Latest news with #Keats
The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge. Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide. One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre. Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries. Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex. Loading Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible. Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines. It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge. Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide. One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre. Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries. Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex. Loading Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible. Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines. It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
Mint
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
This new book asks what if there were no silver lining to failure?
On 23 February 1821, a young English doctor suffering from tuberculosis breathed his last on a tiny bed in a house near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In the last six years of his brief life, this 25-year-old man, who looked more like a wispy boy, had begun to write poetry. He had even published four volumes of his work, but none had sold much or got favourable reviews. His dying wish to his friends was to have the epitaph, 'Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water," engraved on his gravestone. It was duly honoured. Also read: Looking back at the intertwined legacies of Tagore and Ray To most of his contemporaries, John Keats was just another unknown poet, destined for obscurity. No one could have guessed the love and adulation he would be receiving more than 200 years after his death. Similar fates have befallen many creative spirits before and after Keats, the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) being a classic example, who died, allegedly, in a road accident, mostly unsung and, worse, in penury. Some 70 years later, he is revered as one of the greatest Bengali poets since Rabindranath Tagore, while his works are translated widely into other languages. So were Keats and Das failures in their lifetimes? With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to admit that they were but, from the perspective of the 21st-century free market, neither of them, indeed, didn't amount to much by the time they breathed their last. To borrow from writer Amit Chaudhuri's essay The Intimacy of Failing, included in the recent volume On Failing edited by him, 'In capitalism, only success has existence; there are no alternative, negative modes of existence." From our earliest years, we are primed to think of failure as a stepping stone to success. A gazillion corporate gurus and startup bros on social media will tell you why you must fail and fail fast to achieve the nirvana of success. But what if failure doesn't necessarily have any redeeming silver lining, at least not always? Why is it so hard for us to accept failure as an absolute reality, with no promise of recovery sweetening the deal? Some of these questions surface in the handful of essays that feature in On Failing. This slim volume reproduces a series of talks delivered by writers, critics, poets and philosophers at a conference held in the Literary Activism series at Ashoka University, Sonipat, in 2020. Some of the submissions are darkly confessional, where the academic distance between the idea of failure and its intensely human experience is breached with impunity. The opening piece by Clancy Martin, titled Suicide as a Sort of Failure, is a masterclass in writing personal essay. Grimly comic, self-lacerating, yet peculiarly shorn of any self-pity, it is an analysis of suicide as the ultimate act of failure. Martin's first-person account gets to the heart of the matter: the double burden of being a failed suicide, a failure to successfully fail at living. It is a bravado performance, where writers David Foster Wallace and Édouard Levé make virtuoso appearances, a class act that sets the tone for the volume. Also read: Book review: 'Heart Lamp' asks in whom women can really put their faith Bengali poet Ranajit Das's acerbic reflections on his own 'failure" meander through the life and times of Jibanananda Das (no relation of his), but the best piece in the collection, coming right after, is American writer Lydia Davis's Learning to Sing. The second person narrator of the story (or is it a piece of memoir?) is a middle-aged woman, who has decided to learn to sing formally in the autumn of her life. She is well conversant with the grammar of music, reads the score in front of her effortlessly, but her voice keeps betraying her, stopping short of hitting the right note or sounding croaky to her own ears. She isn't planning to be a star performer at this stage in her life, but she is driven by an inner resolve to achieve a certain level of excellence. It's a tense yet tender story of an individual's deeply private struggle to attain a certain benchmark that isn't set by society. Rather, she seeks validation from her inner critic, not even from the teacher who helps her blossom. Only a writer as masterful as Davis could unspool the public images of failure and success so subtly yet surely, nudging the reader to look within and question their own assumptions. The two other pieces that make as strong an impression on the reader are poet Tiffany Atkinson's reflections on her failed IVF treatment and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap's raw and candid dissection of his career. In the former, a slip of tongue by an acquaintance at a party—'One door closes, another door shuts"— seems to encapsulate Atkinson's difficulty with her disobedient body, failing to act according to medical protocol and make her pregnant. In the latter, the reader gets a ringside view of the series of failures—from No Smoking to Bombay Velvet—that Kashyap had to wade his way through to get to where he is today. The most fascinating part of his soliloquy—for it reads like one, with its dramatic interjections—is the unpredictability of his moves, a refusal to follow the script of success, even when it lies bare before him after films like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox. For some of us, failure isn't necessarily always a tragedy. It is often a way of life. It's not a dirty word we shun, but a choice to avoid the ready and the easy way. We would much rather be misanthropes who dabble in failure, than be crowd-pleasers who only know how to cosy up to success. Also read: 'The Last Knot': A novel rooted in Kashmir's past, present and future
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Frieze Frame' Review: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles
The debate surrounding the rightful place of the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from the Acropolis, the site of the ancient complex of temples that overlooks Athens, by agents of Lord Elgin and delivered to London in the first years of the 19th century, is an old one—so old that its terms were framed by the poets Byron and Keats in the 1810s, soon after the Marbles' arrival in England. Keats's 1817 visit to the British Museum, where the Marbles had been recently installed, inspired his rapturous sonnet 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' ('My spirit is too weak—Mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep'). His companion at the museum, the history painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon, encouraged the British government to purchase from Elgin the portions of the Parthenon frieze that he had acquired, and it is not unreasonable to suppose Keats agreed. He returned to examine them 'again and again,' his friend Joseph Severn remembered, 'and would sit for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.' Keats's reflections on mortality were not merely for effect—his death, of tuberculosis, came four years later.
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Climate
- Time of India
New Zealander weather alert: Know how the weekend will be, before it turns ugly next week
As New Zealanders prepare for the weekend of May 24-25, 2025, MetService forecasts predominantly fine weather across the country, offering a respite before more unsettled conditions arrive next week. MetService meteorologist Heather Keats reports that high-pressure systems will dominate Saturday's weather(May 24), leading to cold starts but generally clear conditions. "Tomorrow, very similar, high pressure again so another cold start but looking pretty good," she told Breakfast. In Auckland, residents can expect a mix of sun and clouds with temperatures reaching 18°C (64°F) and dropping to 12°C (53°F) at night. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like This may be of interest to you! Undo Wellington will see sunny to partly cloudy skies, with highs around 16°C (61°F) and lows near 13°C (55°F). Christchurch is forecast to have mostly sunny conditions, with daytime temperatures around 15°C (59°F) and chilly nights dipping to 3°C (37°F). Live Events Also Read: Australia's deadliest floods Sunday(May 25) brings a shift in weather patterns as a front approaches the southwest of the South Island. "It's [going to] be a front that approaches the southwest of the South Island, so there will be some heavy rain for the southwest," Keats noted. However, areas from Christchurch up to Marlborough and the southeast, as well as the North Island, will remain mostly dry, with cloudy periods and the possibility of isolated showers. Keats offers some warmth to the forecast, as winters officially begin next weekend. "With winter starting next Saturday, you'll be happy to know that we actually do have quite a warm spell coming up," she said. The incoming front on Sunday brings a moist northerly flow, leading to an uptick in temperatures, especially noticeable in overnight lows. "In fact, those in the North and the upper North will probably be kicking off the winter duvet for next week as well," Keats added. MetService is closely monitoring developing systems that could lead to severe weather next week, despite this week's calm weather system. "Heavy rain to the West Coast; heavy falls later in the evening. Also the winds, we've got nor-westerners and could even be some gales for Wellington," Keats warned. The system is expected to move over the North Island on Monday, bringing another windy day for Marlborough and Wellington. "On Tuesday, it looks like there's some rather nasty stuff kind of brewing out over the Tasman," she cautioned.
