Ode on an (emotionally charged) Urn?:

The suppression of "the negative capability" through editorial alteration in the Lamia edition.

by Al Provinziano

A Common Misconception

In class, many people said they found Keats easy to grasp a hold of because he seems to present concrete images in his poetry; the general conception about "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is that the poem is on some, as yet undiscovered, Greek vase or urn. However, the original version of the poem, published in the Annals of the Fine Arts leaves open an ambiguity as to the nature of the urn.The Annals edition presents a poem which illustrates the fusion of the speaker's emotions with theurn. Unfortunately, Keats' editors--Woodhouse and Taylor--drown out the voice of the speakerwho unifies himself to the Urn because they want to focus on the urn's timelessness; this creates an unnecessary separation of voice for the Urn from the speaker. The result is to dissipate the negative capability of the speaker and make it seem to be an ode to an aesthetic object (please see "Appendix I: The Negative Capability" for a background and a definition of this theory).

Editors drown the Fusion of Emotion and Urn, in the Ode.

Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a Greek vase--a Man and two women--whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness; and is arare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind. --Keats in a journal letter to his brother George, written in March of 1819 (Gittings, Keats 313).

What is the "only happiness," the "rare instances" that he can only distinguish in their disguisement? While it is impossible to ascertain exactly what is on Keats' mind, there are important emotional elements in his environment and his life surrounding the creation of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn": his love for Fanny Brawne, which is tempered by his inability to marry her, and the death of his brother Tom (in December 1818), which brought death looming close over his shoulder. These factors created a sense of celebration of life for its pleasures, but also a sense of foreboding on its ills.

The exact date of the composition of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is between April twenty-sixth and May eighteenth, 1819 (Gittings, Odes 8). Amidst of these teetering emotions, Keats' spirit was enriched by the spring; he says:

O there is nothing like fine weather...and health, and Books, and a fine country, and a contentedMind, and Diligent habit of reading and thinking, and an amulet against the ennui--and please heaven, a little claret-wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep--with a few or a good many ratafia cakes--a rocky basin to bathe in, a strawberry bed to say your prayers to Flora in, a pad nag to go you ten miles or so; (First week of May, Keats to his sister, in Motion 381)

Keats' letter makes it clear that the dissipation of wintry gloom caused an enlivenment, a sense of renewal and happiness in life, due to the spring. The composition took place somewhere near Wentworth Place in Hampstead, the home of his friend Charles Brown (Gittings, Keats 304). Keats went on walk on the gardens of these estates and composed his poetry often at early dawn (Motion 382). This is a potential influence--as a surrounding environment--on the springtime represented in the "urn." Also, there was good weather at Wentworth for the days surrounding the poems composition (Gittings, Keats 311). Gittings believes this influenced Keats' poetry and saturated itwith the lush natural settings of the surroundings (Keats 311).

Amidst the happiness of the weather, Fanny Brawne and her family moved next to Wentworth Place. Fanny was a woman he loved, Gittings supposes this influenced Keats to be in a more amorous mood than previously represented in his poetry. Now he was able to see Brawne on a day-to-day basis, where before they were ripped apart by distance (Keats, 305, 312). However, this resuscitation of love came with a melancholy sense because he was unable to immediately engagehimself for marriage with Brawne; he was unable to make much money from the sale of his poetry and was heavily in debt (Gittings, Keats 312). Therefore, this provided a tension in his life: an amorous inclination, but a lack of consumation--due to his poor personal wealth (Gittings, Keats 292).

In the previous months--specifically December seventh of 1818--his brother Tom passed away, due to consumption (Motion 327-328). Keats felt the forebodingness of death swinging close by him because he was exposed to tuberculosis, over an extended period of time (this disease claimed his life in a little over two years time) (Motion, 329). To his brother George, he wrote a sonnet on "Darkness," which espoused the ways death and suffering were a part of his life (Motion, 360). However, it is during this season of spring time renewal that the ominousness of death around him decreased because the natural setting became suddenly alive from the gloom of the winter (Gittings, Odes 6 and 10). Therefore, this allowed him to reconcile with the idea of death, his inability to fulfill his love into his use of the negative capability--which he had given up on the theory, due to his personal tragedies. Therefore, hw was able to come to some point of commiseration between the forces of trouble, disagreeableness in his life and with love (Gittings, Keats 312).

