Introduction: To be, or not to be: that is the question.

No word comes easier or oftener to the critics pen than the word influence, and no vaguer notion can be found among all the vague notions that compose the phantom armory of aesthetics. Yet there is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another. [...] Opposites are born from opposites. We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods. 1

Influence has been a key concept in modern literary criticism. In fact, Bloom preserves a whole theory to deal with poetic influence. To the critic, the study of influence is as intricate as the concept itself. The Anxiety of Influence2 and A Map of Misreading3 study poetic influence which is a question before the question. Additionally, the critic, before reading a literary text (play, poem, fiction) confronts the urge to identify the scheme of indebtness of present to predecessor. Bloom, in the Anxiety of Influence focuses on this complex relationship which may postpone any consideration of the text. The critic puts influence centre stage since as a reader he is compelled to deal with influence as a self-conscious attitude of both the poet and the critic.

Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continum, 1981) 48. Further reference to this book will be as CK. 2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Further reference to this book will be as AI. 3 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Further reference to this book will be as MM.

For Bloom, influence is an anxiety of poetic creation. This means that the young poet is deliberately put in a position of inferiority to the dead poets. Indeed, no great poet can afford to avoid going through the intricate experience of wavering between fear of imitation and dependence on his or her precursors. His inherent call for originality has to overcome his deeply-rooted feeling of debt to his tutors. In fact, those who have influenced for so long are by no means omnipresent as Charles J. Rzepka suggests: self-consciousness requires the presence, real or imagined, explicit or implied, of another.4The critic, therefore, finds himself in the intersection between the young poet and that other whose presence provokes the latters self-consciousness. Reading a literary text is an attempt of the critic to escape influence, similar to the young poet. For Bloom, reading is a defensive process and he thinks that (mis)reading is as self-conscious as preserving. The critic, reader of a poet, like the poet, faces influence. By invoking Harold Blooms The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, our aim is to create the image of the young poet. For the ephebe, the predecessors represent death which is an everpresent reality. Bloom, in this respect, situates the ephebe in a state of deathin life as the passage reads:
Negation of the precursor is never possible, since no ephebe can afford, to yield even momentarily to the death instinct. For poetic divination intends literal immortality, and any poem may be defined as a side stepping of a possible death.5

The image of the predecessor has been associated with ghosts, for its home is otherworldly. The ephebe, can never forget poets who succeeded before him; their inheritance is the origins to which he goes back or muses. Remember me, the ghost says to the young poet each time the latter yearns to
4

Charles J. Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats (Cambridge: Harvard, 1986) 6. Later reference to this book will be as SM. 5 AI 116.

free his conscious self from poetic influence. The image of the ghost is immortal, and the poets perpetual remembrance is a deadlock for him. It is a continuous nightmare of self-effacement. Not only is the dead poet a ghost, his image rather extends to envisage that of the father. His is further a poetic father whose coming voice from the far fields of death is potent and overwhelming. This other is the father who outcries remember me,6 his cry is almost a claim of priority over his still young son. In fact, an ephebe is indebted to a long history of tradition. The idea has been elaborated by many critics namely M.H. Abrams in his Natural Supernaturalism7 when referring to Wordsworth as a chosen son for Milton. Bloom, besides, refers to this acceptance as a form of inheriting a divine inspiration which is essential and primary for the act of creation.8 In fact, Blooms The Visionary Company9 studies this process of inheritance of an internal brightness from one British poet to another; one would recall T. S. Eliots opinion in this flow of ideas. To Eliot, the poet is part of the transmission from one generation of poets to another:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his a is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.10

The poet and the critic cannot achieve meaning without reference to dead poets and critics, as Eliot claims in the above quote. The poet, as well as the critic, has a tight relationship to his precursors. Indeed, Keats for example has no
6 7

CW, Hamlet (Act I, Scene V) 678. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973). See specifically Wordsworths Program for Poetry, 21. 8 Bloom again refers to the dead poets as God in AI: To represent, to accept a God altogether other than the self, wholly external to the possible. This God is cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to any thing more.
9

Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York: Doubleday& Company, Inc., 1961). Further refrence to this book will be as VC.
10

T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Mathuen & Co LTD, 1960) 49.

significance unless the critic refers to prominent influences of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. Elsewhere, in his introduction of John Keats, Bloom assumes that Keats wins freedom from tradition.11 It is that natural and organic quality of his romantic poetry and especially of his Odes, which realizes his freedom. In Ode to a Nightingale he accepts the idea of death beautifully before death comes (JK 7). We have already developed with reference specifically to Blooms The Anxiety of Influence the residue of Tradition, which is parental authority and death. Through imagination Keats gets rid of selfconsciousness in the Odes, Bloom claims in John Keats. He goes further in his explanation, and then comes to the resolution that this originality of the poet ranks him after Shakespeare. He is a natural genius like the canon.12 Like Hamlet whose dilemma is only over an action that remains enacted, Keatss action in fight against self-consciousness is procrastinated. The young poet, like the Prince of Denmark, never stops the internal debate over existence; thus to be, or not to be: that is the question is applicable to both. To be is to be taken as an act of defence against influence. This action is a matter of death or life, for by definition no poet, as poet, can wish to die, for that negates poethood (MM 91). Like Hamlet, the young poet is confronted with the stubborn reality that conscience does make cowards of us all.13 Keats and the Romantics are highly conscious of the strong influence of Shakespeare and Milton on them. Thus, this reality is an anxiety over poetic identity. In The Birth of Tragedy,14 Nietzsche argued that for the knowledge of reality Hamlet gave his life. He compares him to the Dionysian man, and I would rather shift

11

Harold Bloom, ed., John Keats (New York: Chelsea House, 2007). Further reference to this book will be as JK. 12 Quoted in Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994) 47. Shakespeare is the canon. He sets the standard and the limit of literature. Further reference to this book will be as WC. 13 CW 688, Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). 14 Frederic Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Doubleday, 1956). Further reference to this book will be as BTGM.

the focus from the Dionysian man to a young poet like Keats.15 So, the comparison between Hamlet and Keats spots the light on the anxiety of selfconsciousness. Wordsworth for instance claims his own weakness before composition as he asks Coleridge for help.16 As a cure from that anxiety of consciousness, Nietzsche proposes forgetfulness. Without forgetfulness, action will never take place; and a poet loses the endeavour of his entire life. At this point one might recall Bloom depicting the man of action, the true poet using Nietzsches words elaborating his previous idea (Bloom 58). The true poet, Nietzsche adds,
is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognizes one law-the law of that which is to be.

Keats finds his way to poetic achievement and freedom from anxiety as he contemplated the greatness of Shakespeare. He drifted from Wordsworths influence to that of Shakespeares art. His letters, in fact, are the gist of his meditation upon literature and poetry in particular. They are the output of his inclination to Shakespeare; also they announce his engagement to poetry. The letters question and answer the questions of poetic identity, life and art. His concept of Negative Capability is most celebrated because it deals with the issue of invention and poetic genius that Shakespeare is the first example of, and Keats is the second. We will discover when analysing Shakespeare and Keatss texts that they are a residue or a point of convergence of the poet with his object, as well as the
15

Quoted in BTGM 51. [The young poet] might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have understood and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlets doctrine, [] what, both in the case of Hamlet and of [the young poet], overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but understanding, the apprehension of truth and its terror. [] The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence. 16 Wordsworth claims in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads his weakness for musings as he says: from a consciousness of my own weakness, I was induced to request the assistance of a friend, NAEL 1437.

reader with his text. Negative capability, with both aspects Melancholy and Rhetoric, is a quality of the self-divided poet to grasp ambiguities and contradictions of his own life and the whole world. The final premise of this paper is resolving the modernity of Keatss theory, also his success at claiming authenticity like his ideal Shakespeare. Negative capability can bring fresh thoughts about the maturity of the reader by the same token. My thesis, in this paper, is that Negative Capability is a medium of artistic and aesthetic communication in Shakespeares greatest achievement Hamlet, and Keatss Odes. Here, the word medium may be understood as a mediator since I wish to emphasise the in-betweeness of Negative capability. For apart from being a quality of poetic greatness, it is a tie, a tool, device for interaction between text and reader. In the first part, we will discuss the different meanings of Negative Capability including identifying with a contemplated object or persona, and also the submission of the poet to mysteries and contradictions, notably pain and pleasure, hope and despair and life and death. Keats referred to Shakespeare as the one who has this anti-solipsistic quality. The first part condenses Keatss major thoughts from the letters starting up with Wordsworths egotistical sublime and closing this part with the Poetical Character and the Chameleon Poet. One crucial thought that goes along the papers stance, and marks Keatss poetic maturity as follows:
I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately, and increased my humility and capability of submissionand that is this truthMen of genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the mass of neutral intellectbut they have not any individuality, any determined character. I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self, Men of Power.17

17

Lord Houghton, ed., The Life and Letters of John Keats (London: Dent, 1954). See Letter to Bailey November 1817, 49-50. Further reference to this book will be in abbreviation as LTJK.

The second part will be concerned with two main aspects of Negative Capability in Hamlet and the Odes; they are Melancholy and Rhetoric. Both aspects reveal communication of the poet with the object, and also the text with the reader. They also explore the poets submission to ambiguity of their literary worlds, which Hamlets first soliloquy and Keatss Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn show. Hamlets melancholy, at peak in the first soliloquy, makes him experience the mystery of the world. In Now I am alone, Shakespeare is able to make Hamlet maintain a contradictory attitude in order to catch the conscious of the King, then take a decision to avenge. In this soliloquy, rhetorical language (negation, figures of speech and tropes) is a second token of Negative Capability. Both poets use rhetoric to relocate themselves in a contradictory world by nature. Rhetoric, the second chapter of part two deals with gaps in Hamlets Now I am alone and Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn. Gaps, in fact, are but devices of identification of the poet with his texts and the reader with his reading of the texts. Mystery of the literary world in both texts is enhanced with the tropes that language provides. This is indeed at a time illustrative of the poets capability to maintain an intricate literary text. Also, it is communicative as far as a reader can make part of the text as his reading is fruitful of different meanings.

Chapter One: Negative Capability and Wise Passiveness

Several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormouslyI mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of Mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no farther than this, that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration; or rather obliterates all consideration.18

Keatss concept of Negative Capability has been of interest, and has been given various interpretations. In a letter to Bailey on March 1818, Keats introduces a quality in literature that forms a man of achievement.(LLJK 7576) It is also possessed so enormously by Shakespeare for whom he has a great admiration. Negative Capability, as the poet conceives, is the ability to endure a world of mysteries and doubts; a Hamlet-like world. The poets idea involves an acceptance of the world as it is. The idea is closely linked to Keatss preference for a life of sensations rather than thoughts. For Keats, concreteness of sensations is more valuable than logic in getting knowledge or wisdom. Keatss stance, in the Negative Capability letter, has no intellectual dimension, since any attempt at rationalizing things is unmanageable with the Peneteralium of Mystery. Ideas about sensations dominate Wordsworths poetry. Similar

importance of sensory experience is placed by Wordsworth. The latters passive toward nature is described in his poem as Wise-passiveness. Later, we will see that Keatss Negative Capability is not different from Wordsworths Wise passiveness as both emphasize the importance of sensations rather than
18

LLJK 62.

thoughts. Both contribute to the poets intuitive or imaginative perception of the world. Walker Jackson Bate, in his essay, Negative Capability explores the meaning of Keats phrase. He emphasizes the intuitive approach to life of Keatss Negative Capability. Bate links I to sympathetic identification. The approach puts interest on the poets capacity for identifying with the outward world. In this respect, John Keats suggests that this quality, being a determinant of greatness (ripeness of intellect) moulds a literary genius. Keats cites Shakespeare as the best example of Negative Capability. William Shakespeare is the best example of Negative Capability, as Keatss letter reads. To Keats, he is so because he exclusively has the ability to extend in limitless possibilities for accommodation with objects and characters outside his own self. In his letter to Richard Woodhouse on October 27, he calls this ongoing process selfannihilation. We have already introduced Wordsworths concept of wise-passiveness which has a connection with Keatss Negative Capability. This connection might be understood as Wordsworths influence on Keats, yet it is not the aim of this paper to study the influence of Wordsworth on Keats. Negative Capability, an attitude that calls for the poets openness to a sensuous response to the world with no searching after fact &reason is echoed in Wordsworth. Like the state of Negative Capability, Wise-passiveness in a state of calm receptivity during which the mind and body receive impulses from the natural world while the intellectual part is laid asleep. For Wordsworth, too, there is no reaching after fact & reason, no need to explain or to rationalize. He enjoys a state of passive acceptance of things as they are. With Wordsworth knowledge is transmitted through senses. In a mood of tranquility, calmness and joy he receives a lot from nature. The meaning of wise passiveness indicates the relation of the poet to the world. Wise-passiveness describes Wordsworths passive attitude or rather anti-intellectual attitude toward Nature. Wordsworth
10

would call this attitude spontaneity; it is an intuitive and imaginative absorption of the world around him. The same happens to Keats in a state of Negative Capability. Wordsworth calls for this receptive attitude toward nature in his poem The Table Turned for our meddling intellect/ mis-shapes the beauteous things/We murder to dissect. Here, Wordsworth argues that rationalism modifies the beauty of things because intellect is meddling, and we may go back to Keats who prefers beauty to anything else as he says in the Negative Capability letter: with a great Poet the Sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration; or rather obliterates all consideration. Passivity is a feature of Wordsworths poetry. It is also a poets genius as Wordsworth expresses in the following lines:
The Genius of the Poet hence May boldly take his way among mankind Wherever Nature leads, that he hath Stood by Natures side among the men of old, And shall stand forever (Prelude, Book 13)

Passivity, or wise passiveness, is accepting the leadership of Nature, in Wordsworths view. His idea is reminiscent of Keatss idea about the poets submission to intuitive knowledge or wisdom that Nature preserves to the poet. In The Prelude again, Wordsworth reserves a whole Book to decry and reject knowledge made up of books (epitomized in the character of the boy who learns in a mechanical manner). He rather praises an organic learning in Nature. Accordingly, the poets centre stage message in The Table Turned is straightforward: let Nature be your teacher (NAEL 1431). This puts emphasis on Nature as a sober presence. In Tintern Abbey, this presence is
11

continually shaping human spirit and soul (PBERV 113). In fact, it is an important tenet of Romanticism, which Wordsworth challenged in his poetry. In The Table Turned, the poet affirms that spontaneous and calm reception of impulses from nature is of great importance. In the same way, Negative Capability illustrates this attitude. Wordsworth and Keats agree on the role of sensations in getting knowledge. Sensations, for Wordsworth are cognitive; it is a path to knowledge of reality. Therefore he refuses to submit to an intellectual understanding of the world. He instead communicates intuitively with it. In the same way, sensations for Keats are more expressive than thoughts. For both poets, sensory reception culminates in wise response. In The Table Turned thus, the speakers outcry calls to come forth, and bring with you a heart that watches and receives, for, he adds,
She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. (NAEL 1431, L15-24)

The response to Natures abundant wealth is carried out by sensory impulses. A poets world, nurtured with generic education, displays its own composure. We find the same case in Keatss Ode to a Nightingale, the poet receives an impulse hearing the birds singing. Then, he tenderly accepts to be utterly transported with the bird as he tells the nightingale already with thee. An organic process takes place spontaneously when the poets senses and
12

imagination subdue to Nature calmly. It is a state of subduing the rational part of the mind to the emotional one celebrating the intercourse of sense (Prelude, Book 2). In such affective state, to finer influxes the mind lay open to a more exact and close communion (Prelude, Book2). The book is made up indeed of the poets recollections of joyful and sublime sensations gifted by Nature. Wordsworths I Wandered Lonely as a cloud provides an illustration of this mood that involves passiveness and repose. Wordsworth feels the pleasure to experience wise passiveness, or Negative Capability, as he wonders in solitude. The poem is about a sensory experience in nature as Wordsworth receives impulses of sight from the wavering daffodils and the reflected stars in a lake. Sensuous impressions are the source of joy and inspiration to the poet as the closing stanza shows:
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

(NA) The inward eye or the mind of the poet is impressed by the beauty and quietness of the scene. In a state of joy, the poets imagination roams into realms of imaginative thought. The poem starts with physical impulses, then moves to musings of the poets inward eye. The poem exemplifies Wordsworths Wise passiveness. To further illustrate the relationship between sensory receptivity and imaginative thought, let us go back to Prelude 1850, Book 5, where Wordsworth explains the process of reception and response between the Boy of Winander and Nature. Book 5, depicts the mood of gentle and spontaneous interaction of the boy with nature, the process is so passive that the boys mind appears as unconscious receiving the sounds of nature;
13

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried fan into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind, With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake.

