Keats: Bicentenary Readings 9781474471442

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Keats: Bicentenary Readings

Other titles published by Edinburgh University Press with the University of D urham : H uw Beynon, Ray Hudson and David Sadler A PLA C E C A LLED TEESIDE

A Locality in a Global Economy Jennifer Britnell JE A N B O U CH ET

Richard A. Chapman P U B L IC P O L IC Y

The North East of England Timothy Clark and Jerrold E. Hogle (eds) E V A L U A T IN G S H E L L E Y

Frank Coffield and Richard Goodings (eds) SACRED COWS IN ED UCATIO N

Essays in Reassessment Roy Davies S E R V IC E IN TH E R O M A N A R M Y

Edited by D. Breeze and V. M axwell Osman Durrani FICTIO NS OF GER M AN Y

Images of German Nation in the M odern Novel Gary Ferguson M IR R O R IN G B E L IE F

Marguerite de Navarre's Devotional Poetry Peter Lewis f ie l d in g ' s b u r lesq u e d r a m a

Christopher Lloyd J.-K . H U Y S M A N S A N D TH E F IN -D E -S IE C L E N O V EL

Ian Roberts C R A F T , C L A S S A N D C O N TR O L

The Sociology of a Shipbuilding Community Ian G. Simmons THE EN V IR O N M EN T A L IM PACT OF LA T ER M ESO LITHIC CULTURES

on the Moorlands of Britain J. R. Watson A N IN F IN IT E C O M PLE X ITY

Essays in Romanticism

KEATS: BICENTENARY READINGS

edited by

MICHAEL O'NEILL

Published b y E d in b u rgh U n iversity Press for TH E U N IV E R SIT Y OF D U R H AM

© Edinburgh University Press, 1997

Transferred to Digital Print 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Linotron Palatino by Koinonia Ltd, Bury

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library isb n

o 7486 0899 o

Cover painting: Joseph Severn, portrait of John Keats. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. The painting is discussed in Chapter Eight b y Martin Aske, 'Still Life with Keats'.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Note on Texts

vii

Chapter One

Introduction Michael O'Neill

Chapter Two

A Cockney Schoolroom: John Keats at Enfield Nicholas Roe

1

11

Chapter Three Keats's New World: An Emigrant Poetry Fiona Robertson

27

Chapter Four Old Saints and Young Lovers: Keats's Eve of St Mark and Popular Culture David B. Pirie

48

Chapter Five

Keats and Silence J. R. Watson

7i

Chapter Six

The Inward Keats: Bloom, Vendler, Stevens Gareth Reeves

88

Chapter Seven Keats's Poetry: 'The Reading of an Ever-Changing Tale' Michael O'Neill Chapter Eight Still Life with Keats Martin Aske

102 129

Chapter Nine 'Cutting Figures': Rhetorical Strategies in Keats's Fetters Timothy Webb

144

Notes on Contributors Index

170 172

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the General Lectures Committee of the University of Durham, whose financial support made possible the 'Keats Bicentenary Lectures' series in 1995 (six of the essays in the book were originally delivered as lectures in this series), and to the Publications Board of the University of Durham, which made possible publication of this volume with Edinburgh University Press. Martin Aske's paper was originally given at the University of Pisa in November 1995 as part of the International Itinerant Conference on Keats. He would like to thank Professor Lilia Maria Crisafulli Jones of the University of Bologna and Professor Anthony Johnson of the University of Pisa for inviting him to this remarkable event; he is also extremely grateful to Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education for generous financial support. Nicholas Roe and I would also like to thank the organisers of the International Itinerant Conference on Keats for inviting us to give lectures, allowing us to develop ideas we had explored in the Durham 'Keats Bicentenary Lectures'. Michael O'Neill

Note on Texts

Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from Keats's poems are from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), and quotations from Keats's correspondence are from The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), hereafter Letters.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

M I C H A E L O 'N E I L L

John Keats is a poet who is fortunate in the critics who have been drawn to his work. But after illuminating books by Walter Jackson Bate (1963), Stuart Sperry (1973), Christopher Ricks (1974) and Helen Vendler (1983), there have been challenges to the (by no means monological) consensus established by these critics. These challenges make the present a stimulating time to write about Keats. The 1980s and 1990s have seen the emergence of new approaches to Keats powered by political and theoretical con­ cerns. Jerome J. McGann's important article 'Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism' (Modern Language Notes, 1979) instigated a series of attempts to read Keats historically. Among the provocative contentions offered by McGann's essay is the reading of 'To Autumn' as 'an attempt to "escape" the period which provides the poem with its context', a contention which has stimulated thoughtful qualification and dissent from a number of critics, notably Paul H. Fry and Vincent Newey.1 Other critics, such as Margaret Homans in her 'Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats' (Studies in Romanticism, 1990), have explored the possibilities of gender-based approaches to the poetry. In Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (1988), Marjorie Levinson brings together a formidable array of modes of inter­ pretation, including historicism, cultural materialism, psycho­ analysis and feminism. Her aim is to deconstruct and rewrite the critical narrative - bequeathed, on her account, by Bate, Vendler, John Bayley, Ricks and others - in which Keats appears as a 'hero' distinguished by 'a profoundly associated sensibility' and typifying an 'exemplary humanism'. Instead, Levinson takes us back to the hostile responses of Keats's contemporary reviewers. She detects in this hostility a construction of the poetry as 'a species of masturbatory exhibitionism, an offensiveness further associated with the self-fashioning gestures of the petty bour­ geoisie'. Levinson sees Keats's 'stylistic project' as, in her words, 'a social-ego project', an 'aggressively literary' writing that is, 'in

2

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

effect, anti-Literature'. She makes strange the poetry in order to recover its complex handling of Keats's own literary and social sense of estrangement. So, on her reading, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' (a significant poem for a number of essayists in the present collection) makes stylistic capital out of Keats's 'alienated access to the canon'.2 More in the mainstream of humanist criticism of Keats is John Barnard's John Keats (1987). Barnard anticipates a concern which recurs in the present volume by relating Keats's poetic significance to his insistence 'upon asking awkward questions about the pretensions of art, and about basic human fears'.3 If Barnard helps to consolidate humanist and formalist perceptions, he also brings them into contact with more recent theoretical models of reading. But the fact remains that the question 'In what direction is criticism of Keats going?' presents itself, in the aftermath of the bicentenary of the poet's birth, as open-ended and uncertain. The present volume reconsiders many issues which might once have assumed an air of comfortable resolution: the function of Keats's style; the trajectory and significance of his poetic career; the relationship between the poetry and the pressures of history; and the poet's sometimes self-divided view of poetry - seen as a power for good, 'a friend/To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man' ('Sleep and Poetry', 246-7), and as riskily associ­ ated with dreaming, deception, and illusoriness. The volume also seeks to describe the workings of selfconsciousness in a poetry which can also seem richly unself­ conscious; its contributors are aware, too, of the variety of genres and forms handled by Keats, the interpretative questions raised by the often complicated nature of the composition and transmission of his texts, and the range of relatively neglected works in his oeuvre (including The Eve of St Mark, the subject of David B. Pirie's essay, and the letters, discussed by Timothy Webb). The publication of two important volumes - Keats and History (1995), a collection of essays edited by Nicholas Roe, and Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (1994) by Andrew Bennett, a book fascinated by the 'instabilities of Keats's poetry'4 - bears witness to a process of re-thinking about Keats among and initiated by British critics (in dialogue and in conjunction with the work of Keatsians in America and elsewhere). Arising out of the 'Keats Bicentenary Lectures' series which took place at the University of Durham between January and April 1995, but also including an essay by Martin Aske first delivered as a lecture at Pisa in November 1995 during the

Introduction

3

International Itinerant Conference on Keats, as well as an essay by David B. Pirie delivered as a paper at the International Conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies in July 1995, the present volume adds its own momentum to this process. Though the essays have as a common purpose the wish to look with fresh eyes at Keats's writings, contributors have not been asked to highlight or favour any one approach or theme. From the start, the lecture series and the resulting published volume have been conceived of as pluralist, and the collection allows space for critical approaches which are emphatically different. The reader of the collection will, I hope, get a revitalised understanding of where major aspects of Keats criticism have reached and are heading in the 1990s. One area which no two contributors map in exactly the same way is that difficult, fascinating terrain where history meets aesthetics. The first essay, 'A Cockney Schoolroom: John Keats at Enfield', is by Nicholas Roe, the author of John Keats and the Culture of Dissent, a forthcoming book on the poet. In his Introduction to Keats and History, Roe claims for the volume that, in it, 'the literary texture of Keats's poetry is shown to have emerged from and to have acknowledged the manifold pressures of contemporary history'.5 Roe's essay in the present collection is concerned to establish Keats as a poet of radical dissent by exploring the influence of his education at Enfield School. The essay contests the notion that Keats was badly educated. This notion virulently infects the attacks on him in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from October 1817 onwards, and it informs Levinson's version of Keats's career as involving stylistic solutions to the problem of being socially (and educationally) disadvantaged; she writes that Keats's poetry was 'an escape route from an actual life'.6 Roe makes us look again at what we think we know about Keats's schooling and education. Charles Cowden Clarke's valuable 'Recollections of John Keats', the main source of information about Keats's schooling, plays down, Roe argues, 'the political and religious dissent' (p. 12) of Enfield School. The articles in Blackwood's pillory the young poet as an 'uneducated and flimsy stripling' (quoted by Roe on p. 12). The consequence is a myth, refined by Shelley in Adonais, of Keats's 'boyish in­ capacity for the world' (p. 13) which has led to readings of the poetry that stress its lack of interest in politics and history. Roe argues that, in fact, Enfield gave Keats an education which fitted him for the realities of his time. In Roe's opinion, Keats should not be patronised because he did not go to Eton and Oxford (as

4

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

Shelley did) or Harrow and Cambridge (as Byron did). Enfield fostered in Keats a longing for knowledge which drives his poetic career and is thematised at the close of the first Hyperion, when Apollo asserts, in the presence of the silent Mnemosyne, that 'faiowledge enormous makes a God of me' (III, 113). Roe persuasively contends that the scurrilous vigour of the attack on 'Cockney poetry' in Blackwood's is itself evidence of 'the Cock­ neys' power to disconcert' (p. 16). His essay is full of stimulating suggestions about the impact of Keats's schooling on his sub­ sequent poetry; taking his cue from Tony Harrison's sonnet 'Them & [uz]', he argues that 'Cockney Keats' (Harrison's phrase) did more than any of his contemporaries to create 'an idiom for modern poetries in English' (p. 25). Amy Clampitt's Voyages: A Homage to John Keats, in What the Light Was Like (1983), is among the most profound tributes in modern poetry to Keats's influence. As an American poet she is intrigued by the importance to Keats of 'the/still unimagined West' ('The Elgin Marbles'). In this volume's second essay, 'Keats's New World: An Emigrant Poetry', Fiona Robertson explores Keats's writings about America, especially his letters to George and Georgiana Keats after their emigration to America, the increasingly studied sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and the crotchety, agonised 'What can I do to drive away/Remembrance from my eyes'. A strength of Robert­ son's essay is its vigilant scrutiny of conventional or fashionable wisdom. She suggests, for example, that 'the Keats who describes a disagreeably down-market United States is not immediately recognisable as the radical of recent critical reinvention' (p. 27). In her reading of 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' she takes on board recent accounts which emphasise the economic and historical realities that threaten to impinge on the visionary gazing with which the poem concludes. Yet she does not deny the poem's 'grandeur' in the process of noting its 'hesitancy' (p. 32). Rather, she argues that 'Keats is still seeing the "horizon of fine poesy", although he indicates the rapacities which might lie presently out of view beyond it' (p. 32). Throughout, Robertson alerts us to relevant contexts and comparisons, reading 'What can I do to drive away' as an example of conscious anti-pastoral in which the 'badness' of the writing works deliberately to establish Keats not, pace Marjorie Levinson, 'as outsider but as insider, throwing the weight of all European literary culture against the offender' (p. 34). The 'offender', of course, is America which has proved to be a place

Introduction

5

hostile to the well-being of Keats's brother and sister-in-law. Robertson describes Keats's America as 'A locus of tropes of discovery and desire, and of experiments with poetical language' (p. 28), and her essay tracks and contextualises the shifting views of America to be found in Keats's writings. Whilst 'What can I do to drive away' might suggest that for Keats the American landscape is 'inimical to art' (p. 41), there are, Robertson suggests, 'more positive consequences and more productive conjunctions' (p. 41) to be discovered in Keats's dealings with America. She contends that 'It is arguably when his vision suddenly expands to take in George's new world that Keats's poetry becomes most energetic and complexly self-aware' (p. 42): a contention which, like one of Keats's own 'speculations', offers a new way of viewing a much-discussed phenomenon (in this case the poet's development). David B. Pirie also renews understanding of the poetry by exploring contexts, in the case of his essay, the legends and rituals associated with St Mark's Eve. Typically, commentators on The Eve of St Mark, a poem important for the Pre-Raphaelites but crowded out of the critical limelight this century by Keats's more famous works, have stressed the sombre implications of one set of superstitions surrounding St Mark's Eve. This set supposes that watchers in a church porch or churchyard would be given a ghostly vision of those who were to die during the following year. In his detailed consideration of the poem, Pirie suggests that the heroine (Bertha) 'may have cheated herself by contemplating only this one superstition, blinding herself to numerous other far jollier traditions' (p. 57) associated with St Mark's Eve. He points out that, as well as John Brand's Popular Antiquities which contains the sombre superstition described above, there are many records of superstitions pertaining to St Mark's Eve which 'clearly celebrate youth as the time to find and enjoy a lover' (p. 60). As a result of his researches, Pirie locates in the poem an awareness not only of 'the threat of death' but also of 'the promise of love' (p. 66). Thus, he is able, in the course of a reading which also addresses Keats's attitudes to Christianity and women, to suggest the poem's kinship with other, arguably greater works in which the poet celebrates and mourns, coupling 'the energy of human existence with the blunt fact of mortality' (p. 67). A lover of fine phrases yet worried about the false beauty pro­ ceeding from art, Keats confronts the close reader with linguistic structures that seem at once to vindicate and challenge notions of aesthetic autonomy. Leigh Hunt's Imagination and Fancy (1844) is

6

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

at its most sensitive in its discussion of local effects in Keats's work. Less epicurean and more intellectually exacting are Empson's witty remarks about 'Ode on Melancholy' in Chapter 7 of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and his more extended discussion of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' in The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Other detailed readings of special value include Leavis's attention in Revaluation (1936) to the interplay of impulses in the Odes, the discernment of felicities in Christopher Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment, and the 'conjectural reconstruc­ tion of the odes as they are invented, imagined, put in sequence, and revised'7which Helen Vendler offers in The Odes of John Keats. Essays in the present volume by J. R. Watson, Gareth Reeves, and myself work within, yet, in places, against, this tradition (which is itself by no means uniform in its practice and emphases). J. R. Watson's 'Keats and Silence' takes as its subject an alluring topic, namely 'that which lies on the other side of language, but which is spoken about, or gestured towards, in the language of poetry' (p. 71). Watson explores the differing implications of 'silence' in a variety of Keatsian poems, including 'On the Grasshopper and Cricket', 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' (whose last line's famous 'Silent' is read by Watson as sensitive to the inadequacies of language, a sensitivity paradoxi­ cally recorded in words), Hyperion and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Throughout, Keats's muse is seen as not unlike a psychoanalyst, prompting him to 'overcome the silence that is itself a form of burial' (p. 76). Of course, contemporary reviewers tried to reduce Keats to silence, to bury his poetry. As Watson remarks (in an insight which tallies with Nicholas Roe's view of the way Enfield formed the poet's character), 'It takes courage to break the silence again when your speech has been ridiculed' (p. 77). Not content with merely formalist discussion, Watson begins by enlisting the insights of the psychoanalyst Nina Coltart to launch his own study of 'a creative purpose that does not shrink from contemplating the appalling as well as the beautiful' (p. 72). Keats's early poetry is, in fact, seen by Watson as opposed, in its 'desire to communicate' and 'disinclination to hide anything' to Coltart's diagnosis of 'the silent patient syndrome' (p. 72). But the essay gives a sense of Keats's poetry as living on the dangerous edge of things, showing its psychic health by its courageous refusal to shirk the full gamut of human experience. Watson's recognition that, for and in Keats, the 'non-pathological' and the 'psychosomatic' can co-exist in close proximity sheds new light on the poet's 'knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade'.

Introduction

7

The phrase just quoted occurs in Keats's final letter to Charles Brown with its concluding evocation of human intimacies and awkwardnesses that defeat language: 'I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.' (Letters, II, 360). That 'awkward bow' towards addressee and posterity has affected many readers; like the 'living hand, now warm and capable' of Keats's famous fragment, the verbalised 'bow' pre­ empts the process of reception, seeming to know that it is destined to reach across the years from the 'now' of its composition. Watson's essay ends by giving the moment its full human value - 'a last brave gesture' (p. 86) - and by suggesting its relevance to a poetic career much concerned with silence. In 'The Inward Keats: Bloom, Vendler, Stevens' Gareth Reeves addresses 'the American reception of Keats' in the light of the 'strong post-Romantic strain' (p. 88) in American poetry (and criticism) this century. Against the 'essentially English debate about [Keats's] social standing' (p. 88), Reeves sets the concern with the 'inward' Keats of American critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. In ensuing pages Reeves reveals himself to be a critic who is attuned to what is best in this American tradition. His own insights into the workings of 'Ode to Psyche' lend support to Bloom's emphasis on the poem's 'internalisation'. Throughout the essay Reeves is alert to the way 'The poetry takes its chances, alters course' (p. 93); so at the end of the sixth stanza of 'Ode to a Nightingale' 'the poetry', he writes, 'arrests itself in mid poetic flight' (p. 94). The second half of Reeves's essay concentrates on 'Wallace Stevens's Keatsian inheritance' (p. 94); it offers reflections on the differences and affinities between the two writers. Aware of Keats's self-consciousness, Reeves sees the language of 'Sunday Morning' as standing 'at a cerebral distance from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn'" (p. 96). Yet, as he also remarks, 'if in Keats selfconsciousness is reticent, it can seem less so after reading Stevens' (p. 94). To read Stevens, then, is to be sent back to Keats in a new light, even as that new light allows for Keats's otherness. For Reeves it is as if, for all his subtleties of suggestion, Stevens were more predictably reflexive than Keats; Reeves quotes Vendler on the end of 'Sunday Morning': 'The scene is being used largely as an instance of a thesis, not [as in 'To Autumn'] surrendered to in and for itself.' (p. 96). The essay finishes by considering the fact that the recent emphasis on situating Keats's 'To Autumn' in con­ texts of various kinds is mirrored in Stevens criticism, where attempts are being made to locate the poetry politically. But Reeves

8

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

is wary of a critical operation that involves translating poetry 'out of its idiom' (p. 99), and reasserts the value of Stevens's (and, by implication, Keats's) own, often knowing, poetic ways of knowing. This emphasis recurs in my essay, which explores 'the poetry's concern with its status as poetry and with the status of poetry more generally' (p. 105). It argues that Keats's relevance to us resides, to a considerable degree, in the way 'his wholehearted pursuit of poetic excellence is crossed (though never deflected) by a fear that poetry may itself be "a mere Jack a lanthern'" (p. 106). Above all, it is fascinated by the different forms which 'selfconsciousness' takes in Keats's poetry, examining a range of poems in the light of the propositions and hidden challenges, even contradictions, in the 'poetical Character' letter which the poet wrote to Richard Woodhouse in October 1818. Among other things, the essay suggests that the drama of 'Ode to a Nightingale' has much to do with Keats's sense of the burden of imaginative experience, a burden which attracts and repels the poet, and that 'Ode on Indolence' is an underestimated and central poem, exploring the poet's wish not to be stirred out of an 'indolence' at once fruitless and potentially fertile. Central to the essay is the suggestion that 'there is often a complicatedly unknowing element in Keats's knowingness and a hauntingly conscious dimension to his work at its most raptly self-forgetful' (p. 123). This attempt to move between and hold steadily in view contrasting positions springs from the conviction that Keats is a poet whose achievements will not reveal themselves wholly to any one critical mode or perspective. Indeed, the desire to look at, investigate and analyse the different things which Keats's poetry can do and make his readers think and feel is at the heart of this collection of bicentenary essays. The collection is brought to a close by two essays which reappraise, respectively, Keats's view of art and his writing of letters. Since Ian Jack in his Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967) pointed out the importance of visual art for Keats's poetry, there has been a good deal of attention paid to Keats's response to paintings and sculpture. In 'Still Life with Keats' Martin Aske poses the questions, 'What does Keats see when he stands in front of the mirror of art? Or rather: how does he look at what he sees?' (p. 129). Aske acknowledges the influence of Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), especially Fried's argument (based on Diderot's writings about eighteenth-century French painting) concerning the complementary yet paradoxical way in which different genres

Introduction

9

of paintings behave: they may be 'dramatic' in that they convey images of absorption which exclude the spectator; they may also be 'pastoral' in that they arrest, fascinate and absorb the spectator. Aske's essay explains Keats's interest in engravings of the Campo Santo frescoes as deriving from the fact that they both exclude and enchant the young poet; they offer themselves, on Aske's reading, as an image of art's strangeness and appeal. By contrast, Benjamin West's Death on a Pale Horse, which gave Keats 'nothing to be intense upon', 'makes no room for the spectator's imagination' (p. 137). The close of Aske's essay offers 'two portraits of Keats himself' (p. 139): Keats's own word-picture in a letter to his sister of himself reading Tike the picture of somebody reading' and Joseph Severn's portrait of the poet, who, on Aske's deft (and Keatsian) reading, comes across as absorbedly reading yet beckoning the spectator in. Severn's portrait of Keats reading serves, on Aske's suggestive interpretation, as a representation of the process of reading Keats. The collection's final essay, "'Cutting Figures": Rhetorical Strategies in Keats's Letters' by Timothy Webb, is also concerned with reading, in this case the experience of reading Keats's letters. In his account of this experience Webb regrets (though in his own readings he overcomes) 'our slowness in evolving a poetics of the letter' (p. 146). 'Perhaps', he argues, 'we know Keats's letters so well that we have forgotten how to read them' (p. 144). His own essay goes a long way towards remedying any such forgetfulness. Webb invites us to read the letters 'as literary texts in their own right' (p. 145); and he draws attention to 'the extraordinary epistolary dynamics' (p. 147) at work in them, and to the textualising of experience which they brilliantly display. In common with other contributors to the collection, Webb discerns in Keats's writing 'a self-awareness which is acute and finely angled' (p. 149). In particular, Webb shows how Keats is able, despite his epigraph to the sonnet 'On Fame', to eat his cake and have it too, 'to assert the imaginative liberty of the writer and, at the same time, to demonstrate its limitations' (p. 167). Drawn to 'the figuring of attitudes' (p. 168), to finding verbal expression for non-verbal gestures, Keats rarely loses sight of language's figurative nature even as he seldom regards it as a prison-house. It is, finally, for such resilience and resourcefulness that Keats: Bicentenary Readings values Keats's writings - for their relishing of the power and limits of words, and for the creative interaction between those words and the real and imagined worlds in which they live and have their being.

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

10 N O TES

1. "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism', in Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty o f Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 61. For Paul H. Fry's subtle reading of 'To Autum n' and dissent from M cGann's account, see his A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 10 8-32. For Vincent N ew ey's response to McGann, see the chapter on Keats in his book Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1 995)/ PP- 9 7 -12 1; the chapter reprints an essay which first appeared in The Yearbook o f English Studies 19: The French Revolution in English Literature and A rt, ed. J. R. Watson (London: M H R A , 1989). 2. Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life o f Allegory: The Origins o f a Style (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 2 , 4 , 5 , 1 3 . 3. John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. ix. 4. A ndrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 1. 3. Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8. 6. Keats's Life of Allegory, p. 9. 7. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1983), p. 3.

CHAPTER TWO

A Cockney Schoolroom: John Keats at Enfield N IC H O L A S ROE

Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose! All poetry (even Cockney Keats) you see 's been dubbed by [a s ] into RP. Tony Harrison: Them & [uz]'1 Modern biographers of Keats agree in their accounts of his education at Enfield School. In John Keats: The Making of a Poet, Aileen Ward notes that the school was 'enlightened' and 'liberal', and that it offered a 'more modem and rounded curriculum than the public schools'. Robert Gittings finds that the school had a 'distinct tone' and that it shared the 'liberal and progressive' curriculum offered at nonconformist schools. Walter Jackson Bate has Enfield School providing 'a fairly liberal education to students whose families were in trade or in the less affluent professions'. The most recent biography of the poet, by Stephen Coote, notes the school's nonconformist background, and describes its teaching as 'neither narrow nor merely utilitarian ... kindly and enlightened ... benevolent [and] earnest if slightly eccentric'.2 All of these somewhat patronising accounts define Keats's education in terms of the contemporary social fabric of England, invoking topics such as economics, religious belief and political opinion: 'liberal' in each case points to the leftward sympathies of John Clarke, the headmaster of Enfield, and his son Charles Cowden Clarke, although I hope to be able to offer here a more precise account of the school's political culture. The primary source for information about Keats's school education is Charles Cowden Clarke's 'Recollections of John Keats' which, although it was written after the passage of many years, describes in heartfelt detail Keats's schooldays and his early reading. Clarke's memoir is still the best guide to Keats's early years - especially so in that it resists the myth of 'poor Keats', the victim of hostile critics, and reminds us of how

12

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

mentally and physically vigorous Keats actually was. According to Clarke, as a schoolboy Keats had been 'highly pugnacious', with an 'ungovernable' temper, and 'terrier courage'.3 But Clarke's essay was certainly not fresh material when it was quarried by twentieth-century biographers. It had first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (January 1861), then in the Gentleman's Magazine, Littel's Living Age, and Every Saturday (all 1874), and in 1878 appeared in its final form in Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke's Recollections of Writers. Keats's biographers all acknow­ ledge Clarke's 'Recollections of John Keats', but the fact that his narrative played down the political and religious dissent of Enfield School for his late nineteenth-century readers has made it difficult to evaluate his observations about the academy at Enfield. Furthermore, manuscript evidence suggests that Clarke had difficulty writing about Keats's politics in particular; the passages of the 'Recollections' which touch upon this matter are heavily deleted, interlined and revised to an extent which is not typical of Clarke's manuscript as a whole.4 Clarke's reticence is one explanation for the longevity of a misleading account of Keats's schooldays. This dates from the poet's lifetime, and the 'Cockney School' essays published over the initial Z in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from October 1817 onwards. The fourth of these essays was written, famously, by John Lockhart and it appeared in August 1818 after the publication of Keats's first two volumes, Poems, by John Keats and Endymion. The essay has been a principal source for the myth of Keats's 'poor' education and 'lower-class' social background. Z's purpose in the essay was to disempower Keats by making him look ridiculous, enforcing his minimal status as a writer in terms of his youth, his social class, cultural status, and gender. According to Z this 'young man' Keats had been infected with the 'poetical mania' that was currently also afflicting 'farm-servants', 'footmen', 'unmarried ladies' and 'superannuated governesses'. Like them, his burgeoning literary ambition far outstripped his intellectual capacity: Keats is the 'wavering apprentice', 'Johnny', 'our youthful poet', an 'uneducated and flimsy stripling'. He is 'without logic to analyse a single idea'; he lacks 'the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history'; he 'knows Homer only from Chapman [and writes] about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from [a person] of [his] education'5 At this period, of course, 'unedu­ cated' people signified the majority of the population in England, the mass who were excluded from the political life of the country

A Cockney Schoolroom

13

- the working classes, women, and all those who held dissenting religious beliefs. Z's Keats was a poet of 'negative capability' indeed, doubly debarred from legitimate participation: he was, on the evidence of his poetry, 'not capable of understanding'. Z's essay was very effective mischief indeed, and it did much to obliterate Keats's worldly presence for later generations of readers and critics. With some help from Shelley's lament in Adonais for Keats's 'delicate and fragile' genius, and Byron's tart observation that Keats had been 'snuff'd out by an article', Z initiated the strong nineteenth-century tradition of Keats's boyish incapacity for the world. For many readers at that period Keats came to be a figure of apathetic sublimity, as in this extraordinary account of him written by Stopford Brooke: [Keats] has, in spite of a few passages and till quite the end of his career, no vital interest in the present, none in man as a whole, none in the political movement of human thought, none in the future of mankind, none in liberty, equality and fraternity, no interest in anything but beauty.6 Brooke's evacuation of Keats, who becomes a poet with 'no interest in anything', is remarkable for showing how far Z's campaign had succeeded. As a devotee of 'beauty', Keats's intellectual and political presence has been wholly obscured by the supposedly uncerebral category of the aesthetic: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know'. The chiasmus which concludes the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was an appropriately enigmatic, introverted figure for the nineteenth-century image of Keats: unworldy and utterly insulated from actuality - truly, beautifully, an autistic poet, 'foster-child of silence'. One should not forget that it had been the insolent volubility of Keats's poetry which had so unsettled Z and the others who had determined to suppress the 'young Cockney rhymester'. Directly in line with Z's view of Keats are modern studies of him which have continued to emphasise how social and edu­ cational 'disadvantages' placed him beyond the pale of legitimate culture and the tradition of English poets which he aspired to join. Having glancingly observed that the 'facts of Keats's life are too familiar to bear recounting', Marjorie Levinson presses on to explain the development of Keats's poetic style in the following way: To observe that Keats's circumstances put him at a severe remove from the canon is to remark not only his educational

14

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

deficits but his lack of those skills prerequisite to a transparent mode of appropriation ... He knew some French and Latin, little Italian, no Greek. His Homer was Chapman, his Dante was Cary, his Provencal ballads translations in an edition of Chaucer, his Boccaccio Englished. Keats's art education was largely by engravings and, occasionally, reproductions. His absorption of the accessible English writers was greatly constrained by his ignorance of the originals upon which they drew and by his nonsystematic self-education.7 By seeking to define Keats's social and cultural presence in terms of 'educational deficits' and constraining 'ignorance', Levinson's provocative account evidently recalls Z's attack in Blackwood's Magazine. The claim that Keats had been 'greatly constrained by his ignorance' takes at face value Z's fiction that Keats was 'incapable of understanding'. Similarly, where Z had found that Keats's poetry was an affront to social and literary decorums, Levinson emphasises Keats's 'vulgar' and 'overwrought' poetic style as the expression of intellectual want 'driven by the strongest desire for an authorial manner and means, and for the socal legitimacy felt to go with it'.8 I should emphasise that Keats's Life of Allegory has been a valuable prompt to my own research into and thinking about the relationship between Keats's education and his poetry, and nowhere more so than in the points at which Levinson's argument replicates the terms of Z's invective. Keats's 'educa­ tional deficits' may be traced to his years at Enfield School (180311), before he left to become an apprentice to the surgeon Thomas Hammond a few miles away from the school at Edmonton. I want to suggest that the idea of Keats's deficient education, his 'ignorance', is predicated on the assumption that a more orthodox grounding in literary culture (Byron's Harrow or Shelley's Eton, Wordsworth's Cambridge or Southey's Oxford) would have been strongly enabling to Keats in later life and as a poet. Certainly, these acknowledged resorts of privilege were not available to Keats - although, as we know, his parents had hoped that he would be able to attend Harrow School. But to bring forward his 'ignorance' as the corollary is to reiterate the social and political prejudices which emerged so forcefully in the Cockney School essays nearly two centuries ago, in which 'good Johnny Keats' was pilloried for composing the 'drivelling idiocy' of Endymion. Where Z had found Keats's social status disabling to his poetic ambitions, Levinson reads his poetry as the signature of social

A Cockney Schoolroom

15

marginality. I want instead to shift the emphasis over to a more positive view of Keats's education, attending to Keats's eloquence as a representative voice of the most vital sector in English culture: that is, the culture of dissent in which opposition to and consequent exclusion from the establishment formed the intellectual dynamic of enlightened progress in political, social, religious, and educational matters. It has often been pointed out that Keats's association with Leigh Hunt was responsible for the politically motivated attacks in journals such as Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Keats read and was published in Hunt's Examiner newspaper; he dedicated his first collection of poems to Hunt; he included in the book his sonnet 'Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison' and in other poems made admiring references to Hunt as 'Libertas'. The political signal Keats gave to his first readers was singular and unmistakeable, just as it would be if one were to dedicate a book today to a similarly controversial public figure (although, that said, public life today doesn't present for ready comparison a journalist/poet of Leigh Hunt's stature). As William Keach demonstrated in his splendid essay 'Cockney Couplets', these explicit statements of Keats's political affiliation were reinforced by a distinctly registered politics of style.9 'Sleep and Poetry', the concluding poem in Keats's 1817 collection, outlined his ambi­ tions as a writer and expressed his contempt for the strict, neoclassical forms of eighteenth-century poets whom (following Hunt) he labelled 'the French School': ye were dead To things ye knew not of, - were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, T ill... / Their verses tallied.

(193-9) The loose, run-on couplets of Keats's poem deliberately broke with the regular 'clipping and fitting' and end-stopping of Pope's verse. But Keats's rebellion against the 'wretched rule' of earlier poets was more than a literary revolution. His sentiments in 'Sleep and Poetry' coincided with Hunt's remarks on 'the down­ fall of the French school of poetry' in the 'Preface' to his collection of poems, Foliage (published in January 1818). According to Hunt, the 'political convulsions of the world' had been accompanied by

i6

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

a literary revolution: The notions about poetry can no longer be controuled, like the fashions, by a coterie of town gentlemen'.10 When read alongside the explicitly politicised commentary in Hunt's preface, the loose couplets of 'Sleep and Poetry' expressed a cocky challenge to the neoclassical values of both the literary and political establishments. In turning back, now, to the Cockney School essays, we can sense that Z's mockery overlay anxieties which ran far, far deeper than the immediate matters of Cockney poetics and liberal politics. In Keats's poetry - one might almost say in Cockney rhymes, high suspended / life is ended hold my pen / denizen on, and on / cinnamon infant's force / rocking horse reverence bow / could reach? How! pleasant sonnet / think upon it pleasant flow / portfolio nearer bliss / Felicity's abyss! cold thin feet / winding-sheet whirlwind writhen / one huge Python11 - Z heard a truculent English version of the Marseillaise, the music of the democratic cultural revolution which had been underway since the latter eighteenth century and which continues in our own time. This brazen, jaunty music is figured in his essay as metromanie, the mania for writing poetry which allegedly accom­ panied the French Revolution. The word 'metromania' actually dated from the revolutionary decade, and William Gifford's 'Baviad' of 1794: 'This pernicious pest, / This metromania, creeps thro' every breast' (OED). To Z, the 'case of Mr John Keats', medical apprentice turned poet, represented the 'phrenzy' at its critical stage, although Z hoped that the 'invalid' may in 'some interval of reason' be 'in a fair way to be cured'.12 The medical analogy brings forward as a 'cure' the reassertion of Z's cultural authority against the democratic raving of Cockney writings. But 'recovery', in other words the re-establishment of consensus against the upstart Cockneys, was not in fact a possible outcome. Z's vigorously caustic diagnosis was itself a recognition of the Cockneys' power to disconcert,13 an acknowledgement that their poetry was a vigorous assault upon the 'lousy leasehold' of cultural exclusivity rather than a literary quest for 'social legitimacy'.