These emotions factor into what he can see as images on the vase. The catalyst for this thought comes from his friend Robert Benjamin Haydon. The emotions of ambition, love, and death were probably intense-- given his poetic sensibilities from his ideas on the negative capability. The lightning bolt which catalyzed these ideas struck Keats, when he read Haydon's review of Raphael's The Sacrifice at Lyrstra and another article which compared Raphael to artists who seemed above passion (in The Examiner of May second and ninth, 1819):

Although the sacrificial animal in the cartoon is a white bull, Haydon gave a great deal of information about the Greek ceremonies, in which a heifer, garlanded, was the victim, and the worshipers were often loose-robed, with disheveled hair...he went on to contrast Raphael (to) Michelango. (His) creations "look as if they were above the influence of his time; they seem as if they would never grow old, and had never been young."...his articles and his print-books, had an immediate effect, but he had only revived in Keats a train of thoughts that ran through all his life. The "immortal youth" of the Greek spirit...he (Keats) now applied this idea as a touchstone to his own recurrent problem of the impermanence of human life. (Gittings 318-319)

Upon reading the art review, Keats met with Haydon. Haydon gave him the idea on how to present his own life through the invention of a greek vase, not as an ode to a urn itself, but as a creation of his imagination to present his own meditation on life (Motion, 391). The main idea Haydon imparted to him was that Greek art is an ideal form of beuty because its formal perfection mirrored it society (Motion 390). This conception has to do with the negative capability, served as station piece for his own ideas. While, Keats had seen Greeks vases before from Haydon, visited the Elgin Marbles and sketched the Soisbios vase, these are influences on the way in which the bearty of greek art represents its society in its art (Motion 390-391). However, they are not the subject of the Ode itself, but influences on its production, not as the vase itself.

Haydon reviewed the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," as well as "Ode to a Nightingale," and recomended them to his friend James Elmes (Gittings, 325). Elmes was the editor of the Annals of Fine Arts and associated with Haydon, due to Haydon's work on renaissance sculpture and ancient art. The Annals was a poignant magazine to publish this work in because it was a publication devoted to the promotion of Greek Art (Motion, 390). Therfore, placing "Ode on A Grecian Urn" in this journal, Keats signaled his own devotion to the idea of perfection through greek from (Motion390).

The poem was copied by Brown, under Keats supervision, and turned over to Elmes to be printed in January 1820 edition of the Annals , without any editorial interferance (Motion 390). This initial edition of the poem present an urn fused with the voice of the speaker and makes their voices become to seem as if they are indistingusihable from one another (please see next section). The version presented to Elmes is considered to be the more authoritative version, since Keats was healthy and he saw it through print. The important thing to note is the variation in syntax throughout the entire poem.

However, in the same version (but a different copy) presented by Brown to Richard Woodhouse for the Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnus, and other Poems edition (published June 26,1820). Unfortunately, Keats became sick and was unable to give much authorial direction in its editing and publication (Motion, 520). In this way, Keats effectively abdicated his work to Woodhouse because he trusted his ability to be faithful to his poetry (Motion, 521). While, Woodhouse had a knowledge of the theory behind Keats' negative capibility, he was of a more conservative in his editorial style and the presentation of this capablitity. (Motion, 390). Therfore, the Lamia editors, Woodhouse along with John Taylor (also Keats' publisher) focused on and representing the Urn as a timelessness object (Gittings, Odes 70). In so doing, however, they substantively altered the syntax of the poem and seperated the voice of the narrator and created a seprate voice for the urn. (whereas in the Annals version, there is a move from a seperate urn to an ambiguity of the fusion between the speaker's voice and the urn).

While the editors did offer Keats choice, he was plagued by consumption (tuberculosis) and was unable to halt the changes made by the editors, which was also partly due to an editorial anxiety to alter the poems in order to make them more agreeable to the publice, due to Keats' earlier failure to be appreciated with Endymion (Motion 520-522). Keats was so distressed over the corruption of the poem that in his personal distribution copy, he crossed out the editorial advertisement and wrote: "this is none of my doing--I was too ill at the time" and "this is a lie" (Motion 522).

Sadly, the Lamia edition's syntax remained as the authoritative version because Keats left for Italy before he could do anything about the alteration (Motion, 530). Once he left for Rome, his condition slowly worsened to a point that his poetic ambitions had to be put aside, in favor of his health because he was slowlt dying from tuberculosis. Therefore, Keats untimely death contributed to the reception of the Urn in the Lamia edition rather than the Annals because this edition was considered to be more aligned with the author, than any other copy of his poetry (All the odes appear-for the first time--in a sequence together, gave credence to this edition of the poems as more comprehensive than any other copy) (Motion, 393 & Gittings Odes, 70).

Two Different Voices, Two Different "Odes": A Suppression of the Negative Capability

"They are very shallow people who tale everything literal"
--Keats (Bates 511)

In some sense, the editors of the 1820 edition chose to take Keats' choice of an urn too literally and accentuated the differences between the speaker's voice and gave a voice to the urn. This editorial action submerged the negative capability movements of the speaker because they intensify the separateness of the urn from the speaker, when the idea of negative capability is a fusionwith the object - but not separateness - of the poet with the aesthetic object (see appendix on the Negative Capability). Therefore, the Annals edition presents an initial separation of the speaker and the urn, which quickly become fused into one voice because it shows the process of the unification of the Urn and the speaker. (please note: there are numerous instance of grammatical distance betweenthe two editions; due to space constraints, I will focus on the most glaring of those distances).

