As John Keats aces out Arthur Rimbaud as the ultimate
“systematic derangement of the senses” practitioner in his Odes, the next,
obvious question arises: why does Keats need to systematically derange the
senses of both himself and his audience? What does Keats, or his audience, get
from it? One answer— not the only by any means— is that the systematic
derangement of the senses in Keats’ Odes can stand as a metaphor for the
mysteries of poetic music (melopoeia). That is, the exquisite prosodic level of
the Odal Cycle— what, first and foremost, makes it peerless in the canon of
English language literature— has mysteries hewn into it which Keats is bearing
down on incisively by tacking the tack he does. Why do sounds move us, derange
our sense and/or moods, the way they do? Why is music, or prosody here,
transform consciousness into something more limpid, fluid, ecstatic than it was
before? By taking Keats’ prosody and making it our own Grecian Urn to dissolve
into (in our derangement), we may begin the work of investigating why the human
race might have a need both for music and for poetic language and their
transformative power. We also may begin with the acknowledgement that, among
its many facets, the Odal Cycle has a way of being “meta,” self-referential— the
Odes make a marked attempt, if read correctly, to reference their own effort to
create a visionary landscape or mindscape with poetic music, melopoeia, and
thus mystify the senses of their readers, scramble sensory data in all
directions, all towards dissolution into higher echelons of consciousness.
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