Though in my edition there is a postscript: ‘Whatever the detail of Keats’s performance, this achievement is such that no one who has never thought him the greatest poet in the world, no matter for how brief a period, has any real feeling for literature.’

Inconstant even in this the dead
heart of the matter: laughter | no joy.
Thin veil of libel úp for bids. You are
wantonly obscure, man sagt. ACCESSIBLE
traded as DEMOCRATIC, he answers
as he answers móst things these days | easily.
Except in thís one craft he shows himself
open to a fault, shaken by others’ weeping;
duty’s memorialist | for the known-unknown
servants of Empire – for such unburied:
the spirit’s gift upheld, impenetrable,
the bone-cage speared by lilies of the veldt.

"Still, we cant entirely absolve Emerson of culpability for our educational debacle. In his writing he laid himself open to the misreadings of Dewey and the progressive educators."

"He flirted with the freedom of absolute relativism. ‘Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this,’ he asserted somewhat casually in ‘Self-Reliance.’ He dreamed of a let-it-all-hang-out liberation. The ‘only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it,’ he held, and went on to vapor about ‘the sacred germ of [a mans] instinct,’ which was ‘not inferior but superior to his will.’

Winters knew Emerson’s work very well, and admired him, to a degree, as a poet. But he is less concerned with Emerson the man than Emerson the influence, and as an influence, as the article you linked also points out, Emerson was very bad indeed.

David: Since you asked, from Forms of Discovery:

"John Keats offers melancholy for the most part unexplained, melancholy for its own sake, combined with detail which is sensuous as regards intention but which is seldom perceived with real clarity. There is almost no intellect in or behind the poems; the poems are adolescent in every respect. Most readers of our time and for some generations have encountered Keats when they were young, have been touched by his unfortunate history, and have formed their taste on his poetry at a time when they knew little other poetry for comparison, and their feeling about him is immovable; they cannot imagine that he might be a bad poet."

He offers some highly qualified praise to Ode on a Grecian Urn and To Autumn, and has some merciless fun at the expense of Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on Melancholy.

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on a rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

His only comment is, “Gray’s youth to fame and fortune unknown appears to have evaded all restraints.”

From Nightingale he cites the awful bit where men sit and hear each other groan and youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies, and says Keats "succeeds in making human misery the matter of unintentional comedy." He thinks the best writing in Keats is in Grecian Urn, but that To Autumn is the most successful complete poem.

I had a feeling there might be a coolness (to say the least) ‘tween Yvor & young Master Keats…

I’ll try to get a hold of Forms of Discovery–but I doubt it will convince me that Ode to a Nightingale is a bad poem… (after all-I did swipe the title for my novel from it!) Of course, like most people (including, it seems, Winters himself?), my favourite of the odes has always been To Autumn…

Dave

I’m as opposed to ridiculous, over-the-top Romantic ranting as anyone (that’s why I applaud Winters’ excoriation of Poe and love what he has to say about Hart Crane–minus the talk about his "bad mentor"). I just think Yvor picked on the wrong guy when he went after Emerson… I’m totally with Winters when he goes after the "southern Agrarians" too!

Just as an aside Aaron–do you know what Winters thought of Keats?

I haven’t come across much on "Mr. Negative Capability" himself in the criticism I’ve read. Needless to say, he’s my favourite of the romantic poets…

Dave

"Emotion" is not the same as "impulse," "intuition," or as Emerson once impishly put it, "whim." Emotion, in fact, meant little to Emerson; indeed his own emotional coldness (and that of his poetry) is generally regarded as one of his major shortcomings. Emerson himself often felt uneasy at the thinness of his own emotional life, but he was never moved actually to do anything about it.

In addition, the intuition he championed is an intuition educated and disciplined by a constant, hyperattentive inspection of one’s own mind.

Winters version of Emerson is a caricature–and a caricature of someone other than the actual Emerson to boot. (A superb caricature of the actual Emerson can be found in Melville’s The Confidence-Man.) As it happens, I read a piece yesterday–courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily–that suggests to me where Winters may have gotten his pseudoEmerson: from John Dewey. The piece is also a good short intro to Emerson–or to a central aspect of his thinking–and I would recommend taking a look at it.:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_self_reliance.html

Emerson is fascinating to read (in part) because he is always struggling with his own ideas. His aphorisms are often misleading taken out of the context of his writing. His famous early essays–the Divinity School Address, Self Reliance, etc.– are themselves pretty one-sided but his journals never are and his best essays–e.g. "Experience"–are dizzying in their dialectical nimbleness.

In the long run, the master term in Emerson is not even impulse; it is power, the power of fresh life. Such power is the ultimate quest of his famous self-reliance. This is what drew Nietzsche to him. (All of Nietzsche’s major terms derive from an Emersonian vocabulary, though Nietzsche sometimes confuses–as Emerson never does–power of self with power over others.)

Finally, Emersonian power of self has many possible manifestations–see his Representative Men for a sampling–but in Emerson himself it took an almost exclusively intellectual/literary form–because that’s the sort of guy he was.

Of course, having now read your post before digging deeply into the poems, I’ve partially violated the sound principle just mentioned. Mea culpa.