superstitions – immortal glory):
Vulgar Superstition ↔ The church bells toll a
melancholy round, their sighing, wailing, prayers, dreadful cares, a damp, a
chill as from a tomb → they go/
Into oblivion → fresh flowers will grow,/ ↔
And many glories of immortal stamp. In the poem To Hope the state
of the lyrical subject (by my solitary hearth I sit, hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom, no fair
dreams before my "mind's eye" flit, my morbidfancy, Disappointment,
parent of Despair … seize my careless heart; Tells to my fearful breast a tale
of sorrow), who deeply empathizes
with the fate of his motherland and his compatriots (the fate of
those I hold most dear) are outlined
by dark colours, the lack of hope is represented by a symbolic actions
“shading, inability of the light to penetrate through thick boughs”, spiritual
discomfort is compared with thorny leaveless shrub. Whereas the sense-line
“hope →a timid feeling for a way to human harts→ a search for one’s
predestination (O let me think it is not
quite in vain/To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air) is treated in the
plane of contextual associates interaction “silver”,
“bright light”, “celestial body”, “fragrance”, “balm”. However,
there is much of deep sense in David Bromwich’s statement that despite the
aspirations of the young poet to become a “real political poet” his main asset
to the English literature lies in the discovering of all penetrating soul, his
poetry failed to be considered solely from positions of political or apolitical
bias in terms of its evasion from or penetration to social issues (Bromwich).
Keats’s aesthetic intention to grasp the truth of beauty becomes the leading
factor of poetic intimization and humanization of national universe and the
concepts of national identity – motherland, nation, country, historic and
cultural continuity. In
the poem Happy Is England! I Could Be
Content the poetic conceptualization of England is created by the
development of imagery planes based on: visual and sense perception elements: I could be content
To see no other verdure
than its own; To feel no other breezes than are blown; sweet her artless daughters; their whitest arms in silence clinging; combinations
of associative domens “native” and “alien” – England and Italy. This very
parallelism embodies the general feature of Keats’s poetics – overlapping of
different cultural and historical codes within a single microcontext: English
primeval forests and the art of Medieval chivalric romance / sky of Italy and
the height of the Alps / isolation from a secular world / beauty of a common
English girl’s look – are amalgamated into a unified feeling (feel
a languishment /For; warmly burn to see ); imagery means of
“humanization” of personal and social environment, unity between the author and
the object of poetic reflection: Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough
their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their
singing,
And float
with them about the summer waters (Happy Is England! I Could Be
Content).
Keats’s social milieu and background determined the possibility to study
his poetry inside the so called Cockney School (Roe 65-88). Modern Anglophone
criticism treats the content of Cockney phenomenon discussion as a politization
and sociologization of certain trends in English Romanticism, although most
scholars intensify its importance for a further development of national
literature and literary language (see Wu; Barnard; Mugglestone). Poetization of these special “low” everyday
themes (A Song About Myself, On
Hearing The Bag-Pipe And Seeing, Where Be Ye Going, You Devon
Maid?), poetic stylization in the spirit of
London vernacular, following in the form and content the folk poetics (A Galloway Song): either humoristic or spicy (Dawlish Fair, Give Me Women, Wine, And Snuff) characteristic for Keats’s poetry correspond to Wordsworth’s determination
to include into the poetic expression topics and “language” of different social
strata. In the context
of studying the embodiment of national identity these meaningful sources of
Keats’s poetics should be interpreted as the reflection of national cultural
polyphony and realities of variegated social space. Within the domain of
literary-aesthetic paradigm of that time such poetization of common colloquial
word belonging to lower stylistic registers, expansion of lingual expressive
means of the context by implementation of folk poetic and rhythmical models,