A Cockney Schoolroom

17

The robust northern-English 'Cockney' idiom of Tony Harrison's sonnet 'Them & [uz]' deliberately alludes to Keats in staging a comparable social-literary skirmish: 4 words only of mi 'art aches and ... 'Mine's broken, you barbarian, T.W.!' He was nicely spoken. 'Can't have our glorious heritage done to death!'14 This scene of confrontation - between 'nicely spoken' master and 'barbarian' pupil Harrison, between 'RP' and an inglorious dialect - exactly parallels Z's quarrel with 'Cockney Keats' while also highlighting the social and cultural stakes contested: 'I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth'. In 1818, as at this end of the twentieth century, the schoolroom was one arena in which wider forces for cultural change came into conflict with received values.15 Z's decision to ridicule Keats's unauthorised schooling and supposed intellectual deficiencies was not, therefore, simply an abusive rebuff to a 'young' poet who was also deemed socially unacceptable. The tactic revealed Z's dismayed understanding that the seemingly naive verses in Poems, by John Keats and Endymion represented a fresh and thoroughgoing challenge to the social and cultural standing of the status quo: that 'coterie of town gentlemen', whether in Edinburgh or London, who - as Hunt said - had presumed to control 'notions about poetry'. Z had learned about Keats's background from a conversation with the poet's friend Benjamin Bailey, who many years later remembered their talk: [Keats] was a young man, to whom Mr Hunt had shewn kindness which called forth gratitude in so young & warm a bosom - but that he himself mingled in no party-politics, & as I could confidently say, from his own lips, saw the weakness of his friend, & the impolicy of having his name mixed up with so decididly [sic] a party-man as Mr Hunt. I gave him an outline of Keats's history - that he had been brought up as a surgeon & apothecary; & though not highly, that he was respectably educated.16 From this very distant recollection it appears that Keats's medical training was discussed and that there was talk about his family background and schooldays. Bailey claimed to have given Lockhart a sentimental account of the 'young' man's politics as the glow of a 'warm bosom' responding to Hunt's kindness: the poet had not in fact 'mingled' in 'party-politics' at all. Whatever he had in fact said to Lockhart in 1818, his report of this aspect of

i8

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

their conversation was a mild invention, as Bailey was surely aware. But it does reveal how the idea of Keats's 'youthfulness' (which had been targeted in Z's attack) was used after his death to efface his worldly presence and interests. Bailey was responding to Milnes's Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848) at a period when it had become prudent to obscure or disavow political activities and involvements of former years. For Keats, this refashioning of the past was undertaken by friends such as Bailey and Clarke, by critics, and biographers. In our own day the process has continued in the biographies by Walter Jackson Bate and Robert Gittings, both of whom have little to say about Keats's political radicalism and the formative influence of Enfield School on his poetic and political lives. In what follows here I want to offer a discussion of Keats's education under three headings: the political culture of the school; the teaching that the school offered; and the formative influence of those experiences on Keats's imaginative life as this was revealed in some of his poems. Enfield School developed from the dissenting tradition which in the latter eighteenth cen­ tury was the engine of advanced intellectual, political and religious life in England. The school's founder was the eminent baptist minister John Collett Ryland; a republican and progress­ ive educationalist, his interests extended through classics, mathematics, Hebrew studies, English grammar, constitutional history, optics, mechanics, astronomy, biology, gardening, and ornithology. The obvious comparisons to make are with the better-known Unitarians Joseph Priestley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both of whom had a similar breadth of intellectual interests and commitments. Like Priestley, Ryland was a Violent partisan' of the American cause during the Revolution, believing that the Americans should take a 'solemn covenant engagement ... never [to] sheathe [their] swords while there was an English soldier in arms remaining in America'.17 As one would expect, he welcomed the French Revolution in 1789, looking forward to comparable changes in England and throughout Europe. Ryland's political allegiances suggest that the school was politically more radical than Keats's biographers have hitherto suspected, and this background gives us a clearer orientation in responding to Charles Cowden Clarke's reminiscences which show that John Ryland's influence at the school continued during Keats's years there. John Clarke (Keats's headmaster) was apparently 'independent-minded far in advance of his time'; he

A Cockney Schoolroom

19

knew some of the most prominent English 'jacobins' of the 1790s, among them Joseph Priestley, Major Cartwright, Gilbert Wake­ field, George Dyer, and he coincided with their opinions.18 In other words, the Clarke circle at Enfield overlapped with the radical movement in which John Thelwall, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Words­ worth, and Robert Southey were also active at that period. Furthermore, the Clarkes maintained their dissenting republi­ canism beyond the turn of the century; they subscribed to Hunt's Examiner newspaper on its first appearance in 1808, and encouraged Keats and other pupils to read it. When Cowden Clarke recalled that Enfield School had 'laid the foundation of [Keats's] love of civil and religious liberty', he placed him in the line of English radical dissent which had been encouraged by the American and French Revolutions and which, at Enfield, had survived the setbacks of terrorism and Napoleonic imperialism.19 More than this, John Ryland and the Clarkes built up an extensive library in which the English republicans of the seventeenth century were well-represented. In addition to the Whig historians listed by Cowden Clarke as among authors that Keats read, he also had access in the school library to works by Milton, Sydney, Locke, Bolingbroke, and Selden. Given this background, we can hear Keats's early poems announce much more clearly the oppositional values of dissenting culture: 'On Peace'; 'Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison'; 'To Hope'; the epistles to George Felton Mathew, George Keats, Charles Cowden Clarke; the sonnet 'To Kosciusko'; 'Sleep and Poetry'; and Endymion, especially the opening of Book III. The list goes on, but just to make the point clear, I will quote the very early lyric 'Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles's Restoration': Infatuate Britons, will you still proclaim His memory, your direst, foulest shame? Nor patriots revere? Ah! when I hear each traitorous lying bell, 'Tis gallant Sydney's, Russell's, Vane's sad knell, That pains my wounded ear. This curious and in some respects slight lyric is nevertheless an unequivocal expression of Keats's sympathies, aligning the patriot republican tradition of Algernon Sydney, Lord William Russell and Sir Henry Vane against 'infatuated', 'shameful',

20

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

'traitorous' monarchists. What I want particularly to emphasise is that Enfield School placed Keats in direct continuity with English radicalism of the 1790s, with the dissenters of the later eighteenth century, and with the republicans of the seventeenth century. When George Felton Mathew remembered that in 1815 Keats had been 'of the sceptical and republican school. An advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder with everything established',20 he defined a political identity which was already fully-formed when Keats met Leigh Hunt in October 1816. Hunt and his circle subsequently provided a base for Keats's literary ambitions and political opposition, at the period when he dropped his medical training to devote himself to poetry. But in a longer perspective this was just one stage in a career which shows remarkable consistency from his earliest years at school through to autumn 1819, and the great letter to George and Georgiana (17-27 September) in which Keats surveys 'progress' in European history from the time of the Normans to the French Revolution to the present day (Letters, II, pp . 193-4).

I want now to turn to the teaching at Enfield School, as it may have affected Keats. John Ryland's method of teaching was, as he put it himself, 'by recreation', and these techniques were continued by the Clarkes during Keats's time at the school. One example will show what was involved in such 'recreative' classes, and why I think the unique curriculum at Enfield was significant for Keats. In the 'living orrery' (Ryland's term again) the pupils recreated in the school garden the disposition of planets and moons in the solar system, then set about moving in circles around the pupil-sun, at the appropriate distance, speed, sequence, and so on. Each child was given a card, with a short description of the planet to be represented: Card 12

I represent stupendous Saturn. My diameter is 78,000 miles. I move round the Sun in 29^ years, at the distance of 907,000,000 miles, and at the rate of 22,000 miles an hour. Card 18

I represent the grand Georgium Sidus, discovered by Dr. Herschel, March 13,1781. Above 4,000 times as big as the Earth, I move round the Sun in about 83 years, and at the distance of 1,800,000,000 miles. My diameter is 34,000 miles.21

A Cockney Schoolroom

21

John Ryland had known and admired the astronomer William Herschel, so there was a direct link between Enfield School and the discoverer of Uranus, the 'new planet' in Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. This ingenious exercise in learning through play indicates something of the imaginative teaching offered to Keats at Enfield School, very much in contrast to the prescriptive curricula at Harrow, Eton and other public schools at the time. Indeed, the 'living orrery' may have contributed more to Keats's creative life than his celebrated prize copy of John Bonnycastle's Introduction to Astronomy. To take just one example, the rapt attentiveness of these two lines from 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken (9-10) convey a sense of awesome disclosure. This is much at odds with John Bonnycastle's laconic account of Herschel's investigation of the night sky, pursuing a design which he had formed of observing, with telescopes of his own construction, every part of the heavens, discovered, in the neighbourhood of H Geminorum, a star, which, in magnitude and situation, differed considerably from any that he had before observed, or found described in the catalogues.22 Bonnycastle's Introduction to Astronomy has frequently been cited as the 'source' of Keats's reference to 'a new planet' in his sonnet. But, on reflection, it seems unlikely that the desiccated prose of the Introduction should have quickened the marvellous vision of sidereal motion in Keats's poem: here, I think, Keats's imagin­ ation was stirred by the memory of discoveries made at Enfield while playing in the 'living orrery' or, perhaps, gazing at a planet's bright image through the school telescope. Finally, think of the words of Saturn in Hyperion, Book I: 'Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice Of Saturn ...' (98-100) It seems at least possible that the poet who could imagine the voice of a Titan in utter defeat, might first have assumed that role in the schoolyard at Enfield: 'I represent stupendous Saturn ...'.

22

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

If these few conjectures have any plausibility, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' may seem rather more than the impoverished creation of someone whose 'Homer was Chap­ man'. It was a compliment for Charles Cowden Clarke (to whom Keats sent his sonnet) which extended beyond the 'golden realms' of Keats's very considerable reading, and intended to acknow­ ledge more broadly the formative influence of his schooldays at Enfield. Certainly, it was the culture of progressive knowledge fostered by Ryland and the Clarkes which transformed Keats with the intensity of a religious conversion, and which sub­ sequently encouraged his developing sense of calling as a poet. Keats was not alone in having been powerfully affected in this way. The Baptist minister Robert Hall had been invigorated by Ryland's tuition, and I cite Hall's example here by way of illuminating Keats's similar experience at Enfield: The senior Mr. Ryland, to stimulate the exertions of his pupils, gave them subjects on which to write, and the best composition carried off the prize. This placed young Robert in a state of direct competition, and roused his dormant faculties, which in this new situation had met with no particular excitement. No sooner was he forced into the ranks for this species of literary fame, than he produced a theme which not only surpassed the efforts of all his competitors, but afforded great delight to his tutor.23 Ryland's example described here was continued by John Clarke, and it seems to have worked a comparable change in Keats's studies at Enfield. Charles Cowden Clarke recalled how Keats's 'highly pugnacious spirit' as a schoolboy had been directed very successfully into studious competition: My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last two or three successive halfyears of his remaining at school, that, upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, [Keats] would be in the school - almost the only one - at his Latin or French translation; and so uncon­ scious and regardless was he of the consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never would have

A Cockney Schoolroom

23

taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes driven out for the purpose by one of the masters.24 Here, Clarke traced in prize-competitions at Enfield School the awakening of Keats's extraordinary determination of intellect and imagination. Keats's 'indefatigable energy' to succeed at his studies would subsequently drive his powerful ambition in writing Endymion as 'a test, a trial of [his] Powers of Imagination and chiefly of [his] invention' (Letters, I, p. 169). Similarly, Keats's extensive reading in his last terms at Enfield foreshadowed his determined quest for the 'knowledge' that would enable him to write a humane, philosophical poetry. 'I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge', Keats wrote to John Taylor, on 24 April 1818: I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world - some do it with their society - some with their wit - some with their benevolence - some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet and in a thousand ways all dutiful to the command of Great Nature - there is but one way for me the road lies th[r]ough application study and thought. I will pursue it and to that end purpose retiring for some years.25 Keats's plan to retire for 'study and thought' acknowledged his wish in 'Sleep and Poetry' to understand all that the celestial charioteer 'writes with such a hurrying glow' (154). The chariot­ eer's descent (and subsequent flight 'Into the light of heaven', 136) accompanied Keats's determination to write poetry that would express 'the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts' (124-3), a 'sense of real things' (137). These statements, which focus so powerfully Keats's aspiration as a poet, seem to me to emerge directly from the competitive environment in which Keats flourished during his latter years at Enfield School. But it is important to recognise that his ambition in writing a poem such as Endymion was directed towards the serene pleasure that a Tong Poem' afforded its readers: Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading: which may be food for a Week's stroll in the Summer?26 Keats's 'task' in writing Endymion, his testing 'endeavour after a long Poem', was moderated by his sense of the poem's amplitude

24

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

and the imaginative recreation which he hoped it might offer. In this way both the competitive and recreative aspects of the curri­ culum at Enfield were sustained in Keats's developing sense of calling as a poet.27 In his letter to Bailey quoted above, Keats figures the long poem as a garden, in which the reader may 'pick and choose' and 'stroll'. He was certainly thinking of The Faerie Queene (which at this time, 8 October 1817, was his most admired example of the longer poem) but probably also of the garden surrounding Enfield School where he had first read Spenser's poem in company with Charles Cowden Clarke: 'the grounds sufficiently large to give space for flower, fruit, and vegetable gardens, playground, and paddock of two acres affording pastur­ age for two cows'28Alan Bewell perceptively describes Keats as 'a poet-nurseryman', who understood 'a poem as being a textual equivalent of a garden', while the garden figured 'not only how readers should read his poetry, but how he himself read other poets'.29Without wishing to enforce a literal, biographical context for Bewell's remarks, it seems likely that Keats's association of poetry and gardens may be traced to his years at Enfield School and the period immediately thereafter when he returned to the School to borrow books and to read poetry, as Cowden Clarke remembered, 'in an arbour at the end of a spacious garden'.30 Directly in contrast to the pastoral character of Clarke's memoir, the grotesque image of Keats in the 'Cockney School' represented the establishment view of a dissenting culture which had been daemonised for years by the Test and Corporation Acts. As I have tried to indicate, Z's vigorous abuse was in all respects in propor­ tion to the Cockney's insolent vitality. Rather than acquiesce to Z's cultural paranoia, however, perhaps we should gloss the label 'Cockney' as a compliment: a welcoming acknowledgement of those who are not content with authorised opinion, and who seek to foster a diversity of voices, opinions, viewpoints, orientation in short, a 'Cockney Culture'. I suggest, then, that the 'Cockney School' essays are among the most important cultural documents to emerge from the Romantic period - albeit for reasons that Z would certainly not have approved. In their acute response to forces at work in contem­ porary literary, social, and political spheres, the essays are comparable to - and certainly as significant as - the 'Prefaces' to Lyrical Ballads. In particular, the essays highlight (even as they excoriate) the distinctive strengths of a vital literary culture and a flourishing academy, in each of which dissent has frequently been

A Cockney Schoolroom

25

the measure of intellectual and imaginative achievement. To a greater extent than any of his contemporaries it was 'Johnny Keats' who created an idiom for modern poetries in English, in which a Cockney plurality of voices has become perhaps the most distinctive characteristic. More than the authorised institutions of the day, it was Keats's unorthodox 'Cockney Schoolroom' which prefigured the modern academy and contemporary multi-cultural, multivocal society in England. Keats famously looked forward to being 'among the English poets after [his] death'. As we celebrate the bicentenary of Keats's birth, we can see that his most farreaching achievement has been to make Cockneys of us all. I acknowledge with gratitude a grant from the British Academy for research into Keats's schooling, and the award of a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust which enabled me to incorporate my research in the present essay.

NOTES

1. Tony Harrison, Selected Poems, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 122. 2. See Aileen Ward, John Keats: The M aking of a Poet (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1963), pp. 7-8; Robert Gittings, John Keats (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 44; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 10; Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), pp. 11-12 . 3. Charles Cowden Clarke, 'Recollections of John Keats', in Charles and M ary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878; Fontwell: Centaur Books, 1969), p. 123. 4. The manuscript of 'Recollections of John Keats' to which I refer is in the Keats Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 3. 'On the Cockney School of Poetry, No IV', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (August 1818), p p.519-24. 6. Stopford A . Brooke, Studies in Poetry (London: Duckworth and Co., 1907), p. 204. 7. Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 7. 8. Levinson, p. 4. 9. See William Keach, 'Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style', Studies in Romanticism 23, 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 182-96. 10. Leigh Hunt, Foliage; or, Poems Original and Translated (London, 1818), pp. 9/12 . 11. See 'Sleep and Poetry', 33-6 ; 47-8; 1 1 7 - 1 8 ; 18 3-6 ; 273-4 ; 319 -20 ; 3 3 7 8; and Endymion, III, 17 3-6 ; 19 3-6 ; 329-30. These few examples of Keats's rhyming also help to explain John Wilson Croker's charge in the Quarterly Review (September 1818) that Keats 'seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it

26

Keats: Bicentenary Readings concludes'. See Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19 71), p. 112 . 12. 'On the Cockney School of Poetry, N o IV ', p. 519. 1 3 . 1 have adopted 'disconcert' from John Bayley's essay 'The Vulgar and the Heroic in "Bad Poetry'", in his The Uses o f Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), p. 115 . Bayley finds the 'disconcerting' quality of Keats's poetry - its vulgar vitality - to be most characteristic of Keats's poetic identity; for Z, Keats's 'vulgarity' w as the measure of his Cockney threat to received literary values. 14. Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 122. 15. See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 17 8 0 -18 3 2 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 129. 16. The Keats Circle, ed. H yder Edw ard Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), II, p. 287. 17. See John Greene, Reminiscences o f the Rev. Robert Hall, A .M . (London, 1832), pp. 92-3. 18. See Cow den Clarke, 'Recollections of John Keats', pp. 4-3. 19. See Cow den Clarke, 'Recollections of John Keats', p. 124. 20. See Rollins, The Keats Circle, II, pp. 183-6 . 21. See William Newm an, Rylandiana. Reminiscences Relating to the Rev. John Ryland, A . M . o f Northampton (London, 1833), pp. 117 -2 2 . Coote, in John Keats, pp. 1 1 - 1 2 , touches briefly on these aspects of teaching at Enfield, but the fact that he refers repeatedly to 'John Rylands' (as in the Manchester Library) and to a 'human orrorey' [sic] tends to compromise his account. 22. John Bonnycastle, A n Introduction to Astronomy (London, 1803), p. 409. 23. J. W. Morris, Biographical Recollections o f the Rev. Robert Hall, A . M . (London, 1803), p. 32. 24. Cow den Clarke, 'Recollections of John Keats', p. 122. 23. Letters, I, p. 271. 26. Letters, I, p. 170. 27. This point emerged in the course of a general discussion at the Keats Conference in the Centre for English Studies, University of London, on 24 February 19 93 . 1 am grateful in particular to Isobel Armstrong for her response to m y paper on Keats at Enfield. 28. Cow den Clarke, 'Recollections of John Keats', pp. 2 -3. 29. Alan Bewell, 'Keats's "Realm of Flora'", in N ew Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp.

74- 5* 30. Cow den Clarke, 'Recollections of John Keats', p. 123.

CHAPTER THREE

Keats's New World: An Emigrant Poetry FIONA ROBERTSON

'Keats's New World' signals a link between Keats's writings about the United States of America, to which his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana emigrated in 1818, and a new relationship to traditions and styles of poetry, even a discernibly different poetic. To propose such a link is to risk validating some easy equations: between America, Atlantis, and realms of gold mineral and poetical, for example; or between Keats's imagina­ tive appropriation of America and his loss, in George, of someone who 'always stood between me and any dealings with the world' (Letters, II, p. 113); or between poetic experimentation and the unavoidably politicised (to us and to readers of the Romantic period) trope of European discovery. The details of Keats's involvement with America as prospect and as reported actuality, however, can shed new light on his uses of poetic convention and on his alignment with European literary tradition.1 Keats's reactions to the imagined but vicariously realisable realms of the west are marked by the heavy intervention of ways of perceiving and describing to which many recent critics have supposed him constitutionally and culturally resistant. The Keats who describes a disagreeably down-market United States is not immediately recognisable as the radical of recent critical rein­ vention.2 John Barnard opens his study of Keats with 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and the observation: 'Keats is a poet of exclusion, perpetually longing for admission to an imagined other world'.3 In his writings about America, however, and most of all in his use of European literary conventions in the late poem 'What can I do to drive away/Remembrance from my eyes?', Keats shows that he is also capable of writing, aggressively and possessively, from inside the other world of his supposed exclusion. For many readers, the subject of Keats's writings about the United States will recall the long reflective and discursive letters written to George and Georgiana after their emigration; most

28

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

immediately, perhaps, the early letter of 14 -31 October 1818 in which Keats denies Dilke's belief that 'America will be the country to take up the human intellect where england leaves off'. Keats explains: I differ there with him greatly - A country like the united states whose greatest Men are Franklins and Washingtons will never do that - They are great Men doubtless but how are they to be compared to those our countrey men Milton and the two Sidneys - The one is a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrify maxims the other sold the very Charger who had taken him through all his Battles - Those American's are great but they are not sublime Man - the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime.4 Their supposed devotion to money is what allows Keats to dismiss Franklin and Washington here. But the movement which is most relevant to the present investigation is the one which Keats immediately goes on to make: 'If I had a prayer to make for any great good, next to Tom's recovery, it should be that one of your Children should be the first American Poet', he tells George (Letters, I, p. 398). He then goes on to include the poem "Tis the "witching time of night'", a fairytale prophecy and lullaby for this expected baby, the 'Little child/O' the western wild'. Keats's fantasy is that an American Keats Junior will break through the bounds of the old world and introduce poetry and sublimity to America. The letter moves swiftly from politics to a poetics which is politically and nationalistically charged. This paper will con­ cern itself, accordingly, with the realignment of literary conven­ tion prompted by Keats's imaginings of America, particularly with the positioning of a language of financial gain amid the conventions of poetical Arcadias.5 A locus of tropes of discovery and desire, and of experiments with poetical language, Keats's America prompts one to propose points of intersection between three speculative prospects: the first, a moment of discovery or vision, what Stephen Greenblatt calls the 'secular epiphany' of views of the new world;6 second, Keats's own imaginative speculations and his relationship to poetic convention; and third, the practical speculation in a new world made by Keats's brother George, who emigrated not just to America but to what William Cobbett called in 1819 'the Western Countries, that Newest of the New Worlds'.7 My argument begins with one poem, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', which deals openly with the first two of

Keats's New World

29

these types of speculation, the secular epiphany and the relation­ ship to poetic convention, and more covertly with the third, the implications of exploration and settlement, especially as these relate to gold. It then moves on to passages from the letters and to a later poem, 'What can I do to drive away/Remembrance from my eyes?', which also foregrounds the visual but which takes a vicious revenge on America as an anti-Arcadia, a land deserted by the figures of classical poetry and devoured by the sordid speculations of capitalism. Throughout, my essay aims to keep in view the British literary contexts of Keats's writings on America: the force which comes from denying idealised views of America as social idyll or rediscovered Eden, in Coleridge's and Southey's Pantisocratic writings; the vogue for new poetical accounts of discovering America, whether by Madoc (Southey) or by Colum­ bus (Rogers, Bowles, Joanna Baillie); the confident reinscription of America as pastoral in Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming. In particular, the force of Keats's denials of America is best registered in the context of master narratives of American history - whether British, as in William Robertson's History, or American, as in Timothy Dwight's Conquest of Canaan - with their strong though opposed assumptions of progress and improvement; or in the light of such surviving oppositional ideals of America as Shelley's Laon expresses at the end of Book XI of The Revolt of Islam: 'a People mighty in its youth,/A land beyond the Oceans of the West' (XI, 4414-15). These reminders of the heavily politicised nature of Romanticperiod representations of the United States (and of South America, with which Keats is less immediately involved) call for a little orientation of the present argument in relation to primarily historicist readings of Romantic geographies. Keats is an obvious and prominent contributor to Romantic-period debate on the practicalities and emotional investments of emigration. He might, had he so wished, have joined explicitly in the debate, as he tells Georgiana in January 1820 during George's brief return visit to England: 'There were very pretty pickings for me in Georges Letters about the Prairie Settlement, if I had had any taste to turn them to account in England' (Letters, II, p. 242). I take it as selfevident that Keats's writings on America form part of his views on the political and moral condition of the British nation, especially as these were revealed by the workings of commerce and the financial system.8 Throughout his 1992 study Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature, Stephen Fender acknowledges that emigration manuals implicitly and sometimes explicitly

30

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

criticised social and political organisation in Britain: 'You could not desire the New World without rehearsing your distaste for the Old', he argues.9 Keats's early, self-bolstering, letters predictably fit this mould: George is of 'too independant [sic] and liberal a Mind to get on in trade in this Country - in which a generous Ma[n] with a scanty recourse must be ruined' (to Benjamin Bailey, May 1818, Letters, I, p. 287); George is 'driven by the "burden of Society" to America' (to Bailey, June 1818, Letters, I, p. 293). Later, when George seems close to giving up on America, Keats warns: 'If ever you should think of such a thing [as coming back] you must bear in mind the very different state of society here - The immense difficulties of the times' (Letters, II, p. 211). Keats's writings on America, most noticeably in the letters, are always implicitly or explicitly simultaneously writings about the present state of Britain, especially its politics and its social opportunities. This does not imply, however, that French or British politics is the displaced subject of Romantic-period writings about the United States. Keats's America starts off by being more metaphorical than literal. His interest in it was not sparked simply by that of his brother. Indeed, if one looks beyond Keats's references to America to his interest in 'the west', George's emigration can look more like a testing out of an imaginary geography which had always attracted Keats. In addition, and like several other writers of his time, Keats drew on the image of the 'brother in the west' as a type of unachieved desires and goals, both practical and creative. Prophetically, as the early poem 'To My Brother George' (1816), shows, Keats had always associated George with the west: Now I direct my eyes into the west, Which at this moment is in sunbeams drest: Why westward turn? 'Twas but to say adieu! 'Twas but a kiss my hand, dear George, to you! The image of the brother in the west is a powerful one, especially when it is associated with a new poetic beginning. Walter Scott, for example, enjoyed the rumour, on which he elaborates in the General Preface of 1829, that the Waverley Novels had been the work of his brother Thomas; and the last series of Tales of My Landlord are kidnapped to America by Peter Pattieson's brother Paul, and published there with all their faults on their head, much to Jedediah Cleishbotham's irritation. The displacement fantasy satisfies something of Scott's and Keats's desires for a literary world which can be cleared and started afresh.

Keats's New World

3i

The west figures largely and often conventionally in Keats's work, particularly, in the early poems, in association with Apollo and his bards: in the 'Ode to Apollo' of 1815 the bards of old sit in Apollo's 'western halls of gold'; gold, west, Apollo, is the conjun­ ction in poem after poem, 'gilding the lapses of time'. Looking to the west is likewise often a pattern, as it is for several other writers of the period, particularly Percy Shelley and William Blake. From the west come emanations, visions, and images, a potent context for the opening of The Fall of Hyperion. More broadly, Keats is fascinated by the act of gazing, standing tip-toe and looking; and with points of view: where 'Nature's observatory', as he calls a hilltop in one early poem ('O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell', 1815), gives him a vantage point from which to view the 'horizon of fine poesy', as he calls it in 'To George Felton Mathew' (1815). These usages align Keats with the 'imperial prospect' traditions of eighteenth-century verse, and are reminders that the act of seeing, of discovering, has always been central to European responses to new lands. The titles of the many books on the subject are expressive: John Bakeless's The Eyes of Discovery, Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes.10 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' conflates the conventional and well-documented sense of discovery as gazing with a more problematic, indeed a coy, half-concealed, sense of discovery as speculation in gold.11 Both these speculations take life from another, the literary adventuring which is going on as Keats reads Chapman's Homer - a colonised Homer, one notes, an English translation - in what Cowden Clarke described as a state of 'teeming wonderment'.12 The implication of the parallel in the 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet is that Keats is a gazer at and despoiler of classical tradition. His gazing is at once reverential and suspect. My argument about the 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet is not that it is really about gold or that 'wild surmise' means daring specu­ lation. The significance of this sonnet for Keats's later reactions to America is that it allows the romance conventions of the gaze across the Pacific to retain descriptive legitimacy. Keats's evocation of the gaze across the Pacific famously conflates Robertson's account of Balboa's first sighting of the Pacific and of Cortes's first gaze over the plain of Mexico to its great city: the scene so far exceeded their imagination, that some believed the fanciful descriptions of romance were realized, and that its enchanted palaces and gilded domes were presented to their sight; others could hardly persuade

32

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

themselves that this wonderful spectacle was any thing more than a dream.13 To say this is of course to dispute the implications of Marjorie Levinson's reading of 'Chapman's Homer', although Levinson's insights do much to illuminate the ironies of the poem's claims to any kind of secure possession of literary tradition. Levinson is alert to Keats's linguistic appropriation not of Homer's original but of Chapman's Elizabethan translation (and indeed 'translatorese', the 'pure serene'), and the sense in which even this has been read (or 'breathed') casually, opportunistically. For her, Keats is a literary adventurer rather than a heroic explorer, and in her reading all the adventurous energy of the discovery turns self­ reflexive: 'The poem looks at itself as the men look at each other'.14 'Pure serene' may be 'translatorese', but it is also what the poem itself strives for. The poem looks beyond as well as at itself, to a world of poetry which is still vast and alluring, and from a perspective not yet sullied by gold mines. Keats is still seeing the 'horizon of fine poesy', although he indicates the rapacities which might lie presently out of view beyond it. In contrast, David Pirie has recently argued that the conclusion of the sonnet is energised by 'complex political ambiguities'.15 He offers a reinterpretation of the closing image, which he says seems at first strangely to validate the heroic figure of the single explorer and his unique vision. Pirie's interest lies with the companions who have helped him get there and on whom he now turns his back, while they look at each other 'with a wild surmise': what are they thinking of, Pirie asks - insurrection? This decisive reading limits the possible double referent of the word 'upon'. Cortes and his incipient militants are standing upon a peak in Darien, but the subject of the poem, its gazings, allows Darien as well as the Pacific to be included in the gaze. One of the difficulties of fixing a political perspective on this poem is that its own gaze is so inclusive and so alert to the wonder of the land on which one stands, as well as to that of the ocean which lies beyond it. By narrowing down the gaze, critics may illuminate one of the doubts the poem raises - its doubt about imperialist heroics - but the end of the poem has its grandeur as well as its hesitancy, and part of this grandeur stems from the headlong (perhaps momen­ tary, perhaps provisional) validation of the possessive gaze west. The co-existence of commercial and conceptual ideas in this sonnet corresponds to different interpretations of the importance of the European discovery of the American continent in Keats's time. For William Robertson and Adam Smith in the 1770s, both

Keats's New World

33

the discovery and the subsequent importance of the New World could be traced to commerce. Part of a global move from agricultural communities to commercial societies, it was also the greatest stimulus to world trade, opening up markets and enormously increasing wealth. In contrast, for Alexander von Humboldt, who in 1799 began his topographical and botanical survey of South America, the importance of the discovery was perceptual and moral.16 In the context of this wider debate, there­ fore, Keats's sonnet can be seen as poised between commercial and philosophical-scientific explanations of the importance of discovering America. 'Poised', indeed. The impact of the 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet lies in its breathless moment of poise on the brink of discovery, its unrepeatable first gaze westward: except that the poem like the urn can keep them there for ever. It reveals a great deal about Keats's America and his expanding world of poetry to consider the differences between this poem and the later poem 'What can I do to drive away/Remembrance from my eyes?', written in October 1819, in terms of discovery and creativity and the link between financial worth and artistic worth. This poem begins with one conventional region of romance, the fairy world over which the memory of Fanny Brawne reigns, his 'brilliant queen'. The American section bursts in abruptly and disjointedly about halfway through, as a second type of intellec­ tual and emotional imprisonment: Where shall I learn to get my peace again? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck'd and live a wretched life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods; Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds; There flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.17 The guttural clutter of the lines suggests a scrapyard rather than an emptiness, and their awkward ugliness is deliberate, not in the Levinson sense of 'deliberate badness' (in which Keats writes

34

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

'badly' in order to register his exclusion) but, interestingly, in a quite opposite sense. Keats operates here not as outsider but as insider, throwing the weight of all European literary culture against the offender. This is to be a landscape which defies Popean natural order. In making such a jarring hash of its Arcadian mimicry it manages to cast a slur on both the American landscape and European literary convention. The primary irony for pioneer ideals, however, is the simple reversal of the implicit value of unowned lands: that America was 'zephyrless' might have been expected to be its greatest attraction. The dull rivers do not just pour in pointless abandon into the sea; they are 'unowned'; the winds 'all zephyrless', out of control, forests to defeat all forest-nymphs, meadows which starve while they feed. Furthermore, the unhealthiness of the landscape is a particularly effective way of attacking a settlement. It is a stinging backlash against Birkbeck's claims for Prairie Albion, several early accounts of which focus approvingly on its unusual healthiness among settler territories.18 Throughout the passage, more generally, European possessives have failed. 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' had been full of possessives: Homer is so rich, goes the implication, that he can be Chapman's, or Pope's, without threat. This, in contrast, is a land that churlishly refuses appropriation by any literary tradition. And instead of the poised expectation of 'Chapman's Homer', the landscape it discovers is a dungeon, a trap, much like that of the poem's first gaoler, Fanny. This section of 'What can I do to drive away' is, like the 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet, closely related to Book 3 of The Excursion, to which Wordsworth appends a note quoting from William Gilbert's poem 'The Hurricane'. In Gilbert's account of the possessive gaze of the explorer, the 'fruit of this wilderness' gives itself up at sight to the 'freeman' of nature. There are none of the problems of ownership which beset 'What can I do to drive away'. Another poem about America is audible in the background too, however. This is Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, with its vision of happy transatlantic settlement and the sure progress of the Spirit of Freedom: Obedient Nature follows where he leads; The steaming marsh is changed to fruitful meads; The beasts retire from man's asserted reign, And prove his kingdom was not given in vain.19

Keats's New World

35

What, then, had happened to Keats's western gaze between 1816 and 1819? The 'teeming wonderment' in which the 'Chap­ man's Homer' sonnet was written has been transformed into the afflicting, starving, unnatural nature of 'What can I do to drive away'. The vision has become a blindness and the gold sordid. The story of George and Georgiana's emigration, at least from Keats's point of view, is dominated by money and by the loss of a poetical ideal. The first is expressed in letter after letter, especially after the bizarre incident involving John James Audubon (pre­ birds) and the riverboat into which he persuaded George to sink, perhaps literally, over half of his money. The second is best seen in the letter written to Georgiana in January 1820, while George is briefly in London persuading Abbey to part with the £700 which has so vexed Keats scholars ever since. ('I sit planning schemes of vengeance upon his head', writes Charles Brown to Joseph Severn in January 1821: 'Should his brother die exposure and infamy shall consign him to perpetual exile'.)20 Writing to Georgiana about the difference between the America of literature and the America of reality, Keats retorted in 1820: 'Gertrude of Wyoming and Birkbeck's book should be bound up together like a Brace of Decoy Ducks - One is almost as poetical as the other. Precious miserable people at the Prarie' (Letters, II, p. 243). At the age of 21, Keats's younger brother George, with his new wife Georgiana Wylie, emigrated to the United States. For about a year before that George had taken the bulk of responsibility for their sick youngest brother Tom, so his departure exacerbated Keats's problems in establishing himself as a poet. Keats's letters at the time betray a mixture of depressive indifference and anxiety: his own position was materially affected by George's departure. Once George had left, however, Keats wrote a series of brilliant, questioning, letters, bursting with curiosity and imagin­ ation: What are you doing this morning? Have you a clear hard frost as we have? How do you come on with the gun? Have you shot a Buffalo? Have you met with any Pheasants? My Thoughts are very frequently in a foreign Country - I live more out of England than in it.21 Again, addressing Georgiana this time, a few months later: do you put your hair in papers of a night? do you pay the Miss Birkbeck's a morning visit - have you any tea? ... What place of Worship do you go to - the Quakers the Moravians,

