Keats and Recreating the Ancient

by Hamish Critchley 

"Keats had a peculiar ability to recreate the life of the past, endowing it with movement, colour and feeling" - Kathleen Sharkey

Although Keats is probably best known for his pastoral, Romantic poetry, another large influence on his work was that of classical mythology; however, his best work shows the intersection between the two. His interest in ancient mythology began when he was in school, where he was often see studying the classical dictionaries which later developed into independent reading and study. His former tutor and friend Cowden Clarke was instrumental in fostering this interest in Keats by reading aloud passages from Chapman's Homer with him, which would inspire his poem, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and also lent him books on the history of ancient Greece. 

Keats used his interest and knowledge in Classics to manipulate mythology 'to express, in vivid imagery, philosophical ideas and emotion' (Sharkey) and with this vividness comes a recreation of the ancient era. 'Chapman's Homer' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' achieve this recreation the best whilst simultaneously offering the aforementioned intersection of myth and nature. 

Despite being able to read Latin, Keats couldn't understand Ancient Greek, which made him dependent on translations in order to understand the classic Greek epics. His poem, 'Chapman's Homer' presents translations of Ancient texts - specifically Chapman's of 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad' - as transcending time. The volta in this Petrarchan sonnet is a shift in time caused by his reading of Chapman's Homer 'Till I heard Chapman speak out loudly and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies'. The time adverbials at the beginning of 'Till' and 'Then' present the time shift as 'Till' implies a place in the past that causes a change and 'Then' presents the change as a change in, specifically, time. Furthermore, Chapman lived 200 years prior to Keats, so his use of 'heard out loud' continues the transcendence of time in the poem which the adjective 'bold' suggests Chapman to have made his translations in this manner deliberately to overcome time. 

Time and its effect on humans is a theme prevalent throughout almost all of Keats' poetry and his life too: the amount of death around him meant that he was very aware of his own mortality. Exemplified through the simile 'like some watcher of the skies' which creates a godly image - as the Greek gods were said to watch people from the clouds of Olympus. Moreover, a reminder of his mortality is represented through the ambiguous 'some' which shows his lack of knowledge of the god experience - a large of which is immortality - something Keats knows he can never achieve continuing the separation between him and the ancient gods which is furthered by his use of a simile, not a metaphor, which amplifies his feeling of separation. 

There is also separation found in this simile between the speaker and the ancient world itself, as the clouds act as a barrier to maintain his status as a voyeur to this 'new planet' as he calls it in the next line. This limits the power of the translation over time as it constricts the reader to simply spectate. This could be a metaphor for translation itself as it is transporting the past to the present and changes the past through a change of language, yet the translation is also restricted to what needs to be translated which makes this poem not only a testament to the power of a translation but also represents the process of translation itself - the power and the limitation.

In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', Keats uses the remnant of the Ancient world - the Urn - to present time as multifaceted as he suggests there are positive attributes to couple the negative. He writes of the frozen lover on the urn - 'She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss'. Keats feels conflicted on whether or not to envy the lover - although the pair have gained his sought-after immortality, they are also perpetually kept apart from each and frozen before their kiss. Keats often uses the verb 'fade' to describe ageing and it is the fate that time has installed for every living human, which then gives life meaning as nothing can last forever and everything fades. This is perhaps why he doesn't entirely envy the lovers; although they will live forever (forever young), they have no purpose and are still and silent. Furthermore, throughout this poem there is a sorrowful tone present as he remembers 'marble men and maidens overwrought, with forest branches' which fill him with dread as, an artist, his work will likely outlive him and he will be forgotten, which is perhaps why he chooses to put a preposition in the title 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', as he feels his poetry akin to the art on the urn. 

It is odd to read Keats' poetry, as he believed himself forgotten and transient and yet here we are in the 21st century still very much invested in the man and his work. Keats' interest in classical mythology and its steadfast ability to maintain in the foreground of art and civilisation spurred him to write of his fear of mortality and oblivion only for those very poems to keep his art at the forefront of poetry even today.