"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 figures 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 | A Source and Referent for the Title:
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
John Keats (1817) |
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:
Two definitions of Nostalgia:
The old man Lear and his one true daughter: |