The way in which personal emotion becomes fuse with the Urn survive in the images on the urn. In stanza II, the piper who "never canst...kiss," but "for ever wilt thou love" is a moment of Keats, potentially, symbolizing himself through the piper and catching the intensity of emotion about his inability to consummate his love with Fanny Brawne (ll.17, 20); he is in love with her but can,tlegitimately be with her because he doesn,t have enough money to become engaged. Therefore, a sense of ambiguity emerges between Keats' speaker as representing his own life and the imageson the urn. The image becomes a point of fusion on the emotional suffering (in some sense) of Keats': his ability to be close to someone he loves by writing her a poem, just as the piper sings his song, yet there is still a gulf between him and his love (a love-poem to Brawne is mentioned in Gittings, Keats 311).

In Stanza III, the setting of the images on the Urn is spring time (the speaker says: "nor ever bid the Spring Adieu" on the ability of the urn to stay in spring) (ll.22). In this image on the vase, Keats' speaker reveals his desire to live in an eternal spring, just as Keats writes in his letter to his sister on his exuberance about the dawning season ("O there is nothing like fine weather," from above). However, despite the "happy" spring, it leaves the "heart high-sorrowful and cloyed" (ll.29). This feeling of sorrow is related to the death of his brother Tom and its feelings of powerlessness in Keats; it mimics the rhetoric of his "Darkness" sonnet, which is about the contradictory emotions of life and death, which he can,t completely reconcile on his own.

In Stanza IV, the garland heifer and the sacrifice ceremony are related to the far removed and ancient people in the vase because cannot tell their story "evermore," due to the fact that they don,t exist (ll.38). Since Keats' brother died of tuberculosis, this exposed him to the possibility of immanent death to the same disease. In some sense, the Greek act of sacrifice, of ritual with the heifer, is an event without a story behind it, just as Keats might empathize with his own poetry's loss of meaning after his death. Therefore, there is a fusion of emotion between Keats himself and the poem because the emotions surrounding his life, the anxiety of his oncoming death and the future existence and meaning of his poetry become enfused in the ritual sacrifice and its evaporated meaning.

The point of representing these images is to show the way the climate of Keats emotions--a tug-of-war between melancholy and exuberance--are present on the Urn. While the evidence of the fusion between the urn and Keats emotions survives, the fusion of the speaker and the urn--the ambiguity between the concreteness of the Urn and the speaker's separate identity is not present in the Lamia edition because it works to separate these two objects. However, the Annals edition focuses on the process of unification between the urn and speaker as a process in Stanza I, which runs through the emotional identification of the urns images and culminates into a fusion of voice in Stanza V.

In the Lamia edition of the Ode, the opening line is: "thou still unravished bride of quietness." However, in the Annals version, "thou still," has a comma at the end of "still." Therefore, the Annals version allows for an initial separation between the Urn and the speaker because the comma is an intensifier and a recognition of an actual object, of its stillness. While, the Lamia edition's represents a separate object, the focus is on emphasizing the timeless quality of the urn because "still" comes to connote unravished or unfulfilled, this covers up the potential emotion in the Urn (unravished means in some sense unfulfilled sexually or emotionally). It remains an object untouched by time. The result of this is to "cover-up" in the Lamia version is to the initial separation which will open up the fusion of the Speaker's voice and the Urn, later on in the poem.

The most poignant difference between the version, is the separation of the Urn's voice from the Speaker's voice, in Stanza V of the Lamia version:

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'; that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(ll.48-50, Wu 1061)

The quotation makes around "Beauty" separates the fusion of emotions and images in the previous stanza because it gives the Urn a separate voice from the speaker. The affect this produces is to alter the meaning of the poem because it submerges the fact there is emotional commiseration between the speaker and the urn. This idea of unification with an object is a key point to Keats' idea on the negative capability because it involves an ambiguity of the relationship between the poet and the object. The poet is supposed to throw his own identity into an object, in order for all the other factors to evaporate and leave the purity of emotion he attempts to communicate. Therefore, the Lamia version's separation of the speaker and the urn thwarts the exposition of the negative capability.