(The Prelude 1850, Book 5) Bate refers to a wordsworthian idea which would help us better approach Keatss concept of Negative capability, that of Wise passiveness. It duplicates the central theme of The Table Turned. Like The Table Turned, Expostulation and Reply elucidates Wordsworths philosophy: nature and the language of sense are authentic tutors for a young poet like himself. A duologue between Wordsworth and his friend Matthew, the latters expostulation remonstrates the fruitful education of dead men. In reply to this, Wordsworth seeks to speak directly to nature since she speaks to him via eye and ear. The young poet is a good learner; he is led in a sleepy state by his teacher. Our bodies feel and our minds retreat in her powerful presence. Here come the final stanzas depicting this image:
Nor less I deem that there are powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness. Think you, mid all this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking?
14

--then ask not wherefore, here, alone, Conversing as I may, I sit upon this old grey stone, And dream my time away. (Italics mine, NAEL 1430)

In Expostulation and Reply a controversial expression is italicized; it is significantly in keeping with Keatss theory of Negative Capability. Wise passiveness, an expression that links wise and passive; I understand from the coinage of these two words that Wordsworth means the poet gets wisdom in a state of passivity; when rationality recedes and sensuousness advents. The expression refers inherently to a serene and blessed mood enabling the poet to be taken somewhere, or as Keats says in his letter, it is the ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts. The poet undergoes an experience that allows him to see beyond the immediate appearance of objects. Wordsworths Tintern Abbey, notably, gives us an insight of the speakers mystical experience through the working of memories of sensations and imagination. The epistemological locus is left at the end when the poets sensual affinity with the world makes him see into the life of things; in other terms, truth comes to the speaker as soon as he deeply harmonizes with the world. Murry, in his Keats and Shakespeare, refers to this harmony as this submission of consciousness to unconsciousness (KS 139). And the coming lines show that process of communication between sensation and imagination:
These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind mans eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

15

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration. (NAEL 1432)

From this sensuous state the poet moves into:

That blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (NAEL 1433)

The affections gently lead us on to an imaginative flight and we are led asleep in body. Alike, the speaker in the Ode to a Nightingale flees to the fancy world of ephemeral happiness. In this atmosphere, the dull brain perplexes and retards; reality perplexes the speaker (PBERV 277). Therefore he substitutes reality with an imaginative perception through dreams and visions.

16

Imagination can be involved in the definition of Negative Capability. When imagination is active with this state, poetic creation begins. It shapes the poets creative passivity vis vis Nature, and represents it in art. Thus, imagination is not an illusion but the poets affinity with the truth of objects he beholds, and also an invitation to the reader to interpret reality. In Ode to a Nightingale, he is with the bird already with thee he said, and conscious that it is a temporary encounter with the fancy world (PBERV 277). He is so with this world that he cannot go back to reality:
Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famd to do, deceiving elf. (PBERV 278)

Keatss interest in sensations and imagination is significant to the idea of Negative Capability. It might be considered as the quality of joining the mystery of imagination. Negative Capability for Keats is shown in his poetic imagination. Here, we refer to Rzepka explaining this idea. In The Self as Mind, Rzepka analyses the poets escape from embodiment. The poet rather loses any sense of self; he projects himself into the self poetically embodied (Rzepka 175). In the fancy world of imagination, the poet outlives space and time where the subject joins the addressed object. The Nightingale, an immortal Bird, immortalizes the speaker, and her song makes him forget his coming death (PBERV 278). The personas embodied self eternalizes the poet. It is an infinite (limitless) poetic self. Keats extols truth of the embodied self in poetry. Keats has faith in the authenticity of his genial spirit (Coleridge calls imagination). He claims his faith in his letter of 22 November 1817 entitled as the Authenticity of Imagination:
17

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the hearts affections and the truth of Imaginationwhat the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truthwhether it exists before or notfor I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty The Imagination may be compared to Adams dreamhe awoke and found it truth.19

In the same flow of thinking about imagination is linked to Negative Capability, we recall some useful ideas from Keatss letters. They are expressive of Keatss thoughts on the poetic process, which goes hand in hand with imagination. He started his axioms of poetry with a primordial aspect of poetry in his view, which is spontaneity. For Keats, it is not only a romantic feature, but also a criterion of beauty. As we have seen earlier, for Keats, for Wordsworth too, the process of poetic creation starts with spontaneous interaction with Nature culminating in inspiration. The second axiom Keats comes to is that,
touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imaginary, should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it.20

Here, too, Keats declares that poetry should be inspired by Nature in order to strike the readers imagination. He affirms his idea in this sentence: if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all (LLJK 70). In his letter to Reynolds, he expands upon the idea saying that imagination is a home for the poets limitless musings. Indeed, Keats believes in the power of imagination to bring the poet to his maturity and ripeness therefore puts in front of his eyes Shakespeare as his ideal. Dreams and visions are the

background for a mature intellect as this illustrative paragraph shows:

19 20

LLJK 45. LLJK 70.

18

I had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this mannerlet him on a certain day read a certain page of full poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale. But when will it do so? Never. When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness of intellect, any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all the twoand- thirty palaces.21

21

LLJK 58.

19

Keats, again reclaims the importance of sensory experience in enhancing Imagination. Along his poetic career, his soul has gone through a variety of extreme feelings from agony to joy. Then the poet realizes the inevitability of pains interrelatedness with pleasure; and most importantly his complete belonging to a world of despair and mystery. In this world, his Negative Capability is displayed. That calm submission with temperament and destiny, Murry remarks, defines the poet as a pure poet. Murry assumes that keats achieved in April 1819 his own complete individuality, and the knowledge which inevitably accompanies that achievement. In fact, he wanted to say that the poet passed from an abstract recognition of beauty to its concrete manifestation in the Odes. Notably, in Ode on a Grecian Urn where he apprehends Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all/ you know on earth, and all ye need to know (PBERV 280). Like Bate, Murry acknowledges the development of Keats22 to rival with Shakespeare. Both achieve a harmony of his imagination with the universe. It is this striking capacity for sympathetic identification, in Hazlitts terms, which challenges the man to reach universality like Shakespeare and become eventually a Man of Achievement.

22

Bate quotes Woodhouse, a friend of Keats, in his Negative Capability essay. The latter endorses Keatss concept of Poetical character and for him the poet is the prototype after Shakespeare. Here is his account: I believe him to be right with regard to his own Poetical characterand I perceive clearly the distinction between himself and those of the Wordsworth School The highest order of Poet will not only all the above powers but will have [so] high an imagination that he will be able to throw his own soul into any object he sees or imagines, so as to see feel be sensible of, & express, all that the object itself would see feel be sensible of or express-- & he will speak out of that objectso that his own self will with the Exception of the Mechanical part be annihilated.and it is [of] the excess of this power that I suppose Keats to speak, when he says he has no identityAs a poet, and when the fit is upon him, this is trueShakespeare was a poet of the kind above mentioned and he was perhaps the only one besides Keats who possessed this power in an extreme degree.

20

21

So far we have dealt with the possible meanings of Negative Capability. It can be applied in Keats and Shakespeare since both achieved literary greatness. In the following section, I attempt to show that Negative Capability is applied in Shakespeares poetry as well in Keatss through sensuousness and poetic imagination. In Keatss Odes, sensuous experience and visionary power exemplify Negative Capability. In fact, poetic visions make up the Odes of 1819. Keatss withdrawal from the actual world to the realm of dreams is a common feature in his Odes. Keats underestimates the rationality of the enlightenment thinkers, and radically undertakes a sensuous stance. Keatss Negative Capability thus, implies outweigh of poetry over philosophy, which is a classical debate. For Keats, feeling precedes thought; and therefore he reasserts the value of sensual experience. And here we have an example from his Ode to Psyche where the poet gives an account of his goddess dream, hence his own Negative Capability. It reads as follows:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see

22

The winged psyche with awakend eyes? I wanderd in a forest thoughtlessly. (PBERV 280)

The speaker, by [his] own eyes inspired, upon the midnight hours, becomes the priest for psyche. With pleasant pain of his minds mystery, he locates psyche in some untrodden region of my mind.

To better understand Negative Capability, it is recommended to go back to Keatss literary scope. The poets own ideas and attitudes to literature and to Shakespeare has greatly been inspired by Hazlitt whose literary theory and
23

criticism contributed to Keatss poetics. One idea pushed Keats to concentrate on Shakespeare is gusto. Hazlitt, in his Round Table, defines gusto in art as power or passion defining any object.23 By being truthful to nature, as Hazlitt observes, Shakespeare accomplishes truth. Shakespeare has too much of influence on the young Keats who owe to the Bard his modern perception of Beauty and Truth, belonging to ink and paper.24 Murry says in this respect:
Keats and Shakespeare are alike, because they are both pure poets, and pure poetry consists in the power to express a perception that it appears at the same time to reveal a new aspect of beauty and a new aspect of truth.25

This attitude calls for the poets openness to a sensuous response to the world at the expense of searching after fact and reason. He has placed a preference for the life of sensations rather than thoughts.26 Bate refers to this valuable point in his analysis of Keatss negative capability letter. It is an infinite absorption of the world through imaginative perception, he tells us. Here we are reminiscent of a significant idea for our study, which is the Poetical Character. Keats, in this respect, approaches a distinctive view about the nature of the Poetical Character which along literary history has been a critical issue to contemplate. Let us stop for a while to consider Keatss major poetics of identity. Here, we should recall the most celebrated idea of the unpoetical poet which defines his poetic self in his letter to R. Woodhouse on the twenty seventh of October 1818. He says:
23

William Hazlitt, The Round Table and Characters of Shakespeares Plays (London: J. M. Dent &Sons LTD, 1944) 77. This book will be abbreviated as RTCSP. 24 Shakespeares master conceit of ink and paper in the sonnets, the speaker eternalizes the beauty of his mistress. However, his ink and paper recreates the ephemeral beauty of his mistress with an ever-lasting beauty of his verse. See, specifically sonnet 54, where he compares his mistress to a rose whose beauty, he says, fades away with time. Yet his mistresss will live long in his verse. Beauty of his verse is Truth as the couplet implies: And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, / When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth, CW 1231. 25 John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare (New York: OUP, 1958) 147. For further reference to this book, it will be abbreviated as KS. 26 See letter to Benjamin Bailey on November 22, 1817, LLJK 45.

24

As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which if I am anything, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is everything and nothingit has no character-- what shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the cameleon Poet A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identityhe is continually in for, & filling some other Body.27

Keats obliterates a self that is a thing per se, and praises the other with no character. One that submits itself to everything outside itself, and sees the plurality of: objects, characters, and metaphysics. Then fulfill an acceptance of the real world with all its varieties and complexities. Keats alludes to an

application of this on characters or people in general. Hence, the poetic self submits to people without trying to indoctrinate or improve them. This quality is at its fullest in Shakespeare, take for instance Hamlet where the poet let his tragic hero take him to various worlds of Melancholy, Philosophy, Imagination and Art. Highly amazed with Shakespeares greatness as a unique poetical character, Keats puts this in comparison with a previous genius of his fallow Romantics, Wordsworth. Although the young poet has a great admiration for Wordsworths poetic style, he underestimates the poets self-centered character. Standing in the middle between Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Keats infers the characters of both poets, and then distinguishes the Shakespearean poet from the Wordsworthian or Egotistical poet. In contrast to the Wordsworths ego sublime, Shakespeares sublime has no identity of his own. Later in this paper, we are going to consider in details Wordsworths Egotistical Sublime. Yet for now, the focus is on Shakespeare and Negative Capability as introduced in the letter. Keats prefigures that Shakespeare has successfully submerged with his artistic creation of a complex personality, Hamlet. The
27

LLJK 187.

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latter dares to ask for a wider space in the play within a play: the Mousetrap. The poets mind captures a variety of attitudes, and gives us numerous portraits of the man. Due to Imagination, Shakespeare is able to characterize various human temperaments. Problem Plays saying;
One is tempted to call Hamlet the greatest display of sheer imaginative vitality in literary form that a man has so far achieved. It is here we feel that Shakespeare first reached the full extent of his powers; and he gives us the sense of glorying in them. And no other play of Shakespeare gives us just that touch of sheer exaltation.28

E. M. Tillyard comments on this in Shakespeares

Negative Capability also might mean a fusion between the poets mind and the contemplated object. We refer again to Bates idea of unity between the mind and object attributing it to a harmony of the inner life with truth. It is this harmony that Beauty and Truth come together.29 This unity or fusion, as Bate explains, results in a sense of beauty that Keats acknowledges as truth. Dealing with Hazlitts idea of gusto and Keatss beauty as truth, Bate shows that the latter takes Hazlitt a step forward as he relates imagination, the inward eye,30 with sensations in representing the outside world. Besides, his famous quote about art is very telling of his creative linking of beauty with truth. Keats claims that; The excellence of Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty &Truth.31 He coins Beauty as a principle, especially in his poetry, saying; I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.32

28 29

E. M. Tillyard, Shakespeares Problem Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951) 27. Walter Jackson Bate, Negative Capability<http://work.restory.net/IB/keats/criticism/Negatiive%20Capability.pdf, 14. 30 I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud, NAEL 1478.
31 32

LLJK 61. See Letter to Fanny Brawne on February 1820.