36

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

the Unitarians or the Methodists ... do you and the Miss Birkbecks get groggy on any thing - a little so so ish so as to be obliged to be seen home with a Lantern - .. ,22 The reality of what was happening to George and Georgiana was not so zestful. They made the predictable hard journey: sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia, crossed the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh, went down the Ohio River by keelboat for another 600 miles, had doubts about Birkbeck's Prairie Albion so went south instead, to the frontier settlement of Henderson, Kentucky. From here George wrote describing his disappointment in the Birkbeck colony and his need for more money. In September Keats heard again of an even more serious blow to George's hopes: he had lost over half his money through a scheme proposed by Audubon, whom he had befriended in Henderson. The scheme was that George should invest his savings in a steamboat, plying the Mississippi trade; the snag was that the steamboat in question was already lying at the bottom of the river. George was prepared to sue, but Audubon, jailed for debt and declaring himself bankrupt, was untouchable.23 Keats was deeply indignant at this apparent swindling.24 Desperate for money, and after moving Georgiana and their baby daughter from Henderson to Louisville, George returned to England for a few weeks early in 1820, to claim his share of their dead brother Tom's inheritance. He left with £700, a vexed £700 for Keats scholars, who have wondered for years how much of that sum should have been Keats's, and how much Keats and George understood of their financial situation. Whatever the truth, Keats did not see George again: a few days after they parted Keats suffered the severe haemorrhage that clearly signalled to him his terminal illness. He died two years later. George and Georgiana survived: by the early 1830s they had become fairly prosperous, with a lumber mill and a flour mill and a large house in Louisville. In the 1820s and 1830s his letters to his sister and to Dilke are full of accounts of the moral decay of America, political mayhem and institutionalised financial dishonesty. '[W]e are getting blacker and blacker in political villainy', he writes in 1832: Altho' I consider the American republic as the best possible for an intelligent and virtuous people that has no prejudices in favour of other forms, I do not consider the Americans either sufficiently virtuous or intelligent to perpetuate their institutions unimpaired to a very remote posterity.25

Keats's New World

37

George died of tuberculosis in 1841, leaving five daughters and two sons, and his widow, who re-married two years later. Georgiana lived until 1879. Back in 1819 and 1820, as the ideals of a new prosperity for George in America faded, Keats lashed out at the country and its promoters, most notably Birkbeck. He was continually suspicious that America would 'fleece' George: that George had pathetically been 'shipwrecked among Americans' (Letters, II, p. 211). He was also, however, increasingly convinced that America fatally lacked a literary culture: the fantasy figure of the First American Poet no longer seemed a viable possibility. In all the letters of the first few months, Keats assumes that George has joined Birkbeck's settle­ ment: he thinks of sending copies of Leigh Hunt's Examiner but decides 'Birkbeck no doubt has all the good periodical Publi­ cations' (December 1818-January 1819, Letters, II, p. 11). A year later, though, Keats is making it clear that he could not come out and exercise his own poetry there: 'What could I do there? How could I employ myself? Out of the reach of Libraries' (September 1819, Letters, II, p. 210). His revenge on America, fittingly, denies it the spirit of poetry. In the early optimistic letter about the 'Little child/O' the Western Wild', the new world of America had seemed to be a new opportunity for poetry. More importantly still, George Keats's American adventures had always been closely connected with literature, with ways of describing, and it is in this context that one can see why Keats took the kind of revenge he did in 'What can I do to drive away'. First, the language of natural deformity and inferiority which dominates this poem reopens a strongly politicised debate about the place of America in natural history, developing out of the work of Buffon and De Pauw and validated by Robertson, among others. These views did not go unchallenged, most eloquently by Thomas Jefferson, who pugnaciously begins his section on animals in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1784 with an account of the American mammoth, and makes a point of stating soon afterwards (specifically targeting Buffon): 'It is well known that on the Ohio, and in many parts of America further north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled magnitude, are found in great numbers'.26 This did not, however, end the debate in Europe. Hegel endorsed Buffon's views, while Alexander von Humboldt's scientific explorations of the natural history of South America were in part undertaken to test Buffon's theories. Keats mentions Buffon along with Pliny's natural history in a letter to

3«

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

George and Georgiana of February to May 1819 (Letters, II, p. 70). Such consistent politicisation of American natural history provides a revealing context for 'What can I do to drive away', which is a poem about lost liberty, about regaining liberty by a process of forgetting the dungeoning of George and Georgiana. That the American landscape can imprison rather than liberate is a fundamental failure of republican trust. But the point of Keats's literary revenge is not just political. From the start, George's emigration had been prompted and fuelled by literature. Instead of going it entirely alone in the States, and buying land in the uncleared lands of the American interior, he chose to head for a settlement which had a very high literary profile in 1818: Morris Birkbeck's and George Flower's English Prairie or Prairie Albion in Edwards County Illinois. Birkbeck is Keats's second decoy duck. In 1817 Morris Birkbeck, the son of a rich English Quaker, emigrated with his family to America; with George Flower he founded the settlement in Edwards County which is variously known as 'Prairie Albion' and 'the English Prairie', and two towns, Wanborough and Albion, modelled on English villages. Birkbeck died in 1825 but was an important figure in the shaping of early Illinois - which became a state of the Union in 1818 particularly in campaigning hard and successfully against attempts in 1824 to introduce slavery to the state. Birkbeck's first emigration manual, Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (originally published in the United States in 1817), went through four English editions in 1818. The sequel, Letters from Illinois, went through seven in the same year. The publishers of Letters from Illinois were Keats's publishers, Taylor and Hessey, and it was John Taylor who lent it to George. It is easy to see why George was won over. In his opening remarks to the Notes on a Journey in America, Birkbeck analyses the social and political position of an English farmer like himself, concluding that: having no elective franchise, an English farmer can scarcely be said to have a political existence, and political duties he has none, except such, as under existing circumstances, would inevitably consign him to the special guardianship of the Secretary of State for the home department.27 Birkbeck's Illinois is a place where such a man could instead hope to join 'a flourishing, public-spirited, energetic community, where the insolence of wealth, and the servility of pauperism,

Keats's New World

39

between which, in England, there is scarcely an interval remain­ ing, are alike unknown'.28 Birkbeck offers more than just a social ideal, however. In a passage which reveals how attentively he had read William Robertson, he evokes a land of romance which to some readers would appear potently Spenserian. Emerging from the dark forests that covered southern Indiana and much of his route from Virginia, be describes the sight of 'several beautiful prairies, so beautiful with their surrounding woods as to seem like the creation of fancy, gardens of delight in a dreary wilderness'.29 Like several prospect-passages in the Notes, it is indebted to the sections in Robertson's History of America in which Balboa gazes out on the Pacific, or Cortes has his first glimpse of the riches of Mexico: the same passages, in fact, which Keats conflates in 'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer'. When Keats takes revenge on Birkbeck, therefore, he does so in part by turning this same language of visionary discovery against itself. If Birkbeck's Letters invite literary reading, they were denoun­ ced by their detractors as, precisely, fictional. One of the fiercest criticisms is contained in William Cobbett's 'Letters' to Birkbeck at the end of his Year's Residence in the United States of America (1819). Cobbett describes the Letters from Illinois as a 'Transalleganian romance, which I might leave to the admiration of the Edinburgh Reviewers', and he presents Birkbeck not as a hard­ ened liar but as a victim of romantic delusion: 'because I knew how enchanting and delusive are the prospects of enthusiastic minds, when bent on grand territorial acquisitions'.30 Birkbeck replied in Extracts from a Supplementary Letter from the Illinois; An Address to British Emigrants; and a Reply to the Remarks of William Cobbett, Esq. in 1819. Also in 1819 a rival publication appeared, C. B. Johnson's Letters from the British Settlement in Pennsylvania, persuading would-be emigrants that Birkbeck was a false prophet, and that Pennsylvania was still better than Illinois. Cobbett was only one of a series of writers who combined to make Birkbeck's colony a highly contentious topic at the time of George Keats's emigration. He was joined by Henry Bradshaw Fearon (Sketches of America, 1819), by William Savage (Observations on Emigration to the United States, 1819), and most intemperately in an anonymous pamphlet of 1819, written (as it declares) by a back-emigrant from Derbyshire, entitled A Clear and Concise Statement of New-York and the Surrounding Country, which attacks Birkbeck's 'false and fascinating accounts of swamps, morasses, or mud-fields, swarming with croaking bull­

40

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

frogs and everlasting filth'. Birkbeck 'is now detected and execrated by many persons who have examined for themselves this new settlement, or mongrel colony, in an unhealthy, marshy, and deadly wilderness, situated in the Illinois territory'.31 As for the shifty, verminous, meagre city of New York: There have been three different instances in New-York, within the last two months, of sows being met in the public streets with young children in their mouths, dragging them along, and upon the very point of tearing the little innocents to pieces.32 Continuing the writer's emphasis on unhealthiness, those pro­ moting the new territories are likened to quack doctors.33 There is no evidence that Keats read such accounts, though it seems likely that he would have devoured confirmations of the villainy of Birkbeck, to whose settlement George was confidently bound. It is even more likely that he knew the reviews and articles elicited by Birkbeck's book in the major periodicals, including the Quarterly Review, the Monthly Review, and (as if to fulfil Cobbett's prediction) the Edinburgh Review.34 But it is clear enough that his denunciation of America draws on the same rhetoric, which essentially is a return to the Buffon and De Pauw image of America as unnatural, and a rejection of Jeffersonian and other reclamations of it which associated nature and natural politics. Cobbett points out that for the imaginative reader comfortably seated by his own fireside and pondering emigration, Birkbeck's victories carry more conviction than evils be cannot picture: You do indeed fairly describe the rugged roads, the dirty hovels, the fire in the woods to sleep by, the pathless ways through the wilderness, the dangerous crossings of the rivers; but, there are the beautiful meadows and rich lands at last; there is the fine freehold domain at the end\ There are the giants and the enchanters to encounter; the slashings and the rib-roastings to undergo; but then, there is, at last, the lovely languishing damsel to repay the adventurer.35 The play with literary conventions here exposes those subliminally in use to sell the idea of emigration, and gives point to Keats's concentratedly emphatic creation of anti-Arcadian America in 'What can I do to drive away'. Criticising Birkbeck's evocation of 'the fair Enchantress, Liberty', Cobbett later resumes the romance parallel:

Keats's New World

4i

It is the enchanting damsel that makes the knight encounter the hair-breadth scapes, the sleeping on the ground, the cooking with cross-sticks to hang the pot on. It is the Prairie, that pretty French word, which means green grass bespangled with daisies and cow-slips! Oh, God! What delusion!36 Birkbeck, then, has ended up structuring his work as a romance quest. His account ensnared the leisured fireside reader imagined by Cobbett in just the way that he or she had been educated by tourist-adventurers like Scott's Edward Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone. The English heroes in Scott's works are conducted through the perils of Scottish landscape and ancient custom, just as Cobbett here sees the English reader agreeably and most rewardingly swept through the hinterland of America. Cobbett's ironic recommendation of Birkbeck to the attentions of the Edinburgh Reviewers, like Keats's coupling him with the romance of Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming, indicates the literary expectations which such narratives arouse, and which are then dangerously translated into emigrant action. In other words the fireside yeoman is in the perilous position occupied by the female 'fair romance reader' in earlier Romantic-period diatribes against the dangers of reading. When Amy Clampitt asks, therefore: what can John Keats have had to do with a hacked clearing in the Kentucky underbrush?37 one might reply that he was making it as separate and distinct from European culture as he could. At the end of 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', the figure of Cortes is left eternally gazing at a Pacific which seems to be 'for ever warm and still to be enjoyed' (in the terms of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'); while in 'What can I do to drive away' the American landscape, like the Scottish, reverts to being 'anti-Grecian' (as described in Keats's letter to Tom, written from Scotland in early July 1818, Letters, I, p. 309). That is, inimical to art: unassimilable to literary tradition; kept as firmly out of the sweetshop as Keats himself has sometimes been seen to be. There are, however, more positive consequences and more productive conjunctions to be found in Keats's involvement with the imagined, and realised, United States. The thought of George and Georgiana and the kind of life they would be leading in frontier territory continually and productively stimulated Keats:

42

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

for example, it was while he was reading Robertson's History of America and musing on more primitive states of society versus the 'Bailiffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life' that he entered into the 'Vale of Soul-making' idea in the long letter to George of February to May 1819. Apart from their energetic curiosity ('In your next tell me at large your thoughts, about america', Letters, II, p. 211), Keats's letters to George are a continual self-extension. Keats describes a split sense of being part of and being blankly separated from his brother's emigrant experiences, as in the letter begun in December 1818, in which he writes: How are you going on now? The going[s] on of the world make me dizzy - there you are with Birkbeck - here I am with brown - sometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you.38 It is arguably when his vision suddenly expands to take in George's new world that Keats's poetry becomes most energetic and most complexly self-aware. There is another group of poems which appear rather differently when Keats's thinking about America is taken into account. Closely associated with the start of George's expedition to the United States was Keats's own walking tour through the Lake District and Scotland in the summer of 1818, which can be viewed afresh from the perspective of Keats's consciousness of the parallel voyage of discovery going on across the Atlantic. The poems written during this walking tour are commonly approach­ ed via the picturesque and travel literature, as by Ian Jack in Keats and the Mirror of Art, and more recently by Carol Kyros Walker in Walking North with Keats,39 but they are also obsessed with a literary landscape, a Scotland read through Burns ('great shadow', as Keats calls him in the sonnet 'On Visiting the Tomb of Burns') and where the landscape continually speaks of earlier literary descriptions: 'There is a pleasure on the heath where/Druids old have been' ('Lines Written in the Highlands'). This is the parallel vision of exploration which never quite materialises. Writing from the foot of Helvellyn, Keats is confident of the benefit of new sights: 'You will have an inexhaustible astonishment', he writes to George (28 June 1818, Letters, I, p. 303). The best way to read the poems which followed is as a displacement of what he imagined happening to George. The sonnet 'To Ailsa Rock', especially, marks the poetic rhetoric of the Scottish tour as a variation of the rhetoric of discovery and the image of the looming continent

Keats's New World

43

which is suddenly bereft of the association of creative renewal and excitement found in 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. Some recent critics have focused on the contrast between 'northern' and "southern' characteristics (human, topographical, poetic) displayed in Keats's writings from Scotland.40 Constantly in his thoughts, however, is the additional perspective of the west, the processes of discovery it represents and the cultural blankness it seems to offer or to threaten. The letters to George and Georgiana are also the immediate contexts for several transcriptions or compositions of the poems. 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', for example, has been consistently read in the context of Keats's feelings about Fanny Brawne, and his continuing artistic engagement with Spenser. Like other Keats poems of this period, however, in manuscript it is embedded in a long journal-letter to the emigrants. In this context of the letter to George and Georgiana,41 a more complicated interplay is set up, for example with the other fairy poem a few pages before it, 'When they were come unto the Fairy's Court'. This is not to suggest that its true subject is George in the American wilds, though Keats's first version of it sets the encounter not in 'meads' but in 'wilds'. But its evocation of loneliness, the passing of a lovely but distempering vision, withered sedge and no birdsong, again intensifies Keats's experience by analogy with his brother's, and makes it clearer why a few months later, venting his anger at America as a barren dungeon, the landscape is again an anti­ romance. As a ballad about disillusionment, it does not suffer from being wrenched away for a moment from Fanny Brawne and read in the context of the letter to the brother whose lost hopes were causing him pain and anxiety. An even clearer new context can be created for 'When they were come unto the Fairy's Court'. Miriam Allott disputes Gittings's theory that this poem is an allegorical family joke, but the questions of the 'fretful princess' in the woods, Tone and wild', sound very like Keats's teasings to Georgiana about her finery in the wilderness of Birkbeck's (quoted above), which form part of the same letter: 'No one at home!' the fretful Princess cry'd, 'And all for nothing such a dreary ride, And all for nothing my new diamond cross, No one to see my Persian feathers toss ...' Keats's delight in such an image springs from his amused combination of a primitive wilderness and the fripperies of modern manners and possessions. The poem parallels the

Keats: Bicentenary Readings

44

affectionate raillery of the letter. When that combination of the sturdiest of nature and the most charming of idle fashion is shattered by the revelation, as he thought it, that the Americans were motivated merely by money, that they had 'fleeced' and betrayed George, he takes revenge by creating a waste-land America, uncolonised by European literary culture. And in doing so he was deflating not just the particular claims of Birkbeck's Illinois but also a much wider tradition by which American social and political liberty was predicated upon its 'zephryless' flora and fauna. Appropriately for what Nicholas Roe has recently described as Keats's 'forcefully proleptic imagination',42 one final passage draws together the various types of desire suggested by Keats's writings on America. It keeps alive the expectation and poise of 'Chapman's Homer', while locating the west in the imagination, which is where, at the end of 'What can I do to drive away', Keats chooses to place it. The passage is from 'Sleep and Poetry' (1816) a poem about explorations, chiefly poetical - and in it the poet reflects on his lost vision of the chariot of Apollo. It was written two years before George left for America, but it is disconcertingly evocative of his experiences, or rather perhaps of their spectral presence for Keats, who wrote in his last days that he seldom thought about his brother and sister in America:43 The visions all are fled - the car is fled Into the light of heaven, and in their stead A sense of real things comes doubly strong, And, like a muddy stream, would bear along My soul to nothingness: but I will strive Against all doubtings, and will keep alive The thought of that same chariot, and the strange Journey it went. NOTES

1. The subject of this paper forms part of a wider study of British writers' w ays of representing the United States in the Romantic period. I acknowledge the support of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, the New berry Library, Chicago, the University of Durham, the Leverhulme Trust, and the British Academ y in helping me to carry out research for this paper. 2. Although Lockhart's 'Cockney School' essays for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine provide ample evidence of contemporary awareness of the political implications of Keats's poetry, thorough­ going interpretations of Keats's social sympathies have awaited the present day, with such essays as Jerome J. M cGann's 'Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism', reprinted in his The Beauty o f Inflections (Oxford: OUP, 1985), triggering a wide range of political

Keats's New World and historical studies, including Susan Wolfson, ed., 'Keats and Politics: A Forum', Studies in Romanticism 25 (Summer 1986), Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), Vincent N ew ey, "'Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace": Keats, Politics and the Idea of Revolution', The Yearbook o f English Studies, 19, ed. J. R. Watson (1989), pp. 265-89, Daniel P. Watkins, Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London and Toronto: Associated Univ. Presses, 1989), Nicholas Roe, ed., Keats and History (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). 3. John Keats, British and Irish Authors Introductory Critical Studies (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), p. 1. 4. Letters, I, pp. 397-8. 5. Stephen Greenblatt's emphasis on the wonder of the N ew World posits, as he acknowledges, a challenge to previous traditions of seeing and representing: 'The discovery of the N ew World at once discredits the Ancients who did not know of these lands and, by raising the possibility that what had seemed gross exaggerations and lies were in fact sober accounts of radical otherness, gives classical accounts of prodigies a new life'. (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the N ew World, The Clarendon Lectures and the Carpenter Lectures, 1988, Oxford: Clarendon, 1991, p. 22). Here, Greenblatt's interest lies in the opportunity the N ew World brought its first observers both to challenge and to re-examine received ideas about older writings. Part of m y argument builds on the reminder that the N ew World, and particularly its topography and natural history, exposed a gap in classical conventions of imagining and describing. 6. In his 'Introduction: N ew World Encounters', to Greenblatt, ed., N ew World Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. vii; he echoes Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, 14 9 2 -16 16 (1974). 7. From the opening of Cobbett's Preface to Part 3 of A Year's Residence in the United States o f America (1819), rpt. Centaur Classics, gen. ed. J. M. Cohen (Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1964), p. 243. Appropriately, Cobbett is preparing to discuss the role of Morris Birkbeck in attracting settlers, including George Keats, to the Illinois territory. His 'Newest of the N ew Worlds' is a region 'to which so many thousands and hundreds of thousands are flocking, and towards which the writings of Mr. Birkbeck have, of late, drawn the pointed attention of all those Englishmen, who, having something left to be robbed of, and wishing to preserve it, are looking towards America as a place of refuge from the Boroughmongers and the H oly Alliance, which latter, to make the compact complete, seems to want nothing but the accession of His Satanic majesty' (p. 243). 8. See further, Marilyn Butler's analysis of the social commentary of one letter to George and Georgiana Keats in the context of Hyperion, in Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 17 6 0 -18 3 0 (Oxford: OUP, 1981), pp. 15 1-4 . 9. Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 55 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 45. 10. John Bakeless, The Eyes of Discovery: The Pageant of North America as Seen by the First Explorers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950); M ary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1992). 11. Recent discussions of such possibilities in 'On First Looking into

45

46

Keats: Bicentenary Readings Chapm an's Homer', and their links to imperialist aggression, include Watkins, Keats's Poetry, pp. 2 6 -3 1, Greg Kucich, 'Keats's Literary Tradition and the Politics of Historiographical Invention', in Roe, ed., Keats and Histoiy, pp. 242-4, Vincent N ew ey, 'Keats, History, and the Poets', in Roe, ed., Keats and History, pp. 18 3-5. 12. See the discussion of the composition of 'On First Looking into Chapm an's Homer' in Charles Cowden Clarke's 'Recollections of John Keats', in Charles and M ary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1878), pp. 1 2 8 -3 1 (quoted from p. 130). 13. William Robertson, The History o f America, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan, 1777), II, 50. 14. Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory, p. 14. 15. 'Keats', in D avid B. Pirie, ed., The Penguin History of Literature, vol. 5, The Romantic Period (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 357-9 . 16. Informative recent discussions of Humboldt's importance in this period include Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 1 1 1 - 4 3 ; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the N ew World (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1993). 17. This is one of the less frequently analysed of Keats's poems; but see Paul de M an's comments in his Introduction to Selected Poetry of Keats (N ew York: N ew American Library, 1966), pp. xxvii-xxxiii, contended with by Helen Vendler in The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 272. Hermione de Almeida comments briefly on the nightmare vision of nature in 'W hat can I do to drive aw ay', which she relates to The Fall o f Hyperion, in Romantic M edicine and John Keats (N ew York and Oxford: OUP, 1991), p. 282. 18. See Keith L. Miller, 'Planning, Proper Hygiene, and a Doctor: The Good Health of the English Settlement', Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 7 1 (1978), 22-29. 19. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William M cCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 158 (lines 223-6). 20. The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), I. p. 93. 21. Letters, II, p. 9. 22. Leters, II, p. 92. 23. The story is told in more detail in several accounts of Audubon. See for example John Chancellor, Audubon: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1978), pp. 74 -5; L. Clark Keating, Audubon: The Kentucky Years (Lexington, Kentucky: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1976), pp. 74-9, which contains analyses of the roles of George and especially of Georgiana ('a lower-middle-class English girl of uneven disposition and exaggerated social pretensions', p. 74) which are strikingly different from those most commonly found in Keats scholarship; Alice Ford, Audubon, By Himself: A Profile o f John James Audubon, From Writings Selected, Arranged and Edited by Alice Ford (Garden City, N ew York: Natural History Press, 1969), pp. 8 1-4 . 24. See especially Letters, II, p. 2 11. 25. Rollins, The Keats Circle, II, pp. 14 8 ,14 9 . 26. Notes on the State o f Virginia, ed. with introduction and notes by William Peden (N ew York, 1954; reprinted N ew York and London: Norton, 1972), pp. 43-4. 27. Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory

Keats's New World of Illinois (London: James Ridgway, 1818), p. 10. 28. Notes on a Journey in America, p. 10. Stephen Fender emphasises the importance of Birkbeck's analysis of opportunities for farmers in Britain and the United States, commenting that: T h e immediate impact of Birkbeck's book w as enormous, and it was felt at least as strongly on the domestic political debate as on discussions about the advantages of emigration'. (Sea Changes, pp. 39-40). 29. Notes on a Journey in America, p. 120. See also the passage on p. 109, in which Birkbeck writes: 'The object of our pursuit, like the visions of fancy, has hitherto seemed to recede from our pursuit'. 30. A Year's Residence in the United States, pp. 301, 285. Cobbett takes issue with Birkbeck again in Rural Rides, the very first of which (1822) ponders the rumour that Birkbeck is to return to Britain from 'the Land of Promise' (p. 36). In August 1826, after hearing the news of Birkbeck's death, he reprises their quarrels (pp. 30 1-2), describing Birkbeck as one who 'sinned with his eyes open; he rejected all advice; he persevered after he saw his error; he dragged thousands into ruin along with him' (p. 301). References are to William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. with introduction by George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19 67,1985). 31. A Clear and Concise Statement ofN ew-York and the Surrounding Country Containing a Faithful Account o f many of those Base Impositions which are so Constantly and Uniformly Practised upon British Emigrants by Crafty, Designing, and Unprincipled Adventurers (New York: for the Author, 1819), p. 3. The pamphlet was reprinted in Belper, the town to which the emigrant had returned, by J. Ogle, 1819. 32. A Clear and Concise Statement, pp. 7-8. 33. A Clear and Concise Statement, p. 6. 34. Quarterly Review, 19 (April 1818), pp. 34-78; M onthly Review, 83 (February 1818), pp. 146-64; Edinburgh Review, 30 (June 1818), pp. 120-40. 33. A Year's Residence in America, p. 286. 36. A Year's Residence in America, p. 291. 37. 'The Elgin Marbles' (3-7), from Voyages: A Homage to John Keats, in What the Eight Was Like (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1983), p. 51. 38. Letters, II, p. 3. 39. Ian Jack, Keats and the M irror of A rt (Oxford: OUP, 1967); Carol Kyros Walker, Walking North with Keats (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1992). 40. See for example John Glendening, 'Keats's Tour of Scotland', KeatsShelley Journal xli (1992), pp. 76-99; Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), ch. 6. 41. This is the first surviving state of the poem, a different version of which was subsequently published in Leigh Hunt's Indicator in M ay 1820. The most recent summary of the ongoing debate about the two versions is John Barnard's preparation for his own contextual study of the Indicator version in 'Keats's Belle Dame and the Sexual Politics of Leigh Hunt's Indicator' in Romanticism I. i (1993), pp. 34-49. 42. 'Introduction', in Roe, ed., Keats and History, p. 8. Roe develops Paul de M an's theory that because of his childhood experiences Keats was oriented towards the future in a particularly intense way. 43. Letters, II, p. 343.

47

CHAPTER FOUR

Old Saints and Young Lovers: Keats's E v e o f St M a rk and Popular Culture D A V I D B. P I R I E

Come lover, come lad, And make my heart glad, For husband, I'll have you, For good or for bad. (An old Norfolk charm for St Mark's Eve)1 Keats left The Eve of St Mark unfinished and he may never have decided how the poem should end, although he does seem to have decided what its title should be. In this essay I hope to demonstrate that previous commentary on the poem has been limited by failing to attend to the extraordinarily varied rituals which were practised on St Mark's Eve. It is readily accepted by most critics that the title matters. Any reader who mistook it for a mere labelling device, extraneous to the poem itself, could not, for instance, make sense of the first line: 'Upon a Sabbath-day it fell'.2 Here 'it' refers back, of course, to the date named in the title. Keats chooses to set the poem in a year when St Mark's Day itself, 25 April, will fall on a Monday; so that this day, its Eve, is on a Sunday. Repetition re-enacts the double significance that the occasion has for most of the local inhabitants: it is 'Twice holy' in line 2 and again in line 13. Lines 4-12 suggest that the year is also unusual in its weatherpatterns. As this April nears its close, the Spring is emerging only slowly and precariously. Traces of winter are still visible in the 'chilly sunset' and in a landscape, so 'cold' as to be 'unmatured', 'bloomless' and even 'aguish' (4-12). In spite of the uninviting weather, the people of this cathedral-town - presumably Chichester where Keats wrote the poem - are out on the streets. They have turned out, en masse - whole 'companies' - all moving towards the Minster for evening prayer (15-18). In heading for their shared religious ritual, they respond to an invitation which the poem itself soon comes to hear as enticing. The 'Sabbath bell / That called the folk to evening prayer' (2-3) is later supported by

Old Saints and Young Lovers

49

organ-music; and that is not just 'loud' - it sounds 'sweet' (22). The summons is so widely accepted that the otherwise 'silent streets' are now 'crowded well' (14) - and that adverb suggests approval. These 'companies' might remind us of Endymion and of that 'goodly company' gathering to worship Pan (I, 129).3 Alternatively, since those congregating in The Eve of St Mark are 'pious companies', and twice described as 'folk' (3,20), they might remind us also of the procession in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. There an entire town has been 'emptied of [its] folk, this pious morn' (37). Its 'silent' streets testify to the whole community having already followed their 'mysterious priest' into the countryside, for their sacrifice at some 'green altar' (39, 32). However, the religious services in Endymion and the 'Grecian Urn' are pagan: rituals of that ancient, Greek culture which Keats and his fellow-liberals in early nineteenth-century England imagined as having been enviably humane and liberating. The sonnet which Keats placed at the front of his first published volume bemoans the fact that now such 'Glory and loveliness have passed away' and that, in the England of 1817, 'Pan is no longer sought'. In his last volume, he would still be complaining that, 'in these days', society was 'far retired' from those 'happy pieties' and 'antique vows'. Where there was now no 'temple ... Nor altar heap'd with flowers; / Nor virgin-choir ... no pipe, no incense sweet / ... No shrine, no grove, no oracle' to support true religious feeling, the poet had to rely on inner resources. By his 'own eyes inspired', he could re-build the altars of paganism: but only as 'branched thoughts', cultivated 'In some untrodden region' of his own 'mind' ('Ode to Psyche', 28-51). Meanwhile, the power of the Church and State party was such that most of his contemporaries would continue to put their trust in Christianity: the very religion whose 'melancholy' bell-tolling, 'gloomy prayers' and 'horrid sermon' had provoked Keats to express, in another early sonnet, his own 'Disgust of Vulgar Superstition'. On the very day that he was composing The Eve of St Mark Sunday, 14 February 1819 - Keats also wrote a letter to his brother in which he announced that he had begun to 'hate Parsons', since any Christian priest must, by definition, 'be either a Knave or an Ideot'. This may partly explain another remark in the same letter, referring to the respectably Christian young lady whom Keats was finding at once desirable and exasperating: 'Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff' (Letters, II, p. 63). In fact, celebration of the Christian evangelist Mark could have struck Keats as contrary to the dose of invigorating Pan-worship

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which he prescribes elsewhere. Mark, after all, had supposedly not only lived like a saint but also died as a martyr; and Keats just eight months after writing The Eve of St Mark - reported feeling 'astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion'; the very thought had made him 'shudder' (Letters, II, p. 223). The fact that Mark had been responsible for one of the four gospels would not have helped. Such biographers, according to Keats, had misrepresented Jesus and initiated the perversion of Western culture away from its healthy Greek origins. In a letter written only a month after composing The Eve of St Mark, Keats 'lamented' that the real, historical Jesus, who had probably been a 'great ... man', had 'transmitted no writing of his own to posterity'. Instead he had left his wisdom and life-story to be 'written and revised by men interested in the pious frauds of Religion' (Letters, II, p. 80). So the first problem in this puzzling poem is this: If Keats was sometimes a militantly polemical antiChristian, why does he describe that conventionally pious crowd, headed for the cathedral service, in terms that sound almost supportive? Perhaps the support is relative. In a culture where nearly everyone else was clearly not going to be lured away from Christianity itself, Keats may have been realistic enough to discriminate between the various products of that 'vulgar super­ stition'. Certainly, when addressing any young woman whom he meant to entice into more intimate relationship, he might have to accept that she would never abandon her faith completely. Instead, it might be pragmatic to concentrate his attack on just one or two of its most damaging manifestations. In the letter that denounces Christian martyrs, Keats assures Fanny Brawne that he himself does have a religion - and indeed one for which he too might be prepared to die - though this, of course, turns out to be 'the religion of love'. So perhaps, in The Eve of St Mark's opening, those gregarious Christians are there not only to provide a point of departure, but also a point of comparison - and even of contrast - with what follows. As the service begins, the poem turns away from the com­ munity to consider someone who has preferred to be alone with a good book: 'The bells had ceased, the prayers begun, / and Bertha had not yet half done / A curious volume ...' (22-4). Bertha is still in her youthful prime as 'a maiden fair' (39); but she has stayed at home and devoted her whole day to reading. Jack Stillinger notes that, whereas the 'townspeople outside are ... engaged in a social and communal activity' and 'associated with home and family

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5i

life', Bertha herself is 'solitary and remote', giving 'all her attention to the elaborately decorated book'.4 Her stamina and concentration in this seem extraordinary, perhaps even extremist. She has presumably just heard, outside her window, the 'bell / That called the folk to evening prayer' (2-3); and later, when the evensong service is over, she can hear 'the still foot-fall / Of one returning townwards late, / Past the echoing Minster gate' (5860). Yet, undistracted, she goes on reading. She had opened the book at 'earliest morn' (27); and she has studied it, throughout the day, in a series of repeated efforts: 'Again she tried, and then again' (50); 'Untired she read ...' (83); and, later on, yet again, still 'Untired she read the legend page' (89). Far from feeling squeamish at the legend's descriptions of imprisonment and torture, she relishes the episode about the 'pagan chains' binding Mark, 'Rejoicing at his many pains' (90-2). This may give a sinisterly literal resonance to the captivating power of Bertha's book: 'That all day long ... / had taken captive her two eyes' (26-7). Even when Keats's fragmentary poem is about to break off, it notes that Bertha's 'constant eyelids' (115) are still resolutely open to the example of 'Sainte Markis life and death' - a death admirable apparently because it was a 'fervent martyrdom' (116). She is still focused on her book, as the poem's own vision finally fades away, faltering to a halt after only three syllables of a line that requires eight. At that point, Bertha's book promises not only to describe Mark's 'holy shrine / At Venice', but also to give some account of another maryred saint, 'Cicilie'. Cecilia is now perhaps most associated with music; but Keats knew Alexander Pope's firmly Christian poem in which she is praised for having actually narrowed the tonal range: 'to her Maker's praise [she] confin'd the sound' ('Ode for Music, on St Cecilia's day', 125).5 For Pope, Cecilia represents the defeat of Greek myth and the triumph of Christianity's 'greater power' (131-4). Thanks to such saints, the heroines of the ancient world, like Eurydice, can now be confined to that dark underworld of superseded faiths where 'tortur'd ghosts ... shady forms ... And ... pale spectres dance', observed only by each other. So, even 'Of Orpheus now no more let Poets tell' (64-8; 131). For Keats and his contemporaries, however, it was Chaucer's 'Second Nun's Tale' (and conventional hagiography) which ensured that Cecilia was mainly famous 'For pure chaastnesse of virginitee'. Her life-story articulated the most dogged refusal to have sex. She had supposedly managed to avoid it, even when she got married. Her trusting husband was persuaded that, by

