Robert Baynard
19th Century British Poetry/ Prof. Brooker
November 18, 2007
Art
and Experience in Keats and Browning
Robert
Browning and John Keats share the same sense of expressing the “emotional
directness of personal experience” found in the Romantic Movement of the 19th century
(“Romanticism”). Both poets
explore the emotional experience of art in the poems, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
and “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”. In
this essay, I would like to describe how Keats uses the Urn—and Browning uses
Galuppi and his music—as a way of allowing the audience into the experience of
art. I want to further discuss the
ability of art to preserve and create emotional experience. The following analysis of both of the
poems will show how art can excite and create an experience for the
participation of the audience—and it is through the participation in the
experience that art creates that the audience can escape the transience of
time.
Keats
uses his sympathetic imagination to surrender into the happiness of the Urn only
to retreat to the understanding of his own limitations (Brooker Oct. 17,
2007). Understanding the limits of
reason and being at ease with uncertainty are important factors in his idea of
Negative Capability. “The Ode’s
deal with some of the concepts that Keats had been most preoccupied with since
beginning to write poetry: the relationship between art and history, between
reality and ideals, pain and pleasure, social responsibility and imagination”
(Mathison).
In
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats makes an apostrophe to the Urn, addressing it as
though it were living when in fact it is an inanimate object
(“apostrophe”). The Urn symbolizes
mortality and death, but the art on the urn opens itself up to interpretation
through present experience, symbolizing the life or immortality of the urn and
of interpretive art in general.
The art on the urn and the urn itself are a “friend to man” in that they
enable us to have an emotional experience of the beauty of art through a symbol
of the decay and transience in human life (line 48). “Having set in motion this tension between something
unchanging because it is dead and something transient because its alive, and
having refrained from declaring preference, Keats designates the urn a ‘sylvan
historian,’ more potent than poetry to tell a tale in a
woodland-picture-history” (Patterson 210). Keats’ disdain for the “Cold Pastoral!” of the Urn’s art
stems from his own knowledge of transience in human life that will not last
through generations (line 45). The
classical art of the Grecian Urn represents art that is fixed—not only in its
own time of ancient Greece, but also in the time of whoever experiences that
art. Charles Patterson suggests:
This
work of art has teased us “out of thought,” that is, out of the world of the
actual and into an ideal world in which we can momentarily identify ourselves
imaginatively with life that is free of the particular imperfections of
our lot here. But deficiencies,
for it is lifeless, motionless, cold, unreal. At
the very apex of our enjoyment of its permanence, we realize that it has these
imperfections and that it exists only in conception. (215)
Art has the ability to take us “out
of thought” and into imaginative experience. Whether through a Grecian Urn or through the “Ode on a
Grecian Urn”, art has the ability to bring its audience into its own
experience. Keats is allowing his
audience in on the speaker’s experience of the Urn. The Urn is open to interpretation and new experience with
its art of “unheard” music that is able to “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no
tone” (lines 11, 14). The art can
be reinterpreted to fit the imagination of its audience. The quotation at the end of the poem,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” can be “attributed variously—speaker to urn,
speaker to reader, speaker to figures on the urn, urn itself to reader—[...]
They exist both inside and outside of any single frame of reference, in the gap
that separates and unites the reader, speaker, figures, and maker of the urn”
(Mauro 299). Art has the ability
to bring about an emotional response from all who partake in the imaginative
experience. The poet, the speaker,
and the audience participate in the experience of the Urn. There is also a sense that the Urn has
the capability of surviving the transience of life, and through this power, the
Urn is better than life itself.
However, the Urn serves as a constant reminder of the temporality of
human life. The Urn is a spatial
art and stands outside of the effects of time—its meaning can be renewed
through future experience and interpretation.
Robert
Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” is like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in
that it points to the ability of art to create and preserve experience for its
audience. When looking at the
similarities of the effects of the two poems, Stefan Hawlin suggests:
Galuppi’s
music, we might say, is the speaker’s Grecian Urn: He interrogates
it, he enters into its meaning, and it lets him in to another world
and time.
Like
the ‘Grecian Urn’ the poem hinges on the teasing and ambiguous
interrelation of art and reality, and on the questions raised by a work
of art surviving into an era remote from itself—particularly of course the
question of human transience. (Hawlin 622, 623)
Browning interprets the experience
of art and its relation to the reality of human transience through his dramatic
monologue of another speaker.
