Paul De Man at Harvard 1958-1959
Keats, Hölderlin, Gérard de Nerval
Lecture notes taken by an undergraduate at Harvard College
Comparative Literature 159
Paul De Man, 1958
Comp. Lit. 159: Keats, Hölderlin, Gérard de Nerval
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged. Mr. de Man.
To be omitted in 1958-59.
A comparative study of the common themes and related attitudes of these three poets, especially in connection with the key concepts and main trends of the romantic tradition to which they belong.
A reading ability in either French or German and an elementary
knowledge of the other language are required.
[From the Harvard course catalog, 1957-58.]
Comparative Literature 159 (at Harvard College, Cambridge MA)
Mr. Paul De Man
Sever Hall 9 - Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays at 11 AM - Spring 1958
office hours Wednesday 2:30 to 4 PM
This course enrolled five students, probably all Harvard-Radcliffe juniors and seniors. It was taught around a table in a small classroom in Sever Hall. I think it did not occur to any of us to wonder what a lowly graduate student was doing teaching an upper level course in comparative literature.
I majored in German at Harvard, after learning German as an American military dependent at an American high school in Kaiserslautern, Germany. After that I went to medical school and had no further contact with literary criticism, Deconstructionist or otherwise. I have continued to write poetry, and have always considered Paul De Man a major influence on my development as a poet. I offer this transcription in gratitude more than 20 years after his death. Paul De Man was the greatest teacher of literature I ever knew. This text is posted to the Web on the occasion of Jacques Derrida's death.
I have edited these notes with a rather light hand, deleting occasional schoolboy asides and correcting obvious slips of the pen. I have carefully left en dashes where I wrote them originally, since they usually represent ellipses when I was unable to keep up with De Man's lecture. (In the Web version the en dashes are replaced by double hyphens, since HTML does not support en dashes reliably.) I took the notes in class and made few if any immediate additions to them. I received a grade of A in the course.
Robert S. Richmond, Harvard College '59
Required Texts:
All students: John Keats, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, Modern Library T48, edited by Harold E. Briggs.
Students fluent in German: Hölderlin, Werke (in einem Band), Salzburg, Verlag das Bergland Buch, 1952. Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings, translated by Geoffrey Wagner, New York: Grove Press, 1957.
Students fluent in French: Gérard de Nerval, Le Rêve et la Vie, Hachette, Collection du Flambeau. Hölderlin, Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger, New York: Pantheon, 1952.
Readings are listed in the order in which they will be taken up in class.
Keats: Sleep and Poetry, I Stood Tip-Toe, Endymion I-II, Endymion II-IV.
Hölderlin: Hyperion, Vorstufen: (Thalia Fragment), Hyperion I-II
Nerval: Sylvie, Promenades et Souvenirs
Keats: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion
Hölderlin: Der Tod des Empedokles, erste Fassung. Empedokles auf dem Ätna (dritte Fassung), Grund zum Empedokles.
Keats: To Autumn
Hölderlin: Wie wenn am Feiertage...
Nerval: Isis, Aurélia, Les Chimères, El Desdichado, Delfica.
Keats: Ode on Melancholy
Hölderlin: Menons Klagen um Diotima
Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn
Hölderlin: Der Archipelagus, Brot und Wein
Hölderlin: Anmerkungen zur Antigone, Germanien, Der Einzige, Andenken
Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey
Meeting at 11 AM on Wednesday, May 14th to discuss Hölderlin's Der Einzige and Anmerkungen zur Antigone. Not on the final exam.
Term paper due about May 15th. Dangerous topics are encouraged. Any work of one of these writers; related writers in relation; general and critical topics in relation to these writers. May 20th okay. About 15 pages. Recover papers at Office of Comparative Literature about May 27th.
Final Exam will consist of three questions:
1. Question derived from quotes from two authors - - passages dealt with in class - - choice of Keats and Hölderlin OR Keats and Nerval
2. General thematic question - - involving Hölderlin
Explication of a poem not read in class, Keats, Hölderlin, or Nerval
Final Examination: [there was no mid-term hour examination in this course. There was a single term paper.]