phonological and grammatical features of speech was not only the bold
experiment but the defining of new vectors of national literature aesthetic
development. Moreover, these nonstandard artistic means of modeling the
character of interrelations between the human and the environment exposes the
latter with all its features and forms, material, sensual, intimate, social
manifestations which are not antagonistic but close to the persona and comfortable
in its whole polyvocality (this world’s
true joys). For example, in the poem Where Be Ye Going, You
Devon Maid? this unity between the narrator, poetic addressee and the object of poetic
depiction is verbalized in repetitions “I love your
meads, and I love your flowers, And I love your junkets mainly, I love your hills, and
I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating” and serves as implicit representation of author’s self identification
with a definite social and natural environment. The verbal level that displays
the idea of unity between the persona and the environment in the poems To My Brothers, To John Hamilton
Reynolds, This Living Hand, Sonnet. The Day Is Gone is
saturated by images based on the lexical elements with common semantics of
“unity” and “accord” (This living hand, now warm and capable/Of earnest grasping; An' every
heart is full on flame; The flush of welcome ever on the cheek; In little time
a host of joys to bind,/And keep our souls in one eternal pant!; This living
hand… I hold it towards you) and numerous word combinations including
possessive pronouns (our hearts; our
silence; our care; we together; our spirits; my beloved). Among all other
English romantics Keats managed to create “a human face” of England, intimate
and comprehensible by poetization of social and cultural context in the
entwinement of “mundane” sketches and “live portraits”. The intimization and
humanization of the environment is achieved by application of poetic
microconcepts woman, brother, home verbalized by corresponding lexical units
(whispers
of the household gods that keep/ A gentle empire o'er fraternal souls; Many
such eves of gently whisp'ring noise
May we together pass; This morn, my friend, and
yester-evening taught
Me how to harbour such a happy thought) and a bright palette of images that represent the
phenomena of sensual sphere (whispers of the household gods that keep /A
gentle empire o'er fraternal souls; This morn, my friend, and yester-evening
taught/Me how to harbour such a happy thought; Sweet voice, sweet
lips, soft hand, and softer breast,/Warm breath, light whisper, tender
semitone,/Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and lang'rous waist!; So could we
live long life in little space,/So time itself would be annihilate; this
world’s true joys); lexical
units that make a suggestive influence on the addressee (busy flames play through the fresh laid
coals; Your eyes are fixed, as in poetic sleep,/ Upon the lore so voluble
and deep; When the dusk holiday -- or holinight/ Of fragrant-curtained love
begins to weave/The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight); means
of microcontext dialogization (But O, on the heather to lie together,/With
both our hearts a-beating!/I'll put your basket all safe in a nook,/Your shawl
I'll hang up on this willow,/And we will sigh in the daisy's eye,/And kiss on a
grass-green pillow). Human oriented aspect of concept
MOTHERLAND actualization and dialogization of poetic reflections in Keats’s
poetry are inseparable from each other. Among the most frequent ways of
dialogization of poetic word in Keats’s poetic discourse there is a genre of
poems-dedications and poetic addresses to friends, poets-compatriots or to
outstanding men-of-letters of the past. The poet applies this poetic format as
a “platform” on which he expresses his own viewpoints concerning different
urgent issues, among which there dominate the problems of aesthetics, nature of
poetic creativity, essence of poetry, development of national poetic language
and tradition, integrating in this way different epochs of national and general
European culture into a complex unity ( poems If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain'd, To George Felton Mathew,
To Charles Cowden Clarke, What The Thrush Said. Lines From A Letter To John
Hamilton Reynolds, Epistle To John Hamilton Reynolds, How Many Bards Gild The
Lapses Of Time!Sonnet Xiii. Addressed To Haydon
Sonnet Xiv. Addressed To The Same (Haydon) and closely related
to them in terms of defined problems topicality (Sonnet To Spenser, Sonnet.
