Visions of Innocence/Experience Pt. 2

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.