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prior arrangement, she was instead to be visited each night by an angel: one considerate enough to manifest itself 'in the shape of a beautiful youth', according to one sceptical commentator in Keats's day.6 Cecilia's imaginative approach to the reproductive act makes her an appropriate heroine for Bertha's book: which apparently argues elsewhere that a baby can be a saint before it is born, provided that its mother has adopted a rather eccentric method to get herself pregnant. This method, outlined in a supposedly verbatim quotation at lines 105-7, is almost the opposite of the well-proven, if messy, device of co-opting someone with a penis. The more immaculate conception is achieved by sentencing oneself to solitary confinement and to busy kissing of nothing but a crucifix: 'Kepen in solitarinesse, / And kissen devoute the holy croce' (106-7). Bertha herself, concentrating on such anecdotes reported by 'the learned eremite' (93), seems enough of a recluse to resemble a nun. Certainly, she wears, like those who contem­ plate marriage only as brides of Christ, 'garments black' (88). Keats, in choosing a name for his protagonist in The Eve of St Mark, may have known that Bertha was the anglicised version of the Teutonic 'Berchta', the goddess whose specific responsibilities included the soul of any girl who was still a virgin when she died.7 However, for readers of his generation the name would have been even more likely to recall the Queen Bertha of early English history who, in her own way, was as uncompromising as Cecilia. This Bertha, renowned for the steadfastness of her Christian faith, had been born a French princess and raised in a court already converted to worship of the holy cross. When it was arranged that she must marry the heathen king of Kent, Ethelbert, she saw this, not as a temptation to abandon her religion, but as an opportunity to extend its sway by bringing her own priests with her to England. Her crucial achievement, according to the historians of Keats's day, was to prepare the way so well for Saint Augustine and his forty missionary monks, that they often had only to preach to the already converted.8 Keats, only a fortnight after he wrote The Eve of St Mark, reported in a letter that he was 'not unwilling to read Church history at present' and now planned to move on to the five volumes of Joseph and Isaac Milner's History of the Church of Christ that had been published between 1794 and 1809 (Letters, II, p. 70). Bertha may choose to live imaginatively with saints like Mark and Cecilia, who died centuries ago, She may remember her own name-sake who lived in such primitive times that her marriage

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could introduce Christianity to a still benighted England. She may choose literature so old that it exists only in a frail volume which, being already 'patched and torn', requires careful handling (25). She may even regard its archaic vocabulary, which requires some decoding (99-119), not as a nuisance, but as fanciful and alluring. Nevertheless, for Keats she is in fact a modern young woman. Outside the quotation from her ancient book, he des­ cribes her in language that would have seemed to his contem­ poraries almost racily up-to-date. Moreover, the furnishings described in lines 76-82, are probably reproduced from Keats's own observations of how one fashionable young woman, in his own circle, had decorated her sitting-room.9 As late as 1885, one reader could still recognise the poem's setting as 'of our time ... not the Sunday evening of old' and insist: 'Every item of the description is modern'. So, Walter E. Houghton is surely right to argue that the poem aims to evoke 'the known and familiar life of a nineteenth-century town'.10 Bertha, in fact, could easily be living in the Chichester of 1819 where Keats wrote his poem. However, she has chosen a house with specific and limited prospects: 'Dwelling in the old Minster Square', she 'could see ... its rich antiquity', through her window (40-2); but her view is then cut short by 'the Bishop's garden-wall' (43). These walls and the 'mighty pile' of the minster itself - obstruct not only vision but also the movement of the wind: allowing the site that Bertha has chosen for her life to be described explicitly as 'sheltered' (47). Moreover, Bertha does not use her window to look out and see even this confined portion of the external world. Instead she uses the window only to facilitate her reading. The late afternoon sunshine is fading, but the thrifty Bertha can still postpone lighting her lamp, as she rises from her fire-side and takes her book nearer to the window and to the last glimmers from the setting sun. There she can still 'read awhile, / With forehead 'gainst the window-pane' (48-9). In that last syllable, the homonym hints that maintaining such a position could prove uncomfortable; and, sure enough, having 'Again ... tried, and then again, / Until the dusk eve left her dark / Upon the legend' (30-2), she eventually suffers the pain of 'aching neck and swimming eyes' (55). By then, when she can endure it no longer and has 'lifted up her soft warm chin', it is too dark to see anything through the window. Even if she did now choose to look, 'All was gloom' (54, 57). However the outside world, which she ignores, has been unusually busy at this time of the year; and its business is partly

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at least that of mating and reproduction. The date of St Mark's festival falls in Spring, as the opening paragraph has stressed; and the poem - composed between Saturday 13 and Wednesday, 17 February 1819 and set so firmly on 'a Sabbath-day' - may have been largely written on the Sunday, 14 February, St Valentine's Day. It certainly alludes to a jolly superstition, which is usually attached to that day, rather than to St Mark's Eve: the idea that each bird is then busy choosing its mate. By line 61 of the poem, night has fallen and that mating game is completed. The birds have ended their 'clamorous' song and 'play'. Those courtship rituals had, however, been frenetic. Bertha herself may have been so absorbed in her book that she did not notice the din; but it had been loud enough, 'above the tree-tops and towers', to be heard in the city 'all the day' (61-2). Now, with night fallen, all the birds have successfully established their couples. 'Pair by pair', each with its mate has settled into its 'nest' (64): lulled to sleep, not only by any post-sexual exhaustion, but by the 'music of drowsy chimes' from the 'belfrey' (63-6). The lines immediately following point a contrast between the drowsy birds, each sharing a nest with its mate, and the vigilant Bertha who persists in her solitary reading. She has already been characterised, back at line 41, by a hearth and home which are defined as the property of a single woman: 'her fireside'. The singular pronoun registers because, even earlier in the poem, in lines 15 -2 1, the community - whole 'companies' of 'folk', on whom she seems to have turned her back - were equipped with a plural pronoun that signals a shared household: 'Warm from their fireside' (15-20). At this later point, when we move back from the birds to Bertha, there is admittedly some common ground between their external world and the interior of her 'homely room'. Both share the same literal darkness: stressed by the way that line 57 - 'All was gloom, and silent all' - is virtually repeated in the transition from the birds to Bertha: 'All was silent, all was gloom, / Abroad and in the homely room' (67-8). However, unlike the 'gloom' that has soothed the birds into the shared silence of their sleep, the more oppressive 'gloom' of Bertha's house - in which she is the only living thing that could break the silence - goads her into movement: and the two things that she does, in lines 68-9, smack of defeat and desperation: 'Down she sat, poor cheated soul! / And struck a lamp from the dismal coal' (69-70). It is in the context of her depressingly feeble fire that Bertha is a 'poor cheated soul'; and that phrasing may be merely colloquial, so that the comment can sound like a spontaneous sigh

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of pity. Yet, if we give more sober weight to the word 'soul', it also hints that Bertha is cheated by the poverty of her own selfimage which seems to foreground only her more spiritual tendencies. She may see herself as all soul and no body. She seems not only physically inaccessible,but emotionally impervious too. She is able to concentrate on her book, although the 'glare' of lamp and fire makes her shadow 'in uneasy guise, / Hover' as a 'giant' form, looming on the ceiling above her and on the furniture that surrounds her (72-6). Later, the shadow grows into an even more ominous doppelganger: Untired she read, her shadow still Glowered about, as it would fill The room with wildest forms and shades, As though some ghostly Queen of Spades Had come to mock behind her back, And dance, and ruffle her garments black. Untired she read ...

(83-9) In reiterating that Bertha nevertheless remains 'untired', the poem may hint that she is also still feeling unruffled. Even such an ironic dancing-partner, product only of her own chosen pose as a solitary reader, seems to have left no impression in Bertha's equanimity. The anarchic and, in some ways, playful apparition is perhaps an aspect of her own latent destiny - on which she turns her back, its shadowy obscurity suggesting her refusal to acknowledge its existence. To the reader, however, as the 'ghostly Queen' mockingly gropes those nun-like clothes that Bertha chooses to wear, its potential dynamism is disturbingly clear. If Queen Bertha, that uncompromisingly active proselytiser for the faith is summoned here, she might articulate impatience with the self-absorbed passivity of her namesake's too fugitive and cloistered virtue. But there is another Christian heroine who better fits a 'Queen of Spades'. No commentator seems to think it worth mentioning that the name 'spades' for one of the card-suits had originated from the Spanish word for swords, espadas; and that, because of this etymology, Joan of Arc, famously successful as a sword-wielding soldier, had gained the nick-name 'the Queen of Spades', meaning 'the dame of war'.12 Though she had her own intensely introspective moments, Joan's dreams had roused her to lead armies. In peacetime Chichester, Joan, simply as military commander, would be an unlikely role-model for Keats's Bertha. However, Robert Southey, in his long poem, Joan

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of Arc (1796), had concentrated almost as much on her gendered purity as on her martial prowess, repeatedly calling her 'the Maid' and 'the Virgin'. So, it seems probable that, if the Maid of Orleans is lurking here, we should also remember her militantly virginal response to men. Joan's tough-minded preference had been to surrender to the flames a body that had never known the full force of human passion rather than accept any compromise over the work that God required her to continue. Nevertheless, if this 'ghostly Queen of Spades' does here recall another virgin martyr it resurrects a Joan who is in a distinctly uncharacteristic mood. The dancing and mocking clothesfumbling with which she approaches Bertha, that 'maiden fair', may evoke all those more sociable, and even sexual, pastimes that Joan has come to value after all. Her belated insight could yet be in time to save a still living girl, if only Bertha would look up from her book. The 'wildest forms and shades' which fill the room seem so frenetic and polymorphous that they could image, as Bernard Blackstone suggested, 'the psychology of frustration'. They may demonstrate Keats's 'growing interest' in those 'darker aspects of the love relationship' which would be developed in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' - written immediately after The Eve of St Mark. Certainly, the 'chilly sunset', to which Bertha gravitates, can recall the 'bitter chill' which in The Eve of St Agnes 'numbs' the Beadsman, inviting us to recognise another 'maiden who must be awakened ... The frosty promise of spring, always prone to relapse into winter, must be matured into summer warmth'.13 Such an interpretation would be compatible with the possi­ bility that the shadows evoke the subterranean survival of the ancient world's pagan mythology. The old gods were valued in Keats's circle partly because they embodied the Greeks' celebra­ tory respect for human flesh. If the return of the repressed here embraces not only the libido of a modern woman but also the mythic forces of the ancient world, that might seem to Keats's circle a natural alliance. It would seem just as logical to the poet who composed the Saint Cecilia ode although, of course, he would have seen it as an essentially unholy alliance. It is as a young woman longing for reunion with her earthly love that Pope's Eurydice seeks to escape her role as Queen of Shades, bride of the Underworld king. Yet it is also as the defeated heroine of pagan myth, that she must now epitomise those other 'tortur'd ghosts ... shady forms ... And ... pale spectres' who must, now that Christianity has triumphed and forbidden poets

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to sing of such figures, be left to 'dance' in the obscurity of their lost world for ever (64-8). Yet even if Bertha were to turn around and see herself as a Queen of Spades, she might not recognise any summons to pagan sexuality. She could, on the contrary, choose to interpret the image as supporting her own Christian piety: a reminder that, being human, she is doomed to die. In a pack of playing cards, according to Cowper, the suit of Spades are 'emblems of untimely graves' (The Task, IV, 222). Moreover, one of the popular superstitions about St Mark's Eve could lead Bertha's mind in the same sombre direction. In some villages, it was believed that anyone brave enough to spend the night in a churchyard would be rewarded at midnight by a procession of ghostly figures. These would not resemble anyone who had already died. Instead, they would image living members of the local community, but only those who were going to die within the next twelve months. If Bertha knew such folk customs, she could have been reminded of this grisly preview on other nights of the year too, since it was only associated with St Mark's Eve in some areas. Elsewhere the same custom was tied to other dates, Hallowe'en being particu­ larly common; according to William Hone, whom Keats so much admired, St John's Eve or Midsummer Eve were the dates favoured in some places.14 Bertha may have cheated herself by contemplating only this one superstition, blinding herself to numerous other far jollier traditions that were, almost everywhere, associated with St Mark's Eve. All these other customs, hitherto unreported in commentary on the poem, associate St Mark's Eve as firmly with young love as does that now more familiar superstition which Keats had described in The Eve of St Agnes, completed by 2 February 1819, just before he wrote The Eve of St Mark. Both nights were so widely dedicated to marriage divination and both involved such similar superstitions, that Keats, in designing a second poem to form a matching pair, can hardly have intended to contrast the dates themselves. It is far more likely that Keats saw, in the fact that the two dates had potentially almost identical associations, a chance to contrast his two heroines and expose the gulf between their responses to similar opportunities. The plot of The Eve of St Agnes, as well as the values it so sturdily espouses, depend on Madeline's actively hoping to see, on her special night, at least a convincing image of the lover whom she desires. Her optimism, which is rewarded by the arrival in her bed of the real Porphyro, may derive from her living

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in the Middle Ages, a period that was regarded in Keats's circle as offering a healthier culture. She is, for instance, partly admitted into the joyful world of her own sexuality by her lover's seductive recital of a folk-song, an 'ancient ditty' from an oral tradition now 'long since mute' (291) - although this early nineteenth-century poem may try to resurrect it within its own narrative of those who lived 'ages long ago' (370). Bertha, whose approach to saints' days seems almost opposite, may have been designed to measure the price that a young woman might now pay for the misfortune of being bom so much more recently. By Keats's own day, culture had arguably become far more fragmented: so that those boldly imaginative customs and ritual songs that well-born Madeline had enjoyed, as much as the common people, were now frowned upon by those who felt that they belonged to a social or moral elite. Some of the fertility rites associated with St Mark's Eve are so blatantly sexual that Bertha would certainly have felt bound to repress any conscious memory of their existence; and she might have found most of them so suggestive as to border on indecency. That, however, will hardly serve as an excuse for today's critics. Yet every commen­ tary on the poem that I have found ignores the love rituals. Instead, they cite just the one, thoroughly dispiriting - and arguably quite atypical - piece of folklore, that Dante Gabriel Rossetti supplied for his brother to impose on the poem a century ago.15 Admittedly, this is a custom which Keats indisputably knew. He described it in the mock-Chaucerian fragment, 'gif ye wol standen hardy wight', copied on the reverse of the page which contains the quaintly Chaucerian lines from the Eve of St Mark quoted from Bertha's book. There is no manuscript of the poem which incorporates a single line of the fragment about the custom and, conversely, no hint within the fragment that the gloomy vigil is scheduled for that particular day in the church calendar. Nevertheless, Miriam Allott's edition of Keats's poems dares to scissor-and-paste the fragment into the text of The Eve of St Mark. We know that Keats had deliberately crafted the quotation from Bertha's book which he did use in the poem, as 'an imitation of the Authors in Chaucer's time' (Letters, II, p. 204). So, it seems obvious that each fragment is copied on to its respective side of the same sheet only because both are exercises in the same stylistic game: pastiches of literary English as it existed in the Chaucerian period. If mere coincidence of style were to authorise all of us to promulgate our own interpretations of The Eve of St

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Mark, by selecting whichever of his mock-Chaucerian passages best suited our purpose, I might be tempted by the following undated fragment: 'they weren fully glad of their gude hap / And tasten all the pleasaunces of joy' (published by H. W. Garrod in 1939 from a manuscript in Keats's hand then owned by M. B. Forman). Since we lack any evidence to the contrary, Keats could, for all I know, have scribbled these two lines out on the same day that he wrote The Eve of St Mark. And if we were bold to the point of rashness, we could hypothesise that Keats meant to supply, before these lines, some dramatic narrative development initiated perhaps by a seductive knock on the door, from some modernday Porphyro or by Bertha at long last chucking away her worthy old tome and taking-up instead some much racier readingmatter. That couplet could then serve as the surprise happy ehding. But, of course, such whimsical speculation about the text could not be justified. All Keats's other editors - Jack Stillinger, John Barnard and, most recently, Nicholas Roe - quite rightly leave Keats's poem as he left it: without the wholly unwarranted interpolation offered by Allott. However, this trio of editors, and all three of Keats's recent biographers, including Stephen Coote, whose book appeared as recently as 1995, do supply annotation suggesting that the custom itself is relevant to interpreting the poem. All cite it. Most quote the account of it given in the book that they take to have been Keats's source for the information, John Brand's Popular Antiquities. Why such a consensus? Perhaps some hope that, with such a grim evocation of mortality in support, Bertha's pious use of what brief time she has on earth will seem more sensible. At least one critic uses the superstition to suggest that, in The Eve of St Mark, Keats can be heard offering a glum premonition of his own early death.16 But most commentators, I suspect, offer no more than this one superstition because they mistakenly assume that there are no significant rival customs - or at least none that are as often associated with that particular date. Actually, there are, in the folklore that surrounds St Mark's Eve, lots of other well-documented rituals and superstitions which seem at least as appropriate to such facts as we have about Keats's attitudes at the time of composition. There is, of course, ample evidence of Keats's interest in death - though none at all that, at the time of writing the poem, he anticipated that his own death would be as early as it proved to be. But there is even more evidence in the letters and in the verse to prove that Keats, like

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most young people, thought quite a lot about the pleasures of sex. In a letter of September 1819, for instance, Keats quotes his own phrase from The Eve of St Mark, 'kepen in solitarinesse', to describe the frustration and loneliness he felt when staying in the Cathedral town of Winchester. He complains that the only women in town are old maids; when what he fancies would be 'middlesized, delicate Devonshire girls' who, ideally, should be fifteenyear-olds. On his coach-journey to Winchester, he had spotted one suitable candidate, loitering outside a pub; and found that thoughts of her kept him warm for the next 16 miles (Letters, II, pp. 166-8). Amongst the many examples in the verse, I offer just two, conveniently short poems. 'O blush not so' is a frank exercise in literary seduction, addressed, in this case, to a far from coy mistress. Its canny pronouns shift, from the egotistical and predatory singular to an invitingly shared plural in the penulti­ mate stanza. At first a young girl is assured that her signals will be interpreted positively enough: 'if you smile the blushing while, / Then maidenheads are going' (3-4). Her 'loosened hips' are cited to remind her that she is already sexually experienced: 'you have tasted ... in an amorous nipping' (11-12). Later stanzas insist that, for both, the opportunity for sexual play will 'only ... last our youth out'; and that in 'the prime' of their 'kissing time' while neither yet has 'one sweet tooth out' - they should 'share it' (14-20). The other poem, 'In drear nighted December', describes frustration that is obviously sexual - however much we might disagree on our interpretation of that wonderful phrase 'the feel of not to feel it'. Moreover its insistence that 'frozen thawings' are a peculiarly human phenomenon reverberates interestingly against the Eve of St Mark's opening description of a natural world that, in this almost unnatural Spring, seems to retain the 'chilly ... unmatured ... bloomless ... aguish' inertia of winter; even though, unlike the ice-bound brook of 'drear nighted December', the 'sheltered rills' here already flow with the 'wholesome drench of April rains' (5-12). As such, The Eve of St Mark may hint a pathetic fallacy in which the landscape does articulate that simultaneous experience of icy restriction and heated desire in which, according to 'drear-nighted December', all too 'many / A gentle girl and boy' have 'Writh'd' (17-20). The vigour available to those still young enough to be 'girl and boy' is often articulated in Keats's writings as essentially sexual; and most of the superstitions associated with St Mark's Eve that I have been able to discover clearly celebrate youth as the time to find and enjoy a lover. The customs involve young men and

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women meeting each other to choose partners, or undertaking various rituals to discover whom they will marry. As early as 1770, Poor Robin's Almanack had recorded the following trick for marriage-divination, to be practised by anyone who, like Bertha, is 'a maiden fair': On St Mark's Eve, at Twelve O'Clock, The fair maid she will watch her Smock; To find her Husband in the dark By praying unto good St Mark.17 The fact that these lines precede Keats's poem by half a century need not diminish their relevance. Folk customs, by definition, last. For instance, there was a tradition recorded as early as 1684 of girls 'watching their suppers ... with the door of the room open', so as to 'see the Persons whom [they] should marry come in'; and this was one of the old 'superstitions and impious practises' which, according to The Hull Advertiser of May 14 1796, were still being wickedly carried on by the young, on 'what is called St Mark's Eve'. In 1812, according to a poem of 1826 but recording events in a churchyard on St Mark's Eve fourteen years earlier, those on the midnight vigil were not only braced for 'the ghosts of those to die / Within the following year', but also hoped to see 'likewise those who will be wed'. In 1841, it was 'on St Mark's Eve ... still customary with young maidens to make the dumb-cake ... and then walk to bed backwards ... Those who are to be married see the likeness of their future husbands, hurrying after them as if to catch them; but those who are to die unmarried neither see nor hear anything.19 The 1894 edition of E. Cobham Brewer's The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable reported the superstition that 'On St Mark's Eve all persons fated to be married', as well as those doomed to die, would join in a single procession at the church porch (p. 810). As late as 1915, an eighty-year-old woman could still remember, as a girl, joining others 'who wanted husbands' to set out food 'for them on St Mark's Eve'; and then sit, 'waiting for the spirits of their future husbands to come ... as soon as they had returned from church at midnight'.20 That certainly suggests that Bertha, if not too numbed by reading about dead saints, could have heard far from morbid reverberations in 'the still foot-fall / Of one returning ... late' from church (58-9). Some St Mark's Eve rituals were more bluntly sexual. The London Chancery court, on 2 August 1827, heard this testimony from a girl who had been hoping to wed:

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I'll tell you what I did to know if I could have Mr Barker. On St Mark's night I ran round a haystack nine times, with a ring in my hand, calling out, 'Here's the sheath, but where's the knife?'21 An 1826 report noted another suggestive, if subtler, game: 'On St Mark's Eve ... it is still a custom for young maidens ... as soon as the clock strikes twelve' to 'walk up to bed backwards ... Those that are to be married see the likenesses of their sweethearts hurrying after them, as if ... to catch them before they get into bed ... but the maids ... take care ... to slip into bed before they are caught by the pursuing shadow'.22 In Keats's poem, Bertha is pursued, not by the apparition of a would-be lover, but only by her own shadow, repeatedly looming behind her (75,85). Since the shadow is Bertha's, it portrays at one point, however misleadingly, the 'maiden fair' in the pose of ruffling her own clothes. This was almost exactly what another custom for St Valentine's Eve specified. A girl who sought a bedmate should turn her night-gown inside out. Then having put it on again, she would settle down to sleep, in expectation of seeing 'her future husband in a dream' (much as Madeline does after her elaborate undressing in The Eve of St Agnes).23 All marriage-divination customs, including those practised on St Mark's Eve, look to a ceremony that centres, at least for the would-be bride, on her special costume; and that, by Keats's day, was white - the opposite of Bertha's 'garments black'. 'It's the worst luck in the world', Oliver Goldsmith had already insisted, in 1768, to marry 'in anything but white'.24 By 1801, according to George Eliot's Adam Bede (set at that time, though published in 1859), even Methodists abandoned their sober uniform for a wedding. Dinah 'was not in black this morning: for her Aunt Poyser would by no means allow such a risk of incurring bad luck and had herself made a present of the wedding dress'. The pious bride has not gone so far as to accept white but has settled for a 'wedding dress, made all of grey', provided it is still styled 'in the usual Quaker form, for on this point Dinah could not give way' (Chapter 55). Bertha's funereal costume may hint at the even more uncompromising stance of rejecting the prospect of any wedding at all. The deviance of such an attitude is clear, since those St Mark's Eve customs that sought to ensure marriage were, by definition, popular; and, in at least some communities, would go on being so. In 1891, the present tense was still thought appropriate to describe the ritual in which 'a youth or girl walks round the church, at dead of night, on St Mark's Eve, looking into

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each window ... in expectation of seeing ... the face of his or her future partner in life'.25 Contrast with this Bertha's use - or abuse - of a window. Keats's 'Ode to Psyche' praises a much more open attitude: one in which a young woman ensures that, after dark, her lover can still find his way into her bed-room, by arranging 'A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in!' (66-7). There are choices to be made - even when deciding how to respond, on the Eve of St Mark, to the odd fact that Mark was traditionally the patron saint of those whose job was to make and repair windows.26 Mark, as patron saint of glaziers, could not have been used as pretext for another custom since it was practised, not in houses but in barns that presumably had no glass windows. Nevertheless, it was 'on St Mark's Eve at mid­ night' that young men in Derbyshire who wished 'to see the vision' of a 'future wife', duly assembled in a chosen barn. As late as 1895,one man could still confirm that this had worked for him; but another had seen only 'a spade, which fore-cast that he would remain unmarried'.27 He perhaps could have warned Bertha what that Queen of Spades might portend. If her spades are to be associated with literal digging, they can echo some other village rituals which supposedly persuaded the St Mark's Eve spirit to plant in each eager girl's room some implement to 'tell them the trades of their future husbands'.28 According to this superstition, spades appearing on this particular evening might imply that Bertha is destined only for the arms of the local grave-digger. William Hone reported another combination of formula and ominous rider. Girls whose marriage-prospects were not con­ firmed by an actual vision of their future husband might still receive 'the desired token' by hearing 'a knocking at the doors'; but those who could 'neither see nor hear anything' on St Mark's Eve had to deduce that they would 'die unmarried'.29 In the poetry of the oral tradition it was often not death itself but life alone that was most feared. Anxious girls, on St Mark's Eve, would recite the following rhyme, three times, before going to bed: The Eve of St Mark by prediction is blest, Set therefore my hopes and my fears all to rest. Whether my rank is to be high or low; Let me know my fate, whether weal or woe, Whether to live single or to be a bride ... Should this verse fail, the girl would have no dream that night;

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and she would know that for the rest of her life she was destined to 'be single and miserable'.30 This bleak threat drove some girls into more strenuous fertility rites. In Norfolk, Suffolk and Sussex (where the practice was still being maintained in 1878) the custom was for them to go outside at midnight chanting 'Hemp-seed I sow ... he that is my true love, / Come after me and mow' and scattering symbolic seed on the ground. If the charm worked, the 'figure of their future husband' would 'appear, with a scythe and in the act of mowing'.31 Eventually, of course, it will be Death the Mower who harvests all; but that need not mean that girls like Bertha had best retreat into piety. It might be as appropriate to look forward to making love, while there is still time. Whatever Bertha herself may think, the poem surely hints that there are fates - such as a wasted life that may be worse than death. David Luke is surely too blunt in glossing the Queen of Spades as 'a symbol of death'.32 That complex image may include hints of mortality; but the apparition seems not only regal but feminine and Death, in most of his traditional guises such as that of the mower, is usually male, He is, for instance, in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner where, in the 1800 edition, italics insist that 'his bones were black with many a crack'. Conversely, his even more terrifying rival - who eventually wins their game of chance and thus gains the prize of a human soul - is indeed female: 'The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she / Who thicks man's blood with cold' (193-4). Bertha may herself seem relatively cold-blooded in the context of the more tender superstitions about St Mark's Eve. The harsh 'glare' of her reading-lamp (72), for instance, seems bound to cast a chillier shadow than the one summoned by another popular custom: 'If a maiden sits ... in her bed-room, at midnight on St Mark's Eve, with a candle ... giving only a dim light ... she will presently see the shadow of her future husband'.33 Is it just fortuitous that this can provide so neat a contrast to the bleak apparition that shadows Bertha? Or did Keats know of such rituals? Such knowledge would certainly not have been regarded as irrelevant amongst his circle of liberal friends, interested, as they were, not only in the political rights of the British people but also in the traditional folk culture represented, for instance, by those popular ballads about Robin Hood which Keats and J. H. Reynolds had recently been trying to revive.34Indeed, might most of his contemporary readers have been so much better-informed than we are that, as a writer, Keats simply had to anticipate those who might associate the occasion, not just with premonitions of

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death, but even more with the prospect of successfully finding a lover? It seems clear to me that Keats himself certainly did have the relevant knowledge. He uses that name of Bertha again, in another poem, for a character who is essentially dedicated to preserving her virginity. In his satirical narrative, The Cap and Bells, written later in 1819, the second Bertha, like the first, lives in a cathedral city; and she too has no conscious interest in men, her motto being 'Cupid, I - do thee defy' (455). However, the prince who desires her contemplates 'some soft manoeuvre', such as catching her off-guard when she is 'in a swoon' (490-2). He seems to hope that she may be like the poem's puritanical 'priesthood' who, after a day spent denouncing the sexual activity of their prince, cannot control the nightly visitations of the subconscious: 'They dreamt of sin' as 'he sinned while they slept' (16). The prince - whose desire is for flesh-and-blood 'mortal women, maidens fair, / Whose lips were solid' (5-6) - is not con­ tent with surreal impalpabilities like the earlier poem's shadowy Queen of Spades: 'He loved girls smooth as shades, but hated a mere shade' (9). Having sought expert advice on how to approach the Cupid-defying Bertha, he equips himself with what sounds like a homoeopathic remedy, for neutralising any devotional literature by which she might have been indoctrinated. This is a special book, 'old / And legend-leaved, mysterious to behold'. It will work a 'potent charm, / That shall drive Bertha to a fainting fit!' (512-19), but only if applied on the one correct evening of the year: 'for on that eve alone can ... the maid', even if her suitor has the magic book, be seduced. That night is 'April the twentyfourth ... Saint Mark's Eve' (501-4). This should perhaps have been sufficient on its own to guide us to a better-informed reading of the earlier poem. However, technically it only proves that Keats had learnt about the date's proverbial appropriateness for seduction by November of 1819 when he began work on The Cap and Bells. Unsupported by other evidence, it would still leave open the remote possibility that Keats had not known this in February when he was writing The Eve of St Mark but only later had met some account, in his reading during the intervening eight months. However, conveniently enough, one of the periodicals that Keats favoured, the New Monthly Magazine, had already in May 1817, printed the following: On the ... anniversary of St Mark ... certain customs are frequently practised in the country ... On that night young men and women watch their shirts and shifts from 1 1 to 12

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O'Clock for the purpose of beholding their intended partners in matrimony. At the same hour ... they also repair to the village church; and running three times round it sow hemp-seed, with divers ceremonies and incantations; ... a person of the opposite sex appears behind them with a scythe, and if they are not sufficiently brisk, cuts their legs. Old men on that night, sit in the church porch, where they behold all those who are to die in the parish in the next year; and, if they are themselves to die in that period, they fall asleep.35 Clearly the prospect of death looms large here, not just for the old men but also for the young people agreeing to be pursued by the symbolic scythe, as they are hurried into using their youth while it is still available. However, once Keats had read this report he would clearly associate St Mark's Eve not only with the threat of death, but also with the promise of love: with those rites of sexual passage whose eroticism could only be made yet more urgent by any awareness of mortality. In 1818 Keats's friend J. H. Reynolds announced that he was going to be married. Keats wrote to him: you are in the right path ... and I must see you marry your lovely Wife ... I have more than once yeame'd for the time of your happiness to come, as much as I could for myself after the lips of Ju liet... Things like these, and they are real, have made me resolve to have a care of my health.36 In a later letter, just five months before the Eve of St Mark was composed, he told Reynolds: I have rather rejoiced in your happiness ... I conjure you to think at Present of nothing but pleasure 'Gather the rose &c' Gorge the honey of life. I pity you as much that it cannot last for ever, as I do myself ... I never was in love - yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me.37 The certainty 'that it cannot last for ever', that death must eventually divorce even the most devoted couple, far from rendering young love a waste of time, is the shadow with the harrying scythe that forces wise folk to use such time as youth allows. I am not, of course, suggesting that future annotators of the poem should no longer cite the morbid custom that was indeed associated, by at least some communities, with St Mark's Eve. I merely plead that they should also supply some examples of the

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rival tradition as well. Then we can recognise the poem's true sense of balance. It is, after all, generous in conceding the allure of a literature whose rich decorations are deployed in support of Christianity. Annotation that mentions only the gloomier custom amplified disproportionately such hints as the poem itself offers that human life on earth is inescapably brief. Bertha's pious text, about 'Sainte Markis life and death', already couples the energy of human existence with the blunt fact of mortality. That is the text that Keats's own poem already contains; or, in more active and partisan fashion, seeks to contain. The traditionally cited superstition, if put forward alone, encourages the idea that the proper response, for a young person remembering that she cannot live for ever, is indeed to shut herself away with a good book. It is not only Christian literary critics who may be slow to question such a policy. All of us, as a professional hazard, could exaggerate the usefulness of devoting time to old literature. However, we may, in future, need to guard against an opposite risk: that of under-estimating the poem's respect for Bertha. The novelty of reading The Eve of St Mark in the light of the more seductive customs must not lure us into patronising her. Certainly, the poem itself is careful not to do so. Keats's friend, Richard Woodhouse, was surely misreading the poem when, whilst making a transcript, he decided that we could not be meant to admire Bertha's independent lodgings as 'homely' (68) and that the word should be replaced by 'lonely'. Keats is unlikely to have expressed such glib pity for someone who cares as much for reading as Bertha does. Bertha's own choice of book may not suggest the most open mind; but it is a book, and Keats is not only a writer by profession but a reader by desire: 'I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover' he wrote in a letter of 1819 (Letters, II, p. 139). Keats's own gusto as a reader is inclusive enough to embrace even her taste. When, in lines 89-96, Bertha is concentrating on the pedantic footnotes that the 'learned eremite' has supplied at the foot of each 'legend page', Keats is not looking down on her. Instead he is eagerly reading over her shoulder: following each 'golden star, or dagger bright' which 'Referred to pious poesies / Written in smallest crow-quill size / Beneath the text' (94-7). We know from his poem on the monks' skulls in Beauly Abbey how much Keats admired the old manuscript-illuminators whose 'fingers set ablaze, / With silver Saint in gold rays, / The holy missal ... 'Mid bead and spangle' ('In silent barren Synod met', 43-6). So in The Eve of St Mtfrk, it is the poem itself, as well as Bertha, that relishes the colourful variety of its 'golden

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broideries', its 'stars of Heaven'; and its 'Azure saints 'mid silver rays' (28, 30-3). The poem sees enough of what Bertha sees to understand how such dazzling images have 'taken captive her two eyes'; but it also sees that they have in fact 'perplexed her' (29) until her mind is 'dazed with saintly imageries' (56) perhaps because the imagery here is composed only of 'pious poesies'. It is the forces that delude Bertha into such a limited sense of life's possibilities, not the intensity with which she explores word and picture, that the poem attacks. So we need not suspect Keats here of the fault that he himself diagnoses in some of his other poems: 'there is a tendency to class women ... with roses and sweetmeats - they never see themselves dominant' (Letters, II, p. 327). In The Eve of St Mark, at least, Bertha's willingness to surrender herself to such self-destroying role-models as the Christian martyrs cannot be blamed on Keats. The ex-doctor may be responsible for the diagnosis but the originators of the disease, he would argue, were those Christian propagandists from Mark himself right down to the leaders of the contemporary Church of England. It was they who had gulled women, like Bertha, into thinking that they must settle for sedentary piety even while the potential energy of their minds and bodies was in its prime. Moreover, in this gentlest of polemics, the poem's opening paragraph has already hinted Keats's own willingness to compromise: to accept, as one healthier alternative, a version of Christianity itself. If Bertha's generation cannot yet be lured away from the Saints and returned to the primal 'realm ... of Flora and old Pan' ('Sleep and Poetry', 101-2), still they need not stay at home, each meeting her God alone, behind closed doors, studying a long-dead scholar's foot­ notes to gory martyrdom. Many, though just as committed to Christianity as Bertha, do still find their way to a social celebration. They prefer to join their neighbours, out on those crowded streets, moving towards a communal act of worship, responding to the beauty in those 'sweet' sounds of music for which St Cecilia is perhaps more usefully celebrated. NOTES