Written Before Re-Read King Lear, Bards Of Passion And Of Mirth,How Many Bards
Gild The Lapses Of Time!, Ode To A Nightingale, Sonnet: As From The Darkening
Gloom A Silver Dove, Sonnet To Chatterton, Sonnet To Byron, On Visiting The
Tomb Of Burns, Written In The Cottage Where Burns Was Born Lines Written
In The Highlands After A Visit To Burns's Country). All
mentioned poems in their aggregate reveal the integration of nationally
significant concepts into a conceptual complex “human – poet” actualized within
the following literary-semantic planes: “poets – compatriots, brothers and poets –
great teachers” as a substantiation of continuity and succession
of national poetic tradition, creative reception of other cultures and
languages achievements, development of ideas concerning the elaboration of
national poetic canon; “the poet and his predestination”,
the nature of poetic enlightment, the sources of poetic inspiration; “national
poetic language”, the perfection of national language, refinement of
feeling and senses, the search for the ideal object of poetic description which
would testify the independence of the eternal art from transient manifestation
of life, promotion of the cult of perfect and accomplished poetic forms. These issues fostered the comprehension of ontological
status of the poet and his power to create a specific world by the force of a
word, the world where the order constructed from the chaos and mosaic of
everyday manifestations advances toward the harmony between spiritual and
physical, mental and emotional, pure poetry and civil serving, which
substantiated the idea of spiritual unity of the humankind and succession of
cultural traditions. Humanization of national cultural and spiritual space
in Keats’s poetry is achieved by means of extensive introduction of
anthroponyms into a poetic context and addressing to famous personalities.
Semantic development of names in the context expounds from a proper name to a
poetic image with corresponding symbolic, cultural and axiological loading.
Famous personalities and their acquisitions become the measurement of poetic
beauty and perfection, poetic canon and ideas to be followed. A poet-persona
entrusts them his thoughts, reveals them his aspirations and conducts a
dialogue with them, positioning himself as their pupil, follower, interpreter
and evaluator of the mastership of his great predecessor. The images of poets –
predecessors and poets-personae are created by various aesthetic resources of the language,
including: units of axiological semantics perfection, proliferation, eternity, merit,
significance, complexity, wisdom, glory (Spenser! … To rise like Phoebus with a
golden quill
Fire-wing'd and make a morning in his mirth;
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,.; The
bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit; warm-hearted Shakspeare; all the
sages Who have left streaks of
light athwart their ages; O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! ); units
realizing the semantics of logical, rational evaluations: labour, interpretation,
intellectual activity – think, teach, discover (It
is impossible to escape from toil
O' the sudden and receive thy spiriting; When
through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire;
How glorious this affection for the cause
Of steadfast genius, toiling gallantly!; Hear ye
not the hum
Of mighty workings?; Thus ye live on high, and
then
On the earth ye live again;
And the souls ye left behind you
Teach us, here, the way to find you,
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumber'd, never cloying). The images of personalities of
national and European cultural space are introduced into the micro- and
macrocontexts imbued with literary concepts “poetry” ‘culture”, “literature”.
They are usually implicitly verbalized within the image models “space” and
“container” (In Spenser's
halls he strayed, and bowers fair, Culling enchanted flowers); «політ» (and
he flew With daring Milton through the fields
of air: To regions of his own his genius true Took happy flights), “heart”, “pulse” (spirits there are standing
apart Upon the forehead of the age to come; These, these will give the world another heart, And
other pulses), “fire”, “celestial object”, etc. Creating the anthropological dimension of the national
cultural context Keats often resorts to metaphoric models “creativity is
flight”, “talent is golden wings”, “creative function is to give wings, to
elate, to sweep away negative manifestations by the wing” (those who strove with the bright golden
wing /Of genius, to flap away each sting
Thrown by the pitiless world); expresses the idea of timelessness,
spacelessness, eternity of existence of “poetic soul”, simultaneousness of
abidance in different locations and planes – the spheres of real and irreal –
applying a traditional artistic device of
dreaming, raving, wandering; introduces into the poetic plot toposes
which provisionally could be defined as “existence of an object between the
earth and the heaven” which is a repository of
the whole cultural heritage, a location where present, past and future meet,
the abode of poetic personalities of different times and nations: Great spirits now on earth are sojourning
( poems Epistle To John Hamilton