26

In this respect, Matthew Arnold relates Keatss sensuousness to the principle of beauty as follows: He has made himself remembered as no merely sensuous poet could be and he has done it by having loved the principle of beauty in all things.33 Arnold perceives that sensuousness is Keatss unique quality. Indeed, the poet yearns for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. This principle is conspicuous in Keatss poems, namely Endymion34 when he opens the poem with a thing of beauty is a joy forever.35 We are also reminiscent of Ode on a Grecian Urn and specifically of Beauty is truth, truth beauty.36 Keatss interest in sensations might well be inspired by Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads37--they put the senses back into poetry. Wordsworths emphasis on sensation is evident also in Tintern Abbey, where he expresses pleasure having an empirical experience in Nature brought by the language of sense.38 Such experience, Wordsworth believes strongly in and in building a moral being, a soul along it. This implies a process beginning with sense stimuli invoked by the external world and responded by the mind evoking emotions of the poet. Wordsworth and Keats perceive the complexity of a moral, mental and emotional process that constitutes the poets consciousness. Negative Capability is about the interplay of internal and external, which is intellectually and spiritually passionate. Keats clarifies this point as

33

Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1913). See specifically John Keats 116. 34 A long poem was ready for publication on November 1817, about which Keats says in a letter to his brother George in 1817: Endymion is finished. It will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my inventionwhich I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with poetry. And when I consider that this is a great task, and that when done it will make me but a dozen paces towards the Temple of Fame [] Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the polar star of poetry, as Fancy is the sails, and Imagination the rudder. LLJK 43-44. 35 Opening line of Book 1 of Endymion: A Poetic Romance, NAEL 1799. 36 David Wright, ed., The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse (UK: Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, 1977) 280. Further reference to this book will be as PBERV. 37 Lyrical Ballads: a landmark work in English Literature (a collection of poems by Wordsworth with the collaboration of Coleridge in 1798); it gives rise to Romantic Poetry in England. 38 PBERV 112.

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follows: The yearning passion for the beautiful, the master- passion, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion,39 Keats adds. In a state of a mist,40 the poet goes beyond tradition giving way to his concept of negative capability: claiming identity by simply negating it. Truth, he finds in mystery, negation and contradiction. Keats acknowledges Shakespeare as his greatest literary model. In fact, Keats, like Shakespeare, has greater richness of the poetic gift, and a greater completeness (Murry147). Keats is endowed with a marvelous gift of expression as Arnold puts in his essay--No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness [] he is with Shakespeare (Arnold 119). Murry also refers to this in his Keats and Shakespeare, which examines the literary influences of Shakespeare on Keats. He conceives that,
[] the poetic gift in a Shakespeare or a Keats is more complete because they are completer men; because they did, in a very precise sense, possess their souls; because they more completely achieved this fusion of mind and body into the immanent reality of the soul, having a life and knowledge of its own.41

What we have been discussing so far prepares us to concentrate on one aspect of Negative Capability, which is passivity. We have cited previously this feature yet we have not elaborated on it; I want to take some time now to do so. Starting with Wordsworths view of this state, passivity is a poets genius. His statement reads as follows: Murrys reading of the influence of Shakespeare on Keats culminates in the resolution that Keats wins greatness; and therefore becomes second to Shakespeare. Keats, influenced by Hazlitts critical ideas on Shakespeares art, discovers the universality of the man:
39 40

LLJK 100. To-night I am all in a mist: I scarcely know whats what, Keats says in his letter to Reynolds on September 1819, LLJK 184. 41 KS 148.

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The genius of Shakespeare was an innate universality; wherefore he laid the achievements of human intellect prostrate beneath his indolent and kingly gaze: he could do easily mens utmosthis plan of tasks to come was not of this world. If what he proposed to do hereafter would not, in the idea, answer the aim, how tremendous must have been his conception of ultimates! 42

In fact, the pure poet, borrowing Murrys expression, is unfit in his actual world, that world that Keats depicts figuratively as the chamber of maiden-thought.43 He flees to the world of dream where his utopian vision encompasses opposites. I move now to show that Negative Capability can be applied to Shakespeare. It is almost the world of the Shakespearean tragedies where he holds up a mirror that reflects the external and internal defaults of nature. Renaissance era is by nature equivocal, it is a world where fair is foul, and foul is fair.44 And the theatrical world Shakespeare displays is full of mystery and contradictions. Shakespeare brings the mystery of life into theatre, therefore, in the tragedies good is bad, true is false and dark is light. It is a topsy-turvy world. His tragedies epitomize the quality of Negative Capability that we have been expanding on above. These examples show how deeply Shakespeare is indulged within the psychology of his characters. Though it is not the aim of this paper to study how Negative Capability is worked out in Shakespeares plays, yet I wish to give some examples illustrating the idea. We will develop later in a reading of Hamlet and some of the great Odes. But now, let us concentrate on Shakespeares disinterestedness, an idea in keeping with Negative Capability. Bate overtly explains this in relation to Shakespeares plays says:

42

LLJK 94. I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there forever in delight. However, among the effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening ones vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing ones nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden- Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set openbut all dark--all leading to dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, we are in that state, we feel the Burden of the Mystery, LLJK 87. 44 CW, Macbeth (Act I, Scene I) 858.
43

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Shakespeare is able to dramatise a diversity of temperaments and attitudes, and his imaginative flexibility is such that in a great play like Hamlet or Henry IV, characters seem to have remarkable autonomy, Shakespeare does not manipulate his characters for the interest of his egoist statement.45

Dramatization is another aspect of Shakespeares Negative Capability. It is a dominant feature in his historic plays, as Bates comment reads. In fact, his dramas show the exaltation of the poets mind. His imaginative flexibility, Bate adds, is an asset to characterization. Therefore, his imagination is insightful of the character of a king, a liar, a fool and a murderer for instance. The very state of Denmark in Hamlet is notably a stereotype of this mingling of two extremely opposite poles: one of the honest men and another of the treacherous men. Still in Hamlet, Shakespeare gives space to each persona to claim his attitude. He even allows Hamlet to surpass him in The Mousetrap; thus tracing his absolute openness (to the world; real and literary). This [un]egoist statement, Hazlitt already paid tribute to in his Round Table, is illustrative of Shakespeares disinterestedness:
He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egoist that it was possible to be. He was nothing of himself; but he was all that the others were, or that they could become His genius shows equally on the veil and on the good.46

Shakespeares characters, especially the tragic heroes are close to the audience due to Shakespeares disinterestedness. This idea is very close to Negative Capability since it includes the poets identification with his characters. Extremely indulged with his characters consciousnesses,

Shakespeare indulges his audience with a traumatic experience. He even benefits from such techniques as the soliloquy and the antic disposition. It is the case in Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. In Shakespeares tragedies, the audience is put within an activity of feeling, thinking and philosophizing. Besides,
45 46

Cedric Watts, ed., Preface to Keats (London: Longman, 1985) 34. Part of the secret of Shakespeares canonical centrality is his disinterestedness, WC 53.

30

purgation is some kind an involvement of the audience within an equivocal nature of life. Hence, Shakespeares world is wondrous. He has the quality to put aside vice and virtue, to still perceive horizon within the mist and mostly to be transported with his characters till we no longer think of him as their creator. However we think of them as independent from him and belonging to us.47 They become authentic like him with this quality of Negative Capability. One of the Romantics, A. W. Von Schlegel, gets this typically Shakesperean quality and wrote about it as follows:
It is the capability of transporting himself so completely into every situation, even the most unusual, that he is enabled, as plenipotentiary of the whole human race, without particular instructions for each separate case, to act and speak in the name of every individual. It is the power of endowing the creatures of his imagination with such self-existent energy, that they afterwards act in each conjuncture according to general laws of nature: the poet, in his dreams, institutes, as it were, experiments which are received with as much authority as if they had been made on making objects.48

47 48

Hazlitt said: It is we who are Hamlet, RTCSP 232. Jonathan Bate, ed., The Romantics on Shakespeare (England: Penguin Books LTD, 1992) 97. Further reference to this book will be as RS.

31

Part Two: Negative Capability: a Medium of Artistic and Aesthetic Communication

Theoretical Framework: Hamlet, the Odes and Negative Capability

Beyond the uncompromising sense that we are completely physical in a physical world, and the allied realization that we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand, there is a third quality in Keats more
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clearly present than in any other poet since Shakespeare. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades us again that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, the one most able to grasp the individuality and reality of selves totally distinct from his own, and of an outward world that would survive his perception of it.49

Two statements, in the above text, I underline. First: we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand. This realization is steeped in Keatss consciousness. That makes him discover a secret quality of human achievement which is more clearly present [in him] than in any other poet since Shakespeare. Then, it is the gift of tragic acceptance. Blooms phrase here is very telling of this Shakespearean and Keatsean poetic achievement of transcending the real with imagining infinity of characters. Both have the ability to empty and fill within other bodies.50 They both perceive that The World is too much with us,51 hence, they masterfully counterbalance this perception with an intensified sense of integrity within their art. Hamlet and the Odes are tokens of such a quality. Both poets experience the wildness of the world, and make of its un-apprehended reality a truth,52 allied to their self less stance. A modern approach to literary studies of modern texts naming Hamlet and The Odes favors a new perspective, that of text-reader relationship. Traditionally, the text and the author were the central focus of critics. 53 Modern schools of literary theory and criticism place a seminal interest on the text as a bridge between poet and reader. This part aims to analyze the communication of each of Shakespeare and Keats with the audience through Negative

49

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (New York: Harper Collins, 2004) 458- 459 (Italics Mine).
50 51

Go back to the Negative Capability letter, well illustrated in Part One, chapter one. The title of William Wordsworths little poem composed in 1807. 52 Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry, defines poets as follows: Poets are the hierophants of an un-apprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved on, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, NAEL 1781. 53 With reference to the new criticism approach, this puts the author centre stage.

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Capability. This quality offers a space for the reader/audience. Thus, I will concentrate on Negative Capability as a dialogic quality binding author with reader. I will be eclectic in dealing with this since Jacques Derridas deconstructive approach crosses with Wolfgang Isers phenomenological approach. The focal point is inquiring about the role of the reader in both literary works. First, the use of soliloquy tradition is meant to call for a direct response from the part of the audience through Catharsis.54 Second, the ode is a lyric addressed to a Nightingale, Autumn and the Urn. Each time the addressee is omnipresent and interactive. Some ideas of reader-response and reception theory study the interaction or duologue between reader and text. They assume that a reader (i.e. audience/addressee) is a contributor to the production of meanings or a meaning. Accordingly, the accomplishment of a literary text depends on the receiver, and no longer on the sender of the message. In fact, both texts lend themselves to Isers aesthetic assumption, which claims the Implied Reader to be subjectively engaged in a reading process. Wolfgang Iser, a leading figure of the reader- response theory in the late 70s, grounds his approach on the following premise:
The literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader [] The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader.55

54

Quoted in AC, Catharsis implies the detachment of the spectator, both from the work of art itself and from the author later he comes back to Catharsis, the traditional theory of catharsis implies that the emotional response to art is not the raising of a natural emotion, but the raising and casting out of actual emotion on a wave of something else. We may call this something else, perhaps, exuberance: the vision of something liberated from experience, the response kindled in the reader by the transmutation of experience into mimesis, of life into art, of routine into play 66-93. 55 Wolgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bumyan to Beckett (London: Johns Hopkins paperback edition, 1978) 274. Further reference to this book will be as IR.

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What this part tends to investigate is how Negative Capability is manifested in Shakespeare and Keats both artistically and aesthetically. Therefore, Negative Capability is larger than the text; it starts there and goes on to reach the readers consciousness. Negative Capability, hereafter, might be considered as a mutual quality possessed by the author and later acquired by the reader. This ingenious concept of the 19th century young Keats anticipates very early the modern theories concern with mediation, text-reader relationship and structure of meaning. Firstly, the author is endowed with Negative Capability. Later, the reader gains it. We cannot deny the contribution of new criticism and the modernist debate over the nature of the reader. They give many descriptions of the reader. Yet we will stick to Isers reference to the Implied Reader who is both the author and himself. The study of Negative Capability is two-fold. Two very important features of Negative Capability are going to be discussed. One is semantic, i.e. Melancholy, another is linguistic, i.e. Rhetoric. Melancholy will be explored with reference to Hamlets first soliloquy along with Keatss ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn. Later in this paper, Rhetoric will be dealt with resorting to Hamlets Now I am alone and Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn. The drama of Hamlet is analogous to the drama of Keats; both are struggling with their thinking on metaphysics. However, with Negative Capability Shakespeare and Keats enchant what is sensual and poetic instead of what is intellectual.

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Chapter One: Melancholy

The melancholic symbol is related to Shakespeares characterization of his tragic heroes, whose temperament varies with the Renaissance Passions. On the other hand, the melancholic self in Romantic Poetry shares the same characteristics with Renaissance time. The interest here is on Melancholy, not the psychological or clinical malady but the state of mind. It is a variation on the personality that finds relief or escape in solitude. It appeals to spending time in reflection and meditation even though it remains in an elusive and enigmatic circle of thinking. The Romantic school gives a modern image of the melancholic self; an image that blends sensitivity with sensuality. An enhanced sensitivity is the prospective of melancholy with Keats. Keatss poetics of

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melancholy has roots in the Shakespearean era; mourning and melancholy are basically associated with the black bile.56 The temperament of the melancholy man has been associated traditionally with the black-bile. [T]he melancholy man is sorrowful, lumpish, sour, and dark.57 To define melancholy, we go back to the Anatomy of Melancholy which sets it clear from the Renaissance time as it is the focus of Burton and Bright:
Melancoly is of two sortes, the one is called naturelle, whiche is onely colde and drye, the other is called adust or bourned...Melancolye adust is in foure kindes[burned from the four humours]...But of all other, that melancholy is warste, whiche is ingendred of choler, finally all adust melancolye annoyeth the witte and judgemente of man.For when that humour ishette, it maketh men madde, and when it is extinct, it maketh men fooles, forgetfulle, and dulle.58

Cassius, in Julius Caesar,59 is the epitome of the melancholy man. Here we have the depiction of this man which best introduces to us the character of Hamlet. Hamlet, the modern melancholy man inspires the melancholy speaker in Keatss poems;

He reads too much; He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music: Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort
56

Renaissance malady appears as melancholy and madness. Hamlet is a typical example of the Renaissance black bile disease. 57 Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeares Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1959) 59, see specifically Man as Micrososmos. Further reference to this book to STHSP. 58 STHSP, see specifically The Anatomy of Melancholy 75. 59 CW, Julius Caesar (Act I Scene II) 585.