In contrast to Lamia, the Annals version closes without quotation marks because it shows the unity of the speakers voice and the urn:

Than ours a friend to Man, to whom thou say'st
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.--That is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
(Annals edition, ll.48-50, Motion 390)

The original absence of quotation marks around the "Beauty" quote creates an ambiguity on whether its the speaker or the urn voice or a combination issuing this wisdom. While the speaker does say "thou say'st" (of the urn), this is not a separation of the vase from the speaker because it becomes an agreement with the vase, an acquiescence to the knowledge it imparts. The ambiguity is important because it remains faithful to Keats negative capability by leaving open the possibility of a unification between the two objects. In the Lamia version, "truth" and "beauty" take on an admonishing quality, whereas in this version they come into a simultaneous existence because of the commiseration between the speaker and the urn; once there is an evaporation of distinction, then the only thing left to communicate is the intensity of the object's message, to Keats this is the merging of "beauty" and "truth."

In some sense this is ironic discussion on meaning because the scene of the heifer is about the lack of meaning in ritual art due to the sufferings of time, just as Keats' meaning suffered at the pen of his editor. The fusion of voices is drowned in the Lamia edition because there becomes a certain fixed quality to the urn and its images, which is not present in the Annals edition of the poem. Therefore, it seems the Annals version of "Ode on A Grecian Urn" is closer to the aesthetic theory of Keats, than the widely received Woodhouse version of the poem because the Annals maintains an emotional ambiguity on the relationship between its author, speaker and object.

Works Cited

Bates, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd., 1968.

- - -. The Odes of Keats and Their Earliest Known Manuscripts. London: Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd., 1970.

Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998.

Appendix I: The Negative Capability

The purpose of this discussion is to briefly present a central aspect to Keats' aesthetic thought. While this would serve as a definitional role in an analytic paper, in this paper its purpose isas background information on Keats' unifying system of thought, which in itself is important tounderstand why the changes from the version of the "Grecian Urn" in the Annals of Fine Art to theLamia edition of 1820 suffocate the role of the negative capability.

*

Keats' theory on the "negative capability" is a conception of poetry which concentrates oncapturin the intensity of emotion and communicating this feeling via the imagination. The process to do this involves a key action: the poet must throw himself into an object in order to obliterate his personal identity. The purpose of the obliteration of personal identity into an object is to fuse emotional intensity with the object (Bates 260-261); in this way, the object becomes symbolic of the emotions. The imagination is involved in the receptiveness of the poet to another object: toenpicture himself (his emotions) through another object (Bates 257) [This is my claim on the speaker's representation of an Urn in "Ode on A Grecian Urn"]. In this unity, it is not theconcreteness of the object, but the fusion of the object into the poet's identity which is important because it is this fusion which will communicate the poet's intense emotions (Bates 247). Keats expresses this idea as:

The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty & truth--Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury it repulsiveness. [letter from Keats to his brother George on Benjamin West's "Death on the Pale Horse"]

In the active cooperation or full "greeting" of the experiencing imagination and its object, the nature or "identity" of the object is grasped so vividly that only those associations and qualities that are strictly relevant to the central conception remain.(Bates 243)

Keats' claim is the power of art is in its ability to communicate emotional intensity. The poet's fusion of his emotions into an object imparts this intensity because "the disagreeables"--for example the loss of Kingship in Lear--become unimportant as the emotion, symbolic through the object (lost kingship) takes on central importance. Therefore, "The irrelevant and discordant (the "disagreeables") "evaporate" from this fusion of object and mind. Hence "Truth" and "Beauty" spring simultaneously into being, and also begin to approximate each other" (Bates 243). Since the idea becomes so vivid, due to the fusion which evaporates everything except for the emotion, the beauty of the object coincides with the truth of the existence of the object. Therefore, the object's beauty (the Urn) and the truth of the scenes it represents become one thing: the truth of the message--despite its unsettling--becomes beautiful:

For, on the one hand, the external reality--otherwise overlooked, or at most only sleepily acknowledged, or dissected so that a particular aspect of it may be abstracted for special purposes of argument or thought--has now, as it were, awakened into "Truth": it has been met by that human recognition, fulfilled and extended by that human agreement with reality, which we call "truth." And at the same time, with the irrelevant "evaporated," this dawning into unity is felt as "Beauty." (Bates 243)

While the usual impetus is to minimally recognize an object, the negative capability allows for that same object to become truth because it meets with the human intensity of emotion, comes to represent that truth. The evaporation is of the meaningless, the irrelevant to the emotion. Therefore, the beauty that emerges is of a unity of an object with emotion which comes to represent the poet's feelings.

It is at this point, Keats contends: "I mean negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason--with a great poet the sense of Beauty...obliterates all consideration" (Bates 249). The triumph of poetry is in its ability to obliterate the need to reach for certainty (especially and most likely the way science seeks facts), but to relish in ambiguities and in this relishing feel the sensation of emotion, while not yet being able to pin that same emotion on to the poet.