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Originally Posted by
MorpheusSandman
Ironically, intellectual was term coined to separate the scholar/academic from those who learned and studied and took that learning outside of the academy to engage others in less formal ways. The person who holds down a job, but reads voraciously and then discusses/debates with people online today would be closer to the classic “intellectual” than the professor that never takes their learning out of the classroom, or never publishes outside of journals on the subjects they study. So when it comes to people like Keats, who would read and study and think and then discuss his ideas on poetry with friends and acquaintances in letters, that’s much closer to the classic intellectual than whatever academic you can name. Obviously there is a continuum between an academic and intellectual, or even academic and critic. Eliot once used the distinction to almost mean those that were concerned about facts (academic) and those that took facts and used them in creative evaluation (critic), and the latter is closer to how I imagine the intellectual.
Ironically, I am a man of XXI century, Keats from XIX and by them the term was already used to refeer to specific class , which was related to scholars and academics, not always being the same (intellectual was even more specific), but, all of them, not related to Keats except for his medical trainning.
The origem of the term (not oposed to scholars or academics at all, rather related as it meant to reffer to people who could read, not to chit-chat among friends) is a bit irrelevant here.
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There was that classic poem about AC Bradley and his criticism of Shakespeare that goes:
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.
There’s also the classic story about Hitchcock’s granddaughter, who took a class on Hitchcock, and when it came time to write a paper she chose Shadow of a Doubt, and she asked Hitchcock about the film, wrote the paper, and got a C. She went home to tell Hitchcock and Hitch replied with: “Sorry dear, that’s the best I can do.”
:D Funny, I had a similar experience. A teacher once gave us a paper on social-historical background of our city, we could pick the theme. I picked the formation of the neighbourd where my grandfather lived, he being a philosopher/historian that was one of the founders of that same university i was studying. She gave me what would be a C and said I made up all that as nobody really lived it and my source was unreliable in the sense my grandfather would be describing wrongly his own life. Her evidence was that she could not find a book with the title. I ask which title. She shows me the reference. And I was: not a book of course, it is the speech of my grandfather when he was nominated for a chair in the Historical Institute of our state... Anyways.
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There there is a gap between artists and critics/academics is usually inevitable to some agree, because they’ve devoted their lives to different pursuits. And yet, there is often a lot of overlap, especially with the greats. If you read the interviews with Hitch, he clearly had a conscious understanding of how suspense works. In fact, his explanations still find themselves in textbooks as the perfect explanation (“surprise is a bomb going off suddenly in a room with two people talking; suspense is the audience knowing there’s a bomb in the room while two people are talking.”).
Obviously there is many artists who can explain what is art, understand it, etc. Not all. Not the majority. Hence the claim that understanding art or his precussors is trait of all the best poets is false.
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I think much the same would apply if we talk about the great poets, even the romantics. Wordsworth clearly understood the value of line breaks in poetry, likely from reading Milton (though it could’ve come from elsewhere), and whether or not he ever formally ruminated on this is somewhat beside the point.
Yes, Wordsworth had a keen understanding of poetry. He also knew the basics, had knowledge of grammar, etc. But Wordsworth explains well his own poetry, the poetry of Pope for example is not something he dwells well. In fact, Coleridge-Wordsworth divergences come from Coleridge understanding the poetry of Wordsworth a little better than his friend.
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With something like Negative Capability Keats had clearly tapped into a key tool of the trade of the great writers, and I think he sought to apply it himself—the notion that an artist can’t and shouldn’t have all of the answers to their work, because then it becomes too much of a crossword puzzle, rather than an artistic experience that closely mimics the various perspectives on life.
Yes and Negative Capability is exactly what I say: poets do not need to understand all to access their poetic capacity. That is what Keats says and he even goes onwards to say Coleridge need to explain and rationalize all that exists. I will not discuss if Keats is wrong to say it about Coleridge (as his incapacity to work harder is more due to other reasons than stopping all day trying to answer every question) but Keats is clearly pointing understandment (fully) or capacity of explanation is secundary to a great poet than his sense of beauty.
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But even understanding that effect of Negative Capability is an intellectual concept. That Keats could grasp something so profound without ever formally developing is certainly proof of his innate intellectualism, an insight he gained in reading and studying (even if informally) the work of Shakespeare.
I have no problem if you want to use the word intellectual for every product of our minds or a replacement for intelligence. I see it as pointless, as obvious this make no relevant distinction between all forms of thinking, when intellectual can and is used with a more specific form. But I do find strange you use "innate intellectualism', mixing one word related to instinct and another to reason. It is strange, specially considering this topic. But claiming someone has something innate due to study is just a mistake. Innate is something which is born with the individual, something that come without experience, study or anything else. It is like too much words and not much content.
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As for study implying something academic, I guess it’s different for people who are autodidacts. Study is just something that happens naturally everyday without being told what and how to read.
Again, Study as something naturally and daily is like kicking out all teachers, pedagogy, schools of the map. Experience is something that happens naturally everyday. Study is something more specific and I found very strange we talk about studying poetry and studying without knowing what and how to read...