1. See A. R. Wright, British Calendar Customs, 3 vols (London: Glaisher, 1936-40), II, p. 187. 2. The Eve o f St M ark survives in more than one manuscript version; see Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats's Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 220-2. This essay quotes the text in John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), drawn from the British Museum holograph (Egerton 2780). Some variants in the version that Keats included in

Old Saints and Young Lovers his journal-letter of 17 - 2 7 September 18 19 are of great interest; that text is currently available in John Keats: Selected poems, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Everyman, 1995). 3. The 'goodly company' of pagans in Endymion may well be a defiant riposte to the Ancient Mariner who imagined how sweet it would feel 'To walk together to the kirk, / With a goodly company' so that 'all together' could 'pray / While each to his great Father bends'. The emphasis on communal solidarity, at this point in Coleridge's poem - 'all together ... / Old men, and babes, and loving friends / And youths and maidens gay' - would have appealed to Keats and suggested the need to free such healthy instincts from the Christianity which seems more often to have imposed isolation on the Mariner. It has certainly made the Wedding-Guest, who 'Turn'd from the bridegroom's door', as anti-social as the main character in The Eve of St Mark. In Coleridge's poem it is the 'vesper bell' that audibly 'biddeth ... to prayer' and, in Keats's fragment, 'vesper prayer' (22) that the bells announce: a summons which only Bertha seems to refuse. So, the unified congregation envied by the mariner, as well as the pious solitude in which he seems to pass most of his life, could well have been in Keats's mind as he wrote his own poem. 4. 'Reading Keats's Plots', Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. H. de Almeida (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1990), pp. 97-8). 3. Keats quotes the ode, in a letter from Winchester, complaining at the city's 'excessively maiden lady like streets'. These seem to permit only sounds which are 'very staid serious', like Pope's 'dying fall'. Keats's own imagination allows his letter, even in such a repressed environment, to conceive of the opposite: 'thundering-Jupiter ... opera-trebble-tattoos'. The very next sentence names both the glamourous city of Venice (whose name provides the last word of The Eve of St Mark) and the drearily ecclesiastical Winchester, in a characteristically broad-minded recipe for verse: 'The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting - The palatine Venice and the abbotine Winchester are equally interesting - Some time since I began a Poem call'd "the Eve of St M ark'" (Letters, II, p. 201). 6. John Brady, Clavis Calendria, 3rd edn (1813). 7. Brewer's Dictionary o f Phrase and Fable, revised by Ifor H. Evans (London: Cassell, 1970), pp. 1 0 2 - 3 ,1 1 3 2 . 8. See John L. Mosheim, A n Ecclesiastical History, Antient and Modern, tr. A . Maclaine, 6 vols (London: 1768), I, pp. 429-30. 9. See Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year (London: Heinemann, 1934), pp. 90 -1; W. Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 433. 10. See William Bell Scott, quoted by Sidney Colvin, in John Keats (London: Macmillan, 1917), p. 440, and Walter E. Houghton, 'The Meaning of Keats's "E v e of St. M ark'", English Literary History, 13 (March 1946), p. 71. 1 1. The holograph sent to George Keats, 20 September 1819, supplies an extra word here, creating the oxymoron of a 'swart lamp'. This, even as Bertha seeks to throw more light on her illuminated and - in her pious eyes - illuminating book, makes her actual darkness more evidently visible. The more authoritative British Museum holograph (see note 2 above) achieves much the same effect in this line by chilling Bertha's fire, the potentially cheerful warmth of which is denied by its 'dismal coal' (all emphases mine). Keats w as careful to

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Keats: Bicentenary Readings delete, as inappropriate, another couplet he had at first included at this point: 'The Maiden lost in dizzy maze / Turn'd to the fire and made a blaze'. Admittedly, the first line here might have reinforced the impression that Bertha is bewildered by the giddying prettiness of her book: lured into what was, for Keats, a mental labyrinth built b y 'M en interested in the pious frauds of Religion' (Letters, II, p. 80). However, this couplet would also have suggested a Bertha who was sybaritic enough to warm her body by a literal 'blaze' whereas, according to the sentence that first introduced her into the poem, it is her 'Perplex'd' mind that she chooses to inflame - by looking at a book whose illustrations include 'M artyrs in a fiery blaze' (29-31). 12. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 13. Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn (London: Longman, 1959), pp . 298-9. 14. See William Hone, The Every-D ay Book; or, Everlasting Calendar, 2 vols (London, 1826), I, p. 851. Cited hereafter as EDB. 15. W. M. Rossetti, Life o f John Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887), pp, 18 4-5. So far as I know, no modem critic has followed up D. G. Rossetti's other hypothesis about what, if the poem had continued, would be disclosed about Bertha's past. On this surmise she would turn out to have rejected the suit of a 'now absent lover' and, as time passed on St M ark's Eve, to have grown 'remorseful'. This suggests that Rossetti may have had some knowledge of the alternative tradition (see p. 185). 16. David Luke, "'Th e Eve of St. M ark": Keats's "ghostly Queen of Spades" and the Textual Superstition', Studies in Romanticism, 9 (Summer 1970), p. 166. 17. See A Dictionary of Superstitions, ed. Iona Opie and Moira Tatem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 349. 18. Enid Porter, Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 10 9 -11. 19. R. T. Hampson, M edii JE v i Kalendarium: or, Dates, Charters, and Customs o f the M iddle Ages, 2 vols (London: 1841), II, p. 221. 20. Opie and Tatem, Dictionary o f Superstitions, p. 386. 21. Wright, British Calendar Customs, II, pp. 186-7. 22. Hone, ED B, I, pp. 523-4. 23. See Wright, British Calendar Customs, II, pp. 15 3-4 , aRd cf. also the similar custom of 'chemise turning' on St M ark's Eve, p. 184. 24. The Good-Natured M an, IV; quoted in Opie and Tatem, Dictionary of Superstitions, p. 44. 25. Wright, British Calendar Customs, II, pp. 18 4-5. 26. See A Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, ed. Gertrude Jobes, 2 vols (N ew York: Scarecrow Press, 1961), II, p. 1375. 27. Wright, British Calendar Customs, II, p. 184. 28. Wright, II, pp. 187-8. 29. Hone, ED B, II, p. 524. 30. Wright, British Calendar Customs, II, p. 185. 3 1. Wright, II, p. 187. 32. Luke, 'The Eve of St Mark', Studies in Romanticism 9, p. 17 1. 33. Wright, British Calendar Customs, II, p. 187. 34. See Letters, I, pp. 224-5. 35. N ew M onthly Magazine (M ay 18 17), pp. 3 30 -1. 36. Letters, I, p. 325. 37. Letters, I, p. 370.

CHAPTER FIVE

Keats and Silence

J. R. W A T S O N

My subject is that which lies on the other side of language, but which is spoken about, or gestured towards, in the language of poetry. Silence is, by its very nature, enigmatic: it can take many forms - the silence of horror, as in the response to the concentra­ tion camps ('after Auschwitz, no poetry'); the silence of anger or despair; the silence of wonder; the silence that precedes or succeeds sound or words, poems, or verses; and finally the silence of sleep and death. In beginning to discuss it, I take as a model not George Steiner's 'Silence and the Poet' in Language and Silence but a collection of essays by the psychoanalyst Nina Coltart, entitled Slouching to Bethlehem (1992). As the title of her book indicates, Coltart finds literary metaphors useful and illuminating when she is describing psychoanalytic experience and method: in particular the 'rough beast' of Yeats's 'The Second Coming' is something within the patient that gradually begins to form in analysis, and which it is the analyst's dangerous duty to find. In an essay on the silent patient, Coltart discusses the difficulty. 'I have treated', she writes, 'eight patients in twenty-five years who have been deeply silent for long periods during the analysis. One for nearly a year, several for months and weeks': Any silence of more than about forty minutes in analysis begins to have its own peculiar interest. But there is a very particular challenge issued by profoundly silent patients, who are often, by the way, not diagnosable as such during a careful assessment interview. I make this point because it indicates that profound silence itself, as well as what it conceals, can be a rough beast which is slouching along in the depths of a communicative, articulate patient and whose time may need to come round and be endured in the analysis.1 She writes of one such patient who, after an initial elation, 'fell violently silent, exuding ever-stronger black waves of hatred and despair'.2 We have met his fellow in Iago, busily engaged in a

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destructiveness that gives purpose to his obsessions and hatreds, elated in his scheming, and falling silent at the end of the play: Demand me nothing, what you know, you know, From this time forth I never will speak word.3 What we know, we know, indeed: we have experienced Iago's envy and clever hatred for five acts; his silence is a withdrawal into himself, the final refusal to be human. Keats spoke about Iago, when he was describing the poetical character, which 'enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen/(Letters, I, 387). The words 'delight' and 'gusto' are crucial here, and so are their relationship to the darkness of Iago's mind: a delight in Iago is, for Keats, indicative of a creative purpose that does not shrink from contemplating the appalling as well as the beautiful (the parallel with psychoanalysis is again evident). In this context I wish first to draw attention to the abundance of Keats's early poetry: it is a quality which is not usually discussed, but I think it might be described as the opposite of the silent patient syndrome. In other words, it has an openness, an enthusiasm, a readiness to speak, a desire to communicate, a disinclination to hide anything. His boyish delights sometimes seem so ingenuous that they become naive: in his early poetry there is no use of the ironic mode to represent the complexity of human experience. Yet we must be careful to acknowledge the goodness of this, the way in which it is evidence of an open heart and an uncomplicated mind (the New Critics not having been invented in Keats's time, we may permit ourselves an enjoyment of poetry that is straight­ forwardly rejoicing in goodness). Similarly, the letters show, and continue to show, a vivid and open passion - a love and an energy that are so ingenuous at times that (to give one example of their effect) they upset the more guarded and defensive Matthew Arnold. In Essays on Criticism, Second Series he quoted from one of Keats's love-letters: 'I could be martyred for my Religion - Love is my religion - 1 could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.' Arnold, who would have been a most interesting and difficult case for a psychoanalyst (there is much evidence of problems with the strong father) commented that the letter has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the

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training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them.4 Arnold, who was a delightful and humane person, and a good critic, appears here like one of W. B. Yeats's 'old, respectable bald heads' in 'The Scholars', 'forgetful of their sins': Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way? But Arnold has one phrase which describes the open, earnest Keats of the early poems very well when he speaks of a 'relaxed self-abandonment'. Keats abandons himself to the joys and delights of his youthful enthusiasm, although paradoxically, of course, this sharpens his sense of the perceiving and experiencing self. The T of this self and its delights is found in such sonnets as 'Oh! how I love, on a fair summer's eve', and the sonnet 'To My Brother George': Many the wonders I this day have seen: The sun, when first he kist away the tears That fill'd the eyes of morn, - the laurel'd peers Who from the feathery gold of evening lean; The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears, Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been. (1-8) The difficulty for Keats in this sonnet, and elsewhere in his early poems, is that he is describing 'wonders', and the only appropriate response to a wonder is to be silent in amazement at it. So, in the first poem of the 1817 Poems this T has 'stood tip-toe upon a little hill', from which it has a view that is full of wonder: There was wide wand'ring for the greediest eye To peer about upon variety ...

(15-16) And so the poet gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free As though the fanning wings of Mercury Had played upon my heels: I was light-hearted, And many pleasures to my vision started; So I straightway began to pluck a posey Of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy.

(23-8)

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Keats does not seem to know what to write about except 'luxur­ ies', things that he delights in, which he describes with a total lack of inhibition, an openness which is the opposite of Coltart's silent patient syndrome. In the paper which I have quoted from already, 'Thinking the unthinkable in psycho-analysis', Coltart suggests that bodily illness is often the product of 'pre-verbal, never thinkable, never expressible rage.' 'The special interest of psychosomatic symptoms', she writes, is that the rough beast whose hour is not yet come is holed up in the body. There is a lovely quotation from the poet John Donne, in his poem 'Progress of the Soul', which refers to the nonpathological aspect of this: her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought.5 It is this non-pathological thinking of the body that Christopher Ricks has drawn attention to in Keats and Embarrassment: the instances of blushing which are analysed in that book echo Donne's perception, and signify the same transparent humanity. It is as though Keats, in his early poetry, has chosen to provide a demonstration of his uninhibited enjoyment in everything; and his poetry at this time is distinctive not only in its embracing of blushing and embarrassment but also in its lack of reticence. The word which the anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Magazine in April 1817 used of it was 'revelry': There is in his poems a rapturous glow and intoxication of the fancy - an air of careless and profuse magnificence in his diction - a revelry of the imagination and tenderness of feeling, that forcibly impress themselves on the reader.6 This description is very perceptive, with its reference to those qualities which are found iri such abundance in Keats's early poems - the glow and intoxication of the fancy, the tenderness of feeling, the readiness to lay out his feelings in a kind of profusion. He is a poet who, in Wordsworth's fine phrase from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.7

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Or, as Keats himself put it in the sonnet 'On the Grasshopper and Cricket', 'The poetry of earth is never dead'. The grasshopper and the cricket are part of the goings-on of the universe, signs of its life and odd energy: the grasshopper enjoys itself throughout the summer - 'He takes the lead / In summer luxury', and its alter ego, the house-cricket (Acheta domestica, described by the OED as 'a saltatorial orthopterous insect') gives a sign of continuing life during the winter months: The poetry of earth is ceasing never: On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills. (9-14) Keats wrote the poem when he and Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet in a quarter of an hour: Keats won on time, but might be thought to have cheated a little by borrowing from Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight', where Coleridge described him­ self as sitting by the fire, while outside the frost performed its secret and silent ministry. In Keats's sonnet, as in Coleridge's poem, there is a warmth which compensates for the cold outside (that warmth and drowsiness is found combining again in the 'Ode to a Nightingale'): in the sonnet it allows the poet momen­ tarily to imagine that summer is back again, what T. S. Eliot called 'the unimaginable zero summer' becoming present in the drowsy dreamings by the stove. It is fascinating, and curious, to see Keats racing to complete a sonnet about being half asleep, eagerly and actively making a representation of the opposite state, as though each of those states was a part of the endless and fascinating variety of being alive summer, winter, dashing through a sonnet, dreamily listening to the house-cricket. What is characteristic and revealing, too, is that Keats should have published the poem in the 1817 volume: he seems to have had no sense that it was any different from the other poems by being done in a timed competition with a friend (and, of course, this information was not given to the reader in 1817). It was another example of the wonderful variety and energy that Keats celebrates in the poem, and in the manner of its writing, the Wordsworthian rejoicing in himself and in the world. The grasshopper makes poetry; so does the cricket; so does Leigh Hunt; and so does John Keats. Its composition is evidence of a

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state of mind that is the opposite not only of the silent Iago but also of the tormented and anxious Matthew Arnold, the poet of 'The Buried Life', who described: A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us - to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. (51-6) We have no skill, says Arnold, to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpressed ... (61-3) It is the psychoanalyst's task to free these 'nameless feelings' that Arnold talks about, to allow a patient to uncover the deep sources of discontent, to allow the rough beast to be born, to overcome the silence that is itself a form of burial, a hiding away of those things that are too painful to be contemplated. Indeed, Keats's poetic career presents a parallel to this, in that he was encouraged out of silence by Leigh Hunt and other sympathetic friends such as George Felton Mathew and Charles Cowden Clarke. Each of them receives a recognition in the form of a poem-title, and Keats's debt to Leigh Hunt, who is in the position of the primary analyst or encourager, is signalled in the dedication 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.' (the 'esquire' being a kind of addition, perhaps affectionately comic or arch, perhaps mock medieval, perhaps intended to give Hunt a certain dignity and respectability). In the dedicatory sonnet Keats suggests that the antique world has gone - 'glory and loveliness have passed away' - but that he has been blessed with compensating delights, which include that of being able to bring the 'offerings' of his mind and heart: But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time, when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please With these poor offerings, a man like thee. (9-14)

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Such an encouragement to speak was vital for Keats's develop­ ment as a poet, and it is interesting to see that the reviewers knew that, and were critical not just of Keats but of the relation­ ship which he had with Hunt. Croker, in the Quarterly Review, attacked 'Mr Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte'.8The reviewer in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany described Keats as a poet 'who seems to have formed his poetical predi­ lections in exactly the same direction as Mr Hunt', and recommended that he should 'cast off the uncleannesses of this school'.9 These reviewers were very sensitive, one might almost say jealous, of the processes by which Keats was able to break the silence. It caused one of them, Lockhart, to exhort Keats to go back into the silence from which he had come, out of which Leigh Hunt had encouraged him. Lockhart's review is sometimes seen as snobbery, but I think that it is cruder and crueller than that, angry and envious at being outside the special Keats-Hunt relationship: 'back to the shop, Mr John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," &c'.10 It takes courage to break the silence again when your speech has been ridiculed: these were the reviews which Shelley thought had hastened Keats's death. What makes them inappropriate is not only their smear tactics but also the way in which Keats's early poetry combines the abundance, which I have been stressing, with a control of form. Keats used the Spenserian stanza, blank verse, and above all the sonnet to express his ideas: each of these literary forms works not just by what it says but also by the boundaries which are drawn round it: the sonnet's fourteen lines are a deliberate choice by the author to write in that particular fourteen-line shape, with space, or silence, before and after it, with space at the end of each line. As the speech ends, the silence begins. In this way, Keats's early poetry is not just an outpouring, but an outpouring which has its own subtle relationship with silence; if only because the silence is that not of anger but of wonder. The clearest example of this is the use of the word 'silent' in the sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. The first sight of Chapman's translation was a new experience, a wonderful moment which Keats aligns with other kinds of discovery: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men

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Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (9-14) The sestet of this sonnet conducts the reader with a graceful firm­ ness towards the important word: the only response of Cortes and his soldiers that is in any way adequate is to remain silent in amazement. The sight of the new ocean is the reward for their bravery, just as the sight of the new planet is a reward for the astronomer's long hours watching the night sky; it is. a reward of delight and amazement, best expressed in the recognition that words are inadequate. Yet, of course, Keats is writing about it in words. Keats is now entering a world which is quite unlike the cosy sharing of his pleasures with Leigh Hunt. The encounter with Homer, even at one remove through Chapman's translation, is a meeting with one of the giants, an overwhelming experience. Keats is pursuing his art towards a world unknown to 'Leigh Hunt, Esq.', a world which Wordsworth described in the Preface to The Excursion: For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep - and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.

(28-30) This is the role of the poet which has been so vividly described by George Steiner in 'Silence and the Poet', when he speaks of 'the god-rivalling, therefore potentially sacrilegious character of the act of the poet'.11 When Keats describes Cortes and his men as silent, he shows them acknowledging the limitations of the human word (Steiner's phrase) which he (the poet) daringly refuses to accept. It is Keats's duty, as a poet, to go beyond this, to reach into the silence. Such a reaching, as Steiner forcefully points out, is dangerous. It is also the poet's privilege to reach towards the transcendent: 'It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvel­ lously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.'12 His great example is Dante, one of those giants whom Keats was later to encounter on his poetic pilgrimage (he took Dante with him on his journey in search of the sublime in the Lake District and Scotland in the summer of 1818). 'We may understand the Paradiso as an exercise, supremely controlled yet full of extreme moral and poetic risk, in the calculus of linguistic possibility.'13 Keats's attempt is found,

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not in the biblical and Christian world of The Divine Comedy, but in the classical world which he discovered in Lempriere's Classical Dictionary; and as Dante was (in Steiner's words) 'able to make verbally intelligible the forms and meanings of his transcendent experience', so Keats presses language into service to realise Lempriere in Endymion: It will be a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing indeed - by which I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry.14 This is Keats pondering his next step and deciding on a long poem: the degree to which he used language to break the silence may be seen by the laconic entry in Lempriere (2nd edn, 1792): Diana saw him naked as he slept on mount Latmos, and was so struck with his beauty that she came down from heaven every night to enjoy his company ... The fable of Endymion's amours with Diana, or the moon, arises from his knowledge of astronomy, and as he passed the night on some high mountain, to observe the heavenly bodies, it has been reported that he was courted by the moon. From this Keats weaves the four-book romance: it is a significant attempt to make something out of very little, and also an attempt to make a word-music. As he said of the word 'Endymion' itself: The very music of the name has gone Into my being

(I 36-7) and it was one of the many words from Lempriere that fascinated him and that ring through his poetry - Hyperion, Ganymede, Ariadne, Dryope, Peona, Mnemosyne. The music of these names contrasts with two things that are the antithesis of music: one is noise, so that Keats resolves to begin Now while I cannot hear the city's din (I40)

and the other is silence. The opening scene of the poem, with the Claude-like clearing in the forest and its marble altar, begins with the hush of early morning, 'the silent workings of the dawn' into which comes sound:

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All suddenly, with joyful cries, there sped A troop of little children garlanded; Who gathering round the altar, seemed to pry Earnestly round as wishing to espy Some folk of holiday: nor had they waited For many moments, ere their ears were sated With a faint breath of music ...

(i, 107-15) Music is very important in Endymion: the 'Hymn to Pan', which Wordsworth described as 'a very pretty piece of paganism' is sung by a chorus, and in Book IV the roundelay is called for by Endymion in words that echo Twelfth Night: Let me have music dying, and I seek No more delight - 1 bid adieu to all. (IV, 140-1) This quiet music contrasts wonderfully with the arrival of Bacchus, who is accompanied by cymbals and trumpets (as in Titian's painting), which in turn contrasts with the final vesper hymn. Such music is used by Keats in the challenge to the empty space which is Endymion. It is brought in, as it were, as part of the evidence of life and energy. In Hyperion, on the other hand, the interaction between sound and silence is an essential part of the poem's mythic structure. Saturn, having fallen, is quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair. (1 4-5)

In this opening scene there is no wind, no speech, and no sense of energy. The Naiad Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips. (i/14) During the course of the poem poetry becomes possible: Saturn's impotent rage, like that of the silent patient, gives way to the enthusiasm of the poet, as Apollo wakes to find 'a lyre all golden' by his side. The last moment of the fragment is a shriek as he becomes a God (I almost entitled this essay 'the shriek of Apollo', for the shriek is the primal cry, the moment of self-discovery in being born). Life, with all its infinite promise, awaits, just as for Saturn it is now over in the process of time that is both enabling and (ultimately) disabling. Apollo, who has shouted the beautiful

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word 'Mnemosyne' to the Titan who is the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses, now promises to articulate what Mnemosyne cannot. He reads A wondrous lesson in thy silent face (III, 112) and promises sublime energy from his lyre: Point me out the way To any one particular beauteous star, And I will flit into it with my lyre, And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss. (Ill, 99-102) 'The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo'. The end of Love's Labour's Lost, which Keats was reading at Margate in 1817, sets poetry against the messenger of death; Keats is perpetually engaged in the same fascinated struggle. One of his motives, to judge from his early poetry, is the sheer compulsion to celebrate life in all its abundance; another, which is found in the opening of Love's Labour's Lost, is renown, fame. 'My dear Haydon', he writes in a letter of 10 - 11 May 1817: Let Fame, which all hunt after in their Lives, Live register'd upon our brazen tombs, And so grace us in the disgrace of death: When spite of cormorant devouring time The endeavour of this present breath may buy That Honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge And make us heirs of all eternity. The letter continues: 'To think that I have no right to couple myself with you in this speech would be death to me so I have e'en written it - and I pray God that our brazen Tombs be near neighbours.' (Letters, I, pp. 140-1). The juxtaposition of fame and death is very characteristic of Keats, who sees poetry as a harvest (as in 'When I have fears that I may cease to be'), but also as a daring enterprise. He uses the image of the samphire-gatherer from King Lear: 'I am', he writes in that same letter to Haydon, "'one that gathers Samphire dreadful trade" the Cliff of Poesy Towers above me' (Letters, I, p. 141). In that process he engages silence with all kinds of music, contrasting the 'silver, snarling trumpets' (31) of the high festivity in The Eve of St Agnes with the delicacy of Porphyro's playing of the lute in Madeline's room; and clearly the sound of Keats's verse, the multiplication of images and stanzas which challenge the silence of the white page

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that surrounds them, are part of the process of resisting death, of affirming life. It is this challenge to silence which makes the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' such an inscrutable and central poem in Keats's oeuvre. It 'teases us out of thought' by being beautiful, and by refusing an easy answer, by being, as the first lines say it is, Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time ... ( 1- 2)

It is the silence of the urn which disturbs, its indifference to questioning. The poet interrogates it, calls upon it to reveal its secrets: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or Gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (5-10) The questions come faster and faster, perhaps because they are never answered: the urn's silence is disconcerting in its lack of response. The poet then consoles himself with the thought (at the beginning of verse two) that Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. (11-12 ) The pipes play on, but they make no noise. They can only be heard in a strange un-hearing, in which the silence becomes that of a finer music: Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone ... (13-14) The dense and assonantal text, with its jarring clashes of similar sound and different meaning, makes an ironic music against the background of the urn's silence: it is as if Keats is drawing attention to the text itself, a work of conscious artistry about a work of conscious artistry. Keats has - almost defiantly, one might say - made a poem out of his own inability to hear the pipes, out of his failure to elicit any answers. He challenges the

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urn's silence with his own unanswered questions, and in describing how he loses, he wins. He fashions a poem out of his own impotence, out of the urn's silent inscrutability: he can describe what happens on it, of course, the marble men and the maidens who are overwrought, the little town, and the lovers who never quite kiss. But ultimately, the urn declines to submit to his interrogation: Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! (44-5)

Keats describes, cajoles, reproaches, questions, admires, tries to coax the urn's secret out of it, only to be given a sphinx-like ending. The urn, described with one final flattery as 'a friend to man', says something - or rather remains silent while the poet imagines what it might say if it could become something other than the foster-child of silence and slow time. It gives out a final message, which, however it is punctuated, is baffling: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (49-50) Is it all that we need to know? Or do we need to have a familiarity with other things, pain, and suffering, and hope, and forgiveness? Or is it, as Keats's letter to Benjamin Bailey (22 November 1817) suggests, that I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagin­ ation seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.15 Keats seems to be moving here into a world which is subject to other laws than ours, in which the imagination is creative but where the ordinary language of human existence has its problems. Steiner perceives it in this way: It is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers, that it borders on three other modes of statement - light, music, and silence - that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing

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and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God.16 Not having the Christian God at the heart of his silence, Keats turns of necessity to other things - to the pagan and classical gods, to paintings, to works of art such as the urn. His code book is not the Bible but classical myths and legends, then the earlier English poets, and especially Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; then his contemporaries, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge; then there is the knowledge of visual art, which has been tracked by Ian Jack in Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967). Keats's poetry finds its way out of the silence through a library of books and an art gallery full of pictures. They provide a mythology and a language. Yet his later poetry has a complexity that prevents it from becoming just celebratory: the enthusiasm and joy, the nonpathological blushing, are only part of the equation, for there is also a strong attraction towards silence, towards darkness, and towards the inexpressible. It is found in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', in the fascination with the beauty of the urn, its 'otherness', its resistance to dialogue; it is found, too, in the patterns of sleep and death which occur in Keats's poetry. Sleep is the 'soft embalmer of the still midnight', the benign force that closes 'Our gloom-pleas'd eyes' and allows a 'forgetfulness divine': Save me from curious conscience, that still lords Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole; Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed casket of my soul. (n -14 ) The images of embalming, of locking up, and of sealing the casket, are associated with the processes of death, the silence that Keats woos to release him from the woes of day, the workings of conscience and the mortal pain, even from time itself (I have wondered if Yeats knew this poem, and wrote 'Sailing to Byzantium' in its shadow). Keats uses the word 'darkness' again and again in the poems written at this time, and (like silence) it has more than one meaning - it is the embalmed darkness of the 'Ode to a Nightingale' and the darkness in which the poet is blind, as he is on the summit of Ben Nevis. In the sonnet 'Why did I laugh tonight' he finds the heart 'sad and alone', so that he repeats the question: Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O darkness! darkness! ever must I moan,

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To question heaven and hell and heart in vain. Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease ... (6-11) This trafficking, this flirtation with darkness, will be found again in the 'Ode to a Nightingale', where Keats leaves behind the mortal pain of human suffering, 'the weariness, the fever and the fret' of illness and old age. The poem moves from sound into the possibility of silence: Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain To thy high requiem become a sod. (59-60) Keats is dancing with 'easeful death' here, Death that might take into the air his quiet breath. The process of dying becomes a 'ceasing ... with no pain'. 'No pain': the temptation to avoid pain is an attractive one, and beyond the activity and energy of words there is a further possibility, the intense silence. The sonnet 'Why did I laugh to-night' ends Verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed, But death intenser - death is life's high meed. (13-14) Death, and the silence that goes with it, are the most mysterious and intense of human experiences, the encounter with which makes the silence of Cortes little more than a pale gesture of wonder. The encounter with death will take the poet beyond poetry and love into a further state, a mystery that transcends all the explorations and preoccupations of human activity (it was this that Shelley recognised so intuitively in Adonais, which makes that poem such an appropriate memorial for Keats). Keats can visualise himself standing alone, on the shore of the wide world, Till love and fame to nothingness do sink (14) The celebration of life, with all its warmth and complexity, its abundance of words, brings with it also the acknowledgment of a deeper reality of death, 'Life's high meed'. So it was for Hamlet, that master of brilliant words, when he acknowledged that 'the rest is silence': his final carrying to the stage is done in the silence

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after the last words have been spoken, in his apotheosis as a seeker after truth. For all his tentative approaches to death, Keats's own silence after his last letter of 30 November 1820 is unbearably painful to contemplate. This is for two reasons. The first is that, as we have seen, he had found a voice: at first to celebrate the wonders of life, and then to begin the stranger voyage. He had not (even after Tom's death) become inarticulate with rage, or silent like Iago or like one of Dr Coltart's patients: indeed, he had become so confident that he had begun to engage with the darkest forces that he knew. The second is the manner of his going. His last letter, written to Charles Brown from Rome, ends 'I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.' (Letters, II, p. 360). It is a wry and humorous recollection of things past, of all those social occasions when he was gauche and inelegant. Now he can find no language to say good-bye: death, the high meed, is also the destroyer of speech. And then comes the bow: you cannot speak and bow at the same time, and so Keats ends, not with the sound of words, that he would have been good at, but with the silent gesture that he performs awkwardly and without dignity. In the context of the letter it is a last brave gesture, the recalling of an individual characteristic that his friends will remember; but Keats also knows that he is passing into the land where the encounter with death will be painful and undignified rather than intense and easeful. With a brave smile that makes one catch the breath in admiration, he went awkwardly into that last silence which his poetry had celebrated with such intensity. NOTES

1. Nina Coltart, Slouching to Bethlehem (London: Free Association Press, 1992), pp. 8-9. 2. Slouching to Bethlehem, p. 9. 3. Shakespeare, Othello, V , ii, 304-5. 4. Matthew Arnold, Essays on Criticism, Second Series (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 103. 5. Slouching to Bethlehem, p. 13. 6. Reprinted in Keats, the Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 19 71), p. 50. 7. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802: in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2nd edn, 1991), p. 256. 8. Unsigned review, Quarterly Review (1818), reprinted in Keats, the Critical Heritage, pp. 1 1 0 - 1 4 (p. 114). 9. Unsigned review, Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary M iscellany (Scots Magazine) (1817), reprinted in Keats, the Critical Heritage, pp. 7 1 - 4 10.

(PP- 72- 3)Review signed 'Z ', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1818), reprinted

Keats and Silence in Keats, the Critical Heritage, pp. 9 7 -110 (p. 110). 11. George Steiner, 'Silence and the Poet', Language and Silence (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 19 67,198 5), p. 58. 12. Language and Silence, p. 58. 13. Language and Silence, p. 59. 14. Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 8 October 18 17; Letters, II, pp. 169-70. 15. Letters, I, p. 184. 16. Language and Silence, pp. 58-9.

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CHAPTER SIX

The Inward Keats: Bloom, Vendler, Stevens GARETH REEVES

It is a truism that American poetry this century has had a strong post-Romantic strain, stronger than its British counterpart. The American reception of Keats is a telling instance. Thus Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler trace a line from Keats, to, say, John Ashbery, through the figure of Wallace Stevens. They regard Keats primarily as a poet of consciousness. Bloom in particular takes his cue from the American biographer and critic of Keats, Walter Jackson Bate, who claims that Keats is especially appeal­ ing to modern readers because he raises issues of identity and consciousness.1 Many of the best English critics of Keats are evidently uncomfortable with this view. For instance John Bayley does not feel that an understanding of the poet is much furthered by dwelling on Keats's preoccupation with identity and his 'obsession with poethood' as revealed in the letters.2 Bayley thinks the best of the poetry is unselfconscious; for him Keats's so-called 'vulgar' diction, in for instance and especially Endymion, is an index of this unselfconsciousness, and creditably so; whereas for Christopher Ricks it is precisely the self-consciousness of the 'vulgarity' that entices, that gives the poetry its frisson of 'embar­ rassment'.3 But in spite of this difference, it is symptomatic that Bayley and Ricks should discuss Keats in terms drawn from what has always been the essentially English debate about his social standing. They are much more interested in what might be called the 'outward' Keats than are the Americans Bloom and Vendler. It comes as no surprise that Bloom, who in his recent book The Western Canon vigorously argues the case for solipsism,4 stresses the inward Keats, and that he regards 'Ode to Psyche' as Keats's crisis poem. It would be an interesting project to follow the critical fortunes of this ode, which has not been as unreservedly prized as the others. Even Bate finds it rewarding more for its potential, as preparation for the other odes, than as a poem in its own right.5 T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, who wrote about 'the present self-con­ scious century', singles out 'Ode to Psyche' in his essay of 1933 on

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'Shelley and Keats', although he says frustratingly little about it.6 In A Map of Misreading Bloom writes that in the 'struggle' with his poetic predecessors Keats 'relies entirely upon finding fresh imaginative space within himself'. Bloom captures the sense of discovery enacted by this poem, its psychic tremor, when he writes that the first stanza 'culminates in so excited a recognition of Psyche, for this is also a moment of poetic self-recognition in which Keats discovers his true muse': 'But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? / His Psyche true!' (22-3). Bloom's com­ mentary on the final stanza conveys his own excitement: Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep ... (50-5) Bloom writes: 'the familiar Romantic conceit of an internalized nature almost transcends its perspectivizing limitations, so extraordinary is Keats's art. ... Internalization has taken him where he has not been before, and it is always a surprise to realize that this landscape, and this oxymoronic intensity, are wholly inside his psyche.' There is an 'extraordinary' physical naturalisation in 'branched thoughts', which, with the effort of creative realisation, the Keatsian 'pleasant pain', become 'darkcluster'd trees' that 'Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep', where the word 'fledge' conjures up sight, sensation, and mental activity with impressive economy. The activity of Keats's language here, as he tries to realise his 'fledgling' thoughts, is astonishing. The tug between idealisation and actuality is very real in this poetry, and is felt at every reading: And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!