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As if he mockt himself, and scornd his spirit That could be moved to smile at any thing. Such men as he be never at hearts ease Whiles they behold a greater than themselves; And therefore are they very dangerous. (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II)

Hamlet, like Cassius, reads too much. He is always holding a book of words, words, words.60 A man with a tragic temperament finds no relief but in words. He is a thinker, an observer and a philosopher. His thoughts stem for his melancholy. Hamlets speech in the soliloquies is melodramatic; his words are loaded with sorrow and grief. Pathetically, he turns to self-degradation for he cannot find an ultimate way to exert the action he is enhanced by his fathers ghost. The soliloquies show him thinking deeply and aloud over and over again, yet vainly ending in despair. Hamlets soliloquies might be characteristic of a sort of lyricism like that of the romantic hero. Then it might be said that lyricism is a characteristic feature of the soliloquies. They hold an emotional debate with the self, which provokes the response of the audience through Catharsis.61 The artistic feature of the text is worth of consideration before assessing the readers participation which will reveal the aesthetic side. The soliloquy shows Shakespeares ability to identify with his tragic hero. Its function, clearly, is to provide the audience with insights of the personas consciousness. It is worth-mentioning that Shakespeare makes perfect use of the soliloquy convention. In fact, the seven soliloquies of Hamlet are expository and
60 61

CW, Hamlet (Act II Scene II) 683. Quoted in James D. Williams ed., An Introduction to Classical Rhetoric (UK: John Wiley & Sons LTD, 2009) 257. Katharsis is derived from kathairein, meaning to purify or to purge. The adjectival form, katharos, means clean, pure, or free from offense. [] Katharsis where used in regard to spiritual or moral matters indicated purification. A person who had defiled a sacred ritual, for example, would go to a temple for cathartic cleansing of the soul. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle used the term with respect to moral purification. Further reference to this book will be as ICR.

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introspective; which fosters the analytical endeavours pursued in this part. They expose both his melancholy and his mastery of language. The first soliloquy is focalized here, for here Hamlets melancholy is at the utmost. It explains the cause of his deep grief toward and his loathing of the whole world. Here, sexuality, incest and time are catalysts of the tragic heros nihilism. In fact, for him nothing is worth living. Hamlets first soliloquy sets the tone for the rest of the play; it also moulds his attitude facing a tragic temperament. The ache of his mind and heart is initiated by the mysterious death of his father and his mothers marriage with his uncle. Hamlet confronts the cruelty of human action and time. He gets mad at thinking too much about his mothers love affair with his uncle. The soliloquy is insightful of the heros emotional turmoil: rage, agony, disgust and despair. The philosophers outcry is worth quoting at length, since it embodies the process of Hamlets dilemma:
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Eversalting had not fixt His canon gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie ont! O, fie! tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in Nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead!nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king; that was, to this,
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Hyperion to a satyr: so loving to my mother, That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,-Let me not think ont, -- Failty thy name is Woman! A little month; or eer those shoes were old With which she followd my poor fathers body, Like Niobe, all tears; -- why she, even she O God! A beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mournd longermarried with my Uncle, My fathers brother; but no more like my father Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married: --O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good: But break, my heart, -- for I must hold my tongue! (Act I, Scene II)

Artistically, the dramatic monologue shows melancholy through negation and punctuation (interrogations and exclamations in specific). In addition to that, the very characterization of Hamlet presents him as a philosopher whose passions defeat his mind. His doleful situation makes him face the uncertainties and mysteries of his reality. For instance, it is the hypocrite society of Denmark
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he fights as his ironic expression take this from this if this be otherwise evokes (Act II, Scene II). An elusive task Hamlet partakes, thus ending up with no resolutions. He is trapped within a net of questions with no reaching after fact and reason. Shakespeare enacts his Negative Capability with characterization. He gives us the portrait of a melancholic player, Hamlet. The psychology of a passive man, he conjures up; justified in the procrastination of action. Besides, the man is a thinker who keeps looking for his psychological balance yet every time he finds out that it is still too far to reach. The first soliloquy is characterized by witticism. Hamlet is transparent; he dons no mask like Claudius and Polonius, for instance. The rhetoric of Hamlet is attributed to the clash between his transparency and the hypocrisy of the Danish court. Hamlets attitude in this soliloquy is suicidal. He is urged to take revenge yet remains pending between his morality and the amorality of the act of revenge. He incarnates the contradiction of his time that is why he makes affirmation in negation. Hamlet, with his suicidal, melancholic and misogynist tendencies seems to preach nihilism which Gertrudes description of his appearance confirms. Mourning his father, he wears in black. The queen, following her husbands remarks on Hamlets excessive melancholy after the burial of his father, wants Hamlet to be just as practical as Claudius (a man of action, not possessed and obsessed with words). She says, henceforth;
Good hamlet, cast thy knighted colour off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust: Thou knowst tis common,-- all that live must Die,
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Passing through nature to eternity. (Act I, Scene II)

He replies to his mother, claiming his deeply rooted melancholy, through negation as follows:
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems. tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, That can denote me truly: these, indeed, seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth shows; These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Act I, Scene II)

In Shakespeares Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion, Campbell studies Hamlet, which he calls the tragedy of grief. The critic assumes that Hamlets main passion is grief or the melancholy of humor. Hamlets melancholy of humor, as Campbell would like to call the formers woe, is fed with morbid thoughts about death and suicide. In fact, an intrinsic battle Hamlet undertakes is explained by Campbell in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Campbell 78). Hamlet is a slave of his passion. And here is shown the kernel dichotomy of passion and reason:
[ ] Whether, then, the passions be regarded as perverting the workings of the mind in the brain, or whether they be regarded as impelling to action the end of

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which is unjudged, the result is the same: the passions are the potential enemy of the rational soul.62

His ruling passion: is to think, not to act,63 Hazlitt refers to Hamlet, the tragic hero. However, Hamlet the play he considers as a tragedy of thinking. He carries on justifying his point as follows: He is full of weakness and melancholy, but there is no harshness in his nature. He is the most amiable of misanthropes (RTCSP 237). Shakespeare explores Hamlets psychology in order to provide us with explanations for Hamlets melancholy. Before making him externalize woe, Shakespeare makes Hamlet express his sickness of life. In the latters answer to his mother, we notice a remarkable use of negative sentences (introduced with not, nor and no). He proceeds with negation as he rejects the whole world for it cannot hold his increasing pain, seen by Claudius as unmanly grief (Act I Scene II). Shakespeare uses several devices to make Hamlets woe overtly expressed. Accordingly, Shakespeares Negative Capability is displayed in the soliloquy through exclamations and interrogations, and here are some examples:
[]O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on t! O, fie! tis an unweeded garden, []Heaven and earth! Must I remember? (Act I, Scene II)

62 63

STHSP 78. RTCSP 235.

44

Shakespeare identifies with his hero. His various use of language shows his absolute involvement with Hamlets calamity, which encompasses corruption, hypocrisy and equivocation. It is the ability of Hamlet to endure the prison of Denmark as well. And he resorts to Pathos because he is trapped in a chained world. Therefore, Pathos may go hand in hand with the idea of Negative Capability, still artistically speaking. Pathos alludes to the acceptance of mysteries and uncertainties of Hamlets infected society. The tragic hero faces the shocking reality of his predicament therefore he must hold [his] tongue. Instead he turns to pathos as an unchained mode of expression. Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism,64 gives us an illustration of how pathos works in tragedy:
Pathos has a close relation to the sensational reflex of tears. Pathos presents its hero as isolated by a weakness which appeals to our sympathy because it is on our own level of experience [] Pathos is a queer ghoulish emotion, and some failure of expression, real or simulated, and some to be peculiar to it. It will always leave a fluently plangent funeral elegy to go and batten on something like Swifts memoir of Stella.65

At this level it is not my aim to investigate the aesthetic feature of the soliloquy which pathos evokes. Now, what interests me instead in the above quote is that pathos is a queer ghoulish emotion, and some failure of expression, real or simulated. Hamlet stumbles in his overwhelming sorrow, which the soliloquy is the gashing out of. Indeed, pathos includes emotions and not decisions and actions. The mans dilemma is not over action; rather it is over the way to action. In fact, everything around it raises numerous questions and rings multiple bells within his consciousness. And each question is a case of contemplation for the tormented Hamlet.
64

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Penguin: Princeton University Press, 1957). Further reference to this book will be as AC. 65 AC 38-39.

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Pathos, as Frye suggests, is a failure of expression in the sense that it prevents Hamlet from taking decisions. He remains inactive and even puzzled. Pathos thereafter, implies procrastination. In Hamlet, Shakespeare as Frye asserts, astonishes us with the magnificent expression of his heros frustration. He realizes the absurdity of life and the action of man and woman. Hamlet doubts everything. He does not reach any truth in spite of his killing of Claudius, though still doubtful. Hamlets procrastination of action is caused by pathos. He reduces the whole world to the absurd. Man and woman are dust though they appear idealized with wise and supreme faculties. Such horrible sickness becomes dangerously infecting his psychological equilibrium. It exceeds with the ambiguities that Claudius, Polonius and his love Ophelia promote. Moral instability, existential quests and craving nihilism are within the dramatic experience Shakespeare presents. Here, Hamlets speech tells all about it:

What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like, a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animalsand yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither. (Act 2, scene 2)

Soliloquy is a vehicle Shakespeare uses to identify (invoke sympathy) with Hamlet and to make us identify with the man. Here, Shakespeares Negative Capability is overtly displayed. He is capable of being involved within the unexpected world of Hamlet: Denmarks rottenness, Claudius and Poloniuss treachery, Gertrudes hasty marriage along with Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildensterns unfaithfulness.

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Ambiguous, gruesome and frustrating is the atmosphere Shakespeare opens his play with. The opening scene extols the poets imagination magnificently mirroring a mischievous reality. Although Hamlet dies at the end, we are left with no crystal clear answer to whether he fulfilled the ghosts message or not. However, one infers the beauty of Shakespeares language and the depth of his literary experience. A very human experience indeed, for in Hamlet Shakespeare emphasizes not the intellectual side as much as the emotional one. Sharing the painful life of Hamlet, Shakespeare is satisfied with half-knowledge. Hamlets central thought in the first soliloquy is death and suicide. However religious awe defeats his thought. [T]he Everlasting had not fixt/ his canon gainst self-slaughter. In to be, or not to be soliloquy, Hamlet inquires about death and after life. To Hamlet such an inquiry puzzles the will. Reflection on death, He figures out to be annihilating;

And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied oer with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. (Act 3, scene 1)

Shakespeares imagination therefore entails the afterlife. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare captures an impressionistic image of this ambiguous world. The mysterious and terrifying nature of death is questioned. Here, the agonies and impediments related to worldly life are a paradise to the horrible otherworldly life. Shakespeare provides a description of metaphysic truth. Death is meant to stabilize the human consciousness which, in Hamlets case, is always
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restless. Shakespeare gives Hamlet a chance to imagine a more mysterious world than his actual world; the undiscoverd country. Yet, to die, to sleep; / to sleep, perchance to dream is a horrendous dream where there is the rub (Act III, Scene I). Hamlets discourse on death culminates in disillusionment since:
[]To die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprisond in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling!tis too horrible!66 The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death. (Measure for Measure, Act III scene I)

Hamlets to be or not to be maintains his own ambiguity, which his use of language reveals. He proceeds in contradiction. Here, the theme of death is reiterated. Yet it further asserts Hamlets power to handle contradictory thoughts. One should heed the interplay of opposing opinions introduced with

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not/no/or. Action for Hamlet is a death or life issue that is why he faces the obligation to choose. He stands between two cruel alternatives: whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, /or to take arms against a sea of troubles. Here Shakespeares Negative Capability presents confusing ideas about metaphysics, existentialism and ethics. Shakespeare shows how they all blur Hamlets vision, though he is still wrestling with them. The choices, presented in the form of contrasted metaphors, add frustration to the tragic hero. Death is a nightmare that Hamlet wishes to be an escape from the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks/ that flesh is heir to, tis a consummation/ devoutly to be wisht. The second configuration of Melancholy is the aesthetic of Hamlets soliloquy. Not only is Negative Capability an artistic quality, but also an aesthetic one. Shakespeare makes his audience participate in the play as soon as he allows their presence through catharsis. They are intentionally called to react to Hamlets speech. Catharsis implies the detachment of the spectator, both from the work of art itself and from the author,67 Frye reconsiders the traditional concept of Catharsis in terms of text-reader debate. The debate or rather the interaction of both is basically denoted as an aesthetic distance. This distance or detachment as Frye elucidates is implied in the raising of emotions of pity and fear. They are the result of the audiences experience of profound identification with the tragic hero, whose calamity they absorb and virtually live in the cathartic event. Aesthetically speaking, Catharsis is where Shakespeare gives the floor to the audience to experience the mystery of drama subjectively. Soliloquy is Shakespeares Negative Capability, while catharsis might be the audiences. They acquire such quality when they accomplish Shakespeares plot through emotional response to Hamlets conduct. Accordingly, Iser, in his The Act of
67

AC 66.

49

Reading,68 confronts the duologue between text and reader. For him, the reader is a contributor to the interpretation of the literary text. Derrida, the French philosopher, crosses Iser on the same idea as the former suggests that: what goes for literary production also goes for the reading of literature. The performativity we have just been talking about calls for the same responsibility on the part of the readers. A reader is not a consumer, a spectator, a visitor, not even a receiver.69 And so is the case in Hamlet. Everyone in the audience has his interpretation of the drama. Each one has his own emotional reaction of pity and fear. For Iser, the reader participates in the interpretative assignment through The Reading Process. So, the audience in Hamlet is involved within the dramatic plot, for the cathartic effect is a basic element of the tragedy. Aristotle, in his Poetics says that catharsis is not the function of tragedy; however it is beneficial to have as effect of Purgation (See the introduction of Aristotles Poetics). The aesthetic dimension of catharsis is related to Isers idea that the texts meaning is located somewhere between text and reader. One might think of catharsis as the virtual dimension.70 This phrase Iser uses to describe the locus where the reader and text meets. It is a virtual locus characterized by mediation. Iser explains that it is transcendental for both, the reality of text and the individual disposition of the reader (IR 274). The audience is involved within the fictional enterprise of the author by this virtual dimension, Iser illustrates. In the case of the tragedy of Hamlet, the virtual dimension is catharsis. The cathartic mood combines the heros trauma with the audiences empathy. The arousal of emotions of pity and fear is at once an appeal to the tragic heros consciousness and the audiences imagination. The
68

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Later in this paper, reference to this book will be as AR. 69 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routeldge, 1992) 51. Further reference to this book will be as AL. 70 MLCT 725.

50

becoming together of text and imagination, through pity and fear, creates an image of the tragic experience. Hence, Isers contribution to the act of Reading is grounded on the active participation of the audience/reader, as he explains here:
The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality. This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is becoming together of text and imagination.71

So far, we have seen that Shakespeares Hamlet challenges the audiences imaginative appeal to stimulate their response. Goethe grasps this asset in the following:
Shakespeares works are in the sense highly dramatic; by his treatment, his revelation of the inner life, he wins the reader; the theatrical demands appear to him unimportant, and so he takes it easy, and we, spiritually speaking, take it easy with him. We pass with him from place to place; our power of imagination provides all the episodes which he omits. We even feel grateful to him for arousing our imagination; for with the stage that signifies the world we are more familiar than with the world itself, and we can read and hear the most fantastic things, and still imagine that they might pass before our eyes on the stage. This counts for the frequently bungling dramatizations of favourite novels.72

As Shakespeares stage takes us from place to place, Keatss ode takes us from here to there, where the Nightingale sings. The nightingale is associated with melancholy which inspires him with an abundant vision. With Keats, Melancholy is inseparable from delight. This principle, inherent to the Odes, shows Keatss acceptance of opposites in his art. Like Shakespeares stage,

71 72

IR 279. RS 76.

