Keats and Autumn

I saw Bright Star yesterday, a very romantic film about Romantic poet John Keats. Liberties may have been taken with the poet's love life, but the quiet, well shot movie is a beautiful period piece nonethless. Ben Wihshaw certainly looks the part of the 25 year old Romantic poet dying of consumption. There are some gorgeous shots of the English countryside. However the chief virtue of Bright Star must be the way it slowly takes you through some of Keat's verse.

It skipped the poem that I hoped to hear; his Ode to Autumn being very perfect for this time of year.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

j

A Painful Creative Process?

Caravaggio
'Artist suffer to produce art' was the opening premise of my post yesterday. Somehow the creative process is one of "cracking your skull open" or "putting your sweat and blood into it." "Tortured artist" even gets a page on Wikipedia, and is linked to the similar 'poète maudit,' the bad-boy artist who is against the establishment. In a way, societies finds tortured artistic personalities moving in the most Romantic way, because they feel a deep connection to this other person.




Vincent VanGogh

This all may be true to an extant, but I'm a little skeptic. Both the Romantic I of lyric poetry and the Romantic artist struggling to produce art are flawed characterizations. This emotional ethos en-nobilizes the making of art from a craft to fine art, with the by-product of considering the piece of work to reflect the soul of its creator. I think you're as likely to see a reflection of your own soul as you are that of the artist.

Charles Baudelaire
Making art is suffering as much as making anything else is. It could take the same amount of work, in terms of energy expelled and time, to make a table as a painting. Going to work is often not fun, but do I really get to claim that I suffer as I email and answer the phone? Running on a treadmill might be considered suffering, but nobody will idolize your soul over it.

Robert Mapplethorpe
Also, don't happy people create, and why shouldn't they create good art? Leonardo is generally upheld as a great artist. He is also widely considered a brilliant thinker--yet he didn't brood over his canvases. Hell, he could hardly be coerced to finish them once he had sketched them out, much less pour a troubled soul into them.