“A Sick Eagle” and “I am”: Hymns to Sculpture by Keats and Rilke

Abstract

: At the turn of eighteenth and nineteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sculpture came to serve as an emblem of humanity’s response to the challenges of the times. John Keats and Rainer Maria Rilke, felt compelled at their encounters with ancient Greek sculpture in the museum to reflect upon their vocation in an age disrupted by political upheaval and rampant commercialization respectively. Keats’s sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817), registers a n intimation of his latent grandeur in the form of a “sick eagle,” confronting “a shadow of a magnitude.” To overcome this experience, Keats The mark of this slowness and dissatisfaction, which are proof of the artist’s sincerity and also of the rhythm that animates the universe, the non finito thus corresponds to what is most profound, most authentic in Rodin, his quest for a form taken to extremes in terms of expression and that is yet open to whatever influences the chance happenings of life may have on it. (qtd. in Bartram 9)