- Elizabeth bishop 'unpleasanst insistence on the palate'
- Carlyle 'hungering after sweets which he can't get, going about saying "I'm so hungry; I would so like something pleasant!"
- Helen Vendler thinks his obsession with gustatory taste shows vigourously taken pleasure
- Mrjorie levenson thinks shows dysfunctional aestitic attitude
- poetical character defined by ability to taste and relish
- it is body that tastes and can experience pleasure from it
- consumptive body - consumes itself starved to death
- when dying 'his stomach - not a single thing will digest' 'distended stomach keeps in perpetual hunger or craving' 'ghastly wasting away of his body and extremities'
- if self definition is matters of taste than to be driven by hunger is to lose pretensions of taste
- kant ' people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat... only when men have got all they want can we tell who... has taste or not'
- legendary chameleon feeds on air
- couldn't besustained on transcendental food
- existing in the world of aesthetics made him modernistly nauseous in the real one?
- He bases the apprectiation of beauty on 'allegories of taste'
- In 'La belle dame sans merci' his allegory begins to founder upon real hunger
- Hyperion's character becomes sick because of
- Gorging self on beauty
- restricted economy of consumption defines taste
- In Paradise Lost death is hungry and has a predator's sense of smell
- smell has always been linked to bodily senses of taste rather than the more intellectual/higher of vision/hearing
- smell brings you down to animal level but can also be gourmet
- is death a creature of discrimination or taste and is he of substance/body
- Does death function as an abstraction of hunger as coleridge believes
- However when you consume something it ceases to exist - aesthetic consumption?
- Creativity like preying bird 'gull'
- Keats's gorging allows poet to sublimate his identity into poetical character
- Keats's adverse to recognising unidealizable hunger underpinning creation
- Predatory hunger at core of creation - food chains - Keats saw no escape from cycle of fierce destruction
- mortal nature's carnivinous consumption makes it unable to be aesthcicised truthfully
- Uneasy tension between taste and appetite, substance and insubstantiality
- 'feast your (eyeballs) on the sea' eyeballs tragic reminder of flesh's vulnerability (King Lear) -metonym for body's cravings, disrupting eye's idealization of the scene - speakwer's appetite can't be allegorized into taste
La Belle Dame sans Merci - 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is when Keates realises that hunger underpins his work
- autumn is when world is ripe, but the fruitfulness and plenty give way to withered sedge in the ballad - through hungry eyes of knight the world appears 'blighted' - has the knight lost his ability to taste
- he's too hungry to experience taste
- knight ohysically wasting away for no reason (sexual hunger?) lack of proper nutrition
- given food by dame - poisones?
- dame -consuming love, seductive death, danger of swallowed up by literary tradition
- fevered condition - skews senses - unable to experience disinterested pleasure
- 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' by joseph aDdison (for Addison 'humans come into the world with a fresh slate with all knowledge coming from sense perception and experience' 'Imagination as an internal sense that could add pleasure to perception' 'important to cultivate it')
- aesthtic experience long been held as seperate from bodily sensation
- addison asks why desires beyond basic needs that sustain humans
- sensual pleasures of appetite (full or empty belly) and intermediate pleasures of sense
- are senses pleasures of mind Hobbes: 'anything that is pleasure in the sense the same is also pleasure in the imagination'
- pleasures of imagination allow to take more than bodily delight
- Light and colours are only ideas in the mind - Addison
- Is knigh ailing because he can no longer 'tast'e the beauty around him
- Allegory of taste - signed it 'caviare' instead of his name - Keat's had been criticeised for his 'sugar and butter sentiments that cloys and disgusts' (Richard Woodhouse)
- Keats said those who didn't understand poetry had 'a taste vitiated by the sweetmeats and kickshaws' of the age
Ode to melancholy
- In Ode to Melancholy physical taste acheives symbolic significance
- Herder 'the object of sensibility is always sensuous'
- has lots of gustatory and ingestive imagery
- 'glut' 'feed deep'
- Vendler 'world of violently taken pleasure'
- bursting of grape ' centrality and normaliciy of aesthetic response'
- levinson sees grape as dysfunctional consumption - unnaturally restricted consumption
More for Keats and The Body:
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