Osher RIT Fall 2025
Donna Richardson
John Keats did “cease to be” at only 24 before arriving at a mature philosophy, but he did realize some of the best poems ever written about the experience of appreciating art, and what art can accomplish. We’ll read his poems about art, and finish with his acquaintance Percy Shelley’s poetic elegy on Keats and art, Adonais. No books to buy; texts are on this site and will also be emailed to participants.
In his tragically brief life, John Keats aspired to join the pantheon of great literature, specifically to emulate, if not surpass, Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and his immediate predecessor (and perceived rival) Wordsworth. To paraphrase his own words, he ceased to be before he could glean from his teeming brain a clear sense of his own philosophy, or of what subject matter to address. (Hey, if Shakespeare had died at 24 and 2/3, he would have completed—nothing. He was probably still holding horses in front of the theater.)
But in the process, Keats did brilliantly realize, in polished form and content, some of the best poems ever written on the experience of appreciating OTHER people’s art—and on what art can, and cannot, accomplish. We will try to experience Keats’s progress from unqualifiedly depicting the “peak experience” of first reading a good translation of Homer, to poems about the more ambiguous and painful experiences he describes seeing the Elgin Marbles as well as reading Homer and King Lear, to possibly his greatest poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which synthesizes the complex joys and pains through which art can deliver (or so Keats thought at this point) a more satisfying experience of life than the “peak experiences” his Romantic contemporaries found in nature.
We will of necessity confine ourselves to 4-6 sonnets (some in more detail than others) and two odes, with side readings and comments on other works, as well as passages from Keats’s letters (all on this site and to be emailed).
Why Keats is good (if challenging) for learning HOW poetry works: Keats is the epitome of an old-fashioned poet who saw his work, not as some kind of personal self-expression (a concept he at least in principle abhors), but as part of the great tradition of European & classical poetry, epic & dramatic. As such, he not only “loaded every rift of his subject with ore,” using every imaginable poetic technique, but also used formally-elaborate genres with long thematic histories—the sonnet & the ode—which he evokes & then deliberately transforms in every detail. (In other words, we need to talk about the sonnet and the ode before rushing into the poems). He is also a poet’s poet in that he believes a poem “says something” but that the “something” is no cleanly-extractable “message”—it is the sum total of everything implied by experiencing that rich use of metaphors, sound effects, genres, etc. He provides a great “lesson plan” for learning about older poetry because his basic ideas in each poem are fairly easy to grasp—in broad, fuzzy outline—but it is the layering of poetic devices that enriches this meaning with complex ambiguities the reader can never exhaust. You can get the general idea by paraphrasing the poem—then experience more subtlety the more you look at how each technique layers on additional meaning.