(58-67)

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'The wreath'd trellis of a working brain' is antithetical to 'I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly' (of the first stanza), but it also contains a tense antithesis within itself, 'wreath'd trellis' conjur­ ing up imaginary structures against which, but also by means of which, the 'working brain' would re-figure its vision. Bloom feels this tug between idealisation and actuality when he writes of 'Ode to Psyche' that 'Keats projects the past as feigning and introjects the future as love, but even as there is no present moment, so there is no place of presence, nor perhaps will there ever be.'7 It is not necessary to follow Bloom in the deploy­ ment here of his favourite Freudian tropes, to observe the strong presence in the poem of the optative mood of desire, in alliance with the vocative case: 'O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers' (which itself is a powerful evocation of non-presence, akin to the 'ditties of no tone' of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'), 'And pardon' (line 3); and then, in stanza three, the exclamatory vocative 'O brightest', and the poet beseeching, 'So let me be thy choir ...'. In the final stanza this mood becomes more insistent, the repeated future tense (there are three 'will's and three 'shall's) conjuring up a landscape of desire. The scene is one of mental anticipation - 'To let the warm Love in' - and yet it is made very much present in the realisation of the poetry. Desire makes present what is selfdeclaredly imagined and imaginary: an absence made present. The mental and emotional life of this poetry never keeps still. The climactic moment where the poet fully acknowledges the inwardness of his inspiration, in the third stanza's proud line 'I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired', comes curiously out of the lines that precede: Yet even in these days so far retir'd From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. (40-3)

The effect of these lines is disorientating, even as the poet finds his bearings. If it is asked what the poet syntactically 'sees', the answer has come two lines earlier, with 'thy lucent fans'. But the fans have dropped away by the time we get to 'I see' because of the intervention of the line 'Fluttering among the faint Olympians'; and so the line 'I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired' begins to take on an independent, declarative life of its own. This becomes even more the case with the words 'and sing', because grammatically it is more awkward, though possible, to

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sing lucent fans than to see them (one would normally sing of lucent fans). It is entirely appropriate that sight and voice, seeing and singing, should thus blend and blur, since the poet's song is inspired by his gaze. The move from the beautifully fluttering, but at the same time plaintively defiant line 'Fluttering among the faint Olympians' to the self-assertion of 'I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired' is breathtaking. That move mimics a mental and emotional shift from tentativeness to a confidence in visionary inwardness. Bloom sees 'Ode to Psyche' as participating in Keats's deepen­ ing understanding of himself and his poetic vocation. In arguing that Keats 'fully found himself' and reached poetic 'maturity' in the writing of the ode, he makes much of the fact that it was composed soon after the abandonment of the first Hyperion.8 He writes that in the ode Keats 'discovers his true muse [of poetic selfhood], though in a gently idealized form, not the grandly purgatorial form she will assume as Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion/ 9 The later, also abandoned, Fall of Hyperion interiorises the first Hyperion, the narrative of the fall of the Titans, within the priestess Moneta's skull, thus making us aware of this process of inwardness by objectifying the act of consciousness. In the second Hyperion, soon after the narrative of the original Hyperion has been introduced by Moneta ('Deep in the shady sadness of a vale', I, 294) the poet-figure breaks in: whereon there grew A power within me of enormous ken To see as a god sees, and take the depth Of things as nimbly as the outward eye Can size and shape pervade. (Fall of Hyperion, I, 302-6) A few lines later the original Hyperion fragment resumes. These interjected lines bring home the act of consciousness, of envisioning, as experienced by the poet-figure, paralleling Moneta's god-like perspective. The notion that the internalisation in 'Ode to Psyche' predicts what goes on in The Fall of Hyperion is taken up by Helen Vendler in her book devoted to the odes. The 'theater of the mind' in the ode's last stanza, she writes, 'will become eventually Moneta's hollow skull'. 'Theater of the mind' is a helpful phrase: it yokes together inner and outer, but it also intimates mental action, the playing out of impulses. Vendler sees her book as a corrective to John Jones's John Keats's Dream of Truth, which examines Keats's

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'poetry of sensation in terms of its extraordinary empathic power', in Vendler's words. By contrast, Vendler wants to emphasise the tug between 'sensations' and 'thoughts' in Keats's poetry: the odes trace a search for an 'intensity' of intellect that would rival the intensity of sense. In fact, the intensity to be found in the mind attracted Keats at least as much as, if not more than, the apparently easier intensity of sense. According to Vendler, Keats wants 'imaginative intellectual ecstasy' rather than 'physical sensation'. This has the right emphasis, although in practice Vendler's reading of the odes can seem to over-schematise their thought, thus losing the sense of the intense 'working' of the brain which their language figures forth.10 Thus 'Ode to a Nightingale' famously ends in questions ('Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?, 79-80); but those questions are alive in the dynamics and language of the vision enacted at the centre of the poem. The 'dull brain' is enlivened into a 'working brain': 4 Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 5 I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

(31-50)

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The poetry takes its chances, alters course; it is true to its own emotional curve, its own fluctuating moods. The poetry flies 'viewless'; it 'cannot see', does not know, where it is going all the time. 'Viewless' itself is a tricky word: unable to see, or unable to be seen? 'Already with thee! tender is the night' can sound like envy, followed three lines later by a note of despondency in 'But here there is is no light'. But this mood modulates, with the word 'Save' ('Save what from heaven'), into the visionary paradise of stanza 5, where darkness ('I cannot see what flowers are at my feet') gives way, in a sort of synesthesia, to the 'guessing' of incense ('guess each sweet'); so that to be viewless, without sight, allows for insight beyond the realm of sight. The poetry conjures up a hallucinatory vision which cannot make up its mind whether it is time-ridden or timeless. 'Season­ able month' (not 'seasonal' but 'seasonable') means a month suitable to the time of year, according to the OED, which cites this phrase. But the time of year turns out to be difficult to pin down: the months implied by the botanical list seem to be May through September. The poetry encompasses the year's welcomings ('coming musk-rose') and its farewells ('fast fading violets'), and cannot resist the fulfilled, seductively ample music of 'The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves'. The poet has got caught up with, almost taken in by, his own nostalgic cadence of endings. This is a 'richly dying' music, to adapt a phrase from the next stanza; and so when that stanza begins: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die ...

(51-5) - when the poem goes on to say this, it is as though, in listening to the nightingale's song, the poet has been listening to his own music of 'easeful Death' in the previous stanza. The incursion at this point in the poem of the sense of death has been fore­ shadowed. 'Embalmed darkness' feelingly predicts 'Darkling I listen' and 'easeful death'. 'To take into the air my quiet breath' is an extraordinary line, intimating at once death and song, expira­ tion and inspiration. Then there is another mood-fluctuation as the poetry backs off with the distinctly unseductive cadence of 'Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain - / To thy high requiem become a sod' (59-60). This is the opposite of calling

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death 'soft names': the poetry arrests itself in mid poetic flight. Thus the poet feels the pulse of his own emotions even as the poetry unfolds. At its finest Keats's poetry feels through its language; it thinks feelingly. The language is very inward: 'Darkling I listen'. This is 'shadowy thought' in action. The way in which this poetry listens to itself, apprehends itself, acknowledges its own wish-fulfilment and fallibility, feeling its way as mood and emotion change, is typified by that famously self-reflexive moment, the repetition across the stanza-break at the end of 'Ode to a Nightingale': 'in faery lands forlorn. / Forlorn! the very word... (70-1). Here is 'the very word' acting in the theatre of the mind. Both Bloom and Vendler emphasise Wallace Stevens's Keatsian inheritance. In view of Bloom's claims for the centrality of 'Ode to Psyche', it is not surprising he should argue that Stevens's 'radical isolation' is what makes him 'Keats's descendant';11 like Keats, Stevens is a poet continually thrown back on his 'sole self'. However, as Vendler's studies always remember, Stevens works at a level of abstraction alien to Keats: 'Stevens had so absorbed Keats that Keats acted in his mind as a perpendicular from which he constructed his own oblique poems'. But Vendler also makes clear that Stevens had attended to Keats's 'theater of the mind'. Stevens has a similar phrase, 'man's interior world'; and Vendler writes, 'that interior world, our construct of the world and all the world we have, is one of great vividness and reality'.12 It must seem obvious, though, that we cannot say of Keats what Vendler says of Stevens, that 'a reflexive intelligence that cannot evade a knowledge of its own processes is always present'.13 Yet we should be wary of finding ourselves saying this sort of thing about Keats. We can be alert to the presence of the 'working brain' in his poems, that they are self-questioning and self-searching, without, for instance, going down Marjorie Levinson's road to argue that they are totally knowing, that they do not deploy a 'lyric I', not, in her phrase, 'audible voices, but visible signs of canonical voices'.14 That said, if in Keats self-consciousness is reticent, it can seem less so after reading Stevens; this at any rate seems to have been Vendler's experience. As Vendler has demonstrated, Keats's 'To Autumn' pervades Stevens's poetry. First, some comments on the final stanza: Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

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And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (23-33) The poem ends on a note that rests content in the present moment ('and now with treble soft...') without contemplating the thought of the coming Winter, of Autumn as death's harbinger. There is, to be sure, 'a resistance involved', to borrow a phrase by Stevens ('The Course of a Particular'), but it has come and gone by the third line of Keats's final stanza. Unlike 'Ode to a Nightingale' which ends in questions, 'To Autumn' has done with questioning by the time it reaches conclusion. That other music, 'the songs of Spring', is gently put aside, not, though, to dismiss the feelings of transience and nostalgia in the questions 'Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?', but to absorb them into the music of Autumn which is Keats's poem - and thus to overcome them. Transitoriness is absorbed into a richly equable vision. The day's end is amply mitigated not only by the sound of the line 'While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day' and by the word 'soft', but also by the rich pun in 'dying'. The choir may be 'wailful' and the gnats may 'mourn', but the falling cadence ('the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows') is lifted by the addition of the words 'borne aloft'. The poetry floats on alterna­ tives: 'borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies'. The sheep are 'full-grown lambs', a way of putting it that harks back to Spring. The last line gathers to itself the poetry's sinking-rising, living-dying impulses in a beautiful equilibrium: 'And gathering swallows twitter in the skies'. Swallows gather before migrating, but these swallows are not quite bidden adieu: 'twitter' counter­ balances 'gathering', and 'dies' five lines earlier is lifted by its rhyme word, 'skies'. Intimations of time passing are there, but are absorbed into the poem's movement, contained by and in its mood, its equable contemplation. Not only is there the gentle admonishment not to think of the songs of Spring; there are the bees in the first stanza that 'think warm days will never cease' (10), which quietly acknowledges, while warding off, the thought that they will; the 'oozings' watched at the end of the second stanza are the 'last', and yet that thought is at once balanced by

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the phrase 'hours by hours' (22), by the feeling of a perpetually present time. What 'To Autumn' does not do is come up with a statement such as 'Death is the mother of beauty', the statement around which Stevens's poem 'Sunday Morning' revolves. The statement is not irrelevant to Keats's ode, nor indeed to much of his other poetry, but it is not part of the ode's mental theatre. Vendler writes of the end of 'Sunday Morning': 'The scene is being used largely as an instance of a thesis, not [as in 'To Autumn'] surrendered to in and for itself.'15 'To Autumn' begins by invoking the season, but turns into a poem of self-invocation and psychic equilibrium. The form of 'Sunday Morning' - thoughts of a fictive 'she' about her desire for 'some imperishable bliss', modulated in and answered by the poet-preceptor's conscious­ ness ('preceptor' is Vendler's useful word) - demonstrates the several removes of Stevens's poem from Keats's, that it is the product of a 'reflexive intelligence'. 'Sunday Morning' has its Keats-like music of luxury, eroticism, pang and desire, much of it derived, this time, from 'Ode on a Grecian Urn': VI Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.16 But this music is only Keats-Zzfe, for the diction and expression stand at a cerebral distance from Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Stevens's poet-preceptor speaks of the 'inarticulate pang' in a slightly world-weary 'sameness' of phrasing ('rivers like our own that seek for seas / They never find, the same receding shores / That never touch'), whereas Keats enacts the pang: 'Bold Lover,

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never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal...' (17-18). Or again, Keats's unchanging boughs - 'Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu' (21-2) - are transformed into Stevens's, 'Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth...'. In Stevens's lines the derisive touch, the slight curl of the lip occasioned by the very act of conceiving this cold pastoral, a derision audible in the allitera­ tions 'hang/heavy' and 'perfect/perishing', alerts us to the fact that the poet has already succeeded in emotionally detaching himself from his subject. This tone becomes even more audible with the notion that 'they', that is the denizens of this imagined paradise, should 'pick the strings of our insipid lutes!' - a line which, with self-defensive irony, calls into question Stevens's own, and by implication Keats's, and indeed all earthly poetic 'musics'. However, it is typical of Stevens that he should then go on to undermine his own irony by producing a rich and serious music, the opposite of insipid: 'Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, / Within whose burning bosom we devise / Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.' But if we compare this with, for instance, the Keatsian music of 'All breathing human passion far above, / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue' (28-30), we can hear how, while Stevens's music richly registers the burning inarticulate pangs of human desire, the burning bosom, it at the same time steps back to acknowledge that our attempts to accommodate them, even to make a theology out of them, are a devising, a human fictiveness. One of the swallows at the end of 'To Autumn' has evidently migrated to the end of the fourth stanza of 'Sunday Morning', where the poet-preceptor declares that no make-believe paradises of religion or romance will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings. 'The consummation of the swallow's wings' is an image that reflects the enduring nature of the woman's emotional transactions with the world (which have been described earlier in the poem) - although, as 'tipped' intimates, this is a qualified endurance, as such transactions necessarily are. The line has an air of fulfilment, like the last line of 'To Autumn': 'And gathering

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swallows twitter in the skies'. But 'consummation' does something else; it provides comment on the emotional landscape. It stands back; in Vendler's word, it implies a 'thesis'; it is both within and without the scene; it implies an onlooker not totally absorbed into what is being looked on. The swallow is not being 'surrendered to in and for itself'. At the end of 'Sunday Morning' pigeons replace the swallow: At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. At the end of 'To Autumn' the reader is made to feel those 'undulations' between sinking and rising, but here we are told about them, and how to react to them, that they are 'ambiguous'. The poetry poses and poises its opposites in an impressive rhetorical balance: 'wings' balances 'sink'; 'downward' balances 'extended'; and 'casual' is poised with and against the rhetorical symmetry of these lines. At the same time the reader comes almost to visualise, by means of this thinking image, the abstraction 'ambiguous undulations'. Stevens's poetry is self-consciously of the mind. Its realities are, in his phrase, 'things as they seem', because for him how they seem cannot be differentiated from how they are. 'To Autumn' is a poem of consciousness, but it is not self-conscious in Stevens's way. Even so, the poem composes a mental landscape, achieving that psychic equilibrium. It knows mortality, but it is not about mortality. 'Negative Capability' is a phrase that has attracted almost as many interpretations as Eliot's 'objective correlative', but Keats's further words, 'without any irritable reaching after fact and reason', are helpful:17 change and mortality are acknowledged in the poetry of 'To Autumn', but there is no irritable reaching after them. They comprise part of the poem's mental landscape; any irritations have been put to rest, and, like the gleaner, the poem keeps a steady head. The Bloom-Vendler approach to Keats has been under pressure for the last fifteen years or so, principally from new historicist critics led by Jerome McGann in his much cited essay of 1979, 'Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism'. In spite, or because of the situating of 'To Autumn' in its publishing, social and political contexts in an attempt to demonstrate how, in Seamus Heaney's words, the 'poem floats adjacent to, parallel to, the historical moment',18 McGann finds himself concluding,

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essentially, that the poem is escapist. As my account of the poem has tried to show, I do not think it is, although its relationship with the 'outer' world is not straightforward. Vendler is fond of quoting Stevens on 'imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality', and in her essay 'Keats and the Use of Poetry' she argues that the relationship between art and life implied by this statement is Keatsian.19 Pressing back against reality is not escapism; it is maintaining mental equilibrium. It is significant that reactions to Stevens have been undergoing a similar sea-change. For instance Milton Bates, in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1986), argues fairly that Stevens's political conservatism did not blind him to social realities during the interwar years, and that his poems can be shown to reflect this. But for this sort of case to be made, the poetry needs translating so far out of its idiom that one is inclined to ask, to what end? Stevens's poetry itself shows that it knows full well the imaginative terrain it is occupying and defending, that it is aware of the charge of 'aestheticism' - if indeed that is a charge (Vendler would not think it is). 'The Death of a Soldier' is another of his many poems that have to do with the Keatsian season of Autumn: Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops, When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction. This has been taken to be a politically quietist poem. But it is open-eyed about what it cannot talk about, the death of a soldier. It searches about for an appropriate idiom, coming to a premature closing cadence in the first stanza, as if to say this is all there is to say: 'Life contracts and death is expected, / As in a season of autumn. / The soldier falls.' In American English there is the autumn/fall pun, though how appropriate, albeit clipped, at this memorial moment is open to question. In the second stanza the poem tries to keep going, to pick itself up, but finds itself turning

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lO O

pompous, becoming the thing it wants to ward off, 'Calling for pomp': 'He does not become a three-days personage' mimics the idiom and stance it would shun. But when in the next stanza the poem starts again for the second time, it manages to find a more suitable register by acknowledging its problem: 'Death is absolute and without memorial'. And this time the poem does not come to a full-stop with the phrase 'As in a season of autumn', but manages, haltingly, to keep going. The season that traditionally ushers in thoughts of endings and death, is discreetly and unpompously extended into a coda that extends the poem's ending. 'The wind stops', but the poem does not, and carries on past the stanza break by hesitantly repeating this line about the wind stopping, but with the addition of an 'and' ('When the wind stops and') to allow itself a beautifully managed, not too swelling cadence towards an underspoken affirmation of life as, at any rate, a supportable 'nevertheless': life must go on, as we say. Life does go on, in its 'direction', but the poem is too feelingly reticent to say what that may be. The poem's self-reflexive intelligence can be felt constantly at work in the texture of the language. It achieves those 'heavens' and 'clouds', the subdued lyric moment of the final stanza, against the odds, knowing the cost. A line such as Keats's fullthroatedly autumnal 'While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day' would, needless to say, be out of place in 'The Death of a Soldier'. 'Nevertheless' Stevens's poem tacitly registers that such full-throatedness is possible - if not in this poem, and if only by encouraging his reader to hark back to Keats. NOTES

1. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963; London: Hogarth Press, 1992): 'Keats saw ... that he w as and could only be a modern poet: that he could hardly escape a poetry that w as turned more to the inner life/ (p. 322) Of The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream Bate writes: 'In the powerful fragment that he now wrote, anticipating much of what poetry was to do a century later, the interest that takes precedence over every other is the self as it tries to come to terms with reality.' (p. 587) And comparing that poem with Hyperion: A Fragment, he writes: 'The problems involved in the poetic treatment of the growth of modern consciousness are now faced directly at the start.' (p. 602) 2. John Bayley, The Uses of Division (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 112 . 3. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: OUP, 1976). M y opening paragraph attempts to sketch only the broad outline. In the last decade or so the picture has become more complicated, and American critics in particular, partly in reaction to the BloomVendler approach, have been anxious to relate Keats's style to its social matrix: see especially Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of

The Inward Keats Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1988). 4. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994), passim. 5. Bate, John Keats: T h e modern, respectful attitude towards this ode is deserved. But the itch for novelty has encouraged a few critics to suggest that the poem, in some dark but fundamental w ay, has more to it as a whole than do the later odes. Am ong the many interests of the ode, the principal one is that, through writing it, Keats learned better how to proceed.' (p. 491) 6. T. S. Eliot, 'Introduction', in Paul Valery, The A rt of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (London: Routledge, 1958), pp. vii-xxiv (p. xi). 'Shelley and Keats', in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 100. 7. This quotation and those in the previous paragraph are from Bloom, A M ap o f M isreading (New York: OUP, 1975), pp. 1 5 3 ,1 5 4 ,1 5 5 . Bloom is evidently using an unauthoritative text which splits the first stanza of 'Ode to Psyche' in two; I have adapted my description of his commentary according to the authoritative text. 8. See Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1976), p. 122. 9. Bloom, A M ap, pp. 153-4 . 10. The quotations in this paragraph are from Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1983), pp. 57, 8,46. 11. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 128. 12. The two previous quotations by Vendler are from Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1986), pp. 48, 5. See also Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 170. 13. Vendler, 'The Hunting of Wallace Stevens', in The M usic of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard UP, 1988), p. 77. 14. Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory, p. 15. 15. Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1969), p. 49. 16. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1955). All subsequent quotations of Stevens's poetry are from this edition. 17. Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 2 1 December 18 17. 18. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 12 1. 19. Wallace Stevens, 'The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words', in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1942; N ew York: Random House, n.d.), p. 36; Vendler, The M usic of What Happens, p. 127.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Keats's Poetry: The Reading of an Ever-Changing Tale' M ICHAEL O 'NEILL

In 'Sleep and Poetry' Keats writes that 'Life' is 'The reading of an ever-changing tale' (90, 91), and, typically, his rhythms and images display an engrossed purchase on their subject. Yet this subject often includes the process of representation. In the lines referred to, Keats may imply that poetry comes as naturally as the leaves to a tree, but he hints, too, that 'Life' can only be known as it is 'read' artistically. If 'Life' is an 'ever-changing tale' in Keats's work, it is so because the 'tale' is being told by a writer quick to change mood and self-examining about the value and purpose of his poetic telling. In 'Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed', Keats declares, 'Dear Reynolds, I have a mysterious tale / And cannot speak it' (86-7). The last four words address a problem that is also a spur to further creativity. Though the larger 'tale' vanishes, the 'first page' (87) is read with unexpected power. In fact, the trope of reading gives way to that of seeing, suggesting the eruption into the proposed 'tale' of data that the narrator cannot control: I was at home, And should have been most happy - but I saw Too far into the sea; where every maw The greater on the less feeds evermore: But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction, And so from happiness I far was gone. (92-8) A flat, authenticating urgency of tone shows in the sustaining of the same rhyme sound through four lines (93-6), which supports the poem's air of present discovery, for all its use of the past tense. The word 'far' (98) contributes to the impression that Keats has embarked on a voyage 'from happiness' which still has some distance to go. The lines pull in different directions: confident that poetry should celebrate 'happiness', they also know that it is the

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poet's duty to confront the 'eternal fierce destruction' emblem­ atised by the seascape. Here Keats may see 'Too far' because, 'Lost in a sort of purgatory blind' (80), he cannot see far enough cannot, that is, see his way out of the dilemma the poem has charted. In making this confession, however, the poem also asserts; poetry, its loose-knit couplets discover, is a medium allowing for the articulation of difficult intimations, a vehicle permitting the exploration of crisis. At once sympathetic and an enigma, teasing and teased out of thought, Keats manifests himself textually in quite different ways. There is the Keats of the letters, by turns gossipy, eloquent, confiding, affectionate, profound, and observant, a multifaceted figure who offers himself as an object lesson in poetic development. There is the Keats of the poetry, now caught up in acts of linguistic alchemy, now burdened by self-questioning about the role of the poet and the significance of poetry. Those 'nows' are not just rhetorical. There is, it would be foolish to deny, heroic improvement over the course of Keats's truncated career. To make the point, one has only to contrast the way reflexive concern with writing is handled in these lines from 'To Charles Cowden Clarke' The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.' And so I did. When many lines I'd written, Though with their grace I was not oversmitten ...

(99-102) - with the treatment of the same subject in the brooding conclusion to the induction of The Fall of Hyperion: Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be poet's or fanatic's will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. ( 1,16-18) The lines in the early poem are written by a gamesome tyro; the lines in The Fall are the work of an anguished master. It would, however, be wrong simply to see Keats's career as a painful progress towards greater, because more self-aware, poetry. For all the programmes of development sketched in his poems and letters, Keats is guarded about viewing 'self-awareness' as an unquestionable virtue. His work is often anxious about modes of knowing appropriate to poetry. But this anxiety is coupled productively with a belief in poetic exploration, described in one

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poem ('When I have fears that I may cease to be') as involving 'the magic hand of chance' (8). In the poem 'In drear nighted Decem­ ber' Keats praises the tree as 'Too happy' (2) because it cannot remember its 'green felicity' (4). By contrast, 'rhyme' (24) is crea­ tively perplexed and haunted by erotic longing and loss, 'The feel of not to feel it' (21), a perplexed haunting around which John Ashbery weaves his ironic post-modernist variation in 'Too Happy, Happy Tree'.1 Ashbery's manner declares an a priori conviction that nature and consciousness are caught in the snares of language. In his poem Keats seeks to house a complex know­ ledge of absence and loss under the roof of sensation; yet, called into being by the 'feel' it is said never to have found words for, 'rhyme' stands apart from 'feel' by virtue of its failure to rhyme with any lines in the stanza (it rhymes with the final lines of stanzas 1 and 2). Keats's poetic self-questioning here is glancing and oblique. Rarely does it pursue a predestined route in his work. 'Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell', opens one sonnet, an opening stranded between embarrassment and would-be angst, and passing into a swerving assertiveness characteristic of Keatsian self-exploration. An octave concerned with the difficulty of discovering a supra-human 'voice' gives way to a sestet settling for knowledge of poetic power that goes on to trouble itself: 'I know this being's lease - / My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads' (9-10). The phrasing is tortuous, and yet it twists its way towards an intricate eloquence. Keats's glimpse of the 'utmost blisses' made possible by 'fancy' depends on acceptance of his 'being's lease'. But this acceptance soon relaxes, in the poem's finest lines, into an enlarged sense of what lies behind the poem's impatient bewilderment: namely, the desire for an end to or transformation of consciousness (including 'fancy'). Keats, for all the promised intensity of 'Verse, fame, and beauty' (13), prefers the 'intenser' (14) experience of 'death ... life's high meed' (14). That leap from pride in his 'fancy' to a conjuring up of 'death' points to Keats's intent ambivalence about the poetic vocation. Imagined deaths in Keats signal the emergence of crises and further thresholds. In 'Sleep and Poetry' he pleads for aid from 'Poesy' (53) that 'I may die a death / Of luxury' (58-9). The coyly withheld phrase 'Of luxury' cannot erase a desire on the young poet's part that he should undergo a change of state, a change which, in Endymion, is re-imagined as the product of 'enthralments far / More self-destroying' (I, 798-9): enthralments that may contain a threat. It is Apollo's fate in Hyperion to seek to

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'Die into life' (III, 130), and frequently Keats uses ideas of death to stage a poetic rite of passage. Such rites involve uncertainty. Affirming the value of such uncertainty, this essay explores the poetry's concern with its status as poetry and with the status of poetry more generally. Central to the essay is the contention that 'poetic achievement' is among the category of 'Things real', in Keats's phrase, even if it requires 'a greeting of the Spirit to make [it] wholly exist' (Letters, I, p. 243). But to say this is not to enlist Keats in any art-for-art'ssake cadre. Typically the category of 'Things real' - applied to 'existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare' occurs in a letter (of 13 March 1818) which includes the remark, 'I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance' (Letters, I, pp. 243, 242). Keats's love-affair with poetry is rarely without a 'sceptical' dimension. Significant in this respect are the poems which he wrote about Robert Burns as a result of his northern walking tour in 1818. 'There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain' is eerily discomforted by the business of poetic pilgrimage. Its alexandrines, purposefully lumbering, find themselves moving, as in a trance, 'beyond the bourn of care, / Beyond the sweet and bitter world - beyond it unaware' (29-30). Vision's offer of transcendence is, here, a nightmarish exit from 'the sweet and bitter world'. Keats recoils from the imaginings by which he is visited, and prays that he may 'keep his vision clear from speck, his inward sight unblind' (48). Keeping 'inward sight unblind' involves resistance to certain tugs of the imagination. In 'On Visiting the Tomb of Burns', written a few weeks earlier, he also experiences an obscure sense of poss­ ible solipsism at the heart of aesthetic disinterestedness. Bringing to the poem's surface an underlying discontent, Keats shapes this involved generalisation: All is cold beauty; pain is never done For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise, The real of beauty, free from that dead hue Sickly imagination and sick pride Cast wan upon it! (8-12) John Barnard glosses these lines thus: Pain is never done for him who has a mind to relish the full reality of beauty, and to discount (as can Minos, judge of the

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dead in the underworld) the pallor which the deceiving imagination and human arrogance cast upon it.2 This is helpful, but it is worth adding that the passage has a tangled intensity illustrative of troubled feelings. In the same breath the lines raise up and deplore. They set the Minos-like intuition of 'The real of beauty' above the hues cast by 'Sickly imagination and sick pride', yet they associate such an intuition with endless 'pain' and a judge from Hades. The recollection of lines from Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' speech (III, i, 83-4) indicates the presence of a self-divided consciousness, one made anxious by the thought of 'beauty' as a palliative for the 'suffocation of accidents' (Letters, I, p. 179) experienced by a poet such as Burns. For this consciousness there is little gap between 'The real of beauty' and 'cold beauty'. Moreover the self­ dissatisfaction evident in 'Sickly' and 'sick' contends with the awareness that without the 'dead hue' cast by imagination 'pain is never done'. At the same time this 'pain' is not without its positive side. It is apprehensible only by a person 'who has mind to relish ... / The real of beauty'. The Burns poems emphasise that Keats's wholehearted pursuit of poetic excellence is crossed (though never deflected) by a fear that poetry may itself be 'a mere Jack a lanthern'. In the journal letter to George and Georgiana Keats of 14 February to 3 May 1819 he produces, in his entry for 19 March, a meditation on what it would be like to have 'a speculative Mind' (Letters, II, p. 80); it concludes: I am however young writing at random - straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness - without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind m[a]y fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel - By a superior being our reasoningjs] may take the same tone - though erroneous they may be fine - This is the very thing in which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy - For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth - Give me this credit - Do you not think I strive - to know myself? (Letters, II, pp. 80-1)

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Here Keats dramatises the clash between 'poetry' and 'philo­ sophy', the former being identified with the verbal enactment of creaturely energies, the latter imagined as a disinterested state beyond a writer 'straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness'. Poetry may not be so 'fine' as philosophy, but it turns out to be the medium through which Keats can communicate a 'complex Mind - one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits - who would exist partly on sensation partly on thought' (Letters, I, p. 186). The style of the long passage quoted above - shying away from 'consequitive reasoning' (Letters, I, p. 185) - makes the point. 'Truth' is trans­ cendent but bloodless whereas an 'eagle' is non-conceptually 'there'. Keats's 'This' ('This is the very thing in which consists poetry') sweeps up into itself pleasure in 'energies', delighted mockery of 'our reasonings' as possibly best understood as amusement for 'a superior being', and the mind's awareness of its own - in some ways -- transgressive pleasures. For Keats does 'strive - to know [him]self', the more intriguingly because he is so alive to the pitfalls of certain forms of knowing. Applied to Keats's work, 'self-knowing', 'self-aware' and 'selfconscious' are terms which need to be alienated from the image they conjure up of the responsible intellectual at home and happiest with abstraction. After all, 'Sensations' and 'Thoughts' those famous antagonists (see Letters, I, p. 185) - criss-cross and entwine in much of his finest verse (as Keats's account of the 'complex Mind' he desired might lead one to expect). For John Bayley, Keats's freedom as a poet lies in the escape from selfconsciousness made by passages such as the opening to Endyun­ ion, Book III.3 For Marjorie Levinson Keats's poetry is marked at a stylistic level by a masturbatory self-consciousness reflective of 'the complex identity problems of a middle class in a middling stage'.4 Both critics, illuminating as they are in their opposed ways, risk selling Keats short by seeing his self-consciousness as a poet in terms of entrapment. Consciousness of entrapment is, indeed, both theme and dilemma in Keats's work; but Keats is able to subsume this consciousness within artistic structures of compelling force. In this respect, Keats's playful account of the 'poetical Character' (in a letter to Richard Woodhouse of 27 October 1818) is full of resourceful propositions: As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a

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thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body -The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute the poet has none; no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. (Letters, I, p. 387) Keats is a poet whose language is continually in for and filling some other body. We respond unreservedly to his poetry because it gives us what Barthes (only half-mockingly) calls 'the hallucina­ tory relish of "reality"',5 the illusion of presence. Through his use of language Keats is able to 'reproduce', in Shelley's words, 'the common universe of which we are portions and percipients'.6 'The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass' (3) at the start of The Eve of St Agnes, where the rhythm limps in sympathy with the trembling creature, is one example. 'A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings' (216) in the same poem is another, a line where the bunching assonance and startling verb animate the inanimate: a line which, in keeping with the poem's 'knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade' (Letters, II, p. 360), blazes against a background of 'twilight saints, and dim emblazonings' (215). In doing so, the moment offers, in miniature, an example of the poem's attitude towards the 'old romance' (41) with which its maker's 'brain' is 'new stuff'd' (40). The genre of romance makes possible, and yet is outdone by, The Eve of St Agnes; at the same time the poem is unshowily haunted by the sense that it may be merely imaginary, even as its imaginativeness is glowingly, richly substantial. A third, even more far-reaching, instance occurs in the lines about Ruth in the Nightingale Ode: 'Perhaps the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn' (65-7): more farreaching because not only do the words 'found a path / Through' make of Ruth's sad heart an aching, penetrable space but also because the initial 'Perhaps' signals to us the poet who is 'filling

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some other Body', or indeed for whom another body is filling in. The 'sole self' ('Ode to a Nightingale', 72) is just round the corner of these seemingly so self-forgetful lines - as it is in the sentence after the passage about the 'poetical Character' just quoted, which amusingly returns to the apparently selfless self: 'If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would right write no more?' (Letters, I, p. 387) And here the 'compositions and decompositions' (Letters, I, p. 265), in Keats's phrase, start again. 'His art is happy, but who knows his mind?', asks Yeats's Tile' in 'Ego Dominus Tuus'.7 Helen Vendler's remark that 'In fact Keats's mind was difficult for Keats himself to know'8 suggests the tussles involved in Keats's way of being self-conscious in his poetry. For Keats the poet of 'no Identity' coexists with Keats the poet of 'the sole self'. Keats the unshockable 'camelion' poet is also concerned that writing should engage, in ways his poetry moves us by only adumbra­ ting, with issues of 'right'. Again the poet who would be 'con­ tinually in for - and filling some other Body' seems at times to flinch from the demands imposed by such absorption in otherness. Keats defines the 'poetical Character' with brio; he does not count the cost which may be exacted by the implicit programme he outlines. Yet the poetry enacts a sense of this cost, and keeps aestheticising self-regard at bay. So at the start of 'Ode to a Nightingale' Keats begins in a depressed state. Or does he? My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk ... (1-4)

The first three words assert the presence of the suffering self; but this impression is modified by what follows, where what 'pains' is a 'drowsy numbness': numbness and pain refuse either to support one another fully or to be wholly distinct. 'My sense', too, is inclusive, incorporating, in Morris Dickstein's words, 'mind as well as feeling'.9 The lines surprise; they confuse categories as 'drowsy numbness' lapses from and prepares for a heightening of consciousness. If the subsequent similes elaborate the original sensation (which refuses fully to define itself), they also draw away from it. The opening four lines are, then, in keeping with Keats's sense of the 'poetical Character' as living in Tight and shade'. But at the start of the ode this living in light and shade is less a delighted relishing than a potentially creative inhabiting.

