Aesthetics: A Gloss

Somewhat Scholarly, Somewhat Whimsical: A Gloss on Kirchwey

(inspired by the "Etymology and Extracts" in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick)

On Sitting Down to Read
"On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again"
Once Again
(to a belated nostalgic Modernist)

Can we please not drag in Negative Capability
            this time? I, too, hate Hummel figurines
            and Lawrence Welk, but not all figured scenes
or complete narratives are kitsch. Beauty,
a transcendent virtue, does not thereby
            push other virtues out and, as to means,
            the clumsily inelegant is not what sustains
beauty or best honors human multiplicity.
Though we have learned to mistrust perfection,
            we must not lose it in the old collage
of borrowed forms. We must pursue it in
             our simultaneous broken worlds, nostalgia
             the only real enemy, when we are brought where
                         the old man wakes to find his one true daughter.

Karl Kirchwey

From Keats' 1817 Letter on Negative Capability: at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason--Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Various Forms of Kitsch:

Hummel Figurines: A Rich Heritage
The Lawrence Welk Show
A Definition of Kitsch

Two definitions of Nostalgia:

The good old days multiplied by a bad memory.

originally refering to a serious medical disorder:
"the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again."

The old man Lear and his one true daughter:

From William Shakespeare's King Lear : Act 1, Scene 1, in which Lear casts off Cordelia
Act 4, Scene 7, in which Lear awakes to find her returned
Act 5, Scene 3, in which Lear laments her death

Source for the Poem:

On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
            Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
            Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
            Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay
            Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
             Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
             Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
            Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.

John Keats (1818)
From Web Book Publications

On Sitting Down to Read
"On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again"
Once Again
(to a belated nostalgic Modernist)
Can we please not drag in Negative Capability
            this time? I, too, hate Hummel figurines
            and Lawrence Welk, but not all figured scenes
or complete narratives are kitsch. Beauty,
a transcendent virtue, does not thereby
            push other virtues out and, as to means,
            the clumsily inelegant is not what sustains
beauty or best honors human multiplicity.
Though we have learned to mistrust perfection,
            we must not lose it in the old collage
of borrowed forms. We must pursue it in
             our simultaneous broken worlds, nostalgia
             the only real enemy, when we are brought where
                         the old man wakes to find his one true daughter.

Karl Kirchwey

Prepared by Anne Dalke

Return to Aesthetics: An Exchange Between a Poet and a Dramatist