Reynolds, Bards Of Passion And Of Mirth,
Lines On The Mermaid Tavern). The absence of visible boundaries between the mundane
and the elevated, the earth and the heaven, constant whirlpool of feelings and
senses, transference of natural states, changeability of the focus from which
the environment is comprehended, lack of definite special localization,
modeling of poetic topos based on the idea of unity between nature and culture,
spiritual syncretism – are the main features of poetization of the subject and
the space in Keats’s poetic world. Lines On The Mermaid Tavern,
for example, is a humoristic sketch with all respective attributes – wine,
gayness, satisfaction – created on the principle of two existential planes
contamination – of terrenial and celestial
paradise (Souls
of Poets dead and gone, /What Elysium have ye known), equally real for the protagonist. In Sonnet: After Dark Vapors Have Oppress'D Our
Plains there is parallelism
between the change of the seasons, rebirth and stagnation of nature and poetic
beauty manifested in far, unreachable and close, tender, intimate substances: After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
For a long
dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick
heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious
month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer
rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding
-- fruit ripening in stillness -- Autumn suns
Smiling
at eve upon the quiet sheaves --
Sweet Sappho's cheek -- a smiling infant's
breath --
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs
--
A woodland rivulet -- a Poet's death. Symbolism and associations of each textual element is multifaceted,
inexhaustible, presupposes polyphonic interpretations (as, for example, the
tender cheek of Sappho and the smile of a child allocated on a single parallel)
and intends a constant “release of the sense” (Bart). The poet is
a mediator between the worlds, multiple cultural spaces which he synthesizes
and exposes. In this exposure he dissolves and exhausts himself (like sand in a
sand clock), dies and is born again, constructing the text from different types
of the script originating from different cultures, from the legacy of different
verbal-literary elements that belong to different historic and cultural
traditions and enter with each other into versatile semantic correlations. Semantic
quintessence of the lyrical plot development centered on a famous name is based
on the spiritual unity of the creative personality and nation, ethnic and local
culture which gave him his birth. Herewith, this unity is of a two-way
character – from the environment to the person and from the person to the environment
as the emanation of spiritual impulses of the poet-demiurge into the current
and future cultural atmosphere, spiritual leadership, avant-garde. The above
mentioned statements can be exemplified by the corpus of the following poems To
Charles Cowden Clarke, To George Felton Mathew, What The Thrush Said. Lines
From A Letter To John Hamilton Reynolds, Epistle To John Hamilton Reynolds,
Sonnet Xiii. Addressed To Haydon Sonnet
Xiv. Addressed To The Same (Haydon), Sonnet Xi. On First Looking Into Chapman's
Homer, Two Sonnets. To Haydon, With A Sonnet Written On Seeing The Elgin
Marbles, Sonnet To Chatterton, On Visiting The Tomb Of Burns,Written In The
Cottage Where Burns Was Born,Lines Written In The Highlands After A Visit To
Burns's Country. Analysis
of the peculiarities of poetic actualization of interrelation between a human
and national space within the literary-semantic plane “the poet and his
predestination”, conducted on the basis of the mentioned poetic works, makes it
possible to state that, contemplating over the problems of poetic enlightment,
sources of poetic inspiration, essence of the poetry, determination of the
object of poetic reflection, Keats keeps to the assumption about the specific
importance of cultural, social, interpersonal and physical parameters of the
national environment, the motherland, for the poet and poetry. These ideas
display themselves either through the symbolism of numerous specific imagery
elements of the poetic contexts (as in the metaphor “The flower must drink the nature of the
soil / Before it can put forth its blossoming” where flower symbolizes poet and poetry) or lay the ground for extension of
lyrical plot. Thus in his lyrical address to George Felton Mathew Keats
names the poetry a pleasant engagement, satisfaction from creativity that
stimulates friendly relations, unites congenial souls (a feeling /Of all that's high, and
great, and good, and healing),
strengthen the feelings, boosts intellectual activity, underlies the wanderings
about different aspects of life. However, this friendly and sensitive motif (pleasant
note, soft 'Lydian airs) gradually
transforms into other tonality – the urge to unswer complex questions about
poetic insight, poetic vision (far
different cares… whether at all /I shall again see ), ethical and
aesthetic aspect of reality depiction (might
I now each passing moment give /To the coy muse). The imagery texture
of the poem further evolves at the intersection of verbal elements that belong
to different conceptual and semantic domens: mythologemes of the Antique as the basis of tropeic
