Applications Assignment 1

In the book, Keats’ Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes, by Cleanth Brooks, the main problem is the difference between Keats’ true meaning of his poem. Brooks is defining the beauty of the Ode itself as the topic of the article (Brooks 140). His main claim is that Keats should not have used the word “beauty” in his poem (Brooks 141). Brooks approaches this topic by laying the groundwork through other literary giants, such as T.S Eliot, and using their words to describe how he feels specifically about Keats’ word choice in the Ode. Brooks focuses on critiquing specific lines of Keats’ poem rather than being vague about the whole thing, “The reason should be clear:… was Keats the poet able to exemplify that relation in this particular poem?” (Brooks 141). Here Brooks is asking a major question of Keats’ work. The context of the final statement in the Ode relies solely on whether or not Keats was able to paint the picture of beauty he intended to. Looking at the word choice in the Ode through Brooks’ lens of thinking is important due to the major comparisons in writing he makes using other novelists and poets. He uses Shakespeare to apply the talk of beauty as a major idea of the Ode. The advantage to reading the poem using Brooks’ critiques is taking the emotion out of the Ode. Without the emotional heartstrings that Keats is trying to pull, the poem can be seen as Keats evolution into madness or the life cycle of this urn. Brooks’ way of thinking of this poem as a “speech” truly puts this poem into a different perspective that I didn’t think of before. Without Brooks’ perspective of Keats’ poem, the ironies of the poem wouldn’t be addressed. I feel as though Brooks makes good points about Keats’ work. His critiques aren’t saying that the poem is bad or has no meaning, it just makes me think about the depth of Keats’ repetitiveness and how the repeating of ideas is meant to showcase the growth throughout the Ode. I find myself resisting the analysis on page 144, where Brooks talks about revising the opening lines of the Ode. I find the opening lines of the Ode to be rather intriguing, and throughout my own analysis of the poem, I felt myself referring back to the first stanza many times to get my point across. I would take Brooks’ analysis and keep looking at the emotional journey Keats portrays throughout the Ode. I find that it would have great significance to talk about the full circle experience that Keats seems to come back to. I find that Brooks makes me think about the structure of the poem more than I did before I read the article.