[Clive Watkins]

http://res.oxfordjournals.org/conten...hgs021.full#F2

[Gregory Dowling]

Clive, I think the historical scholarship in this essay is rather overwhelming, and that is why your post has had no responses as yet. I have still not had time to read it properly but from my skim-reading I have managed to glean (as Keats would and, indeed, does put it) some good insights: in particular, the scholarly precision of the details about the setting of the poem, in both time and place, brings out just how particular and specific a picture Keats gives us in this ode. Some of the scholarship here may seem a little more pedantic than many of us would feel is necessary but it's a good tribute to Keats's own precision.

I remember Anthony Hecht saying it is the most beautiful poem in the language. I don't think I would argue with that.

I look forward to reading the essay with the attention it clearly deserves. I'm just posting this so that the thread doesn't get lost.

[Roger Slater]

I looked at this essay for about ten minutes but had to stop because my head almost exploded. Then I went back over it to see if the essay was actually a parody, but it appears to be serious. Yes, the Keats ode is arguably the most beautiful poem ever written, but I don't think its beauty lies even slightly in its exploration of "the management of food production and supply, wages and productivity," do you?

[John Whitworth]

No I don't. And an essay about this poem that it takes three people to write is unlikely to come up with much of interest as far as the poem is concerned. The phrase 'conceptualising his poetic practice' also tells me much more than I want to know. Have any of you ever tried to conceptualise your poetic practice?

As I was lying on the green
A small volume it chanced I seen.
Carlyle's 'Essay on Burns' was the edition.
I left it lying in the same position.

But I bet Carlyle was better than these three wise monkeys.

[Orwn Acra]

It gets better after the abstract Abstract, but I find it hilarious that it took three people to explain that Keats went on a walk, found inspiration, and wrote a poem.

I like the part explaining how bookstores work:

If Keats, frustrated by the lack of an accessible library, did not actually buy one of the available guides to Winchester, he would have been able to enter the bookshop, take a seat and browse through them.

[Roger Slater]

I'm not sure bookshops in those days provided chairs for customers to sit and read any book they chose. Sloppy scholarship. Where's the source for that claim?

[Gregory Dowling]

I can't really argue with these responses to the essay, because I still haven't read it properly (and that may partly be because of the effect Roger describes), and I certainly don't think the poem's beauty lies in his exploration of "the management of food production and supply, wages and productivity"; however, my glance through the essay does lead me to believe that it identifies one of the great strengths of the poem: the fact that, for all its tone of suspended reverie, it is in fact a very realistic poem, written about a real farm during a real autumn. And I do have a certain admiration for people who will go to the land-registers and contemporary journals in the pursuit of their studies (even if it takes three of them).

It's possible that I exaggerated when I said I looked forward to reading the essay, but I have vowed to do so the next time I prepare a lesson on the poem (if only to impress the students with my knowledge of early 19th-century farming practices).

[Roger Slater]

I don't see why one needs scholarship to notice the meticulous and realistic attention to detail that Keats displays in the poem. In fact, I would have thought that this was one of the commonplace observations about the poem, and other Keats passages. It is certainly something that I have remarked on to myself and others over the years.

In "Autumn," for example, that is precisely why I particularly love these lines:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies

The image of the gnats passively rising or falling to the whim of a breeze always made me marvel at Keats's microscopic attention to the world around him. The same marveling happens in Melancholy, with:

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips

There, Keats doesn't just see the bee, but the sipping mouth of the bee, which he weaves into a splendidly complex metaphor.

The question for me, apropos the article, is whether I would admire or understand the bee-mouth line better if I were to determine that Keats had a fondness for honey or access to a bookshop selling books about insects. I doubt it very much. The poem makes clear that he sees minutely and clearly. I'm actually quite baffled by the essay.

[Gregory Dowling]

Fair enough, Roger. I look forward to hearing from Clive; I'll be interested to find out why he posted it.

[John Whitworth]

Sorry to ne boring but can someone tell me what 'conceptualising his poetic practice' actually means and how you do it if you are a poet? Sounds like balls to me, but I am prepared to be wrong. I don't know exactly why I think so, but I bet Quincy would know.