resources of corresponding phenomena and realia depiction – Phoebus in the morning, flush'd Aurora, a
white Naiad in a rippling stream, a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam;
mythologemes of germanic-scandinavian and Celtic folklore as imagery
representation of parallel to the real world the world of mysterious nature,
inhabited by fairy creatures which exposes the mastership of the poet to see
into the extraordinary – The dew by fairy
feet swept from the green, elf and fay, their airy march
Beneath the curved moon's triumphal arch; names of national flora and fauna, objects of the
national landscape – Some flowery spot,
sequester'd, wild, romantic, Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing,
dark-leav'd laburnum's drooping clusters , intertwined the cassia's arms
unite, covert branches, the nightingales, leafy quiet, the pillars of the
sylvan roof, violet beds, the bee with cowslip bells was wrestling, a ruin
dark, and gloomy; numerous precedent names characterized by specific
attributive markers that reflect clearly defined imagery-associative and
connotative information rooted in the recipients’ consciousness in the result
of the historic processes– Chatterton,
warm-hearted Shakspeare, moralize on Milton's blindness, those who in the cause
of freedom fell, our own Alfred, Helvetian Tell, whose name to ev'ry heart's a
solace, High-minded and unbending William Wallace, Burns. Undoubtedly, that this polycode textual verbal matrix, allusive density
of the context mirrors the specific literary and conceptual intentions of the
author: motherland as a unity of the notions “native land”, “nature”,
“spiritual bounds” is created on the crossroads of temporal, cultural and folk
aspects. All is here harmoniously united – classical antique myth and
pre-roman, Celtic folklore in its pure form and enframed into Shakespearian
interpretations, poetic voice of the great teachers and civic attitudes of the
compatriots – as if the poetry itself absorbed all the ripeness and mystery of
the old times, all intellectual forces of the national development. It is the
motherland that in its uncountable richness and sensual polyphony is the ground
of poetic inspiration – the poet concludes, claiming: “Felton! without incitements such as these, How vain for me the niggard Muse to tease”. But
in the cited poem the poet makes one more important discovery that determined
the general direction of his reflections concerning the essence of poetic
enlightment. The final part of the poem describes a set of mysterious
metamorphosis as the possibility of mutual transformations of the poet into the
object of poetic depiction: poet ↔ flower, poet ↔ golden fish, poet ↔ swan
which in its sense is a poetic solution of enigma about the sources of poetic
creativity: the poetic world perception is formed as the ability of the poet to
merge with his poetic images, the ability of the poet to reveal his own nature
in his poetic images: For thou wast once a flowret blooming wild,
Close to the source, bright, pure, and
undefil'd,
Whence gush the streams of song: in happy
hour
Came chaste Diana from her shady bower,
Just as the sun was from the east
uprising;
And, as for him some gift she was devising,
Beheld
thee, pluck'd thee, cast thee in the stream
To meet her glorious brother’s greeting
beam.
I marvel much that thou hast never told
How, from
a flower, into a fish of gold
Apollo chang'd thee; how thou next
didst seem
A black-eyed swan upon the widening stream;
And when
thou first didst in that mirror trace
The placid features of a human face… The
above mentioned and similar imagery models and motives of interpenetration of
poetic image and poetic “ego” (O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, /And
yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge -- I have
none, /And yet the Evening listens;
O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, /Would all their colours
from the sunset take: / From something of material sublime, /Rather
than shadow our own soul's day-time /In the dark void of night. For in the
world /We jostle) refrain in a set of Keats’s poems which
enables to speak of the dominance of poetic conceptualization of motherland as
personalized, intimate, creative and intellectual space, the space of spiritual
mentors (How many bards gild the lapses of
time!/A few of them have ever been the food / Of my delighted fancy,—I could brood/Over their beauties, earthly,
or sublime:/And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,/These will in throngs
before my mind intrude:/But no confusion, no disturbance rude/Do they occasion;
'tis a pleasing chime). Similar
to a poetic image that is the imprint of reality, the reality itself bears an
imprint of the poetic image, created by a talented word of the poet, is his
replica, his shade, his soul: a Bard's low cradle-place; at the cable's length/ Man
feels the gentle anchor pull and gladdens in its strength. Anthropocentric
aspect of concept MOTHERLAND poetic actualization in Keats’s poetic discourse
encompasses a set of meanings that are the means of literary reflection of
individual and collective identification – the concept NATION (Listen awhile
ye nations; the people; people of no name,/In noisome alley, and in pathless
wood; native skies) as well as the