51

Keatss poetic world includes contradictions. It is also the gist of Ode on Melancholy as the following couplet read:
Ay, in the very temple of delight Veild Melancholy has her sovran shrine, (Ode on Melancholy, Stanza 3)

Melancholy veiled by delight has its sacredness as the word shrine implies. Keatss consciousness encompasses opposites and that is what Ode to a Nightingale is about. First, we are going to deal with the artistic feature of the poem. Indeed, the ode is a convenient poetic form for Keats to deliver his message to the nightingale. It is Keatss projection of his personal attitude into art. The nightingale, an object of art, becomes an emblem of happiness. The very symbolism of Ode to a Nightingale, therefore, configures its aesthetic accomplishment. Keats believes in the nightingales presence, he even follows his senses entering her mysterious world. The immortal bird is like a Poet hidden/ in the light of thought,/ Singing hymns unbidden/till the world is wrought/to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.73 The poet addresses the nightingale in the way Shelley addresses the Skylark, thou art unseen, -but yet I hear thy shrill delight. Melancholy is a design of Negative Capability in Ode to a Nightingale. It is a sensational design that survives melancholy with the odes lyrical stance. The experience of melancholy in Keatss Ode to a Nightingale is different from that in Hamlet. Unlike Hamlets melancholy which belongs to thinking, Keatss melancholy belongs to sensations. Melancholy is delivered through the Nightingales song: a joyful song yet crying out sorrow. Shelleys depiction of the poet illustrates a paradoxical state of mind, similar to that of Keats in Ode to a Nightingale:

73

PBERV 243.

52

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feels that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.74

The metaphor Shelley draws here attributes sensuality to the poet. Keats, like a nightingale, enchants his own melancholic attitude. In fact, one is reminiscent of the dramatic undertone of the Ode to a Nightingale opening with my heart aches. Not only is Melancholy a disposition of the speaker in the Ode, but only a facet (feature) of Negative Capability. Being a private address to an outside object, the ode is an appropriate form of poetry used by Keats. He identifies with an ambivalent world where the Nightingale sings to sheer him up, yet the song is one of melancholy. Indeed, her world beholds illusion and integrity at once. The poets choice of the ode form of poetry is convenient. Dealing with a personal experience, he escapes the pain of his heart, and deliberately joins the nightingales mirth. Keats belongs to the bird as soon as he allows her to transport him. Although it is detached from his own person, he preserves her space within the ode. The nightingale, a natural object of the outside world, finds residue in the poets consciousness. There, the speaker lives with the bird for a long time in sensuality and beauty. Indeed, like the soliloquy in Hamlet, the ode form in Ode to a Nightingale is an artistic device that Keats uses to relocate himself in the fanciful world. He is no more with his world; he is with nature and with poetry. The speaker follows the light-winged Dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot/ of beechen green, and shadows numberless, / Singest of summer in full-

74

NAEL 1775.

53

throated ease. He accepts to be transported in a romantic vision to a place where consciousness lifts the veil for submission only to imagination. On the other hand, a reconciliation of opposites Keatss Negative Capability achieves. The vision of the Nightingale encapsulates both the ache of the speaker and the happiness of the bird. One is astonishingly struck with an absolute co-existence of pain and pleasure in the poets consciousness. Furthermore, the artistic stance in Keatss Ode to a Nightingale reads a binary oppositional structure. In the poem, the speakers thinking proceeds in opposition. It is noteworthy that the Nightingales happiness and the speakers sorrow for example are inevitably tied together. The union of melancholy and delight Keats accepts as true. It is a fact of human life that he realizes. This union is achieved in a genuine and delicate interplay of two worlds, between which the poet wavers. A fancy world (visionary/poetic) is counterbalanced with an actual (actual/actual) world. Keats, strikingly, balances an oxymoron; the visionary and the immediate. The imagery and diction related to the fancy world serve as a catalyst for the immediacy of the vision. Besides, the image of hemlock/opiate is an example. It concretizes the speakers feelings of ache and dullness. The drowsy numbness that pains his sense allows his feelings to burst into simultaneously pain and pleasure. The senses are not at work here. Instead the poets imagination advents with a state of poetic receptivity like a draught of vintage. It makes him forget what he presently is, and leave the world unseen. That openness to the dream is very telling of the poets Negative Capability. A richness of poetic imagination results in evoking feelings that range from melancholy and happiness to sublime and ecstasy. Stanza six is the speakers expression of such feelings as follows:

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Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Calld him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vainTo thy high requiem become a sod. (Ode to a Nightingale, Stanza 6)

Keats provides a counter image of his actual world. The weariness, the fever, the fret are characteristics of the speakers real world. Notably, the youth dies out of sorrow there. In contrast, Keats draws a vision of the melodious world of the nightingale. He even makes of death an enchanting and lively reality. Keats handles thinking as a symbol of sorrow for he lives where to think is to be full of sorrow. Thus, this recognition of grief and enchantment is the concern of the following paragraph. The ingenious image of beautiful death is a relevant one. The temporality of beauty that stanza 6 tackles is presented as a desire defeated with death. The Hamlet mood along the poem is created with melancholic expressions such as darkling I listen and easeful Death. Keats dissolves within the vision of easeful death. He is too much involved with the nightingales mirth so that he forgets his sorrow, and moves to imitate her song. This submission to the nightingales enchanting world shows the speaker holding his breath softly at moment of deep and exclusive joy. It seems rich to die. Keatss s vision of death immortalizes the moment when his imagination fuses with nature in total
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affinity. The speaker seizes that moment as he dies. He leaves no room for suffering to start up a new day. One should recall again Keatss idea about the holiness of the imagination achieving natures sublime. This intimacy and harmony between nature and imagination is suggested by the word ecstasy. The recently lingered song of the bird has her own existence within the speakers consciousness. The latter internalizes her happiness. In Keats and Shakespeare, Murry clarifies Keatss enchantment with beauty saying that the odes reveal him as beyond happiness. He was pressing out a quintessence of beauty from the contemplation of his thwarted destiny, he adds. The same image of eternalizing natural beauty we find in Shelleys Prometheus Unbound. The poets sense of love for natural beauty grows to encompass the mysteries of the universe. The expansion of experience is what Keatss Negative Capability is about. Shelleys address to the spirit of the hour is illustrative of Keatss Negative Capability in Ode to a Nightingale as the poem reads in the following:

Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky, and the wide earth, There was a change The impalpable thin air And the all circling sunlight were transformed As if the sense of love dissolved in them Had folded itself round the sphere world. My vision then grew clear and I could see Into the mysteries of the universe. (NAEL, Act 3, 1744)

Keatss dream of the nightingale accommodates him with the idea of death before his real encounter with death. Keatss reality provokes his melancholy.
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The poets imaginative experience in Ode to a Nightingale is characterized by an intensity of emotion. It also characterizes Keatss historic To Autumn. In this little poem, the poet shares an experience that binds the irreconcilable concepts of death and life, which autumn reconciles both. The poem opens with an antithesis (a striking contrast) putting emphasis on autumn as the season of mutability. The alliteration and the melodic impact of the /m/ sound in mists and mellow brings the image of temporal process closer. Autumn, as the image shows, incarnates Negative Capability. Keats means to create an image that holds negative and positive. Both headings suggest various oppositions like melancholy/ joy, death/life, mourning/ celebration and fruition/decay. In Ode to Autumn, Keatss sense of mortality grows with maturity (fruition of thought) accepting death. In fact, here it is real, too real. Keats moves from a vision of easeful death in the Ode to a Nightingale to an actual experience of death in To Autumn. Continuity and expansion is one aspect of To Autumn. Here, the speaker moves from one season to another. The first stanza presents a detailed description of the ripeness of the fruits henceforth:
How beautiful the season is now. How fine the air--a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weatherDian skies. I never liked stubble-fields so much as nowaye, better than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble field looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sundays walk that I composed upon it.75

We notice the accumulation of verbs of action in the first stanza: to fill, to swell, to plump, to round and to load. They all aim at portraying the process of ripening of the apples, gourd and fruit. Autumn is an occasion to celebrate the

75

See Letter to Reynolds, 22 September 1819, LLJK 184.

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more than enough ripeness. It is more than enough for the sun matures, and accelerates the process. And the summer has already oer-brimmd [the] clammy cells of the bees (Stanza 2). Unlike his lively characteristic, autumn, as stanza two shows, represents retreat, decay and inaction. He is importantly a reaper. Keats familiarizes the reader with autumn. First it is the season of celebration. Second it is the season of mists. In the first, harvest provides prosperity. In the second decay foreshadows death in the coming winter. Interestingly, the soft-lifted hair in the personified image of autumn, and enhanced by the winnowing wind, is evocative of turmoil and destruction. It is a soft wind, yet it brings death soon. The wind here reminds us of Shelleys west wind, which is preserver and destroyer. However, Keatss wind is only a destroyer because it is a harvester, a collector. The process of nature as the process of life comes full circle, which the conceit of reaping has developed. Talking above about the autumnal wind, musicality is called to attention. The redundancy of the /s/ sound along the poem is insightful of a mood of suffering and pain as the hissing of the wind might suggest. Almost in each line, we have a word with /s/ sound, notably season, mists and sun. The series also include: bless, mossd, ripeness, swell, sweet, flowers, cease, summer, store, seeks, careless, soft-lifted, asleep, poppies, swath, sometimes, across, cyderpress, oozing, Spring, hast, soft-dying, rosy, small, swallows, sinking, lambs, sing, swallows and skies. The idiom of suffering is announced by Aye in the first line. The poem closes as a requiem for the speakers own death. Keats has shown a double-pronged image of autumn one of celebration and life, and the other of mourning and death. The poem ends in a reminiscence of spring, a season of joy and inspiration for the poet. The rhetorical questions, which open the third stanza, anticipate spring.

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The music of autumn is a requiem. To Autumn mourns the soft-dying day. Keats passes from life to death. Maturity is reached with fruition. What comes after, Keats starkly accepts. The main theme of the poem is death. Keats gets ready for death while still alive, and the readiness is all. His ripeness has already lingered his poetry since for him it should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into ones soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. Keats comes to the realization that beauty envelops life and death. Beauty is acceptance of oppositions as his image shows here:
How beautiful are the retired flowers! How would they lose their beauty were they to the throng into the high way, crying out, admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!76

Let us go back to the idea of oppositions in To a Nightingale and To Autumn. Like Hamlets binary monologue to be, or not to be, Keatss Ode to a Nightingale holds a contradictory debate. It deals with contrasts with high sensuousness. Keatss contemplation of the nightingale implies mortality of human beauty and immortality of natural beauty. Alike, his contemplation of autumn is insightful of an inevitable association of life with death. Hence, both poems appear to exemplify Negative Capability. They show Keatss ability to be in a mist. He survives the ambivalence of the world with an artistic beauty, which would add magnificence to his lyrics. Keats, outstandingly, treats opposites in an anti-hierarchical way. In Ode to a Nightingale, death is as easeful and ecstatic as life. In To Autumn, death, like life, is part of nature. These ideas are echoed in Derridas logocentrism and binary oppositions, well explained in Modern Literary Criticism and

76

LLJK 68.

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Theory.77 Derrida deconstructs the traditional thinking on opposites as labeled in various aspects. He rather points out these oppositions as a violent hierarchy (MLCT 653). In his book, Habib explains Derridas idea here;
Derridas project is not simply to reverse these hierarchies, for such a procedure would remain imprisoned within the framework of binary oppositional thinking represented by those hierarchies. Rather, he attempts to show that these hierarchies represent privileged relationships, relationships that have been lifted above any possible engagement with, and answerability to, the network of concepts in general.78

Derridas deconstructive approach shows that Keatss text avoids hierarchies. The latter puts oppositions in parallel, interacting with a number of concepts: immortality, death, life, mortality, poetry, beauty and poetic maturity. De Man, in his Allegories of Reading Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, agrees with Derridas idea that the deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted the text in the first place.79 The aesthetic effect of Negative Capability in Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn is conspicuous with fictionality and negativity.80 The impact of the poets Negative Capability on the reader is brought about by the fictionality of the waking dream or the vision in Ode to a Nightingale. On the other hand, the communication between text and reader is basically handled by negativity in To Autumn. Isers phenomenological approach introduces the aesthetics of fictionality and negativity as the readers effort revealing the imbedded meaning(s) in each poem. Fictionality and Negativity allow

77

M.A.R. Habib, Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2008) 652. This book will be referred to later as MLCT. 78 MLCT 653. 79 Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1979) 17. Further reference to this book will be as ARFL. 80 MLCT731.

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the productive participation of the reader. Thus the response of the reader to the poets Negative Capability might culminate in acquiring this quality. [T]he fictional aspect of a literary text makes it possible, it gives him a presence even though he is absent empirically speaking Iser suggests in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in a Prose Fiction (IR 239). Accordingly, the imaginary or fictional world of the nightingale leaves a room for the reader to share and participate in the fictionality of the Ode. Indeed we cannot decode the apostrophes message without entering this visionary world. The poet has already been deeply involved in identifying with the Nightingales omni-present world. Then the point that he ends up absent/present as the ending rhetorical question expresses, do I wake or sleep. In this respect one should recall Isers Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology81 where he argues that representation is more than a mimetic activity of the writer duplicating Nature. Isers point figures out representation as a performative act. The poet invites the reader to create what Iser calls the bracketed world. The speaker interacts with the nightingales melodious world, instead of his cruel empirical world. The bracketed world is a fictional locus, a mediator (MLCT 731). It is, also, a space of communion between the text and the reader. Hence, the bracketed world is a reality shared by the poet and the reader. Besides, the imagination of the reader contributes to the aesthetic fulfillment of the text, which Iser refers to as action of Konkretisation.82 In fact, the readers imagination creates the image of the nightingale, and overhears the birds singing. The Implied Reader, we have been referring to so far, is a participant in the modeling of the virtual text. He uses his imagination to appropriate the speakers description of the birds wonderful scene. This reader,
81

Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 236. See specifically chapter eleven: Representation: A Performative Act. Further reference to this book will be as PRRLA. 82 IR 274.

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like Keats, is taken from his real world to a bracketed world. And this challenges his Negative Capability. Iser once again explains this idea replying to Stanely Fish:
I maintain that the literary world differs from the real world because it is only accessible to the senses and exists outside any description of it. The words of a text are given, the interpretation of the words is determinate and the gaps between given elements and/or interpretations are the indeterminacies. The real world is given, our interpretation of the elements and/or our interpretations are the indeterminacies. This difference is that with the literary text, it is the interpretation of the words that produces the literary worldi.e. its real-ness, unlike that if the outside world, is not given.83

Since interpretation is a very subjective hermeneutic activity of the reader, the literary text as well as the literary world can be numerous and various as readers are numerous and various. The reader works out the indeterminacies of the words in order to get their meanings and significances. Iser means by realness of the literary text that such a contribution of the reader gives birth to the literary world. It is maintained by finding connections in the text, and these connections are the product of the readers mind working on the raw material of the text, though they are not the text itselffor this consists of sentences, statements, information, etc, Iser puts in his essay The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.84 The reader of the Ode to a nightingale might find out connections linking the poets depressing real world with the beautiful poetic world of the Nightingale. The reader identifies with the unheard voice of the bird so as to absorb the poets vision of a better world that would bring him joy. The poets sickness and the birds cheerfulness are also related to easeful death. The paradox, which makes up the whole poem, permits the reader to analyze the implications and draw a conclusion.

