The influence of John Keats

All lyric poetry (in my opinion) traces back to the Odes of John Keats (Romantic English poet 1795-1821) so knowing the odes of Keats (among the greatest poems ever written in the English language) is important to understanding contemporary poetry.  Even when poets break with tradition it is Keats they quarrel with.

The great contemporary American poet (current poet laureate) Phil Levine once chuckled that the job of the contemporary poet is to "duke it out with Keats."  I thought this a distinctly "male" metaphor, a bit too pugilistic for my tastes, but I do think that Phil had a point.  If you want to become a lyric poet you darned well have to at least sit down and have a cup of tea with John Keats (metaphorically of course.)

Another contemporary American poet whose work I also like a lot, Galway Kinnell, wrote a poem, "Oatmeal"on this topic.  I include a link to that poem here.  It is LOL funny in my opinion but of course Kinnell is using humor to make a serious point about the necessity of engaging with Keats' work.

In her 90s my grandmother could quote Keats poems from memory.  She had learned them in public school and they stayed with her.

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/galway-kinnell/oatmeal/

"Oatmeal" by Galway Kinnell I eat oatmeal for breakfast. I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it. I eat it alone. I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone. Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you. That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with. Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion. Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it with John Keats. Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone. He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it. Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale." He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge. He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket, but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right. An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket. He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble. He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse. I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone. When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn." He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet. He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there is much of one. But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came to him while eating oatmeal alone. I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering. Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters. For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch. I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me. The Ode that Kinnell is referencing is, "To Autumn"  John Keats (1795-1821)       http://www.potw.org/archive/potw279.html