Keats packet的答案上中

Homework 2017/12/31.

Questions for Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22nd November 1817

1. How do Mustapha Mond and Keats view beauty and truth? What are the similarities and differences?

Mustapha Mond view beauty and truth as something that cannot be achieved when people choose to be happy and comfort. He describes truth and beauty as some luxuries that cannot be easily obtained without giving up some other things. That it was never truly achieved because when the mass get holds of the power, they would consider happiness more important than truth and beauty but yet they would still try to reach for them. Keats on the other hand came up with the idea of sensation over thoughts, basically saying that if one is to enjoy happiness, then truth could never be obtained.

2. Keats in this letter longs for “a life of sensation rather than of thoughts!” Do you think he desires a world like the one in Brave New World? Why or why not?

No, because what Brave New World provide is till different from what Keats want. Brave New World did abandon people’s pursue of truth, but it at the same time limited people’s imagination. What Keats was saying in this letter is that people should live a life of sensation, which in other words, people should not limit their imaginations. But Brave New World limited both imagination and thoughts (logic). Residents in Brave New World are merely puppets who listen to the orders and live a perfect life.

3. “The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, - he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning - and yet it must be.” Paraphrase this –what is Keats saying? Do you agree or disagree?

He is saying that what people could imagine would probably end up being the truth, as along as people could prove it. Yet Keats himself never do had an experience where he logic his imagination out and made it become the truth. So for him, this perception about the nature of truth is intriguing. I agree his thinking, because there are many things build just by mere imagination. It is imagination and curiosity and laziness that pushes the world forward.

4. Consider why Keats constantly uses food and eating metaphors in this letter: “delicious place,” “delicious voice”, “delicious face” “careful of its fruits”, “drink this old wine of Heaven”, “redigestion of our most ethereal Musings on Earth.”

5. What do you think this says about Keats’s worldview and views about art?

Keats obviously is romantic, he is more emotional, rather than logical, yet he do not deny the importance of reasoning, which in his words led to the ultimate truth of the beauty in imagination.

Questions for Letter to George and Tom Keats

1. John Keats, in a letter to Reynolds in Feb. 1818 continues his discussion of the poetic ideal of Negative Capability:

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us – and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”

Paraphrase this passage and discuss how it relates to the 1817 letter to his brothers. Keats is saying that poetry should not focus on its form and its use of words but rather than its meaning and what it wants to express. Which is like what he discusses in his letter to his brother, about the beauty and truth of the poetry should not be poetry itself but the idea it passes on. Depth is more important then the alikeness of the form of poetry, which basically everyone could obtain if they learn.

2. Why does Keats turn to Shakespeare when discussing Negative Capability? How does Shakespeare exhibit “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason?”

Because what Shakespeare is the “Man of Achievements in Literature”, and most of Shakespeare’s work contain Negative Capability, his works often question the society, and his work also possess the kind of quality that make people think along his story. They do not follow the crowd.

3. What do we learn about Keats’s social life in this letter? How does the way he presents his social life complement his views on Negative Capability?

He knew Shelley and they two were probably friends, and he know Coleridge and seem to appreciate his poem. The poets he appreciate have great negative capability?

Questions for “Letter to Woodhouse”

1. What do you think Keats means by the “Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime” based on your understanding of Negative Capability?

2. Why does the camelion poet receive “no harm” from “its relish of the dark side of things?” 3. What evidence can we find in this letter to argue that Keats is an “intertextual” poet? 4. Paraphrase this: “But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live.” Questions for “Ode to a Nightingale”

1. Look at the form of each stanza – how are the stanzas similar to sonnets?

2. The poem is written in iambic pentameter except for the eighth line of each stanza which is iambic trimester – why do you think this is?

3. Read “Keats in an Age of Consumption.” Summarize the article’s argument and how we can apply this argument to Keats’s concept of Negative Capability. 4. How can we apply Marx’s concept of “alienation” to the poem?

5. In what ways can we consider “Ode to a Nightingale” as an intertextual poem? Discussion Questions for “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 1. Do you agree with the final two lines? Why or why not?

2. Some critics feel that Keats is saying that Art is superior to Nature. Is Keats thinking or feeling or talking about the urn only as a work of art?

3. In the final couplet, is the poem saying that pain is beautiful? You must decide whether it is the poet (a persona), Keats (the actual poet), or the urn speaking.

4. How could your answer to the previous question be considered an intertextual struggle? Questions for “This living hand” 1. What challenge is the speaker offering?

2. What is the significance of the “hand?” Why not another body part? 3. What is the speaker “earnest[ly] grasping” for?

4. Many early scholars believed this was written to Fanny Brawne, but others think this was written down for use in a later drama. What do you think? 5. How can we consider this an intertextual poem?