83 84

MLCT 735. IR 278.

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On the other hand, Negativity is one aesthetic feature of Negative Capability in To Autumn. Like fictionality in Ode to a Nightingale, Negativity in To Autumn binds the text with the receiver. Negativity serves as a net of ideas which the reader harmonizes together identifying with autumn and the literary world of the poem. Significantly, it enables the reader to go beyond the literal meanings of the text. Habib makes Isers argument clearer in the following extract:
Since literature presents something (knowledge or perspectives) that is not already in the world, it can reveal itself only through negativity, through the dislocation of external norms from their real text. In other words, everything that has been incorporated into a literary text has been deprived of its reality, and is subjected to new and unfamiliar connections. Negativity is the structure underlying this invalidation or questioning of the world, and to do this, she must transcend that world, observing it, as it were, from the outside.85

According to Iser, Negativity represents a basic link between the reader and the text. The reader is indulged in a new perception of what is included in the imaginary world of the text. This perception reintegrates the reader in the world of the poem as we will see later. Negativity, then, is the relocation of the real world into the literary world. Negativity, therefore, assesses and challenges the response of the reader to the text, in addition to his involvement in the understanding of the texts message. A reader communicates with the text or rather the fictionality of the text through Negativity. Iser argues that Negativity puts into action the readers will to make the fiction entailed in the literary world appear real. Besides, Iser says in Representation: A Performative Act, staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure, it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader (PRRLA 244). The critic, here and then, refers
85

MLCT 731.

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to imagination. He attributes it to gestalt; a meeting between the written text and the individual mind of the reader with its own particular history of experience, its own consciousness, its own outlook. Now, let us assess how Negativity contributes to the aesthetic response of the reader in To Autumn. Negativity is a construct provided by the writer and discovered by the reader. It is a construct that familiarizes the reader with the unfamiliar world of the text. It appropriates what is alien within the textual frame to the readers subjective perception, which actualizes the former. Here again Isers definition of Negativity is recalled to further illustrate the idea. It says that Negativity is a characteristic of a work of art that it enables us to transcend our own lives, entangled as they are in the real world. Negativity, then, as a basic element of communication, is an enabling structure that gives rise to a fecundity or richness of meaning that is aesthetic in character. The very idea of fecundity of meaning is going to be developed by the Implied Reader. Unlike the almost absent speaker, the reader in To Autumn is very active. Negativity is a build-up an infrastructure of blanks and negations in the poem (MLCT 731). Not only does the reader follow the speakers realistic description of autumn, but also fill in the blanks, aporia left as sensory images by Keats. That results in, as Habib deduces from his analysis of Isers Negativity, an achievement of the readers ability to deal with the ambiguity of the poems address. The Implied Reader should reveal tow blanks in To Autumn. Two figures of speech enhance the abundance of themes in the poem, which Habib calls as fecundity of meaning. Blanks, gaps for Iser are aporia for Derrida and tropes for Nietzsche and De Man. They all designate images that the reader transfigures while reading To Autumn. Stanza one presents two crucial sensory images
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among others, one of sight, another of taste. Mellow in the first line connotes the hectic color of leaves falling from the trees, though the full expression mellow fruitfulness tends to express fruition. Mellow is a blank that calls the readers imagination to visualize the speakers first reference to autumn. The sound effect of the vowel /: / in mellow completes the picture. It stands for fullness i.e. the roundness of the circle. The sound / : / implies completion. The readers transfiguration of the gap repays him understanding of meanings related to autumn such as transience, mutability, mortality and richness. Negation is a worth of mentioning aporia, before we move to the second stanza. The contradiction of L1 with L3 is a case of Negativity. Autumn is a season of mists, however it conspires with the maturing sun. This contradictory statement implicitly urges the intervention from the part of the reader, following the symbolism of the seasons taking over (life cycle starting with summer passing by autumn and ending in winter). The readers understanding hence, unveils autumn as an allegory of rebirth. Autumn is a mediator between life and death. The trope of autumn, have just been explained, is illustrative of the poets mysterious attitude to both realities: life and death. The reader, hereafter, becomes very close to the poet and to Negative Capability also. Another sensory image is a transfigured blank by the reader, that of sweet kernel. The image of taste, Keats creates in the first stanza, strengthens the readers engagement with understanding the poem. He reads, not only with his minds eye but also with his senses. Here, the sense of taste is invited in order to try the sweetness of the ripped fruit. Unless the reader recalls the taste of the fruits sweetness, he gets not over-brimmed with the image of fulfillment and abundance. However, the very excess in over foreshadows rottenness. The speakers ambivalence here enriches the semantic scheme of To Autumn. In addition, mossd might be considered as an image of touch
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since it stands for softness and smoothness. The blank, in the form of a sensory experience, is explored by the reader while reading. It culminates in adding the ornament of beauty and perfection to autumn. So far, we have been exploring how Negativity works out the aesthetic of the poets Negative Capability. Negativity, as Habib explains, is a bridge or bondage. It binds both artistic and aesthetic features of Negative Capability. Negativity is a transcending tool or a formula provided by Keats, and echoed in the readers response to the poems gaps. Derrida gives an account of the readers potential to partake an interpretive experience in the following extract from his Acts of LiteratureAn interview with Jacques Derrida: This Strange institution called literature;
This moment of transcending is irrepressible [] this also accounts for the philosophical force of these experiences, a force of provocation to think phenomenality, meaning, object, even being as such, a force which is at least potential, a philosophical dunamiswhich can, however, be developed only in response, in the experience of reading, because it is not hidden in the text like a substance.86

Like Iser, Derrida argues how the process of reading is stimulated by the development of semantic richness; and this is the case of To Autumn. Therefore, the readers creative reading that reveal inherent blanks, negations and gaps might be seen as a deliberate enactment of the readers Negative Capability. Metaphors are more tenacious than facts, we borrow De Mans statement to elaborate on the second stanzas ingenious metaphor (ARFL 5). Autumn is depicted metaphorically in an amorous image of a lady sitting [erotically] careless on a granary floor. This image is a second token of

86

AL 45.

66

Negativity. This metaphor is in keeping with the readers aesthetic role in To Autumn, that is why it is tenacious, as De Man asserts. Interestingly, the gap is filled with the readers linkage of autumns reaping aspect to a sexual intercourse. The winnowing wind flirts the ladys hair. Furrow implies the ladys long hair, soft-lifted by the autumn wind. Then the tone ascends with the sound of the reaping machine referring implicitly to the lady who is being sexually overtaken, she is reaped. Asleep and drowsy, announce the process of sexual pleasure. Apart from its literal meaning which is completion and perfection, the sexual intercourse has connotations such as overtaking, breaking and subduing. The metaphor of sexual consummation climaxes at the ladys hook, where ecstasy is recollected like a stream of fruits. Then the fume of poppies evokes the smell of the virgin ladys bleeding vagina, suggested by the red color of the poppies. The male partner in this sexual intercourse is utterly absent along the stanza, yet he is implicitly recalled through the action which he exerts on the female subject. In fact, the movement of the ladys hook is at times rejecting the swath, which is the males extending penis, to penetrate. At other times, the hook sticks like a gleaner, easing the movement of the penis. At this level, an emotional and physical bonding of both male and female bodies is achieved. This peak is implied by the ladys patient look which hints at orgasm. Accordingly, the cyder-press evokes the males penis getting erected, and then ejaculating his sperms. The female, ultimately, witnesses the oozings hours by hours (Pains as the words sound might suggest and the speakers anxiety about time in the later assonance might imply of the sexual consummations completion). To conclude, the amorous image compares reaping of flowers to a sexual consummation. Both acts culminate in rebirth and reproduction. Autumns fruitfulness will not last longer than winter, which is symbolic of death. The
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sexual intercourse will not last longer than desire is reached. Autumn, like Keats, has his music too. Like Keats, autumn claims autonomy needless to wait for spring to come. On the other hand, if winter comes, can spring be far behind, Shelley assures his friend. Autumns soft-dying day incarnates life and death at a time. The Autumnal music urges Keats and the reader to a deep awareness of human mortality.

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Chapter Two: Rhetoric

As far as I am concerned, Negative Capability is a medium of communication between text and reader. This mediated relationship is a case of close analysis for Hamlets Now I am alone and Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn. Indeed, our aim is to assess the communicative stance of Negative Capability through Rhetoric in Hamlets soliloquy. Therefore, it is worthwhile to go back to the definition of classical Rhetoric. Rhetoric, a branch of Art, has been underestimated by Plato for it is twice removed from the truth. Aristotle counterbalances the platonic low-estimation of Art with an Aristotelian didactic approach. With Aristotle, we move to claiming that Art is a representation of Nature. Rhetoric, the art of speech, models Nature in the shape of its articulation. According to Aristotle, it is a productive art, like poetics. In this respect, oratory or rhetoric is the art of using language for persuasion. It is a productive art, for mainly its artistic and aesthetic communication. This art mingles or assures the interplay of
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artistic method with aesthetic response. Thus, rhetoric claims an address to a reader as it is by nature the art of finding the means of persuasion. Unlike Pathos in Melancholy, Ethos and Logos in Rhetoric take over as Hamlet creates the persona of the defeated man, and proceeds logically in the staging of the Murder of Gonzago. By catching the conscious of the king, Hamlet, the chameleon character, turns to a stage director; and probably fulfills revenge. Action is deluded between the Pathos of Shakespeare and the Ethos and Logos of Hamlet, each in his design: Shakespeare through theatre and Hamlet through the play within the play. At this level, we are concerned with Hamlets Rhetoric: mainly Ethos and Logos. Ethos stands for the artistic side of the soliloquy, and Logos its aesthetic.

The aesthetic of Hamlets reception of the dumb show evokes his Ethos, and the response to it in the Mousetrap stage evokes his Logos. The reader is open to receiving and responding to Shakespeares drama as well as to Hamlets play within the play. What the dumb show represents is Shakespeares anticipation of the aesthetic of reception, which is explored by Iser in modern literary criticism. Hamlets reaction to the actors playing gives an extended vision of the character of Hamlet. Shakespeares text is generous as it foreshadows the reception and response of the reader incarnated in the character of Hamlet in the dumb show scene. Equivocation that pervades the Renaissance society is reflected on the character of Hamlet whose equivocal speech represents dichotomy. In The Act of Reading, Iser grounds his debate over textreader relationship on this mixture of determinacy and indeterminacy that conditions the interaction between text and reader, and such a two-way process

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cannot be called arbitrary.87 So, equivocation stands for the indeterminacy of Shakespeares plot that the determinacy of Hamlets dealing with it. Based on Isers assumption, rhetoric is an artistic method that draws a line between determinacy and indeterminacy. This two-way process between textreader, reader-text is manipulated by rhetoric which is not arbitrary at all. Isers reference to the texts indeterminacy gives the reader the possibility for revealing the unwritten part of the text.88 By challenging the latters imagination, Iser determines the readers participation in construing the literary text through filling its inherent gaps. Back to Aristotle, who defines rhetoric as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion with reference to any subject whatever.89 We understand from this definition that rhetoric is mainly finding ways to defend an idea in the aim of persuading. Thus, it provides channels when communicating the reader/audience. The argumentative stance of Rhetoric explains the use of logic. In the case of Hamlet, logic mixes with melancholy and madness to prove the revengeful disposition of Hamlet whose tragic death is inevitable at the end. In this respect, Frye conceives, in his Anatomy of Criticism the following:
The Rhetoric of tragedy requires the noblest direction that the greatest poets can produce, and while catastrophe is the normal end of tragedy, this is balance an equally significant original greatness, a paradise lost.90

The greatness of tragedy lies in rhetoric as Frye suggests above. In Hamlet, rhetoric and rhetorical language pervade the soliloquies. The focus is presently on Hamlets what a rogue soliloquy to unveil rhetoric as an artistic mode. In fact;

87 88

AR 24. IR 282. 89 ICR 232. 90 AC 210.

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A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place.91

Dealing with the rhetoric of Hamlets soliloquy, the reader fulfills the intention of Shakespeare. He intervenes in revealing the significance of Hamlets use of language. He shifts in his role from a melancholic character to a playwright and a critic, which adds poignancy to his dealing with words. He formulates his own dramatic critique as an attempt to be a conventional avenger in the play within the play. The dumb show and The Murder of Gonzago present Hamlet as audience, spectator and a reader of Shakespeares play giving his own vision of a perfect tragedy. Hamlet, sticks to convention disguising in his antic disposition. Hamlets madness has a close relation to rhetoric. He dons the mask of madness to unveil ambiguity and equivocation, doing so he lifts the veil also for his own manipulative use of language. Language, like the tragic elements of Hamlet, is useful to figure out the dramatic meaning of the play. Rhetoric. The latter quotes Lanham as follows:
He is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment The lowest common denominator of his life is a social situation He is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather to prevailing in the game at hand Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful.92

Hamlet has

the same description of the Homorhetoricus whom Fish refers to in his essay

91 92

ARFL 17. Frank Lentricchia & Thomas Mc Laughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), see specifically Rhetoric by Stanely Fish 208.

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Hamlet, the rhetorical man, manipulates the reality of the corrupt Danish court with antic disposition. He creates a fictional life instead of the real life in Denmark. His aim is to find proofs and pursue his tragic fate. Rhetoric deals with Hamlets antic disposition, which thematically serves to delay action. Like melancholy, antic disposition or madness strengthens the mystery of the play. Madness overlaps with melancholy to show Negative Capability. Melancholy and madness do not prevent Hamlet from using Rhetoric to reach the tragic end, rather they reinforce it. He disguises in the character of a mad man in order to hopefully push action forward. However for Campbell, madness also portrays the tragic heros passion:
Again, that madness is nothing else, but too much appearing passion, may be gathered out of the effects of wine, which are the same with those of the evil disposition of the organs. For the variety of behavior in men that have drunk too much, is the same with that of madmen. Some of them ranging, others loving, others laughing, all extravagantly; but according to their several domineering passions: for the effects of the wine, does but remove dissimulation, and take from them the sight of the deformity of their passions passions unguided, are for the most part mere madness.93

Whether madness is a mask or a fact, it belongs to the theme of appearance and disguise. Hamlet, pretending madness, gets closer to Denmarks equivocal world. Both melancholy and madness, as Campbell asserts, are emanated from passion, and both show sympathy and empathy94 of Shakespeare with/to his tragic hero. Claudius resumes Hamlets attitude:

93 94

STHSP 80. Quoted in M. H. Abrams ed., A Glossary of Literary Terms (USA: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, INC., 1988). German theorists in the nineteenth century developed the concept of Einfhlung (feeling into), which has been translated as empathy. It signifies identification with a perceived person or object, in which one seems to participate in the posture, motion, and sensations that one perceives. Empathy is often described as an involuntary projection of ourselves into an object, and is commonly explained as the result of an inner mimicry on the part of the observer; that is, the observer undergoes incipient muscular movement which he does not experience as his own sensations, but as if they were attributes of an outer object. The object may be human, or nonhuman, or even inanimate. [While] sympathy, as distinguished from empathy, denotes fellow-feelingnot feeling into the physical state, but feeling-along-with the mental state and emotions of another human being, or of nonhuman beings to whom we attribute human emotions, 49. Further reference to this book will be as GLT.