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Keats goes on to write: "Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, / But being too happy in thine happiness' (5-6), where 'too happy' casts a self-conscious glance at the asserted absorption in the bird's 'happiness'. Empathy as burden as well as release is a theme minimised in the account of the 'poetical Character', but it comes to the fore in the ode. In fact, empathy in the ode is at once burden and release, at odds with and inextricable from the longing for escape. Keats is able to throw himself into imaginings of escape, but these imaginings take on a force that counterpoints the escapist impulse. In the second stanza of 'Ode to a Nightingale' the poetry dwells inside a pastoral haven in the act of longing for 'a draught of vintage' (11). This haven is at once a place made possible by poetry and the repetition in a finer tone of the world which Keats asserts his desire to leave. Desiring to go, he lingers with alliterative longing over the 'beaded bubbles winking at the brim' (17) of the drink which he trusts will allow him to 'leave the world unseen' (19). Throughout 'Ode to a Nightingale' the poetry is detained by such impulses of imaginative empathy from its dark goal of escape. Emotionally volatile, the poem desires this detaining, even as it continually shapes its next move. In stanza 5 the 'guessing' of 'sweets' (43) turns into a premonitory scenting and sensing of process as the poet imagines 'Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; / And mid-May's eldest child, / The coming musk-rose' (47-9). The violets may be 'Fast fading', but the line, opening with two strong stresses, pauses over their departure. The subsequent 'And' breathes even-toned acceptance of transience; process is transformed, as so often in Keats's great poetry, into procession. Yet, already looming into view, is the next stanza's longing for death. In the lines just quoted 'cover'd up in leaves' suggests, by analogy, how imaginative involvement can feel like being buried alive. Keats's comment on Milton's Satan entering the serpent (Paradise Lost, Book IX, 179-91) is illuminating here: 'Whose head is not dizzy at the prosaible speculations of satan in the serpent prison - no passage of poetry ever can give a greater pain of suffocation.'10 As Nicola Trott remarks, 'Satan-in-the-serpent suggests an egotistical poet in chameleon's clothing'.11 Indeed, Keats is a poet who relishes and suffers his own gift of identifi­ cation with pain and pleasure, joy and suffering. That gift presents him with a poisoned chalice in The Fall of Hyperion. Forced to sustain an unaided vision, Keats portrays himself as

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driven to the limits of endurance: 'Oftentimes I pray'd / Intense, that death would take me from the vale / And all its burthens' (I, 396-8). In these lines 'gusto' turns sour, and yet the tasting of that sourness is what gives the poem 'gusto'. 'It lives in gusto': Keats's sense of the 'poetical Character' is shaped by the criticism of William Hazlitt, whose account of Miltonic gusto could be applied to an aspect of Keats's use of language: 'His imagination has a double relish of its objects, an inveterate attachment to the things he describes, and to the words describing them'.12 In Hazlitt's 'On Poetry in General', we find a parallel to Keats's simultaneous trust in imagination and fear that 'the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry'.13 Keats steals the last phrase for Lamia where he laments that 'Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings' (II, 234); and nowhere in Keats is gusto more powerfully or more tragically displayed than at the end of Lamia. Here Keats drives a sword through the heart of his conviction that 'What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not' (Letters, I, p. 184). Gusto is present in the way the couplets are a steady-paced match for the poem's final metamorphosis of the 'tender-person'd Lamia ... into a shade' (II, 238). As 'tenderperson'd' indicates, the poem's sympathies are for Lamia; but it hands her over to Apollonius's rationalist gaze. That said, Marjorie Levinson shrewdly points out that criticism of the poem tends to reproduce 'The binary acts and understandings to which [Lamia] gives rise in the poem', setting, for instance, 'poetry' against 'philosophy'.14 There is, in fact, a strong, if oblique, connection between the vanishing Lamia and the staring Apol­ lonius. 'Lashless eyelids' (II, 288) stretched 'Around his demon eyes' (II, 289), a description which recalls Lamia's metamorphosis from serpent to woman, her 'lid-lashes all sear' (I, 151), Apol­ lonius becomes what he thinks he beholds.15 If Lamia assumes human form by satisfying Hermes' desire, she loses it by satisfying Apollonius's conviction that she can be categorised as merely 'A Serpent' (II, 303). There is, in this, if one allegorises Lamia as 'poetic illusion', evidence of a poet seeking detachment both from his need to trust in poetry and from his growing inclination to demystify poetry. The final paragraph traces the step-by-step vanishing of Lamia; like Lycius the reader protests, 'Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!' (II, 277). Keats's half-compassionate attempt

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to stop what he has set going shows itself in the unavailing gesture in lines 301-3: 'she, as well / As her weak hand could any meaning tell, / Motion'd him to be silent'. The stress on 'Motion'd' summons up sympathy for Lamia in a characteristically Keatsian way, the very body of the verse moving in accord with its theme. But there is a valedictory note, too, in the act of sympathy. The poem leaves us like Lycius' arms 'empty of delight' (II, 307) - save for the pleasure we take in the art with which Keats implies how vulnerable beauty is once it is regarded as mere illusion. Lamia is, in Amy Clampitt's words, a 'weird trophy / hung among the totems of his own ambivalence'.16 Yet 'ambivalence' notwith­ standing, the poem is indeed a 'trophy': aesthetic spoil wrested from a bruising imaginative conflict. Hazlitt was admired by Keats for 'the force and innate power' of a rhetorical style which 'yeasts and works up itself' (Letters, II, p. 76). Keats's own fineness has much to do with his writing's movement between moods and idioms, its ability to inhabit contradictions. The ever-shifting arrangements of rhyme in the last six lines of each stanza in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' show this movement motivating technical decisions. Barbara Everett remarks of 'To Autumn' that its 'inter-stanzaic pauses are like crevasses, vital landmarks in the poem's spiritual geography'. Whether the result in this poem and other odes is a 'harmony of differences'17 is questionable. Undertows of disturbance are often present, as in the movement in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' from stanza 3 to stanza 4. Stanza 3 concludes with the lines, 'All breathing human passion far above, / That leaves a heart highsorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue' (28-30); stanza 4 starts with the question, 'Who are these coming to the sacrifice?' (31). It is an elusive transition, quite different from the transitions in, say, Wordsworth's 'Ode [Intimations of Immortality]': '- But there's a Tree, of many one' (51), for instance, or 'O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth live' (132-3).18 In the way they move against a preceding mood, these lines take the reader to the centre of the lyric self. In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' the start of stanza 4 obliges the reader to work grammatically. When did the poem last use a question? The answer is, stanza 1 ('What men or gods are these? ... What wild ecstasy?', 8-10). What happened to those fantasising questions about the 'wild ecstasy' imagined on the Urn? They led into a two-stanza exploration of the notion that 'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter' (11-12). That notion began to undo itself in stanza 3 where the reiterated use of

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'happy' ('More happy love! more happy, happy love!', 25) reveals Keats's increasing desperation, and where the final lines (quoted above) have an impact at odds with their apparent significance. What attracts is 'breathing human passion', where 'human' avoids being redundant; instead, it asserts kinship with the species to which the poet belongs. Less attractive is what lies 'far above'; 'aboveness', loftiness, is quickly seized back by and for the '/ng/z-sorrowful' heart (emphasis added). The start of stanza 4 admits tacitly that a course of enquiry has run its course; and now Keats moves more circumspectly. Gone is the latching on to erotic fantasy which met its opposite in the recognition that the urn is remote from 'human passion'. 'Who are these coming to the sacrifice?' is a line that ramifies. 'Sacrifice', by the end of the poem, seems a word which describes what has to happen if the human condition is to be represented (or idealised) in a work of art. In stanza 4 of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' love is left behind for the rituals of religion, the hope of private ecstasy for the depiction of collective ceremony; but what hangs in the air is the phrase 'breathing human passion'. The stanza is driven to discover that the breath of those who dwelled in the Tittle town' (38) has been stilled; the writing drops its questioning guard, addressing the little town in lines of great pathos (38-40), discovering that there is no possible reply to the question which began the stanza or to further questions, 'not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e'er return' (39-40). There is, in Keats, consciousness in and about the act of making; yet it is not the consciousness of Coleridge's Shakespeare who in Venus and Adonis is a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings ... himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions.19 Rather with Keats's odes there is often a brief withdrawal, in the 'inter-stanzaic' space, followed by renewed immersion in the poem's experience, an immersion which exacts a cost. The cry 'Cold Pastoral!' (45) in the final stanza of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is a notable example, and the whole of stanza 5 is at once a retreat, a coming to terms, and a regrouping. Retreat from involvement with the urn is signalled by the opening lines, 'O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought' (41-2), where Keats's word-play reveals awareness that all the

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urn is is an urn, a shape, expressing an 'attitude'; awareness, too, that the lovers of stanzas 2 and 3 are merely 'marble' carvings. If there are puns in 'brede' and 'overwrought', they work like bad jokes at the expense of the poem's earlier imaginings. In the face of these recognitions the last stanza's 'coming to terms' shows in the assertion that 'Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity' (44-5). Though 'tease' has as an undercurrent a complaining sense of 'vex', it is part of a phrase that implies a possible transcendence of the limits of 'thought'. The phrase 'silent form' never loses sight of the fact that the urn is an art-work; though the poem's interrogatives have ceased, the stanza's unvoiced question is, what is the precise scope of an 'art­ work'? Up to this point it is true that the stanza is full of what Helen Vendler calls the '"disagreeable" thought that all art is fictive, medium-bound, and artificial rather than warm, human, and alive'. 20 But in alluding to Keats's own remark that 'the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth' (Letters, I, p. 192), Vendler suggests that the poem will not remain content with this '"disagreeable" thought'. The rest of the stanza tries to make disagreeables evaporate. The final movement begins with the exclamation 'Cold Pastoral!' which crystallises the sense of art as 'medium-bound' and comes close to something like reproach. Yet the air is cleared for the attempted rapprochement between art and life which follows. Keats launches into a long sentence which begins with an internal rhyme that links the only end of 'old age' (46) with the 'Cold' nature of art. The sentence goes on to stress the fact that 'old age shall this generation waste' (46); it knows, too, that 'other woe / Than ours' (47-8) will persist. Yet the sentence also asserts that 'Thou shalt remain' (47), where 'shalt' is stressed as emphatically as the preceding 'shall'. 'Thou shalt remain' reasserts the hope that art (as typified by the urn) is 'a friend to man' (48), a friendship shown by the way it takes the edge off 'waste' by what it 'say'st' (48) and the edge off 'woe' by what it can be said to 'know' (50). The final two lines of the poem are, I take it, entirely urn-speak; they mouth a demonstrable falsehood (demonstrable in terms of what this poem knows; it knows about many other things, including 'waste' and 'woe') and a privileged insight; they reassert the value of the special, vulnerable experience that art offers. If 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' ends by trusting, however ambigu­ ously, in art, Keats is also a poet of recoil upon the self, of dissatisfaction with previous (and indeed current) achievements.

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In the 'poetical Character' letter Keats writes, 'The faint concep­ tions I have of Poems to come brings the blood frequently into my forehead' (Letters, I, pp. 387-8). Occasionally his poems glimpse another mode of being before they have completely achieved their own. It is as if Keats ricochets between the poetic self he finds himself assuming as he is writing a poem and a newer, as yet undefined, identity. The opening of Lndymion, Book IV, develops this notion of present imprisonment and future freedom: Great Muse, thou know'st what prison Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets Our spirit's wings: despondency besets Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn Seems to give forth its light in very scorn Of our dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives. (20-5) The couplets here mime the imprisoning of spirit by 'flesh and bone' which Keats deplores. He invokes the 'Muse' of his 'native land', but the echo of Macbeth's longing not to be 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd' (Macbeth, III, iv, 23) indicates how hard it is for the poet to find his own inspiration. Yet the lure of that 'to­ morrow morn' is strong, goads the poem from line to line, and can be felt as a governing drive in Keats's career. The consequences, however, were not always fortunate. Notoriously Keats wished to alter the fine last stanza of The Eve of St Agnes 'to leave on the reader', in Woodhouse's words, a sense of pettish disgust, by bringing Old Angela in (only) dead stiff and ugly. - He says he likes that the poem should leave off with this Change of Sentiment - it was what he aimed at, and was glad to find from my objections to it that he had succeeded. (Letters, II, pp. 162-3) The last lines were revised from 'Angela the old / Died palsytwitch'd, with meagre face deform; / The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold' to 'Angela went off / Twitch'd by the palsy: - and with face deform / The Beadsman stiffen'd - 'twixt a sigh and laugh, / Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough' (quoted from the textual notes in Stillinger). This revising Keats is a writer who is turning against his imagination's best instincts in regard to the presentation of erotic experience. The 'poetical Character' letter may reveal to us an author who 'resists', in Anne K. Mellor's

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words, 'a masculinist construction of the self as bounded, unitary, complete, and instrumental'.21 But Keats is in 'masculinist' mode as he vulgarises his achievement in The Eve of St Agnes. In the published (1820) form, the success of the final stanza of The Eve of St Agnes is delicately balanced. In this preferable version the last stanza owes everything to a 'Change of Sentiment'. At the end of the previous stanza we are engrossed by the lovers' escape: 'The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans' (369). As we go across the stanza-break, that door opens out of its fictive present into 'the dark backward and abysm of time' (quoted from The Tempest, I, ii, 50 by Keats as an example of 'eternal poetry' in Letters, I, p. 133). From looking with the lovers towards what lies outside the door we look back at them with the poet from a vast temporal distance in one of Keats's most affecting transitions: 'And they are gone: aye, ages long ago / These lovers fled away into the storm' (370-1). The final stanza frames the poem, by which we have been engaged, as a romance. It allows the lovers their ghostly, virtual existence. 'These' rather than 'Those' may prevent this existence from seeming unequi­ vocally remote. But the net result of the transition is to pull us out of the poem's narrative world. The poem, then, as it stood (and stands in the published version), already negotiated in a complex way with its overall 'Sentiment'. In the published version 'palsytwitch'd' plays the return of the real against Gothic convention; the revision, 'Twitch'd by the palsy', wreaks havoc with any play of attitudes, save the cynical movement "twixt a sigh and laugh'. Without the reined-in pathos supplied by 'the old' and 'm eagre', Angela and the Beadsman are humiliated, their deaths a facetious affair of going 'off' and 'stiffening'. The tonal control in the published version of the poem owes much to the absence of anything crudely knowing. Instead, as it develops, this version gives the impression of being able to muse 'awhile, entoil'd in woofed phantasies' (288). Its consciousness of its own workings has the rapt composure which Keats attributes to Madeline at the start of stanza XXXIV: 'Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, / Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep' (2989), where oppositions melt into one another, even as the variation of the caesuras prevents the lines from being somnolent. Reading The Eve of St Agnes and other poems, one is made aware of what Levinson calls 'dissociation of writing from story'.22 Stanza after stanza draws the reader into its verbal 'drapery' and 'colouring' (see Letters, II, p. 234). The poem's manner holds at bay questions about whether Porphyro's intentions are strictly honourable; it

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behaves as though its interest lay in gesture, stationing and evocation, in the poetic cinema of, say, Porphyro 'Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume' (110), or Angela feeling for the stair, 'Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade' (190). At the poem's climax, however, story catches up with the writing, even as the writing's longing to incarnate an aesthetic dream is fulfilled. Enacting a conflict between the 'moral' and the 'imaginative', two things happen. The doubts about Porphyro which have been held in suspense are released into the narrative; so when Madeline awakes, she remarks 'How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear' (311), suggesting that the 'real' Porphyro falls far short of her 'dream' lover (though the accom­ panying fear of abandonment contends with a declaration of love: 'For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go', 315). At the same time, the poem wants to identify the consummation of the aesthetic act with the erotic consummation suggested in stanza XXXVI. The revised version of lines 314-22, removing the declara­ tion of love and making it clear that Madeline is still asleep during the love-making, alters the poem to the point of ruining it. This version (quoted from the textual notes in Stillinger) reads: See, while she speaks his arms encroaching slow, Have zoned her, heart to heart, - loud, loud the dark winds blow! For on the midnight came a tempest fell; More sooth, for that his quick rejoinder flows Into her burning ear; and still the spell Unbroken guards her in serene repose. With her wild dream he mingled, as a rose Marrieth its odour to a violet. Still, still she dreams, louder the frost wind blows ... 'See' protests too self-consciously the poet's distance from what he is staging. Moreover, the insistence that 'Still, still she dreams' makes of dream a diminished, demystified state. In the published version, the reader encounters one of Keats's aware yet selfoblivious moments, the entranced 'Into her dream he melted' (320). The moment flirts with mawkish euphemism, but it emerges - in the face of the qualifications crowding in on the poem like 'the flaw-blown sleet' (325) - as a brave, unexploitative affirmation. The poem's potential disputes are momentarily solved, albeit in a way that leaves it vulnerable to censorious criticism. Lamia, self-protectively leading off the 1820 volume, shows Keats's own self-censure of The Eve of St Agnes, his wish 'to

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write fine things which cannot be laugh'd at in any way' (Letters, II, p. 174). For the rest of his short life Keats struggles with the feeling that the 'real' and the 'dream' ought to come together, even if their coming together can only ever take place in some aesthetic space. But after The Eve of St Agnes the price exacted by dwelling in such a space is always in the poetry's thoughts. In 'To Autumn' Keats chooses acceptance, immersion in the transient, and yet this immersion is sealed aesthetically. The final lines refuse to let any note of lament prevail. The last line, 'And gathering swallows twitter in the skies' (33) read in drafts 'And gather'd Swallows twitter in the Skies'.23 The alteration to 'gathering' - allowing for activity, the possibility of purpose does much to release the poem from anything too doom-laden. Everett is suggestive, however, when she sees in this poem a perfection of technique, tone and diction bought at a great cost: she writes, 'At moments it seems "good" in the way that a child will be called "good" when what is really meant is that its spirit is broken'.24 This overstates the case and is tonally awry; it fails to hear the poem's quietly triumphant constancy of spirit. But Everett sensitises one to the writing's grace under pressure. What has gone from 'To Autumn' are the gestures of protest that are assertions of self in the other odes. The end of 'Ode to a Nightingale' is a case in point. In one sense the stanza is muddled, its categories of 'vision' and 'waking dream' (79) cobbled together after mental events that will not be pigeon-holed. Moreover, its scepticism about 'fancy' (73) has about it the false jauntiness of someone denying a serious attachment. In this sense the alterna­ tive to 'fam'd' (74) recorded by Woodhouse, namely '(feigned) JHR' - an alternative either seen or surmised by John Hamilton Reynolds - has something of the effect of a Freudian slip: that is, the word implies that those who say the fancy deceives are themselves 'feigning'. The poem has known inwardly for some lines that the fancy does not 'cheat' (73) at all; the lines about Ruth swing the voyaging fancy back from the notion of the immortality of the bird's song to the perennial presence of suffering. But the poem will not remain with one attitude or perception. Stanza 7 moves between different audiences and effects. Lines 63-4 link 'this passing night' (63) with 'ancient days' (64), and social classes ('emperor and clown', 64); the lines about Ruth zoom in on a solitary individual experiencing, in terms the writing makes universal, the condition of homesickness; but, despite the gesture of onward flow ('The same', 68), the lines about the 'magic

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casements' (69) take us outside the human into 'faery lands forlorn' (70), across 'seas' that are 'perilous' (70) because they are so far removed from regions where 'breathing human passion' can abide. Here the song is an emblem, not of art as eloquent leveller, or as medium of iconic suffering, but of art as 'magic', as something which can 'Charm' (see 69).25 The writing depicts fluidly these various suggestions. Yet there is an intimate link between their hold over the poet and his decision (which I read as a covert wish) to re-embark on 'The journey homeward to habitual self' (Endymion, II, 276). This journey is made possible by the notion of imagination as escapism which starts to form at the end of stanza 7. The repeti­ tion of 'Forlorn' (in 71), when the poet eavesdrops on what he has just said, instigates the sorrowful but necessary voyage back to the 'sole self'. This second 'Forlorn' is spoken out of a mood of self-protective withdrawal from imaginative projection, from acts of empathy. Although the long 'Adieu's' (73, 75) bid farewell in a spirit of loss, the last stanza is, affectingly, relieved (as well as bewildered) to have awoken from the spell cast by 'fancy'. In 'To Autumn' the abandonment of a split between different kinds of experience gives rise to a persistence in one kind, to a state that is courageous but muted, unflinching yet almost trapped. The Pall of Hyperion, written in the months leading up to 'To Autumn', contains lines that flush out into the open the unseen seer of the ode: 'Without stay or prop, / But my own weak mortality, I bore / The load of this eternal quietude' (I, 388-90). The Fall of Hyperion harrows by including these lines which represent imaginative life as a burden, a torment vouched for by metrical stresses suggestive of distress. We are touched in the way we are touched by a late letter when Keats says of Fanny Brawne, 'I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing' (Letters, II, p. 345), where the repeated 'eternally' joins forces with the sombre play on the double meaning of 'figure' as 'shape' and 'image' to suggest the inescapability of the writer's 'seeing'. By contrast, 'To Autumn' seems a courageous poem by refusing to gloss its creator's mood. It is courageous, too, in the way its use of the 'frozen snapshot', to borrow David Pirie's phrase, holds at bay the larger picture which it silently incites us to imagine. But Autumn's 'hook' (17) only 'Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers' (18) for a moment; the 'last oozings' (22) of the 'cyder-press' (21) may be prolonged partly by virtue of the extra line which Keats employed in each stanza of this ode, but they will finally vanish. Temporality, mortality, history: all

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are implicitly attended to by the poem; at the same time the poem constructs an aesthetic breathing space in which the reader, like Autumn, is able to 'watch' (see 22). What the poem allows one to see is an arrangement of seasonal detail into a poetic design that is both beautiful and truthful. Its form of 'truthful-ness' is the recognition that we cannot live by abstraction alone. The poem seems partly to acknowledge the force of Pirie's remark that after 'the arrested motion of "Autumn's" stopped clock', 'The beautiful and yet brutal dynamism of the historical process could be relied on to press forward again soon enough'.26Yet 'To Autumn' resists philosophical 'speculation'; it refuses to accept that an idea such as the 'dynamism of the historical process' is all we know on earth, or all we need to know. These resistances and refusals are conveyed with understated grace and economy, as in the final stanza's movement away from a syntax that threatens to be too causal ('Then', 27), or too casual (the 'or's' of 29), to a syntax that is braced, accepting, and prepared ('and now', 31). The cost exacted by poetic creation lies close to the heart of 'Ode on Indolence': an imaginative poem about not wishing to experience imaginatively. With the exception of Helen Vendler (to whose account of the poem I am indebted), most critics underrate this poem, regarding it as markedly 'below the standard of the other odes'.27Yet, in turn, Vendler's belief that the odes make up a plotted 'totality' may lead her to downplay the significance of her best insight into the 'Ode on Indolence', which is that, in the poem, 'Keats searches ... for a proper mode of self-cognition'.28 If 'searches' is to be granted its fully creative force, the tidiness of Vendler's overall plot may have to be forsaken. The poem evokes a state of listlessness and drift, yet it does so in a manner that is both energised and unpredictable. The first stanza seems to rehearse the central scenario of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'; but the writing mimes Keats's refusal to initiate any 'greeting of the Spirit': One morn before me were three figures seen, With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced; And one behind the other stepp'd serene, In placid sandals, and in white robes graced: They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn, When shifted round to see the other side; They came again; as when the urn once more Is shifted round, the first seen shades return; And they were strange to me, as may betide With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore. (1-10)

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The first line's passive voice, 'One morn before me were three figures seen', declines to involve the poet in an interpretative or emotional response to what is 'seen', or even to take responsibility for the act of seeing. Only in 'they were strange to me' does the reader detect stirrings of curiosity, curiosity which passes into the chiding questions of stanza 2: 'How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not? / How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?' (11-12). The confusions of this recognition-scene are intricate. Keats seems irked that he did not know the 'shadows' as though, having recognised them, he knows them only too well. The reason for non-recognition - that they disguised themselves as figures in a 'masque' - accompanies surprise that they should be 'muffled'. The poet suspects them of attempting to 'leave without a task / My idle days' (14-15), as though he felt that they were going to prevent him from getting on with a worthwhile 'task'; but he goes to chide the shadows for disturbing his 'summerindolence' (16). Dramatised, almost involuntarily, is the mixture of feelings Keats has about his emotional and poetic life. This most inward of poems demonstrates the problem of trying to say how 'knowing' Keats is being; my foregoing formulation 'almost involuntarily' - tries to suggest how a poet's movements of language do his thinking and feeling for him. As is often the case in Keats's poetry, the fact that he does not resolve his feelings into a single state draws us in, making us involved spectators of his state of restless langour, detached engagement. The poem spins round a dead centre while being on the point of further development. Indeed, in stanza 2, Keats moves past the pleasures of 'summer-indolence' to glimpse the attractions of the state of 'nothingness' (20) from which the figures have kept him: 'O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense / Unhaunted quite of all but - nothingness? (19-20). 'Sense', as in 'Ode to a Nightingale', means 'mind as well as feeling', in Morris Dickstein's words quoted earlier, but the lines pit the interrogating mind against a desired or feared feeling: 'nothing­ ness', dropped into its rhyme slot like a surprising discovery, suggesting Keats's awareness of what beckons when the imagination sedates itself. Or almost sedates itself, for Keats makes of his nothingness an imaginative something, akin to the limbo condition depicted in the Cave of Quietude. Here Endymion enters 'Happy gloom! / Dark paradise! where pale becomes the bloom / Of health by due' (Endymion, IV, 537-9), and experiences a necessary respite from conflict. Yet conflict is present in 'Ode on Indolence' by virtue of the

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poet's inability to reach the degree-zero state which he desires and fears. Stanza 3 identifies the figures as an archetypal trio of Love, Ambition and Poesy. This stanza and stanza 4 ache for 'wings' (24 and 31) and repress that longing; 'the viewless wings of Poesy' ('Ode to a Nightingale', 33) are kept strictly furled, and yet the poem gets airborne while resisting an imagined inspiration. So the short phrases at the start of stanza 4 - 'They faded, and, forsooth! I wanted wings: / O folly! What is Love! and where is it?' (31-2) - turn sharply on the desire for 'wings'. Clearly, though, these turns on the self are driven by momentary pique, as if the ideals embodied by the figures were incapable of realisation, and interest us in the implied self that is driven in this way. In the last six lines of the stanza, the writing gives one a vivid sense of poetry as bound up, for Keats, with irksome processes of reception that would subject him to 'the voice of busy common-sense' (40). However, until now, the poem's agenda is being shaped by the poet's paranoias and fears, by his disappointments and dis­ illusions. In stanza 5 the poem - against the grain of its earlier mood - redefines its initial state as something more positive, imminent, and inwardly stirring: 'My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o'er / With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams' (43-4). A straightforward metaphor ('soul' as 'lawn') made devious by the use of a past tense converts inner 'soul' into an outer space; Keats's favoured imagery of light and shade is rehearsed quietly in the mixture of 'shades' (which are 'stirring') and 'beams' (which are 'baffled'), while 'besprinkled' yields a strong intimation of nurturing and future growth. Here Keats comes as close as he ever does in his poetry to describing those 'inter-stanzaic' spaces evident in his work, where the self's finest intuitions are just awaiting realisation. Elsewhere in Keats's poetry (and, one is tempted to say, at its greatest) 'The open casement' of line 47 opens more boldly into an otherness surprising to the poet and reader. At the end of 'Ode to Psyche', for example, newly discovered inwardness resumes its dealings with a presence other than, though bound up intimately with, 'shadowy thought': And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!

(64-7)

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In these lines a poetic stance more generous, if no less self-aware, than that which dominates 'Ode on Indolence' reveals itself, finding an emblem in the brave accents of 'A bright torch'. However, one should not denigrate Keats's ability, in the 'Ode on Indolence', to make poetry out of assorted feelings, evident in the movement between stanzas 5 and 6. 'Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine' (50) at the end of stanza 5 is at once boast and regret: the regret lies in the fact that the poem is being impelled, or impels itself, away from the creative suggestions, earlier in the stanza, of the 'sweet tears of May' (46) yet to fall. The final stanza bids a long farewell to the figures, asserting the self's independence. Yet even in the (notorious) lines, 'For I would not be dieted with praise, / A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!' (53-4), the falsity of register indicates not only the poet's desire to be left out of the 'sentimental farce' of certain literary circles but also his reticent wish to earn appropriate praise for authentic achieve­ ment. Contradiction, in fact, persists to the end. Though the. figures, now 'phantoms' (59) to be exorcised, are sent packing, the poet asserts his access to separate sources of inspiration: 'Fare­ well! I yet have visions for the night, / And for the day faint visions there is store' (51-8). Even if the second, slightly ungrammatical, line seems to be running out of confidence (as the 'visions' grow 'faint'), the final command that the 'phantoms' 'Vanish ... from my idle spright' (59) suggests that what has been seen has been projected. The 'idle spright' and 'working brain' ('Ode to Psyche', 60) are, the poem half-claims, not so far apart as they may seem. Barbara Everett is too hasty when she writes that 'The "Ode on Indolence" is an example of what really did happen to Keats when he was confined to a stifling self-consciousness'.29 Rather, Keats shows that he can take 'stifling self-consciousness' as a subject, and win from it both eloquence and drama. Knowingly self-conscious and ironical, or spontaneous and unmisgiving: Keats's imaginative uniqueness lies in the way that neither set of terms does complete justice to his poetic distinction. There is often a complicatedly unknowing element in Keats's knowingness and a hauntingly conscious dimension to his work at its most raptly self-forgetful. Both aspects of this assertion are borne out by the absorbed manner in which each phase of a Keatsian poem is imagined. There is a continual sense in which the working brain loses and discovers itself in its work. Even in 'Isabella', which Keats was to reject as 'too smokeable' (Letters, II, p. 174), absorption in details of 'the tale' (153) coexists with, even

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prompts, self-consciousness about tale-telling. The absorption has a quality of rightness which allows 'full', say, in 'her full shape would all his seeing fill' (12) to be keyed-up but not salivating; it is evident, memorably, in the breath-stopping effect of 'their murder'd man' (209), or the account of Isabella throwing back 'her veiling hair' (376) while digging up Lorenzo's buried corpse. But Keats, or his narrator, continually interjects and pauses, delaying partly for suspense, but also out of half-troubled, semihumorous self-awareness as he watches himself converting Boccaccio's 'old Romance' (387) into a contemporary poem. From the opening, the tone adopted towards the lovers is both sympathetic and tenderly mocking as the first line's address 'Fair Isabel, poor, simple Isabel!' - reveals. Keats wishes for an answering simplicity not available to the self-conscious modern poet: hence his apology for 'venturing syllables that ill beseem / The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme' (151-2), where 'venturing', hot on the heels of the description of the heroine's brothers as 'Enriched from ancestral merchandize' (106), links the poet's endeavours with mercantile exploitation. The result is a continual and intriguing unease in the narration. Though Keats is, and would have us, engrossed in the story, he is aware that certain readerly gratifications may be impossible or suspect. Again, the impressiveness of 'Ode on Melancholy' lies in the fact that it is, in Vendler's words, 'a poem engaged in a continual and provisional hunt for its adequate means'.30Keats scrapped an initial stanza as Gothicly overblown; but the one he begins with is itself full of exaggeration and negative imperatives, which have been amusingly glossed by William Empson: One must enjoy the didactic tone of this great anthology piece; it is a parody, by contradiction, of the wise advice of uncles. 'Of course, pain is what we all desire, and I am sure I hope you will be very unhappy. But if you go snatching at it before your time, my boy, you must expect the consequences; you will hardly get hurt at all.'31 The poem is at this stage an exercise in re-definition: Melancholy must not be sought for in the usual ways, via 'Lethe' (1), 'W olfs­ bane' (2), and 'nightshade' (4). Keats denies the addressee these routes to Melancholy on the grounds that they will numb consciousness. His mode of rejection, however, ascribes to these routes an almost inadvertent intensity. Such an intensity is evident in the opening lines where Keats's imperative forbids what sounds like an active search for the means of inducing

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extinction: 'neither twist / Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine' (1-2). That friction between manner and meaning is itself essential to the poem's significance; refusing to be weighed down by its potentially sombre subject, the stanza (like the whole poem) achieves a feisty gusto that makes possible its idiosyncratic, tragic nobility. The first stanza's final two lines switch from command to assertion and chance on a tone which is unique to the poem: 'For shade to shade will come too drowsily, / And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul' (9-10). The tone here, not so much knowing as triumphantly defeated by its knowledge of 'anguish', recurs at the poem's end. As already hinted, the fact that the first eight lines have involved, on Keats's part, a vitality that is the reverse of 'drowsiness' increases the desirability of 'wakeful anguish'. This phrase performs a Keatsian act of arrest: an on-going condition becomes a present-tense state, showing how the poem folds empathetically round a phrase or a state, before moving on. The second stanza starts with a dazzling, almost nonchalant simile which makes of the 'melancholy fit' (11) a 'weeping cloud, / That fosters' (12-13); the cloud passes into the 'April shroud' (14) with which it .rhymes suggestively, at once giving nourishment to the spring and predictive of the spring's inevitable going. Faced by the fluid implications of the simile, Keats enjoins his addressee to channel 'sorrow', find an outlet for it in heightened fixity of attention: 'glut thy sorrow' (13) can mean, as Empson points out, 'Give rein to sorrow, at the mortality of beauty' and 'defeat sorrow by sudden excess and turn it to joy, at the intensity of sensation'.32 The meanings wrestle, just as the commands seek to accept and defy transience; the 'globed peonies' (17) are themselves self-enfolding, an emblem of Keats's instinctive response to change, a response surely the object of self­ teasing in the final vignette of the richly angry mistress. Here the urge to be 'in for ... some other body' leads to the impulse to 'Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes' (19-20). Negative capability teeters, here, on the edge of an aestheticised, near-ludicrous consuming. At this point the poem switches tones, the semi-jokey smile fading in its eye as it produces a transition of sobered, electrifying force: 'She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die' (21) shows that Keats is capable of a poetry of statement; but the statement is the reverse of lifeless abstraction. The line's life, in fact, derives considerably from 'dwells', which honours the abiding presence of 'she' - retrospectively the mistress of lines 18-20, prospectively

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the figure of Melancholy herself. But though the she 'dwells', the 'Beauty' she dwells with 'must die'. What happens for the next few lines is one of Keats's most concentrated blendings of presence and absence, of tragic greetings and farewells: 'Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips' (22) caught for 'ever' in a gesture, but 'Bidding adieu' (23) as the reader rounds the line-ending; 'aching Pleasure nigh' (23), already 'Turning to poison' (24), dissolving from personification into tasted sensation even as we try to salute it. The way the figures are held before us and yet pass away embodies, and even comes to terms with, the imagination's need to fix what it loves and yet to let it go. Melancholy's 'sovran shrine' (26) becomes a room within a stanza. It is, by implication, a space where art savours its finest, most 'wakeful anguish', an experience of simultaneous triumph and failure. The artist, too, finds his alter ego in the seeker after consciousness and sensation conjured up by the final lines. Appropriately his Pyrrhic victory 'His soul shall taste the sadness of her might' (29) - passes into foresuffered defeat: 'And be among her cloudy trophies hung' (30). The use of 'cloudy' links the soul to the 'weeping cloud' of stanza II, reinforcing the connection between joy and suffering which is the poem's often-discussed 'theme'. But the poem's handling of this theme results in much more than bracing platitude. What Keats's syntax and rhyming create is a sense of the interrelatedness of pursuit and satiety, success and failure. The verbs in the last lines switch from active to passive ('taste', 'be ... hung') without batting a syntactical eyelid;33 'hung' chimes with 'tongue' as if to imply the inevitable outcome of the 'strenuous' (27) striving of the tongue, a striving which embodies that search for fullness of perception valued by the poem. Like the entire poem, like much of Keats's poetic career, the final lines of 'Ode on Melancholy' stage a drama in which the chief actor is the poet's 'complex Mind', a mind whose consciousness of itself is always - self-estrangingly, creatively - a linguistic event. NOTES

1. See John Ashbery, A pril Galleons (1988; London: Paladin, 1990), pp. 44-5. The poem opens with a glimpse of a 'coolly meditative' alternative to 'green felicity', 'If the green felicity sits too readily on the lower lip, / Other transports are by moments coolly meditative'

(P- 44)-

2. John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 626; hereafter Poems: Barnard. Barnard prefers the reading 'Fickly' at the start of line 11. 3. See, for instance, the passage from John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976),

Keats's Poetry pp. 120 -2; quoted in John Keats: Selected Poems, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Dent, 1995), pp. 353-6. 4. Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 25. 5. Roland Barthes, T h e Pleasure of the Text', in Barthes: Selected Writings, ed. with introduction by Susan Sontag (London: Fontana/ Collins, 1982), p. 408. 6. A Defence o f Poetry, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 505. 7. Line 54 of the poem. Quoted from W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry, ed. with introduction and notes by Timothy Webb (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 8. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 107. 9. Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 205. 10. Quoted from Poems: Barnard, p. 526. 11. 'Keats and the Prison House of History', Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 263. 12. 'On Gusto', quoted from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 2 1 vols (London, 1930-4), IV, pp. 79-80. 13. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, V, p. 9. 14. Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory, p. 297, note 16. 15. See Levinson, p. 278, who uses the verbal links to suggest 'weird affinities' between Lamia and Apollonius. The same connection is also noted by Daniel P. Watkins, Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), who points out that Apollonius 'becomes indistinguishable from [Lamia], no less a serpent than she is', p. 147. 16. 'The Isle of Wight', a section of 'Voyages: A Homage to lohn Keats', in A m y Clampitt, What the Light Was Like (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 64. 17. 'Keats: Somebody Reading', Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin (1986; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 157. To be fair to Everett, she writes of the odes' 'recreation of the movement of the living mind, remaking itself at every pace forward, so that every new stanza is also a self-losing', p. 157. 18. Quoted from William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (1984; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 19. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (18 17; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19 83,1984), II, p. 21. 20. Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, p. 147. 21. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) p. 175. 22. Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory, p. 108. 23. See Letters, II, pp. 17 0 -1; see also John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Jack Stillinger, with an Essay on the Manuscripts by Helen Vendler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 224-5. 24. Everett, Poets in Their Time, pp. 146-7. 25. See the discussion of this stanza in Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, p. 94; I do not agree with Vendler that the implication of the last three lines of the stanza is that 'art is for no one'.