FINAL EXAMINATION (3 hours)
1. (30 minutes). Select two of the following three passages, explicate and give a running commentary. (In the case of the Keats and Hölderlin selections this will require that you briefly locate the passage within the framework of the larger poem from which it is taken.)
Hyperion III, 91-136: "O why should I...Celestial...."
Brot und Wein, stanza 7: "Aber Freund...in heiliger Nacht."
Delfica: "La connais-tu...le sévère portique."
2. (90 minutes) Each of the passages in question 1 contains a characteristic blend of religious and historical imagery. Describe the particular conception of the relationship between the historical and the divine that is expressed in the two passages you have chosen. (In the case of Nerval, a conception of history is implicitly present in his attitude toward the Christian and the pagan, Hellenic world.)
Draw on your knowledge of other works of the two poets you have chosen to show that this theme (the relationship between the historical and the divine) is a persistent one throughout their work and that it determines the conception of their role as poets (point to specific passages in Keats' Endymion and Hyperion or Hölderlin's Hyperion and Empedokles or Nerval's Sylvie and Aurélia to support your argument; feel free, of course, to allude to other works).
3. (60 minutes) Explicate one of the three following poems and write a brief gneral comment on the poem you select; if you choose the Keats or the Hölderlin poem, comment on the nature of the "Grecian grandeur" with which both poems are concerned (the two poems lend themselves to parallel treatment, and you find it an advantage to deal with both of them, if you wish); if you choose the Nerval poem, you could comment on the relevance of the Pythagorean quotation and on the importance of the Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic tradition for Gérard de Nerval. Aside from thematic considerations include statements on the formal aspect of the poem you have chosen (such as rhythm, sound, imagery, etc.).
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time ("My spirit...of a magnitude.")
Achill ("Herrlicher Göttersohn!...gütig den Einsamen auf.")
Vers Dorés ("Homme, libre penseur!...lécorce des pierres!")
Monday, February 3rd, 1958.
Keats: Oct. 29, 1795 to Feb. 23, 1821
Hölderlin: March 20, 1770 to June 7, 1843
Nerval: May 22, 1808 to Jan. 26, 1855
None of these three writers ever knew of the existence of any of the others!
Nerval translated Faust II - - knew Heine - - liked Jean-Paul [Richter]. Connected with later German romanticism.
Hölderlin was influenced by Rousseau, like everybody else. Hölderlin-Rousseau has not been studied as much as it should [be]. Hölderlin and the French Enlightenment.
Similarity of poetic themes in the three:
Trennung. Separation between man and nature. - - fellow man - - nation. "alienation"
Keats died at 26.
Hölderlin went mad.
Nerval hanged himself.
Bildung. Development by increasing consciousness - - the recovering of unity.
Reconciliation through:
Nature and the vision of nature
Love (Platonic)
Memory. Not in the Proustian sense. Linked with history.
Greece. All three use the Hellenic symbol.
Eschatological vision: the return of the gods: We live in a Zwischenzeit between Greece and Götterdämmerung. Figure of the historical Christ.
The mythological imagination. Myth to them is not decorative; their use of myth is naiv (Schiller's word!) Literal use of metaphor. They do not really use metaphor; myth is reality. No symbols; the poet is not aware of the difference between I and not-I.
February 5th, 1958
Bibliography for Romanticism:
Lovejoy:The Great Chain of Being
Wellek: The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History. 1949 CL.
Lucas: The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, 1948.
Keats, Hölderlin, and Nerval are having an enormous revival right now.
Keats. Work falls into two parts: the shorter poems and the longer works: Endymion and the unfinished versions of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. - - Texts are pretty well established: Garrid's edition is the best one. but there are still text-critical problems: does the moral at the end of the Grecian urn go in quotes or not? - - Dating problems: for instance, was Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion written first? Keats' biography is well known: the best biography is the recent one by Gittings John Keats: the Living Year - - source work for the year 1819 in which Keats did most of his work.
