ハズリットの言語観の革新的な側面とキーツの美学との関連性

抄録

This paper is an attempt to analyze some characteristics of Keats's aesthetics through reading his "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and point out their similarities with the linguistic theory by Hazlitt. Keats's aesthetics contains two major points: one is what beauty should be, and the other is how to express it. They are closely related to his view on language and communication. Conventionally, linguistic theories had been polarized by their emphasis on grammatical rules or practical usage. They are called prescriptive and descriptive grammar respectively. It was the former that flourished in the Romantic Era. Most of the dictionaries and grammars insisted that the usage of only the most polite sections of society should serve as a model of common usage. Language had to guard itself against the corrupting usage by the emerging middle and lower classes by formulating strict grammatical rules. Hazlitt's opinion on language is inconsistent with these dictionaries and grammars. It was common to suppose that the parts of speech related to different sorts of things or ideas. But in his A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1809), Hazlitt argues that the grammatical distinctions of words relate to our manner of speaking of them. What a word refers to can change in our actual discourse. His grammar is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Keats's view on language is similar to that of Hazlitt in thinking that there is no harmonious one-to-one set of correspondences between words and its referents. The meaning of poetical words is not tied firmly to the words themselves but yielded in the act of interpreting. Since words are of their very nature unspecific and ambiguous, there is no definitive interpretation. For Keats, who says, "What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth", how to appeal to the reader's imagination is far more important than any other poetical techniques. The words in his poetry encourage readers to imagine what they refer to. It is the crux of his aesthetics and differentiates him from other contemporary poets.