"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" by John Keats

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Schedule change!

-My trip to England

-Romanticism

-The charm of Keats

-The tragedy of Keats

-The tragedy of Pergolesi

-Italian sonnet redux

-The creative opportunity that is rhyme

-Why this sonnet is weird

-The riddle of Keats's morbidity

-Ode To A Nightingale

-The Notorious B.I.G.

-Ode On Melancholy

-Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement

-The poet is un-poetical, unless the poet is Keats

-Keats's self awareness

-The undescribable feud, described

-On Looking Into Chapman's Homer

-The second-worst thing the Ottomans ever did

-Ubi Sunt

-The Romantic fetish for ruins

-Metrical FUBAR

-The doctrine of The Association of Ideas

-The shift from Objectivity to Subjectivity

-Suns, seas, and shadows

Text of the poem:

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My spirit is too weak—mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

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My favorite poetry podcasts for: Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /) Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u) Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /) Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u) Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u) Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /) Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u) Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)