Emphasis on Keats has changed. The Pre-Raphaelites liked the decorative aspects: the whole 19th century liked him for his effete qualities and [he] was much read by the ladies' clubs. At the present time there has been a change in emphasis to a greater seriousness: interest has shifted to the Odes. Every major critic has written on the Grecian urn. The poem has become a touchstone of criticism; one cannot get a fresh approach. But much less has been written on Hyperion and Endymion. - - Both of these are pretty uneven and a lot of Endymion is just terrible. - - Thus we will emphasize Endymion and Hyperion.
Recent books emphasizing the metaphysical seriousness of Keats: Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone. Only on the Odes: very metaphysical and complicated. Opposed is: Newell Ford, Pre-Figurative Imagination of John Keats - - spontaneous, sensual poet without much awareness of what he is doing. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats. But on the whole there aren't any major problems in dealing with Keats.
Hölderlin: three periods of work:
1. Influence of Schiller and Klopstock
2. Hyperion and Empedokles: the transition to the mature period, around 1800
3. The late lyrical period: hymns become progressively more difficult, going up to his insanity.
None of this was published in his life time except Hyperion and the Antigone translations. Thus through the 19th century he was not known except for the highly sentimental novel Hyperion. There was some awareness of him all along; certainly Nietzsche was interested in him.
Some work was done all along, but Dilthey's was really the first. Then around 1910 a member of the George-Kreis [the group of poets around Stefan George], Norbert von Hellingrath, wrote a thesis on Hölderlin and Pindar. He found some Hölderlin manuscripts in Munich. - - More work turned up, and the complete edition of Hölderlin began. Most of the poems were first published in [Stefan George's] Blätter für die Kunst. After Hellingrath died in World War I von Pigenot took over and published the edition that remained standard until the Stuttgart editions.- - The Hölderlin bibliography is monstrous. The discovery of a Hölderlin poem - - such as the "Friedensfeier" in 1953 - - creates an incredible blast of critical articles. The present definitive edition, now coming out, is Beissner's Großer Stuttgarter Ausgabe. - - Problems. Hölderlin did not prepare his manuscripts for publication, and thre are usually a lot of variants and illegibilities. - - Still much philological work to do: but much interpretation is already being done. Martin Heidegger wrote a number of essays that were collected into a book, and there are other essays by him. Heidegger's intrpretations are anti-philological; he takes considerable liberties with the texts. Thus there is a battle running, Heidegger versus the philologists. There is a Jungian reader, Kerenyi (a Hungarian writing in German), and a religious philospher, Guarini. In English. R. Peacock's book is useful.
Monday, February 10th, 1958 (there was no class the previous Friday)
Heidegger's book is useful because of its ideas on criticism as a whole: is the whole idea of criticism of any value? Textkritik he criticizes: the so-called "scientific" or "objective" method he wants to discard in favor of an internal exegesis. Thus in "Wie wenn am Feiertage" [he amends] ...im Liede wehet ihr Geist / wenn es [das Lied] von der Sonne und warmer Erd' / entwacht
This is Heidegger's reading. In Beißner we have: im Liede wehet ihr Geist / wenn es der Sonne und warmer Erd / entwächst
The manuscript has entwacht: but Beißner says that Hölderlin has a habit of dropping the s in such words - - ther are six or seven instances. But he does not omit the umlaut. Entwachsen takes the genitive: der Sonne und warmer Erd. The manuscript has [der and von, the one written exactly over the other, in wenn es...Sonne und], which doesn't get us very far. Heidegger thinks the whole method doesn't touch the essential and is hence invalid. - - "We do not know what these poems are." - - Cannot be really related to Hegel & Co., says Heidegger. - - Historical metaphor has value only in terms of the development of Hölderlin selbst: he tells us what it means. Stands outside of convention. - - Heidegger captures something in Hölderlin that the others let slip by. He overdoes it in saying that such a prophetic viewpoint is confined to
page 12
Hölderlin. - - The emphasis in Hölderlin studies is on the later poems - - earlier it was on Hyperion and Empedokles. At the present time Heidegger is working on the poems of Hölderlin's insanity.
