Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
General
Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
In bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, Keats avows that there
are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures
on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse
himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his
famous _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It is no single or actually existing
specimen of Attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a
composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such
known to him in reality or from engravings. During and after those
hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which Severn tells
us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware
combining such images and re-combining them. Cricitism can plausibly
analyse this creation into its several elements. In calling the scene a
'leaf-fringed legend' Keats will have remembered that the necks and
shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of
leaf-pattern ornament. The idea of a sacrifice and a Bacchic dance being
figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found,
will have come to him from the well known vase of Sosibios (so called
from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of
which in the _Musee Napoleon_ there actually exists a tracing by his
hand.[16] But this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the
tumult and 'wild ecstasy' of his imagined frieze, the 'pipes and
timbrels,' the 'mad pursuit,' he will have had store of visions ready in
his mind, from the Bacchanal pictures of Poussin, no doubt also from
Bacchic vases like that fine one in the Townley collection at the
British Museum and the nearly allied Borghese vase: while for the
--heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks in garlands drest,
as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the little town
emptied of its folk that old deep impression received from Claude's
'Sacrifice to Apollo' will have been reinforced by others from works of
sculpture easy to guess at: most of all, naturally, from the sacrificial
processions in the Parthenon frieze.
[Illustration: PL XI
THE SOSIBIOS VASE
PROFILE AND FRIEZE: FROM ENGRAVINGS IN THE MUSEE NAPOLEON]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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