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Love! His affections do not that way tend; Nor what he spake, though it lackt form a little, Was not like madness. Theres something in his soul Oer which his melancholy sits on brood; [] Madness in great ones must not unwatcht go. (Act III Scene I)

Hamlets use of language is functional. It has as a role to reintegrate the tragic hero within the equivocal society of Denmark. Rhetorical images and devices show Shakespeares Negative Capability, the quality of being in uncertainties, yet keeping up with artistic beauty. Rhetoric, by nature, is a transfer of uncertainty. It is inherently loaded with mystery, and even its discursive and interactive nature transmits this mystery to the reader. The latter, engages to deal with rhetorical language in order to understand the meanings that rhetoric transfigure. And since,
One of the meanings of the word rhetoric is the study of figures [] rhetorical systems have frequently been constructed, giving names to a bewildering array of turns that can be given to the proper meanings of words.95

So, let us start with the rhetorical devices used in Hamlets Now I am alone. The artistic side of Rhetoric is related to figures of speech as we refer to Nietzsche:
It is not difficult to demonstrate that what is called Rhetorical, as the devices of a conscious art, is present as a device of unconscious art in language and its development. W e can go so far as to say that rhetoric is an extension [fortbildung] of the devices embedded in language at the clear light of reason. No such thing as an unrhetorical natural language exists that could be used as a point of reference: language is itself the result of purely rhetorical tricks and devices [] Language is rhetorical, for it only intends to convey a dox (opinion), not an episteme (truth). Tropes are not something that cannot be added or substructed from language at will, they are its truest nature.96

95 96

Critical Terms for Literary Study, See specifically Figurative Language by Stanley Fish 83. ARFL 105.

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Hamlet, the orator, resorts to Ethos in inquiring about his constant delay. Under the heading of Ethos, two rhetorical devices will be on spot in the following analysis; they are mainly imagery and rhetorical questions. In his speech, he depicts the persona of an alone man who reasons logically about his case. The voice of Hamlet in now I am alone is high-pitched, melodramatic and cursing: O, what a rogue and peasant slave I am. Hamlet carries on depicting the persona of a self-debased character. The degradation goes as follows in this full quote:
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing; no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damnd defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me a villain? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face? T weaks me by th nose? Gives me the lie i th Throat, As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha? S wounds, I should take it: for it cannot be But I am pigeon-liverd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter; or, ere this, I should have fatted all the region kites With this slaves offal: --bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindles Villain! O vengeance! Why, what an ass I am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murderd,

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Promoted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing , like a very drab, A scullion! (Act II, Scene II)

Hamlets rhetorical questions are significant for the characterization of the defeated man, the tragic hero.
A rhetorical question is a question asked, not to evoke an actual reply, but to achieve an emphasis stronger than a direct statement, by inviting the auditor to supply an answer which the speaker presumes to be the obvious one. The figure is most used in persuasive discourse, and tends to impart an oratorical tone to any utterance.97

Hamlet counterbalances his character with that of the player in the dumb show whose capacities for acting out his conduct supersedes that of Hamlet. He turns to self- reproach in the rhetorical questions as follows:

Whats Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across? Tweaks me by thnose? Gives me the lie: th Throat, As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha? (Act II, Scene II)

97

GLT 161.

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Imagery, a rhetorical device, is worth of exploration in the following paragraph. It is useful for the artistic side of Hamlets soliloquy. Shakespeares imagery here is a case of Negative Capability, it makes him explore beyond the literal meanings, the figurative meanings of language. In the second part of the soliloquy, images of cowardice, moral debunking and contempt illustrate the indeterminacy and variety of interpretation. The study of language, through these images, shows that Negative Capability is enacted through language. Abrams, in the Glossary of Literary Terms, defines imagery as:
The term is one of the most common in modern criticism, and one of the most variable in meaning. Its applications range all the way from the mental pictures which, it is sometimes claimed, are experienced by the reader of a poem, to the totality of elements which make up a poem. []Imagery is used, more narrowly, to signify only descriptions of visible objects and scenes, especially if the description is vivid and particularized. []Most commonly in current usage, imagery signifies figurative language, especially the vehicles of metaphors and similes.98

The tone is sorrowful in the soliloquy, and Hamlet turns to a witty selfeffacement. He uses negative images that degrade him to dullness, cowardice and immorality. In the first part Hamlet puts himself in comparison with the player who masters his role. Hamlet now, undergoes a subjective battle. The encounter of the determinate noble man with the dull man provokes the inward turmoil of Hamlet, which the soliloquy portrays. Here he faces the demand to be a Machiavelli, yet still questions his moral conduct. He attributes to his self the following descriptions: a coward, a villain, a rogue, a peasant slave and an ass. He also depicts himself using simile99 (like a whore like a very drab and like john-a dreams). The oratorical tone of Hamlet in his soliloquy confirms Abrams definition of imagery.
98 99

GLT 81. (L neuter of similis, like) A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, in such a way as to clarify and enhance an image. It is an explicit comparison (as opposed to the metaphor, q.v., where the comparison is implicit) recognizable by the use of the words like or as. It is equally common in prose and verse and is a figurative device of great antiquity, DLT&LT 830.

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So far, we have seen that in the first part of the soliloquy Hamlet struggles with the player, while in the second part he contends with his own self. We can better illustrate the character of Hamlet through the critical eye of Nietzsche. The latter proposes reading the play as a modern drama, and Hamlet as a modern hero whose battle revolves around claiming the self. Peter Holbrook, in his essay Nietzsches Hamlet approaches Nietzsche who revisits the tragic heros calamity in modern terms. Creation of the self is the modern mans. The dichotomy of reality should the modern man makes integrity with, yet Hamlet, like Nietzsches hero in Thus Spoke Zarathustra100 confronts its toughness. However Shakespeare, through Negative Capability, rhetoric specifically, holds masterfully mystery, and smoothly lives with integrity. Holbrook says in this respect:
The importance of Shakespeares play for Nietzsche is simply that despite Hamlets modernity there is no more intensely realized figure in literature than he. Indeed, the play is about subjectivity, that within which passes show, in a more explicit way than almost any other literary work.101

Nietzsche attributes the crisis of Hamlet to psychological reasons since he cannot get rid of his fathers omnipresence along the play through the appearance of the ghost. Hamlet unconsciously becomes a puppet which the ghost plays with as Hamlet follows his commands. He wants to get rid of the parental authority of the king (represented in the ghost). Nietzsche proposes that Hamlet holds his psychological equilibrium till the end due to what the former calls active forgetfulness which is like a door keeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette. This self-erasure Holbrook, refers to in his essay, is displayed in Now I am alone. There, Hamlet degrades his self, erases it rather. He curses and insults a will-less self, which is dependent, lazy and
100 101

Friederick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann trans., (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). Peter Holbrook, Nietzsches Hamlet, Shakespeare Survey Vol. 50 (London: Oxford University Press, 1997) 177. Further reference to this Book will be as SS.

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lacking morality. Nietzsche goes on explaining the enigma of Hamlets weakness. It attributes it to a state of skepticism that impedes Hamlet from acting. This attitude:
Is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickness; it always develops when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and decisively. In the new generation that, as it were, has inherited in its blood diverse standards and values, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, attempt; the best forces have an inhibiting effect, the very virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong; balance, a center of gravity, and perpendicular poise are lacking in body and soul. But what becomes sickest and degenerates most in such hybrids is the will: they no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willingthey doubt the freedom of the will even in their dreams.102

Nietzsches psychological analysis of Hamlet, relates the experience of modernity to the unrest chaos of personality, which Hamlet exemplifies par excellence. According to Nietzsche freedom of the will is imprisoned by skepticism, self-effacement and philosophical thinking. Hamlets response to the Dumb show is reflected in Ethos. We move from Shakespeares Pathos to Hamlets Ethos. Hamlet, an orator in the Dumb Show, establishes the stage of The Murder of Gonzago to catch the Kings conscious. The orator should be able to prove opposites, as in logical arguments; not that we should do both,103 therefore he should have the quality of Negative Capability. The play generates confusion, and the play within the play further adds mystery. It is the case of another stage, which attempts at solving the riddle of the first one. What interests me in this section are the following points: first, rhetoric is another aspect of Negative Capability since it deals with the contradictions and ambiguities of language in Hamlets second soliloquy. Also, it shows the identification of Shakespeare with his hero through

102 103

SS 179-180. ICR 231.

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language. Second, rhetoric is by definition a defense of an idea. Its function is to convince a receiver, an addressee, so it is basically communicative. Through rhetoric, Shakespeare communicates with the reader having the intention to influence him. Indeed, such reference to Rhetoric is very modern, unlike Aristotles, which takes into consideration the oratory aspect of the sender of the message and not the interaction of sender-receiver. Yet with Nietzsche and De Man, we move to study the communicative aspect of Rhetoric. I intend to deal with Hamlets contribution to the making of Shakespeares literary text through rhetorical response with reference to Isers aesthetic theory. In response to Shakespeares art, the Dumb Show, Hamlet establishes his drama, The Murder of Gonzago. Catharsis evoked by pathos is translated in the dramatic experience which Hamlet partakes, helped with ethos and logos. Speech goes from the hearer (Pathos) to the speaker (Ethos) then to subject (Logos). Frye explains the
The traditional theory of catharsis implies that the emotional response to art is not the raising of a natural emotion, but the raising and casting out of actual emotion on a wave of something else, perhaps, exhilaration or exuberance; the vision of something liberated from experience, the response kindled in the 104 reader into mimesis, of life into art, of routine into play.

Mimesis105 or Mise en Abyme106 is Hamlets aesthetic response to Shakespeares art. Hamlets art rhetorically serves to persuade the audience that he is going to avenge the murder of the king by Claudius. To do so, Hamlet resorts to Logos in implementing his play. Astonished by the Dumb Show, Hamlet turns to preparing his own Dumb Show. We move from Shakespeares reality to Hamlets mimesis. Theatricality in La Mise en Abyme is related to
104 105

AC 93. It has almost the same meaning as mime but the concept of imitation in this case has wider connotations. Aristotle, in Poetics, states that tragedy is an imitation of an action, but he uses the term comprehensively to refer to the construction of a play and what is put into it. We should rather use mimesis to mean representation, which relates to verisimilitude, DLT&LT 512. 106 A literary recursion: Andr Gides coinage for the literary effect of infinite regression, DLT&LT 513.

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fiction in the Dumb Show, which amazes the very faculties of eyes and ears (Act II, Scene II) and stimulates the faculty of the minds eye (Act I, Scene I). It is the very coinage of [Hamlets] brain as Gertrude says in the closet scene (Act III, Scene IV). Hamlet, the scholar, shows his abilities for dramatic art in staging the play within the play as an attempt to eventually resolve the conventional tragic end. In response to the dumb show, he adds a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines to The Murder of Gonzago and tells the players to act his play, The Mousetrap. Hamlet disguises in various personae just to be a conventional tragic hero, his character is unpredictable and even indeterminate. And may be Keatss definition of the poetical character that is self-less is applicable to him.107 Hamlet the playwright, gives his own version of Shakespeares tragedy. Hamlet, the literary critic, gives his commands to the players before performing, in order to act out the reality he wishes to unveil with theatre;
Be not too neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you oerstep not the modesty of nature: for an thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unaskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, overweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, -- and heard others praise, and that highly, -- not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowd, that I have thought some of natures journeymen had made them, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

107

Quoted in Wislon Knight, The Wheel to Fire (Routledge: Taylor & Francis, 2005) 323. Hamlet, like Keats, has no character or rather he is the chameleon character as Wilson Knight quotes Tolstoy: But as it is accepted that Shakespeare, the genius, could write nothing bad, learned men devote all the power of their minds to discovering extraordinary beauties in what is an obvious and glancing defectparticularly obvious in Hamlet namely, that the chief person of the play has no character at all. And lo and behold, profound critics announce that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, is most power-fully presented a perfectly new and profound character, consisting in this, that the person has no character, and that is this absence of character lies an achievement of genius the creation of a profound character! And having decided this, the learned critics write volumes upon volumes, until the laudations and explanations of the grandeur and importance of depicting the character of a man without a character fill whole librarie. Further reference to this book will be as WF.

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(Act III, Scene II)

Logos or logical reasoning marks the aesthetic response of Hamlet, the reader according to Blooms theory of poetic influence. This rhetorical mode in his speech tends to enhance revenge, which is the very nature of tragedy. Aesthetics of reception and response are shown through language in Hamlets speech in the second soliloquy, and through his contribution to Shakespeares literary text with the play within the play. Concerning the aesthetic of the first Dumb Show, Hamlet here plays the role of audience/receiver/reader. He is amazed with the first players acting. However, the clash between over-brooding passion and philosophical reasoning remains a stumble for Hamlet. A balance between emotion and logic the first player holds, which does not apply to Hamlet. He is moved by the actors power of empathy which he himself lacks. Iser expands on this interplay of text and reader (Hamlet) as follows:
Aesthetic response is therefore to be analyzed in terms of a dialectic relationship between text, reader, and their interaction. It is called aesthetic response because, although it is brought about by the text, it brings into play the imaginative and perceptive faculties of the reader, in order to make him adjust and even differentiate his own focus.108

With reference to Iser, Hamlets response to the players acting is definitely aesthetic. Like the audience, Hamlet experiences Catharsis since the players representation is melodramatic. In the course of his psychological turmoil, Hamlet faces his own weakness. His violent reaction to the Dumb Show in the self-effacing soliloquy is an instance of the fulfillment of Shakespeares

108

See the Preface of The Act of Reading.

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intention. It is firstly to move us when Hamlet confronts Hamarcia,109 then to accelerate action that is ingeniously slowed down by Pathos. The Dumb Show is an encounter between Hamlet and consciousness. The interaction of Hamlet with Shakespeares text in the Dumb Show is explicit through the formers response to it in his soliloquy. Shakespeare pushes Hamlet to accept his fate. Yet, Hamlet is impeded with passion and morality, as the following outcry from his conversation with Rozengrantz and Guildestern expresses:
lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to one a sterile promoter; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave oerhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (Act II, Scene II)

In Act II scene II, Hamlet welcomes the players to Elsinore. Hamlet is already planning for The Mousetrap as he meets the players. The first players performance is a caviare to the general, yet Hamlet the educated man, appreciates and even comments on the play. He said, As I received it, which justifies that reception is one of a critic. He is a reader of Shakespeare. Although it is not the aim of this paper to deal with Hamlet from the standpoint of Blooms theory of misprision, yet it is noteworthy that Bloom would rather call Hamlet a misreader or a belated poet and The Murder of Gonzago a misreading, a misprision of Shakespeares Hamlet. He already claims his role as a reader commenting on the scenes, the lines, and the authors affection. Hamlet wants the player to start his performance with let me see, let me see.
109

(GK error) Primarily, an error of judgement which may arise from ignorance or some moral shortcoming. Discussing tragedy (q.v.) and the tragic hero in Poetics, Aristotle points out that the tragic hero ought to be a man whose misfortune comes to him, not through vice or depravity, but by some error. For example: Oedipus kills his father from impulse, and marries his mother out of ignorance. Antigone resists the law of the state from stubbornness and defiance, DLT&LT 373.