Gérard de Nerval. A much more voluminous writer than Keats or Hölderlin: he was a journalist and wrote for a living. The problem of getting the work of Nerval together at all is staggering. No complete edition exists yet. He used a number of pen names before settling on "Gérard de Nerval". He also collaborated with Dumas, and we cannot always assign the authorship safely. His biography is also obscure - - his life was complicated and has not yet been fully elucidated. His autobiographical statements are untrustworthy. It is not even certain that he killed himself. His relations with women are obscure in the extreme.
Aristide Marie wrote the only biography of any great value. It will probably be replaced. Sources are obscure. Nerval was interested in esoteric wisdom, of which no good bibliography exists. But the esoteric sources of Nerval have been rather well handled by Riche. But there is a lot that he cannot determine. Nerval was widely read in French, German, and English. Knows the French 16th century, and Shakespeare. Was a Goethe enthusiast: he translated Faust, and read Wilhelm Meister. Closely related to Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, later Heine. A lot of Nerval's work is terrible; his drama is just awful. His travel reportages, particularly the Voyage a l'Orient - - he went to these - - have recently come under rather intense scrutiny. The best-known works are the novelette Sylvie, and the group of poems Les Chimères. His other poetry isn't very good.
Died 1856: his fame has gone up and down since then. The official history of French literature has always omitted him, until the latest edition. He had fans in the 19th century; but the official critics like Sainte-Beuve did not like him. Proust (Contre Sainte-Beuve - - posthumous) had much interest in him - - his Recherche has much to do with Sylvie. Temps Retrouvée has some references to Nerval. The Symbolistes really revivied him, however, partly because of his relation to the occult. The Surrealists did much for him. But Gide disliked him considerably. New French criticism has given him much attention. Thus in Richar, Durry. Cahier du Sud - important French literary review - - has done much work on him. But there is still no good book on him as a whole - - no style study.
Wednesday, February 12th, 1958 (no meeting Friday)
Keats: "I Stood Tip-Toe". "It stinks, but it's a different stink." It reveals more of Keats than the later poems will. It is bad partly because it is an imitation of Leigh Hunt, who has a lack of taste and a Cockney preciousness - - Sunday excursions to the country. "The two most pleasant things this world has got / A pretty woman and a rural spot." (from the Story of Rimini) - - Compare to Nerval and Hölderlin in the uncritical taking-over of a style around them. Impatience: they are so eager to get to poetic expression that they are willing to use a style - - reflection does not begin in the word - - like Stephen Daedalus - - but in the experience. (Joyce takes his early prose style from Walter Pater, who is highly verbal himself.) - - This poem was originally called "Endymion". How does the poem proceed out of description of nature? Use of Mercury (24) is not mere illusion, but grows out of the rather peculiar experience of levitation - - peculiar in arising from Cockney escape from the city. - - The other myth references work the same way.
Sensory images point toward Keats's description of ecstasy. Thus Yeats defines "poets of vision" - -
Importance of silence in the poem: silence that one hears intensifies the visual imagery. Keats's is a sensual silence: silence is a word to look out for in all Keats. It is a bridge for movement from the natural to the supernatural. Silence takes us to dream and to sleep. Water associates with silence. - - These poems reveal much of what Keats is to do later. - - Connection between statement and sensation: this starts the process - - which is rather unusual in poets. Authors on Keats take two lines of thought - - either he is a Neo-Platonist, or he is a Realist. Thus Endymion can be read as a neo-Platonic search for pure beauty - - movement into a world of ideas out of a world of sensation. This doesn't work for Keats as a whole - - the farther out he moves the more sensual he gets, in direct contrast to Shelley. - - But neither is Keats a Wordsworthian mimetic or realist poet. He takes neither the one attitude nor the other. Neither is he a symbolist, moving out of his world into a higher material realm.
