Four Dimensions Of Lyricality In John Keats's Lyric Poems

Keats' s lyric poems are artistically enchanting and academically invaluable.However,the critical interests mainly lie in the poetic theme,imagery,style,aesthetics,and religious/political thoughts in Keats poems.The lyricality that makes his poetry lyrical is rarely studied.The lyricality is in fact the ritualisation of the poetic utterance in Keats' s lyric.This dissertation explores the lyricality in Keats' s lyric poems in the four dimensions: indirectness in the dimension of sense,unmusicalness in the dimension of sound,nowness in the dimension of temporality,and performativity in the dimension of performance.Apart from the introduction and the conclusion,this dissertation consists of four chapters.The introduction explains the features of lyric genre and its historical context in order to clarify the extent of the subject matter.The theoretic framework is drawn from semantics,semiotics,phonology,and linguistics as well as theories from Culler's Theory of the Lyric,Riffaterre's Semiotics of Poetry,Lessing's Laoco?n,Brown's Music and Literature,Frye's criticism on melos and opsis,and Austin's speech act theory.This dissertation argues that the lyricality in Keats' s lyric is the ritualisation of lyric utterance because his lyric utterance shows the features of the ritualistic utterance such as riddle,chanting,praying,performance,etc.Chapter I illustrates three types of indirectness in the dimension of sense in terms of semiotic production.The first indirectness is the displaced statement because Keats' s lyric is not what it means literally but to speak about something in order to speak another;the second indirectness is the distorted hypogram for his poetic signs often refer to the preset verbal groups rather than the signified,which distorts the literal meaning;the third indirectness is the filled gap since there are gaps between the signifiers in his lyric so that the reader must fill the gaps with the signifieds outside the text to understand the lyric poem as a whole.Chapter II discloses the unmusicalness of Keats' s lyric in the dimension of sound via the difference between the signifier and the signified.The sound in Keats' s lyric has its signifier as well as the signified that lacks in music.It is the unmusicalness that underlines the quality of Keats' s lyric,which may resemble music but differs from music.The unmusicalness shows in four aspects: the rhythm of Keats' s lyric tends to be regular while that of music constantly changes;the euphonism in Keats' s lyric,including the phono-significance and the phonic symmetry,lacks in music;the refrain that enhances the effect of feelings and deepens the lyric theme also lacks in music;silence or pause is frequently used in Keats' s lyric to produce meanings corresponding with the sound while music seldom uses the rest(or silence).Chapter III studies the remarkable rhetoric of temporality in Keats' s lyric to display that the effect of forever nowness is produced by the juxtaposition of the past,present,and future,which can be illustrated as in the ekphrasis,the non-progressiveness,the aller-et-retour,and the epideixis.The ekphrasis is used to describe artistic objects or natural scenes,whose past and future moment are consolidated in the present moment as beauty;the nonprogressiveness shows that the lyric utterance is about the occurring event rather than an imitation of the past experience.The aller-et-retour refers to the lyric speaker's movement that starts from the present,flies to the past,and lands on the present.Thus,the speaker obtains a higher recognition of reality after his imaginative journey.The epideixis means that Keats' s lyric utterance is always about here-and-now with praising of the valuable and the memorable.Chapter IV stresses that the performativity makes Keats' s lyric more a speech act than a mere speech.In other words,his lyric poems perform with the speech act.The performativity is shown in: the poet's utterance that is a ritualistic speech act which dramatises lyric by means of multiplication of the lyric voice;the dramatic speaker as the Janus performer who is both the mask of the poet,speaking the valuable and the memorable,and that of the reader,repeating after the poet so that values are transferred;the speaker's performance that becomes the reader's re-performance which uplifts the poetic value from the personal to the public.By performance and re-performance,lyric enables the social engagement.The Conclusion sums up the main points of the dissertation and explains that the artistic charm of Keats' s lyric lies in lyricality.The indirectness makes his lyric intricately euphemistic and inexhaustibly rich in meanings.His lyric sound is sonorously vigorous and balanced between sound and silence,which produces ever-expanding implications.With the rhetoric of temporality,the artistic objects in his lyric are frozen in the temporal flow to become an instant of beauty.Via the performative speech act,both the poet and the reader participate the social engagement.In short,the lyricality in the dimension of sense,sound,temporality,and performance makes Keats' s lyric lavish with implications,structurally exuberant,and elevated in artistic conception.