(Download) "Charmides and the Sphinx: Wilde's Engagement with Keats." by Victorian Poetry " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Charmides and the Sphinx: Wilde's Engagement with Keats.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 204 KB
Description
From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century Greece was a primary object of myth-makers' attentions, its history as well as its mythology fodder for the imagination: a ligature exemplified by Oscar Wilde's "The Theatre at Argos" (1877), a sonnet written in situ, "Where once the Chorus danced to measures fleet; / Far to the East a purple stretch of sea, / The cliffs of gold that prisoned Danae" (ll. 5-7). (1) The mythical Danae is given ontological status equal to that of the historical poet and chorus who would have enacted her story in the theater, thus acknowledging that Greek history, like Greek myth, survives now as an aspect of the individual imagination. But throughout the nineteenth century, as archaeology relocated "Greece" in the stones and soil of a small Levantine peninsula, pushing it back into its chronological container, its potency as a fictive realm was inevitably diminished. This essay examines the confusion of the old mythical Greece and the new archaeologically determined Greece in Wilde's long poem Charmides (first published in Poems [London, 1881]), attributing it in part to Wilde's imitation of older models no longer tenable in the changing climate of classical scholarship: in this instance, Keats's Endymion and Lamia. I conclude by reading The Sphinx (published London, 1894, perhaps begun 1874) as a reworking of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," an advance on Charmides in that it maintains a dialectical and critical relationship with its host text rather than a purely imitative one. I begin by summarizing two recent critical accounts of Keats's Hellenism, those of Martin Aske and Helen Vendler, since they both chart movements that have repercussions in Wilde's work. Moreover, since my reading of Charmides depends on Wilde's appropriation of Keats's treatment of topography and chronology in Endymion and Lamia, I will consider these poems in detail.