We cannot read too autobiographically: coolness as an escape from fever or sexual imagery as an escape from frustration. Maybe so, but this is not the point: the point is that he can universalize this personal experience for us. He moves us into a mythological world he has created himself. Also linguistically: Wordsworth does not emphasize one quality - - coolness, shade or what have you: in his descriptions - - his pictures are more harmonious but less purposeful. Thus 128 [Keats] derives myth from nature: nature revealing itself through the myth:
And when a tale is beautifully staid
We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade. - -
the glade exists before the tale - - this the opposite of Wordsworth who describes and then moralizes out of the description. For Keats myth is what matters - - he is in the myth world looking at the real world, and interpreting it from where he is. Thus in Wordsworth's "The Excursion" - - helpful attitude of nature makes the man personify and mythify nature. Keats is just the opposite. - - Keats makes his own myth at the beginning of the poem. - - Wordsworth's myth problem is moral - - why we need to praise - - but Keats's is poetic - creative.
Monday, February 17th, 1958
Wordsworth's "The Prelude" - - compare to Keats's theory of myth-making. Wordsworth's theory leads to a moral imitation of nature. This morality above nature can really be traced to Kant. An imitative imagery originates from such a Kantian viewpoint. The poetic faculty most connected with imitation is memory - - thus Wordsworth's "powerful emotion recollected in tranquility". Hunt degenerates this to a mere ornament. - - One can imitate language as well as nature. - - Keats imitates language: he imitates Hunt's language so easily it is unconscious.
Non-imitative imagery: the analogical. Analogical imagery is really more common than imitative imagery.
Elizabethan poetry is analogical - - the essence of the conceit. Marvell's "The Garden" the classical unconscious analogical imagery. Most western imagery and thought is analogical rather than imitatative - - Science is an analogical statement: of similarity between laws of mind and laws of the world. Philosophers as different as Aristotle and Hegel work by systems of analogy. - - Creates his own world. His Mercury image in the early poems is mythopoietic - - the myth he uses is used to take one out of the world.
Nature can lead to myth if it is a realization of what is already in the created world - - thus the Narcissus myth of TT 1760.
Levitation image - - Mercury. Related to the levitation of various Christian mystics - - cf. also Simone Weil. But Keats creates it out of his own need.
Our own vocabulary is analogical: we have no language to deal with the mythopoietic form of imagery. Thus our theoretical framework is of limited use. We have to read the poets. - - This mythopoietic imagery is common but by no means universal in the Romatic Period.
This is a terrible poem, but it is useful in what it gives away.
"Sleep and Poetry". More obvious, perhaps more successful. The poem is something of a manifesto. Hunt was defending an [Anacreontic] ideal - - and this is pretty close to Hunt.
"And they shall be accounted poet kings
who simply tell the most heart-easing things."
160ff (Sleep and Poetry). Brief history of poetry. Boileau and Pope destroying Renaissance tradition. - - 218 "lone spirit" Chatterton. 225 "lake" Wordsworth. 228 "pipe" Hunt. [?] Keats hated Byron - - considered him an 18th century hangover. Then he turns on Wordsworth, calling him over-naturalistic - - and ends rather tritely.
Wednesday, February 19th, 1958
Sleep and Poetry. - - Keats sets himself with Hunt, against the 18th century.
Line 61. The word "sacrifice" is certainly odd here - - premonition.
And if poetry is a heart-easing thing why the Daedalus image?
Line 96. - - first announcement of his poetic career. - - Thus the sensual. Then 122 - - he cannot stay in the idyllic pastoral stage. - - Then universalization. - - Related to Wordsworth's theory of development - - cf Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth is elegiac - - regretful meditation on the past and what has gone by. Keats has no regret of a preceding unity. - - Hölderlin has both. - - in Keats, when the visions are fled (155) - - there is no Wordsworth melancholy - - this is completely barrenness. Thus at the end of "Ode to a Nightingale" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" - - The whole desire is for the next blast. - - muddy stream bearing soul to nothingness is what he gets for a poetic hangover - - end of poem is just a description of his room - - hence the odd objects.