wide range of related problems, such as spiritual unity, specificity of
national reception of poetry and cultural legacy created inside and outside the
national environment, poetic embodiment of the relations “poet and nation”,
social and political topics, etc. (Sonnet
Xiii. Addressed To Haydon, Sonnet Xiv. Addressed To The Same (Haydon). Keats
poetics represents an essential change in the character of interrelation
between a human and national space, it takes shape of the cyclic, contentious
spiritual motion in the circle created by unity of elements “nature –
poet-mythologist – poetry”. The world of Keats poetic conceptualization
discloses itself as a reflection of creative and cognitive activity of a poetic
personality, directed towards representation of the national environment in the
system of multilevel senses that fix polycultural experience of the nation
aggregated in the literary universe of different epochs and ethnos. The
surrounding world is a temple of poetry and nature, paradise on the earth, the
place of pure rapture (pleasure's temple= a poet's house). The architecture of this temple consists of the unity of the elements
belonging to three basic semantic domens: “the poet” – name,
personality-mediator – the preserver of invaluable ethnically specific and
universal knowledge; “myth” – mythologeme, association, allusion – the
dialectics of the cultural evolution of the nation, the most typical
impressions and stereotypes in the structure and forms of literary
consciousness among which there dominate the criteria of beauty, harmony, perfection,
eternity; “nature” – inspired physical substance of the being existing in its
primary forms of human and social adaptation to geographic environment, forms
of cultural and artistic experiences – fragments of the picture of the world
and their unity, comprehension of the basic vital categories. The poet is placed in the center of existential, cognitive and
communicative spheres “human – nature” and “human – human” that determine
intersubjectivity, anthropocentricity, dialogization of cognitive structures
poetic exteriorization. In the structure of the notional layer of the concept
MOTHERLAND these aspects serve as knots creating the intersections of semantic
lines that represent social and natural determinants of ideological and
thematic feature of Keats’s poetics. Conclusions. The
conceptual core of national identity representation in Keats’s artistic system is created by
interrelation of dominating conceptual models: 1) “Motherland in its
anthropocentric dimensions”. In its discursive realization it is constructed
through humanization of national social environment by extensive introduction
of precedential names; its representation as a universe of “great teaches”,
dialogization of poetic context as a contamination of different temporal and
cultural perspectives, enhancement of
pragmatic value of aesthetic resources by intertextuality that develops
semantic polyphony of poetic context, enriches the expressive potential of
verbal imagery, fosters its modernization; 2) “Motherland as an absolute
value, the source of artistic inspiration”. In its discursive realization it is
constructed through contamination of mundane and sacred themes, material and
spiritual manifestations, unity of historical, mythological and literary
subjects.
The
spectrum of evaluative meanings in poetic conceptualization of national
environment encompasses aesthetic, ethical, hedonistic, emotional values
expressed by notions that are solely positively comprehended: beauty, truth,
closeness, intimacy, continuation of national artistic tradition, emotional
comfort, perfection, harmony, sensitivity. Positive axiology of the represented
literary concepts determines the modes of their textual embodiment among which
there are the most typical ones – “motherland – paradise on the earth”,
“motherland – animated creature/woman”, “motherland – beauty”, “motherland –
myth and reality”. Artistic reflection of interrelation between a human and
national environment in Keats’s poetry manifests the dynamics of individual
artistic priorities development from embodied in poetic forms the basic social
values, moral ideals to the comprehensive representation of national existence
and its deployment through the categories of ethics, intellectualism,
synchronization of different cultural layers of national and European
experience from different historical and worldview systems in a single poetic
dialogue. These artistic intentions led to the essential changes in conceptual
system of poetic discourse and in resources of lingual-expressive means which
extrapolated versatile imagery and symbolic forms of national folklore and
mythology, samples of antique poetic practice into a renewed context of
Romantic literature. Intensive implementation of elements nurtured by different
cultural and intellectual sources into the poetic context performed alongside
with aesthetic function informative and axiological ones and advanced the
modernization of national poetic picture of the world, as well as reflected
specific shifts in national self-representation and in the system of national
cultural universals.
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Web. 24.10.2018.
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