Keats achieves this experience through the sympathetic imagination by
sympathizing with the Urn and speaking through the Urn. Keats experiences art by being absorbed
into the art itself. Becoming the Urn allows a way in which his experience
stands outside of time. He escapes
time through the experience of art.
The
speaker in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” escapes his own time and place through
hearing the music of Galuppi that allows him to step out of his world and into
the world of the Venetians. Venice
is not only a symbol of art and beauty in Romantic Literature, but it is also a
symbol of the decay of time (Brooker Nov. 7, 2007). Venice is in decline, sinking into the sea. At the sound of the music, the speaker
experiences the “good it brings”—through the imagined people of Venice and its
symbols of power such as “Saint Mark’s” and the Doges (lines 5 and 6). The speaker’s imaginative
experience of Galuppi’s music takes him out of England and into Venice “as if
[he] saw it all” (line 9). The
art—of the music for the speaker and the poetry for the reader—has the power to
be experienced outside of the audience’s temporality. Along those lines, art in a way, takes its audience out of
time and opens a possibility for an experience that will be unaffected by the
decay of time. W. David Shaw
comments on Browning’s ability to turn art into a lasting experience:
Even
when the speaker in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” feels “chilly and grown old”, he
also triumphs over time by showing how apostrophe can be used to turn the temporal
transition from eighteenth century Venice to Victorian England into a reversible
movement from the age of Darwin back to the eighteenth century. Browning
contrasts the one-directional movement of narrative, where time has an arrow,
with the reversible, two-way flow of a monologue’s apostrophes. (312)
Ironically, the experience
eventually is accompanied by images of a dying Venice. Just as Venice is “born to bloom and
drop,” so is the experience created by the art of the poem (line 40). The art can only be experienced by an
individual while the partaker in the experience and the experience itself is still
alive. The images conjured up by
the music and the poetry have a transient life of their own. Experiencing the images and the poetry
is ultimately transient in that the audience’s experience exists in time. However, art still holds the power to
give birth to the experience again.
This
analysis makes a distinction between art and the audience. The audience’s experience rests on the
imaginative interpretation of the art.
Art opens itself to different interpretations that create different
experiences for different audiences.
In opening itself to different experiences, art survives the transience
of a particular audience. Art is
also not limited to one interpretation or experience. This distinction is characterized by Jack Herring as an
image of a set of “concentric critical circles” that Browning has developed in
“A Toccata of Galuppi’s”:
At
the center is the artist, Galuppi, proclaiming his message; round about
Galuppi, his
Venetian audience misunderstands his message; the narrator or the poem, forming
the next critical ring, condemns the Venetians for their failure to understand
Galuppi, but himself misinterprets Galuppi (Browning condemns the Venetians
and the narrator, but considers himself as properly understanding Galuppi);
the modern reader forms the outermost ring of criticism condemning the
Venetians, the narrator, and Browning, but probably making the same misinterpretation
of Galuppi’s music. Thus each
generation condemns the previous
one, but repeats the same errors.
Only the artist (Galuppi, or Browning) knows
the truth. (377)
This quotation only serves this
comparative analysis as a model for the framework of arts ability to create
experience on different levels, and I wish not to deal with the issue of art’s
capability to be misinterpreted or misunderstood. In Herring’s structural view of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”,
the music and the poetry open themselves up to be experienced by Galuppi, his
Venetian audience, the narrator, the modern reader, and Browning himself. The Venetian audience, the narrator,
and Galuppi are all characters in the poem that participate in the experience
yet stand outside the spatio-temporal world and the passing of that
experience. “Though every ghost is
a casualty of time, the apostrophe to a historical ghost also places it beyond
time” (Herring 312). The
apostrophe to Galuppi by the speaker takes the speaker out of time
chronologically because he is addressing a dead musician. Likewise, Keats is addressing a Grecian
Urn that has withstood time. Browning
and the modern reader are located in time and subject to the decay of that
experience. However, every member
participating in the experience of the poem can escape the transience of time
through the experience that art creates for them in the poem. The experience will outlast time’s
ravaging effects in that it can be experienced again; either by the current
participants or by a new or future audience.
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