Endymion. Sometimes just as bad as the previous poems. Thus line 248, turtles and myrtles. - - Sources: Ovid (in translation) - - Wordsworth, Shakespeare's Tempest, Milton, etc.
Book I. Read the letter before it. - - Sometimes one loses touch with the action because of the imagery. - - Pastoral [festivity] in honor of Pan. Endymion turns up - - he has [troubles] - - tells his story to his sister Peona - - he is in love with a goddess and that keeps him from being a leader of his people. He cannot satisfy himself with the natural.
The opening is Wordsworthian and the theme is not developed - - though much quoted it is not central.
line 232. Ode to Pan. Original state - - unity in childhood like Wordsworth - - is described here. Pan represents it. Keats has to name unity and nature is the symbol of unity. Aspects of nature. - - Begins by being in praise of water, which doesn't surprise us by now. The hydrodynamics of this poem is similar to the preceding ones. - - Pan is the god of nature. Thus the image of ripening fruit. (252) third stanza is more Wordsworthian - - Pan = nature keeps the lambs out of the eagle's clutches. Line 289 Pan is the
Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge - -
possibly a Platonic reading is possible here. line 298 ether symbol - - this for Hölderlin as well. This symbol pretty well shoots the pastoral symbolism. It is not nature any more - - it is physis, approximately natura but not very closely. Now he is going to have to look for supernatural images. Nature is not going to serve any more - - it cannto be transplanted to the realm of pure intellect.
Two lines of interpretations:
1. Platonic = necessity of moving from natural to spiritual experience
2. No. Keats does not want to leave the realm of sensations. Platonic [is therefore] impossible.
Maybe the problem doesn't arise in him at all. - - For a clue: examine the symbol of love. Is it erotic or is it supernatural? Read Diotima's speech in the Symposium. Human love -> eternal beauty. - - Keats could not have read Plato directly, but he could have got some Neo-Platonic ideas from Spenser, Renaissance writers, etc.
- - Or can be read as Keats' desire to get rid of his virginity - - something that was bothering him at the time.
770 H[yperion?]: - - central passage.
How many times does Endymion fall asleep? And have dreams that he is dreaming that he is dreaming that he is dreaming?
Water symbol -> sleep image.
Monday, February 24th, 1958
start reading Hölderlin's Hyperion.
Endymion Book II. Does this part say anything? - - What is the problem of Endymion as a character? Trennung [separation]. Hyperion is critical of Germany - - but Endymion is not critical of or rebellious from the Latmians - - he merely can't share their stability. Hyperion's ideas are not Keats's - - Keats is not a poète maudit. - - Once again: Platonic or not Platonic? Plato's ideal world is hard to get to, but desirable. Is the ideal so uniformly desirable in Keats? [Book] IV presents a conflict between the worlds - - and through the book Endymion's difficulty is that he cannote reconcile human and ideal achievement. Plato has no need for such reconciliation because of his hierarchic concept of the world. Keats wants both worlds. Thus the meeting with the ideal is conceived of in natural imagery. Sometimes this is not a good thing for the poem - -
the contact with eternal beauty is put out in terms of Cockney love affairs. But the purely natural descriptions - - when he makes them - - tend always to the ideal - - thus the flight imagery of the early poems. The supernatural becomes natural and vice versa. Later on Keats perceives this as a problem and gets quite concerned about it. - - Speaks of "goatish swinish human love confused with adoration of sublime." Asks if Greek has separate words for two types of love. - - He thinks we are caught in a confusion this way. See page 186, Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds, line 74 ff. There is a sudden burst of great Keats where we would not expect it. - - The poetic imagination gets one into this sort of mess itself. - - This all is a common theme in Romantic poetry. - - But nature remains the supreme example. - - And water imagery centering around the archetype of
the Beginning - - the water springing from the earth. - - Nature in its becoming - - similar archetypal concern with ripening - - symbolized by hunger for fruit. - - This is a non-cyclic nature image - - this is [das Beginnende]. Thus the myth of Adonis - - god of growth and ripening - - and Arethusa, the myth of the river - - appear in [book] II - - it is the needs of the inner mythology that bring these in. - - The ideal here Hölderlin would call Kunst - - that which is created. - - Development in this poem exists in the form of repetitive patterns. - - Dialectic process comes out of this. - - Repeated reconciliation comes through here. But this cannot be applied to Keats - - he was not a philosopher. The repetition of experience is what is important for him. P. 47 Letter to Bailey is quite important here. Bailey was a friend of Keats who was studying philosophy.
