Both the Odes and the Elegies offer what might be called,
without undue Romanticism, visions of Eternity— the Odes, Eternity-as-Music,
the Elegies, Eternity-as-Drama. When I say Eternity, I mean to signify the reality
of timelessness and a visionary sense that mind-scapes can exist and subsist in
states of frozen timelessness. So, as the Odes tell us that Eternity is its own
kind of music and the Elegies tell us Eternity is its own kind of drama, the
dichotomous split between Music and Drama, how they are involved in temporality
and recuperated pasts (whereby and wherein the present is the past and the past
is the present), the Gyan Books chap creates for us a confusion or systematic
derangement of time-zones. How these deranged time-zones are demarcated, to the
extent that there is demarcation, has to do with how both the Odes and the
Elegies employ archetypes, which are used to imply suspended temporality in
many aesthetic contexts. Keats’ Odes employ deductive, generalized archetypes—
Love and Beauty (Psyche and Eros), enchanted forests, self-referential
musicality, relics from classical antiquity. The Elegies employ inductive,
specific archetypes (in other words, attempt to create new archetypes)— Old York Road, Elkins Park Square,
Tookany Creek, Subarus, Jettas. When forced to cohabitate in a print text
context, these two approaches to archetypes, and archetypal timelessness,
balance the sense that the Elegies offer (still) a quotidian world, rather than
the transcendentalism of the Odes.
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