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The first player beautifully plays the role of Hecuba whose husband is murdered by Pyrrhus. The dumb show influences Hamlet. Consequently, he resorts to rhetoric to find out a way to action, though his rhetorical language might incorporate blurredness. In the Dumb show, Shakespeare provides us with a vision of a receiver of his own text. Hamlet, in the dumb show scene, is a receiver, a reader and a critic. Reference to Isers the Reading Process Hamlet leaves the familiar world of his own experience since
with a literary text we can only picture things, which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our imagination.110

The reader participates in the making of the literary world. The author gives the reader the possibility to reveal the unwritten part of the text by challenging his imagination to fill in the texts gaps, Iser and Derrida agree on the idea of gaps and the moving process of meaning in texts. In The Wheel to Fire: Interpretation of Shakespearean Tragedy. Wilson Night refers to this word that remains unsaid in Shakespearean tragedy, which he relates to Negative Capability that Shakespeare has:
In living, as in art, creative action matures not from bluster and violence, but from repose controlled emotion does not quite describe that repose, since it suggests a dualism: it is precisely Hamlets efforts at self-control that witness his inability to live his own artistic wisdom. The art of life is not an ethic; ethic, like technical rules, is a makeshift. The repose, or poise, required corresponds again to Keats definition of poetry as night, half slumbering on its own right arm; in life it will suggest a trust in beneficent powers to do this share Keats negative capabilitywithout over-straining, impatience and anxiety of oneself, the trust expressed later in there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow ( V, ii 232); in acting,, it is the power of the thing left unsaid, the gesture not made. It will always be partly unconscious and instructive.111

110 111

IR 283. WF 351.

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Night draws a line linking Iser and Derrida with Keats. Keatss Negative Capability appeals to the idea saying that texts contain gaps. Iser and Derrida stress that what is unsaid in the text is suggested by the reader, and this is his contribution to the text as we have already seen. On the part of Keats, that power, called Negative Capability, is an asset to poetic greatness. It is the poets withdrawal from self to immerse into the characters of his literary world. So far, that quality Keats discovers is interpreted as we have already seen as a medium of artistic and aesthetic communication. In fact, this quality, as defined by Keats in his letter, is in total affinity with interaction of the poet with his object, then the object with the reader. Its communicative stance establishes a link between the text and the reader. Bate, quotes in his essay Negative Capability Woodhouse who is a friend of Keats. The latter writes to John Taylor claiming that Keats is the Poetical Character after Shakespeare. It is expressed here as he says:
I believe him to be right with regard to his own Poetical CharacterAnd I perceive clearly the distinction between himself &those of the Wordsworth school The highest order of Poet will not only possess all the above powers but will have [so] high an imagination that he will be able to throw his own soul into an object he sees or images, so as to see feel be sensible of ,& express, all that the object itself would see feel be sensible of or express -- &he will speak out of that objectso that his own self will with the Exception of the Mechanical part be annihilated and it is [of]the excess of this power that I suppose Keats to speak, when he says he has no identityAs a poet, and the fit is upon him, this is true Shakespeare was a poet of the kind above mentionedand he was perhaps the only one besides Keats who possessed this power in an extraordinary degree.112

Woodhouse, in the above quote, resumes the power of Negative Capability that Keats, like Shakespeare, possesses. After defining Rhetoric, which is an aspect of Negative Capability, now let us examine the rhetorical language of the Ode to a Grecian Urn, then its aesthetic effect as ekphrasis. In Ode to a
112

See Negative Capability26-27.

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Grecian Urn, rhetoric assures the interaction of the reader with the artistic and aesthetic sides of the poem. Keats, the prototype of the Poetical character after Shakespeare as Woodhouse conceives in the above quote, has so high imagination that he throws his soul into the urn. The Grecian Urn, an object of art which Keats apostrophizes, raises the mystery of itself and of its relationship to the poet. Indeed, this section reads Ode to the Grecian Urn in respect of artistic and aesthetic debate that Keatss Negative Capability handles. The rhetoric of the Grecian Urn is communicative as far as it involves the reader with imagination. The urns beauty outlives time as well as Keatss personal trauma. The mysterious object allows the withdrawal of the poet and the advent of the reader. The latter tries to reveal the mystery of the urns regenerating beauty through imagination. The artistic side of the Ode on a Grecian Urn deals with the enigma of the urns representation through rhetorical questions and metaphors, while the aesthetic aspect is maintained by ekphrasis (inspired by Grant F. Scotts Keats and the Urn in John Keats). Yet here, we mean exploring the aesthetics of the poem in the light of this rhetorical device, which serves in the portrayal of Keatss Negative Capability. The speaker expresses his involvement within the enigma of the urn from the outset of the poem. The address is as emblematic as the object itself. The speakers playful language reveals mystery as incarnated by the urn. The message of the first stanza is transfigured with rhetorical questions and conceit. Text-reader dialogue is held artistically through the reception of rhetoric and aesthetically in response to it through rhetoric as well. Rhetorical questions, in the opening stanza, enhance the mysterious representation of the urn in Keatss poem. The speaker, is teased out of thought by the enigmatic shape of the object of art. Here the examples:

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What leaf-fringd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe of the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maindens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to esacape? What pipes and trimbrels? what wild ecstasy? (Stanza 1, PBERV 279)

Keatss use of rhetorical questions furthers the questioning of the object that amazes him. They express the speakers trail at making the urn responds to his astonishment. The apostrophe113 that opens the stanza with Thou, as well as the rhetorical questions, urgently calls for interaction from the part of the urn. The speaker urges the urn to speak out telling him about the mysteries, which it represents. The urn, in stanza 2, shows the speakers interest with the beautiful world that the urn depicts. Beauty of the unheard melodies, the singing youth, and lovers celebrating love with kissing alludes to Arcadias beauteous world. The youth may be the shepherd of Keatss poetic world, which resembles Spensers. The poet teases the urn to speak out the history of beauty in ancient times (Greek and Renaissance), also to reply to the poets thirst for discovery. The urn, accordingly, replies implicitly to this address through symbolism:
The word symbol derives from the Greek verb symballein, to throw together, and its noun symbolon, mark, emblem token orsign. It is an object, animate or inanimate, which represents or stands for something else. As Coleridge put it, a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the special (i.e. the species] in the individual. A symbol differs from allegorical (see allegory) sign in that it has real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary.114

113

Apostrophe (Gk turning away) A figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or absent person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding, DLT& LT 51. 114 DLT&LT 884-885.

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The urn is the emblem of absolute and eternal love and happiness as stanza 3 elucidates:
Ah happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still and still to be enjoyd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (Stanza 3, PBERV 279)

Let us go back to the poems conceit,115 that of the first line. Keatss ingenious metaphor transfers the simple image of an archaic urn to a still unravishd bride of quietness, a foster child of silence and slow time and sylvan historian who canst thus express a flowery tale more sweetly, than our rhyme (stanza 1, L1-3). The figurative language116 or rhetoric of the first line presents the idea of beauty as eternal through the mtaphore vive,117 as
115

(L Conceptus, concept, influenced by It concetto) By c. 1600 the term was still being used as a synonym for thought, and as roughly equivalent to concept, idea and conception. It might also then denote a fanciful supposition, an ingenious act of deception or a witty or clever remark or idea. As a literary term this word has come to denote a fairly elaborate figurative device of a fanciful kind which often incorporates metaphor, simile, hyperbole or oxymoron (qq.v.) and which is intended to surprise and delight by its wit and ingenuity. The pleasure we get from many conceits is intellectual rather than sensuous, DLT&LT 165. 116 Figurative Language: is a departure from what speakers of a particular language apprehend to be the standard meaning of words, or the standard order of words, in order to achieve some special meaning or effect. Such figures were long described as primarily ornaments of language, but they are integral to the functioning of language, and in fact indispensable not only to poetry, but to all modes of discourse.
117

Quoted in Mario Valdes ed., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Theory/ Culture) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 1991) 463. The term vive (living) in the title of this work is all important, for it was my purpose to demonstrate that there is not just an epistemological and political imagination, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a linguistic imagination which generates and regenerates meaning through the living power of metaphoricity. La Mtaphore vive investigated the resources of rhetoric to

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Ricoeur refers to the metaphors function as generating new meanings. It is the case here for this rhetorical device to work out indeterminacy in Keatss Ode to a Grecian Urn. Keats borrows the image of still unravishd bride to elaborate on the immortality of the urns beauty (stanza 1). The poet uses an idiom related to Time emphasizing the urns enigma; that of stopping time at specific spots. The idiom includes still, quietness, silence, slow, historian, legend and Arcady (stanza 1). The consonance of the second line silence and slow adds poignancy to the idea that the urns beauty is not only eternal, but also emblematic. The /s/ sound enhances the meanings of stability, slowness and smoothness of Time. Thus the poems direct meaning remains ambiguous.118 On the other hand, the sexual image in the first line fosters the configuration of meaning, which is reproduced by the reader. This latter interacts with these metaphors as for to picture the object of beauty, which the poet eternalizes in his verse. We have already referred to this productive activity of the reader who uses his imagination to hold a picture of the urn in its full depiction. This is claimed otherwise in Isers reference to the interaction of author-reader through indeterminacy that the texts rhetoric exposes. We, as readers, deal with this gap aesthetically, since the picturing that is done by our imagination is only one of the activities through which we form the gestalt of a literary text.119 Likewise, we picture the urn not with the sensual ear but more endeard [] to the spirit ditties of no tone (stanza 1, L13-14).

show language undergoes creative mutations and transformations. My works on narrativity, Temps et Rcit, develops this inquiry into the inventive power of language. 118 Here I want to refer to Empsons Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) where he expands on ambiguity. Empson explains thus: well call it ambiguous [] when we recognize that there could be a puzzle as to what the author meant, in that alternate views might be taken without sheer misreading an ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful He adds, the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry. Seven types of ambiguity Empson provides, but may be here it is appropriate to refer to the sixth type as it fits the context of this paper: where something appears to contain a contradiction and the reader has to find interpretations, DLT&LT 30. 119 IR 283.

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Aesthetically, Ode to a Grecian Urn calls for the interaction of the reader through ekphrasis. Imagination, in fact, shapes both artistic and aesthetic sides of the poem, and that is why it best exemplifies Keatss Negative Capability. The aesthetic response120 is enhanced by a rhetorical device that preserves the aesthetic identification of the reader with the Urn. Here, we refer to Grant F. Scott as he assumes this response to be ekphrastic. In keeping with the papers stance to aesthetics of response ekphrastic identification,121 Ekphrasis122 is a rhetorical device that pursuits the readers communication with the Urns picture through visualization at first. This calls to consideration of Isers vision of identification as an effect created along the process of reading; it shortens the gap between text and reader:
Often the term identification is used as if it were an explanation, whereas in actual fact it is nothing more than a description. What is normally meant by identification is the establishment of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneselfa familiar ground on which we are able to experience the unfamiliar. The authors aim, though, is to convey the experience and, above all an attitude toward that experience. Consequently, identification is not an end in itself, but a strategem by means of which the author stimulates attitudes in the reader.123

Identification, Iser relates to description. Through description, Keats establishes his affinities with the Urn then the effect of that description on his readers is that of identification. The pictorial aspect of the poem calls readers attention to the mysterious Urn. Description of the pictures designed on it invites us to share the aesthetic experience of the poet through response, which means aesthetic identification. Illustration on the drawn images in the poem is as vivid as the
120 121

JK 165. JK 165. 122 Ekphrasis/ecphrasis (Gk description) The intense pictorial description of an object. This very broad term has been limited by some to the description of art-objects, and even to the self-description of speaking out objects (objects whose visual details are significant). A more generous account would define ekphrasis as virtuosic description of physical reality (objects, scenes, persons) in order to evoke an image in the minds eye as intense as if the described object were actually before the reader, DLT&LT 252. 123 IR, The Reading Process 291.

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last stanza shows. The speaker depicts the object preserving its newness and youth through time:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When olf age shall this generation waste, Thou shall remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend of man, to whom thou sayst, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Stanza 5, PBERV 280)

Another feature of identification is the readers response to the paradox124 of the urns representation in the poem. He reveals the speakers paradoxical attitude towards Time. Time, another token of Keatss Negative capability, is an aporia125 in Ode to a Grecian Urn. As readers, we identify with a mysterious priest of beauty both as timeless and frozen in time as the oxymoronic phrase cold Pastoral calls to attention. Other paradoxical descriptions including: for ever piping songs/ for ever new/for ever warm/ for
124

Paradox (Gk beside/beyond opinion) Originally a paradox was merely a view which contradicted accepted opinion. By round about the middle of the 16 th c. the word had acquired the commonly accepted meaning it now has: an apparently self-contradictory (even absurd) statement which, on closer inspection, is found to contain a reconciling the conflicting opposites, DLT&LT 634. 125 Aporia (Gk impassable path) A term used in the theory of deconstruction (q.v.) to indicate a kind of impasse or insoluble conflict between rhetoric and thought. Aporia suggests the gap or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean. It is central to Jacques Derridas theory of difference (q.v.). In his excellent book on Derridas critique of philosophy (Derrida, 1987) Christopher Norris discusses this central feature of deconstruction as the seeking-out of those aporias, blindspots or moments of selfcontradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean, DLT&LT 50.

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ever panting/ for ever young, and on the other hand, sylvan historian Attic shape/ silent form/ cold pastoral. The reader deals with the gap the way the observer deals the urn. The latters response is aesthetic as he communicates with the object through imagination. The process goes on when the observer animates the images of the urn. And as heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter so he recreates the silent form (stanza 2, stanza 5). What the reader contributes to in Ode to a Grecian Urn is the indeterminacy of the urns representation. Accordingly, the rhetorical devices used by Keats are gaps for the reader. Dealing with the rhetorical devices, the reader is able to fill in the gaps and produce the various and ephemeral meanings related to Time, Beauty and Truth, Art and human life. They are all recurrent in Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn as we have already come across. The Urn, an object of art, interrelates the reader with the text not attempting to fix the determinacy of the texts meaning, rather enjoying the indeterminacy of Art and human life; and that is all you need on earth, and all ye need to know for beauty is truth, truth beauty (Ode to a Grecian Urn, stanza 5).

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Conclusion
Canonical works are those texts that have gradually revealed themselves to be multi-dimensional and omni-significant, those works that have produced a plenitude of meanings and interpretations, only a small percentage of which make themselves available at any single reading. Canonical texts [] generated new ways of seeing old things and new things we have never seen before. No matter how subtly or radically we change our approach to them, they always respond with something new; no matter how many times we reinterpret them, they always have something illuminating to tell us. Their very indeterminacy means that they can never be exhausted [] Canonical works are multi-dimensional, omni-significant, inexhaustible, perpetually new, and, for all these reasons, permanently valuable.126

126

JK

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