I can't tell for sure what her take on beauty v. truth is here. Presumably there is one. If she's corpse 1, though, there's no mention of her rebuking the newcomer: 2's delcaration of brethrenhood is echoed in the poet's "kinsmen", and what they then do forever is chat. I suppose if 2 is Keats she may be gently rebuking him by not affirming? After which they get along fine, though.
But 'Much madness is divinest sense' is matched by 'Tell the truth and tell it slant.' In general Dickinson was after the sublime sorts of beauties, the true ones we can't afford to not forget--the seal Despair, untakeable Tint, Death's courtings and all those. So in a sense she's with Keats in combining B&T, with Shelley in finding beauty a matter of discovering something intellectually real but elusive.
I think my teacher's reading involved both words being silly purposes for life, or silly descriptions of life's purposes; the two are one only when you're dead, when everything else is also one, is Emily's irony. Basically an attack on Romanticism and conventionality--the two being one to that teacher.
Their being Shelley and Keats explains the order of death, proximity, agreement/kinship, cessation of talk once the names are gone etc...I think Dickinson would have found the Urn's seeming-say too easy a target, literalized; whereas the ways what Keats wrote might have been true would have fascinated her. But who knows? Perhaps she's undermining both precursors--implying their male overstatements are true only where they now are. But the rest is tribute.
The only half-mystery I see in the S/K reading is why Dickinson's Keats. But he came first on her favorite readings list. Does she call him junkets somewhere or is that you?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-11-03 12:08 am (UTC)I can't tell for sure what her take on beauty v. truth is here. Presumably there is one. If she's corpse 1, though, there's no mention of her rebuking the newcomer: 2's delcaration of brethrenhood is echoed in the poet's "kinsmen", and what they then do forever is chat. I suppose if 2 is Keats she may be gently rebuking him by not affirming? After which they get along fine, though.
But 'Much madness is divinest sense' is matched by 'Tell the truth and tell it slant.' In general Dickinson was after the sublime sorts of beauties, the true ones we can't afford to not forget--the seal Despair, untakeable Tint, Death's courtings and all those. So in a sense she's with Keats in combining B&T, with Shelley in finding beauty a matter of discovering something intellectually real but elusive.
I think my teacher's reading involved both words being silly purposes for life, or silly descriptions of life's purposes; the two are one only when you're dead, when everything else is also one, is Emily's irony. Basically an attack on Romanticism and conventionality--the two being one to that teacher.
Their being Shelley and Keats explains the order of death, proximity, agreement/kinship, cessation of talk once the names are gone etc...I think Dickinson would have found the Urn's seeming-say too easy a target, literalized; whereas the ways what Keats wrote might have been true would have fascinated her. But who knows? Perhaps she's undermining both precursors--implying their male overstatements are true only where they now are. But the rest is tribute.
The only half-mystery I see in the S/K reading is why Dickinson's Keats. But he came first on her favorite readings list. Does she call him junkets somewhere or is that you?