"The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - - he awoke and found it truth." - - further: repetition in a finer tone - - is a poetic expresssion of the Hegelian dialectic. See also book I, 777 ff. - - this is the main platonistic proving-text. The word essence, here, however, means union between material and spiritual worlds. ["What does 'glory' mean," asked Alice.] Nature -> to world of art: Apollo, Orpheus. Suggestions of historic achievement? - - Discovery of art <- discovery of nature; Natur -> Kunst a common Keats theme - - see Chapman's Homer or Elgin Marbles. "But these are richer entanglements"; art -> friendship and love. III Theme - - This nature -> art -> friendship -> love will be worked out even more in Hyperion (Keats). This love - partly erotic only - but extends blessings to whole of humanity. - - how he isn't clear. This erotic love may well - 836 or so - give rise to whole world of nature. - - The rest of the poem develops this idea - - sexual love of a quality that raises the imagination beyond it. - - Beyond this comes supernatural love and union with God. But that experience is not named in this poem. But this outline outlines the poem, which starts by trying to name these experiences (I). Then II is Endymion's initiation to art. III is experience of friendshiip and human relationship. Then IV human love -> divine love.
Wednesday, February 26th, 1958
For Friday read Hölderlin's Hyperion II III IV. Next week continue Hyperion - Nerval's Sylvie.
Hölderlin's Hyperion - Thalia-Fragment. Begins with a rather important philosophical statement. 2 needs: Einfalt: = complete harmony between our needs and nature - by means of the sheer organization of nature. This is an idyllic state, like the beginning of Endymion. 2. Zustand der höchsten Bildung.
Same harmony occurs, with infinitely augmented needs. This is not achieved by nature, but by "the organization which we are able to give ourselves." This is Bildung. (This word begins really in Schiller and Kant.) - - This is all rather similar to German idealistic thought of the period. The road from Einfalt to Bildung is fundamentally the same for everybody - "im allgemeinen und einzelnen". - - From the moment that man becomes capable of naming - man loses Einfalt. Wordsworth would get real regretful about it - but Hölderlin realizes the necessity of Bildung. - - One has to see the inner necessity of the Stufen. Keats only enumerates them; they arenot seen to be developmental stages. - - But the novel itself has by no means the consistency or clarity of the opening. - - And Keats is a user of love-imagery. Hyperion leaves love imagery behind - - Hyperion goes off to fight for the freedom of Greece. One gets a lot out of Endymion by looking for the developmental stages; but one must not expect them to be too clear. (It wouldn't be much of a poem if they were.) - - Descent into the underworld. "Descent into unconscious." - - "Just a traditional image" says KML [student] - - meeting of figure from the past. - - Development is inward; development of hero's consciousness itself - - "Metallic, angular imagery." - - World of science? (Keats's M.D. training) - - Keats studied chemistry and mineralogy. The angular lines certainly suggest that here he is describing a world of science out of which he is to develop into a world of poetry. - - But there is no agreement among commentators on just what the meaning of "world" is. - - Death has been suggested; poetry; or there isn't any. - - Emphasis on Venus and Adonis, Arethusa. - - These legends all connect with love between a mortal and an immortal. The sexes vary, the theme remains. - - The climaxes of II are the worst - - cf. return [?part] and Adonis return to Underworld - (why) - -
The Cynthia episode is just awful. (740 "darling essence") - - He is at his best when just burbling in his language, as in the description of Adonis.
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Transcribed from notes 1996, posted to the Web October 14th, 2004.