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Some Thoughts On Keats
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John Ruskin writes about the theory and practice as well as the condition of the artist. He says that "those who have the keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest." Those who "are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy," those that possess the greatest intensity and genuineness, produce the highest art. Isolation and alienation, though, are, for Ruskin, the natural conditions for the great artist. He writes about the artist, Turner, who felt no one understood or saw the meaning of his work and, like all great spirits of the nineteenth century--Scott, Keats, Byron and Shelley--died without hope. Great artists, Ruskin continues, have to work at their art all their life and, perhaps, they will become 'a vehicle for truth'—perhaps. --Ron Price with thanks to John Ruskin in Ruskin's Theories of the Sister Arts, George Landow, Internet, 4 November 2001.
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I shall not die without hope, but....
I write with whatever passion,
tenderness, genuineness and
intensity I have been endowed,
tarnished as it all is by life's
walls of self and passion.
The rock of my days has a deep
moss upon it and great fissures,
some conglomerate, great chunks
from everywhere over long hauld
of time and their eras and ages,
their epochs and stages, periods
in some endless drift,some endless
fossil record which has only just
begun a biostratigraphy on its
mysterious, punctuated equilibrium.
Receiving feelings, as I do, within
a centre of wondrous reflection,
where I stand serene watching from
afar-off in a world of isolation,
where sometimes the barking of dogs
is loud on every side and sometimes
the Sun of Oneness shines---will my
shrouded soul ever unite with beauty’s
rose and that Stealer of all Hearts???
Ron Price
(with appreciation
to Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys)
by RonPrice
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