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Keats: Bicentenary Readings 26. David B. Pirie, 'Keats', in The Romantic Period, ed. David B. Pirie, vol. 5 of The Penguin History o f Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994)/ pp- 385,38 6 . 27. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963; London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 528. 28. Vendler, The Odes o f John Keats, pp. 6 ,37. 29. Everett, Poets in Their Time, p. 156. 30. Vendler, The Odes o f John Keats, p. 182. 3 1. William Empson, Seven Types o f Am biguity (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 215. 32. Seven Types o f Am biguity, p. 216. 33. See Vendler, The Odes o f John Keats, for a fine discussion of these lines as 'another of Keats's "false" syntactic parallels', p. 179.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Still Life with Keats

M ARTIN ASKE

The bicentenary of Keats's birth provides us with an opportunity to revisit and rethink familiar themes. Since Ian Jack's ground­ breaking scholarship thirty years ago, the subject of Keats and pictures has received a good deal of attention - most recently in a fine book by Grant F. Scott.1 The following contribution to this area of Keats criticism will be necessarily modest. I do not intend to address once more the possibly overwrought question of how Keats's visual imagination works in poems such as 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or The Eve of St Agnes or 'To Autumn'; rather, I want to think about some of the considerations which might be shaping the act of looking as Keats experiences it. What does Keats see when he stands in front of the mirror of art? Or rather: how does he look at what he sees? At the end of 1818 the poet confessed to his brother and sisterin-law that I have not one opinion upon any thing except in matters of taste - I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty - and I find myself very young minded even in that perceptive power - which I hope will encrease - A year ago I could not understand in the slightest degree Raphael's cartoons - now I begin to read them a little.2 There are some key terms here which can help frame my argument. What I am concerned with is, indeed, a matter of taste - 'an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination' (the definition is Hazlitt's),3 which depends upon the cultivation of a 'perceptive power' that will enable the in­ experienced ('young minded') spectator confronted by Raphael's cartoons to 'begin to read them a little'. It is the nature of this tentative 'reading' which I want to explore. I shall be scrutinising two particular accounts of Keats looking at pictures, in order to see what they can tell us about the Romantic 'art of beholding',4

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and, further, whether they bear any relation to what Keats has to say about the reading of poetry. As a way of bringing the discus­ sion to a provisional close, I want to look at two pictures of Keats. Let me begin more or less exactly where Keats left off, in that same letter dating from the end of 1818. As evidence of his increasing ability to 'read' pictures, Keats informs his brother and sister-in-law of a discovery made when he last visited his painter friend, Benjamin Robert Haydon: I look[ed] over a Book of Prints taken from the fresco of the Church at Milan the name of which I forget - in it are com­ prised Specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakspeare Full of Romance and the most tender feeling - magnificence of draperies beyond any I ever saw not excepting Raphael's - But Grotesque to a curious pitch - yet still making up a fine whole - even finer to me than more accomplish'd works - as there was left so much room for Imagination.5 It is generally agreed that the publication in question had nothing to do with Milan, but was, rather, Carlo Lasinio's monumental volume of engravings of the Campo Santo frescoes in Pisa6 - the same frescoes which had such a profound effect on Coleridge when he saw them in 1806, and which lent Stendhal the governing meta-phor to characterise the fragmentary nature of his memories in Vie de Henry BrulardJ Marjorie Levinson has suggested that Keats's 'art education' was deficient insofar as it relied for the most part on prints and engravings.8 But the fact that Keats saw engravings rather than the real thing makes his encounter more typical of the contempor­ ary amateur art-lover's experience of painting, and emphasises, of course, the significance of 'I begin to read them a little': looking over a book of prints is to read a visual text. The response to Lasinio's volume is perhaps surprising, not least because it reveals the ardent worshipper of England's 'Chief Poet' ('On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again') claiming that 'I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakspeare'. For present purposes, however, the part of Keats's account on which I want briefly to focus is the conclusion: 'yet still making up a fine whole - even finer to me than more accomplish'd works - as there was left so much room for Imagination'. In more ways than one is there 'room for Imagination' in these less than perfectly accom­ plished works. On the one hand the damaged frescoes invite the

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spectator/reader to fill in the gaps, to recompose these fragments into a 'fine whole'. But in another sense the pictures open up a fine hole, a window through which the poet can glimpse a new and strange world, a landscape depicting what Friedrich Schlegel called 'the earliest struggles of unassisted genius',9 radically different from the much more 'accomplished' medievalism which finds its way via Spenser into The Eve of St Agnes. It is its essential unfamiliarity, its alterity, which makes this 'grotesque' landscape - so different, too, from the more familiar terrain of the High Renaissance, those 'realms of gold' ('On First Looking into Chapman's Homer') crowded by all-too-recognisable artistic monuments - particularly hospitable to the poet's 'curious' imagination, giving it 'room' to roam, so that the book of prints assumes the quality of a long poem, 'a little Region to wander in' where the lovers of art 'may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading' (Letters, I, p. 170). Leigh Hunt - connoisseur of prints and other 'forms of elegance' ('Sleep and Poetry') - was fortunate enough to see the real thing. Having arrived in Pisa in the summer of 1822, at the invitation of Shelley and Byron, he was struck by 'the superabundance and truth of conception in [the] multitude of imagery' in the Campo Santo frescoes; but he also suggests that they are so very 'foreign' that the 'best idea ... which [he] can give an Englishman of the general character of the paintings' is to refer 'him' to the engravings of Diirer and the 'serious parts' of Chaucer: There is the same want of proper costume - the same intense feeling of the human being, both in body and soul - the same bookish, romantic, and retired character - the same evidences, in short, of antiquity and commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. And when Hunt describes the frescoes as testifying to 'the struggle of true pictorial feeling with the inexperience of art',10 we can perhaps discern a further reason why the prints exert such a hold over Keats: these specimens of 'unassisted genius' might picture forth the poet's own strenuous search for 'a settled art and language', particularly at the end of 1818, when the 'young minded' author of Hyperion is taking on his great precursor Milton - a dialectic, if ever there was one, between 'antiquity' and 'commencement'. The 'struggle' which Hunt finds embodied in

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the Campo Santo frescoes, of 'true pictorial feeling' with 'the inexperience of art', echoes intriguingly the conflict which Keats fears will undermine his epic project - a conflict, that is, between 'the true voice of feeling' and 'the false beauty proceeding from art' (Letters, II, p. 167). Undoubtedly there is more to say about the influence of Lasinio's volume on Keats's developing poetics. Some of the terms of his response - 'Romance' and 'Grotesque', for example merit closer scrutiny. Does 'magnificence of draperies' belong to the routine language which characterises 'matters of taste'? Or might there be a suggestive link between this phrase and Keats's later announcement that he wishes 'to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a Poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery' (Letters, II, p. 234)? For the time being, however, I am simply wanting to claim that, judging by the nature, of his response, Keats's encounter with the Campo Santo prints registers a decisive moment in his aesthetic education, with significant implications for his thinking about poetry and 'reading' in the broadest sense. At this point 1 should like to turn to another experience of paint­ ing recorded by Keats in his letters. But first a brief digression. My thinking on the whole subject of the Romantic art of the beholder has been profoundly influenced by Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), which I take to be a work of quite extraordinary brilliance; and it is with considerable respect that I wish to take the liberty of extrapolating its main argument in order to establish some kind of theoretical perspective for the present discussion. Fried con­ centrates upon very specific developments in French painting and criticism during the 1750s and 1760s, but I feel that his theory of absorption is so strong, and so suggestive, that it can withstand being applied to a context which, in the end, is perhaps not as remote as may first appear. Diderot's Salons were not published until 1798, and his suggestion that 'perhaps we find sketches so attractive only because, being somewhat indeterminate, they allow more liberty to our imagination' is just one particularly salient example of the way in which he contributes to the overall aesthetic context in which Keats articulates his response to the Campo Santo frescoes.11 According to Fried, what Diderot and other critics noticed as a recurrent motif in contemporary French painting (most notably in the works of Chardin and Greuze) was a capacity among the

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figures depicted for intense self-absorption. Whether they be of a single figure (e.g. Chardin's Philosophe occupe de sa lecture, Salon of 1753) or of a group (e.g. Greuze's La Piete filiale, Salon of 1763), such paintings represent a state of self-absorption so profound that they appear not merely to forget but systematically to negate the presence of the beholder in front of the canvas. And yet, paradoxically, it is just this negation which serves to attract and arrest the spectator in front of the painting: 'Only by establishing the fiction of his absence or non-existence could his actual placement before and enthrallment by the painting be secured'. Fried explains the necessity of this paradox as follows: In Diderot's writings on painting and drama the objectbeholder relationship as such, the very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as theatrical, a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than of absorption, sympathy, self-transcendence; and the success of both arts, in fact their continued functioning as major expressions of the human spirit, are held to depend upon whether or not painter and dramatist are able to undo that state of affairs, to de-theatricalize beholding and so make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction.12 But the argument doesn't stop there. Complementing this 'dramatic' conception of painting, where the fiction of the behold­ er's non-existence is established through 'the persuasive repre­ sentation of figures wholly absorbed in their actions, passions, activities, feelings, states of mind', is a second 'pastoral' conception, which requires the fiction of the beholder physically entering into a painting, and which Diderot develops most fully in the long section on Joseph Vernet in the Salon 0/1767, where the critic elaborates a sophisticated pretence that he is promenading through actual landscapes.13 Although these two conceptions of the relationship between painting and beholder imply different genres (in the case of the beholder's negation, the genre paintings of Chardin and Greuze and, ideally, history painting itself; in the case of the beholder's inclusion within the painting, landscape), they are logically united by a similarity of function: 'The estrangement of the beholder from the objects of his beholding is overcome; the condition of spectatordom is transformed and thereby redeemed; and the beholder is stopped and held ... in front of the painting'.14 To return to Keats and the Campo Santo frescoes. It is my contention that the prints arrest Keats's attention in the way they

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Carlo Lasinio, P ittu re a Fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa , Plate XIV. Reproduced by kind permission of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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do because they simultaneously fulfil both the 'dramatic' and the 'pastoral' conceptions of painting as theorised by Fried in his interpretation of Diderot and eighteenth-century French painting. On the one hand, their awkward age (both 'antiquity' and 'com­ mencement') lends them a unique distance, which encloses them in a strange, remote world and in so doing appears to exclude the modern beholder; yet it is precisely their disconcerting alterity which arrests the poet, and fascinates him. On the other hand, the pictures constitute themselves in their lack of accomplishment as a series of windows or doors, through which the spectator is invited to pass, in order that he might imaginatively occupy these unfamiliar scenes, and thereby enter into a genuinely sympathetic relation (full of 'the most tender feeling') with these otherwise 'grotesque' representations. Thus does the act of 'looking over' Haydon's book of prints become for the 'young minded' lover of art a profoundly satisfying aesthetic experience, where looking and reading conjoin in the imaginative space unfolded by a series of works whose very strangeness constitutes their appeal. One of the most celebrated of the Campo Santo frescoes, repro­ duced in Plate XIV of Lasinio's volume, is The Triumph of Death attributed by Vasari to Andrea Orcagna but now thought to be the work of Francesco Traini. Coleridge described the picture as showing the effect of the appearance of Death on all men - different groups of men - men of business - men of pleasure huntsmen - all flying in different directions while the dreadful Goddess descending with a kind of air-chilling white with her wings expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons. And in a remarkable echo of Keats's astonished reaction ('I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakspeare') Coleridge goes on to claim that 'the impression was greater ... than that which any poem had ever made upon me'.15 In Lasinio's engraving the 'dreadful Goddess' has evidently lost her sting; there is no 'airchilling white' to disturb Keats's sense of these pictures being full of 'the most tender feeling'. Another representation of death, however, which did leave Keats distinctly cold was Benjamin West's Death on the Pale Horse. He went to see the President of the Royal Academy's much-hyped painting in December 1817, and this is what he was prompted to say about it: It is a wonderful picture, when West's age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels

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mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality, the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth.16 It would seem, then, that the effect of West's painting on Keats is exactly the opposite of that made by the engravings of the Campo Santo frescoes; it fails as a work of art because it lacks those cardinal qualities (the 'dramatic' and the 'pastoral', to recall Fried's terms) which were found in Haydon's book of prints. For the beholder to have 'nothing to be intense upon' - to encounter 'no women one feels mad to kiss', 'no face swelling into reality' is to be forbidden entry into the pictured scene, it is to be denied that 'indwelling' by which the imagination can find food for a week's stroll in the summer. In an extended essay on the painting William Paulet Carey describes the central image of Death as a 'funereal mass', where 'all is filled up by the perturbed workings of imagination'.17 For Keats this will never do: the painting makes no room for the spectator's imagination because its 'funereal mass' inhospitably crowds out the beholder altogether, over­ whelming him with the 'perturbed workings' of the artist's imagination exclusively. Carey says later that the 'stern, icy gray' of the Pale Horse creates 'a shadowy light, cold and dark, like the frowning aspect of a wintry day, falling heavily upon the eye, and impressing a thousand images of sadness and desolation upon the heart'. All this is cited as evidence of West's triumphant evocation of the 'sublime spirit' of Milton;18 but for Keats it is just this melodramatic excess (the fake intensity of 'a thousand images of sadness and desolation') which accounts for the painting's 'unpleasantness' and 'repulsiveness', and, by extension, its inaccessibility. 'Falling heavily upon the eye', the painting acquires a kind of apotropaic quality, as the beholder, finding no way in, turns away, repulsed, in disgust. And this apotropaic quality is increased by the painting's overt interpellation of the beholder. Rather than arresting the viewer's attention by depicting a scene of absorption which is so intense that it pretends to assume the beholder's non-existence (which is what happens in Chardin and Greuze, and in the Campo Santo frescoes), Death on the Pale Horse sets out, in its importunate theatricality, to capture the spectator, to force him to stand and admire its own self-evident success in achieving the 'terrible sublime'. In a trenchant essay Hazlitt argued that West's exercise in the sublime was misguided, insofar as the painter, in seeking to render 'the infinite and imaginary defined and palpable', was

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violating Burke's fundamental rule that the sublime required a 'judicious obscurity'.19 Both painting and painter profess and indeed protest too much. The phrase 'terrible sublime' comes from the catalogue which was specially prepared to accompany the exhibition - a ruse which, in Hazlitt's view, merely turned the producer of the exhibition into an exhibitionist. West 'comes forward', says Hazlitt, as the painter and the showman of the piece ... He places him­ self, as it were, before his own performance, with a Catalogue Raisonne in his hand, and, before the spectator can form a judgment on the work itself, dazzles him with an account of the prodigies of art which are conceived and executed. What Hazlitt finds particularly offensive is that West has issued the catalogue (whether or not he wrote it himself is immaterial) in 'a deliberate attempt to encroach on the right of private judgment and public opinion', thereby robbing the spectator of his freedom to behold without being beholden. In a sense the catalogue merely verbalises what the painting itself is already doing; it amounts to a piece of 'vicarious egotism' which 'obtrudes itself ... offensively' in exactly the way that the painting falls heavily upon the eye of the beholder, demanding that it be looked at, and admired.20 In this way does Death on the Pale Horse regress, in Fried's terms, to a falsely 'theatrical', rather than genuinely 'dramatic', view of the relationship between painting and beholder. Now this sense of the spectator being wilfully importuned by West's overly accomplished sublimities remains only implicit in Keats's account of the painting. But of course it becomes more explicit, just a few weeks later, when Keats, in one of his antiWordsworth moods, asks: 'For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philo­ sophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist[?]'. He goes on: We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.21 These celebrated remarks acquire fresh significance if we read them in the context of Keats's response to the palpable designs embodied in Death on the Pale Horse, a response which in turn relates interestingly to Hazlitt's probing critique of the whole

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'event' of the painting's exhibition. In effect, West's painting becomes an example of the 'egotistical sublime' (Letters, I, p. 387). Suggesting that the artist should not 'brood and peacock' over his 'speculations' - in case, like West, he gets carried away and 'makes a false coinage and deceives himself' - Keats notes that 'many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half seeing' (Letters, I, pp. 223-4). Perhaps it is, once again, their want of 'confidence' - their radical difference from 'more accomplish'd works' - which endears the author of Endymion to the Campo Santo frescoes (those 'earliest struggles', to recall Schlegel's phrase, of 'unassisted genius'). And the notion of 'halfseeing' is suggestive. Perhaps the creators of the frescoes could only 'put down' a 'halfseeing', caught as they were, in Leigh Hunt's terms, between 'antiquity' and 'commence­ ment', between 'true pictorial feeling' and 'the inexperience of art'. And yet this obscure 'halfseeing' might be more sublimely expressive than the palpable certainties of a painting like Death on the Pale Horse, precisely because it leaves room for the imagin­ ation, and makes for a more genuinely collaborative relationship between painting and beholder. And perhaps, further, a condition of 'halfseeing' is what the beholder should settle for also. Like that other liminal state which Keats knows so well between sleep and waking - 'halfseeing' betokens the potentially creative indolence of reverie, a benign receptive mood in which looking becomes indeed a kind of leisurely reading, where it doesn't matter if images are forgotten or overlooked because they can always be 'found new' a second time round. Half seeing, half reading: it is just this happy alliance which will help to establish and nurture the beholder's 'perceptive power'. I should like to conclude by looking briefly at two portraits of Keats himself. The first is drawn by the poet's own hand, in a letter to his sister: I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome Globe of gold-fish - then I would have it hold 10 pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor - well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and Crimson - Then I would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva - and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.22

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The whole passage is, in Barbara Everett's phrase, a 'virtuoso exercise', a brilliant display of wit evidently calculated to give the reader pleasure. We might even wish to concede that the poet comes across as a bit of a peacock here: certainly not brooding, but showing off his verbal skills, dazzling an impressionable younger sister with his artistry. Calculating its effects with unerring precision, the writing very deliberately has a palpable design on the reader. Of course we forgive Keats his bravado after all, this is a personal letter, composed with the perfectly laudable aim of cheering up somebody about whose happiness he was always concerned. Even so, it is notable how the poet's deft handling of the scene results in a virtual still life. 'And there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading' - it is a 'final flick of irony', as Barbara Everett says, which serves to remind us that 'the happiness of goldfish and the happiness of young readers ... are alike a dream, a "picture" cut o ff ... from the sources of life'.23 Keats's act of turning himself into a picture suggests an ironic awareness of what he later identifies as 'the false beauty proceeding from art'. It is an art of palpable designs exemplified by Death on the Pale Horse but also found by Keats occasionally in Wordsworth and then, more seriously, in Milton which leads to a kind of paralysis in the relationship between the spectator/reader and the work, where the latter is perceived to have no more life than a 'handsome painted window' and the former is imprisoned like a goldfish in a bowl. In this world of 'suspended animation', art, having framed itself in 'false beauties', freezes into 'a certain kind of death'.24 I turn now to the second portrait of Keats - the famous painting which Joseph Severn began after the poet's death, and described by Grant Scott as a 'pictorial gloss' on the 'fanciful selfportrait' which Keats composed for his sister.251 agree with most of what Scott has to say about the painting, but I should like to inflect his interpretation slightly, in order to suggest, by way of conclusion, that Severn's portrait imagines a way of seeing and reading that goes beyond the frozen stillness of Keats's 'picture of somebody reading'. The painting shows, of course, exactly that intense self­ absorption which Fried discovers in Chardin and Greuze. As viewers of the scene we are immediately put into the position of potential intruders, even voyeurs; and yet the poet looks so absorbed that we might be hard put to distract him from his reading. Keats appears oblivious of the beholder's presence; but, as we have seen, it is precisely this fiction of non-recognition

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which, according to Fried, serves to hold the spectator in front of the canvas. We are enthralled by the figure's own absorption in his text. In this sense, then, the portrait fulfils Diderot's criterion of a genuinely enabling (non-theatrical) relationship between painting and beholder. But, as Scott implies, the painting is more than just a portrait. The two adjacent chairs - one occupied, the other empty, yet both linked by Keats's arm - signify a narrative. To quote Scott: The chair he crooks his elbow against faces away from the poet and points outdoors, as if leading us from the book to nature, from Shakespeare into Constable. Keats's mind moves through the book into the natural scene, as we are meant to do, and the second chair aids our eye in the transition.26 In other words, the movement indicated by the painting's com­ position - from the occupied chair, via the empty one, to the 'natural scene' outside - represents with beautiful economy the reading experience Keats values most, the process whereby a text opens up into a little region in which the lovers of art can wander, where the actual room in which the reader sits turns into more spacious room through which the imagination can roam. But it is at this point in his analysis that Scott seems to me to refuse to acknowledge the Keatsian generosity of Severn's painting: 'The more we look at the view', he says, 'the more we are impressed by its artifice and suspect that it is actually a picture ... Nature is thus constructed as conceit, created out of the text Keats peruses.'27 If this is the case, then the narrative which begins through the conjunction of the two chairs comes to a dead end, defeated by the painting's ironic sense of its own artifice. I should want to argue, however, that the strength of the painting is precisely that it does not want to arouse 'suspicions' in the beholder, that it invites us, rather, to forget its 'artifice' and submit to the logic of the narrative by entering into the pictured scene and following Keats as he loses himself in the imaginary room signified by the landscape outside. Thus can we see how the two chairs reflect the double movement shaping the spectator's creative relationship to the painting, which mirrors the poet's relationship to his book. The figure of Keats absorbed in his reading rhymes with the beholder's absorption in the painting, while the empty chair represents not only Keats's transcendence of the room's confined space but also our disappearance into the pictured scene. Rather than freezing the spectator out of the frame (which is what the

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apotropaic Death on the Pale Horse had done), the painting frees the beholder from her captive position as mere onlooker and beckons her to join the poet in his imaginary wanderings. This, surely, is why we should cherish Severn's painterly tribute. Ostensibly indifferent to the spectator's gaze, the figure in the portrait tacitly extends his living hand in a scene of quiet hospitality. (Might he be simply keeping the other chair free, for whomsoever cared to join him?) It is not a picture of a poet who has cut himself off, posing by handsome painted windows and shading himself preciously with myrtles and japonicas. It is a picture of somebody reading who, for all his apparent self­ absorption, wants to take us with him. NOTES

1. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover and London: University Press of N ew England, 1994); Ian Jack, Keats and the M irror o f A rt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 2. Letters, II, p. 19 (31 December 1818). 3. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 2 1 vols (London: Dent, 1930-4), XX, p. 387. 4. The phrase is borrowed from the title of Elizabeth K. Helsinger's brilliant book, Ruskin and the A rt of the Beholder (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1982). 5. Letters, II, p. 19. 6. Pitture a Fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa (Firenze, 1812). 7. On Coleridge, see E. S. Shaffer, '"Infernal Dreams" and Romantic A rt Criticism: Coleridge on the Campo Santo, Pisa', The Wordsworth Circle, 20 (1989), pp. 9-19. Stendhal's use of the image of the peeling fresco to support his assertion that 'I cannot give real facts, I can only show the shadow of them' runs as an idee fix e through Vie de Henry Brulard: T cannot see things as they really were, I only have my childish memories. I see pictures, I remember their effects in my heart, but the cause and shape of these things are a blank. It's still just like the frescoes of the [Campo Santo] at Pisa, where you can clearly make out an arm, but the piece of fresco beside it, which showed the head, has fallen off' (The Life of Henry Brulard, tr. Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 16 2 ,17 0 (see also pp. 1 1 7 ,1 2 7 , 308-9). 8. Keats's Life o f Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford and N ew York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 7. 9. 'Schloss Karlstein' (1808), in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Frederick von Schlegel, tr. E. J. Millington (London, 1849), P- 4° 510. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: The Cresset Press, 1949), pp. 342, 341. 11. The Salon o f 17 6 7 , in Diderot on Art, ed. and tr. John Goodman, 2 vols (N ew Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), II, pp. 213. 12. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 10 3,10 4 . 13. Diderot on Art, II, pp. 8 6 -123. 14. Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 1 3 1 -2 .

Still Life with Keats 13. Quoted in Schaffer, '"Infernal Dreams" and Romantic Art Criticism', pp. 1 2 -1 3 . 16. Letters, I, p. 192 (21 December 1817). 17. Critical Description and Analytical Review of 'Death on the Pale Horse', painted by Benjamin West, P. R. A. (London, 1817), p. 13. 18. Critical Description and Analytical Review, p. 89. 19. Complete Works, XVIII, p. 138. Burke's example of 'judicious obscurity' is taken, of course, from Milton's portrait of Death in Book II of Paradise Lost (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1739), Cassell's National Library (London, Paris and Melbourne, 1891), pp. 63-6. 20. Complete Works, XVIII, pp. 1 3 3 ,1 3 8 . 21. Letters, I, pp. 223, 224 (3 February 1818). 22. Letters, II, p. 46 (13 March 1819). 23. 'Keats: Somebody Reading', in Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Earkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 141. 24. Kenneth S. Calhoon, 'The Urn and the Lamp: Disinterest and the Aesthetic Object in Morike and Keats', Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 3 -2 3 (p. 3). 'Ode on Grecian Urn' is, of course, the locus classicus of Keats's speculations on art and its potentially false beauties; see Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism: A n Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 110 -2 7. 23. The Sculpted Word, p. 178. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid.

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CHAPTER NINE

'Cutting Figures': Rhetorical Strategies in K eats's Letters TIM O T HY WEBB

Perhaps we know Keats's letters so well that we have forgotten how to read them. Their status is so readily acknowledged and their virtues so indisputable that critical engagement might seem almost unnecessary or inappropriate. In some ways, this critical impasse is related to that sense of completion and of achieved intimacy that caused F. R. Leavis to claim many years ago that there was nothing new to be said about Keats's poetry. Keats may represent a particular or unusual challenge but so firm a pronouncement could only have been produced by a view of interpretative possibilities and of literary texts which was too easily satisfied, or even self-satisfied, or which was unduly influenced by the relative brevity of the Keatsian canon. Yet, although the poetry continues to be reinterpreted, the letters have proved an even greater challenge. Although they are generously quoted in most books on Keats, they rarely receive special treatment. As long ago as 1951, Lionel Trilling accorded them a sensitive essay entitled 'The Poet as Hero: Keats in his Letters' in which he presented a fine liberal humanist reading which took account of the literary identity of the letters but which, as the title indicates, centred its interest in a sustained process of ethical self­ construction and self-revelation.1 In Keats and Embarrassment Christopher Ricks offered an original perspective which treated the letters as literary texts deserving the same kind of attention as the poetry: with characteristic attentiveness to local verbal textures, he noticed the diversity of voices, the wordplay, the dramatic shaping and the energetic variety which had been ignored or minimised by most of Keats's critics.2 The possibilities so richly opened up by Ricks have not yet been fully explored. More recently, John Barnard and Andrew Bennett have written very suggestively on various aspects of the subject3 but it is increasingly clear that there is a great deal which may yet be said about the letters. Before that is achieved, it will be necessary to deliver them from the focus of the biographer and the

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appropriating critic of the poetry, and to learn again how to approach them as literary texts in their own right. As several critics have recently pointed out, one possible strategy for reading the letters would be to address them as narrative. For example, Andrew Bennett has incorporated them, specifically and suggestively, into a larger engagement with Keats's narrative structures and the shaping of his poetic career, while Cedric Watts has adduced the model of fiction. The Letters of John Keats could be read as in some ways analogous to the structures of an epistolary novel. Certainly, it includes the classic fictional ingredients: family, class, sex, money and death. Once, at least, Keats acknowledges this possibility at a local level when he interrupts a letter to George and Georgiana: I shall enqu[i]re tomorrow and then shall know whether to be particular or general in my letter - you shall have at least two sheets a day till it does sail whether it be three days or a fortnight - and then I will begin a fresh one for the next Month. The Miss Reynoldses are very kind to me - but they have lately displeased me much and in this way - Now I am coming the Richardson. (Letters, I, 394; hereafter, Letters will be cited in the text by volume and page number only.) This moment of recognition is significant because it shows that, like Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett,4 Keats's epistolary self-consciousness alerted him to the possibility that he might construct his style and the persona of his correspondence according to a fictional model. Yet, if the Letters is to be inter­ preted in this way, it must also be seen as a text which takes advantage of the accidental: from the existing correspondence between Keats and his friends we can deduce that he wrote at least seventy other letters which seem to have disappeared. So the Letters as we have it (or them) implies lacunae and absences which a novelist such as Sterne might have rejoiced to insert by calculation in the body of his own text. We might go further with Cedric Watts who suggests that the account of Keats's last year is 'a collective masterpiece consisting partly of his own letters and partly of correspondence ... by his friends and acquaintances': It is Keatsian, because he is the central figure and the main letter-writer, but it is also collaborative, because letters by various other figures (Brown, Severn, Haydon, Shelley, Aitken, Abbey, Haslam, Woodhouse, Dr Clark, and Mrs

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Brawne) contribute to the story, the immediate, harrowing, vivid story, of the poet's decline and death. To read these letters is to be drawn into the very texture of that past nexus of experience.5 This interpretation places a different emphasis on the improvised, on that diversity of voices which characterises the more sophis­ ticated versions of the epistolary novel, and especially on the ironical. This reading of the correspondence does not end with Keats making 'an awkward bow' with supreme and poignant tact but fills in the ensuing silence of the protagonist with a sequence of letters both addressed to him and about him until eventually 'it is all over'. Both of these models and especially the second suffer from the disadvantage that their narrative structure is not entirely under Keats's control. While this undermining of authority may be as congenial to post-modernist readers as the planned instabilities of the text may have been to Laurence Sterne, the letters also allow for another model of interpretation which accords a fuller centrality to Keats himself. The interest of the letters must rest in part on their combination of the important and the trivial, the ludic and the serious, but anyone who reads them as a sequence must also recognise that there is a recurrent theme which gives them unity and purpose. That theme is the life of the poet. Lawrence Lipking has alerted us to some of the ways in which Keats charted the crucial and archetypal phases of a poetic career in his poetry; although the letters necessarily broaden the focus and readers are involved in the stages of a life lived, felt and recorded with unrivalled intensity, that life is consistently based on and related to Keats's continuing need to define himself as a poet and to be confirmed in his search for poetic identity by public recognition. This might be seen as a Bildungsroman; as John Barnard notes, 'It is quite possible to read the letters in their own right, as the autobiography of Keats's imaginative quest, as his Prelude, but a Prelude unmediated by memory'.6 The comparison is suggestive but the Letters read very differently from the Prelude because they were not written as a whole or as a portrait of the artist; their very heterogeneity is part of their attraction but challenges readers who are comfortable with greater unity. A major preliminary obstacle to a full recognition of Keats's achievement has been created by our slowness in evolving a poetics of the letter. Recent attention to the uncanonical, the 'unliterary' and the autobiographical has produced significant advances in our approach to the reading of letters; in the case of

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the Romantic poets, however, primary emphasis is still focused on the biographical or on the ways in which the letters can be exploited as keys to unlock the poetry. The letters have been employed not so much in their own right but for what they can tell us about Keats the man or Keats the poet. Little effort has been made to acknowledge their autonomy as literary texts or the significance of their generic identity. Their very notability has obscured their complex and shifting character by attracting atten­ tion to a relatively limited number of 'canonical' passages. So we are familiar with the Pleasure Thermometer, the Chambers of Life, the march of intellect, negative capability, the vale of soul­ making, and the holiness of the heart's affections, not to mention Keats's delight in drinking claret, his project for appropriately experiencing the pleasures of fruit-tasting, his comparative evaluations of Milton and Wordsworth, his politicising of 'the grand democracy of forest trees', and his assertion that 'English ought to be kept up'. Any such list is unsatisfactorily selective and indicates by its frustrating exclusiveness how widely we are indebted to Keats's letters and what diverse claims they make on our attention. We would be seriously at fault if we were not to acknowledge the metaphoric inventiveness which they share with the poetry or their capacity to achieve an articulation which is both compellingly general and memorably exact or their profound insights into literature and the operations of the human heart. Yet when these points are conceded - and they constitute a large concession - we should also be prepared to recognise that such an approach does less than full justice to the experience of reading Keats's letters either as individual texts or as a collection. A concentration on extracts may serve some of the purposes of biography or certain kinds of critical explication but it largely ignores the extraordinary epistolary dynamics which produces them and the shifting matrix of tone, style and context which generates such crystalline forms out of its flux. Such partial readings also have encouraged us to neglect those features of Keats's correspondence such as his comic and dramatic inven­ tiveness and his vocal variety which are less easily reconciled to prevailing models of his poetic achievement. A more complete reading might serve not only to accord appropriate attention to the full range of Keats's remarkable achievement as a letter-writer but also to throw new light on the received parts of the letters and especially on the programme of the poetry when compared to the unstable but diverse expressiveness of the letters. Take for example the detailed self-portrait in the serial letter

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written to George and Georgiana between 14 February and 3 May 1819 (II, 58-109). Keats has just been sharing with his brother and sister-in-law a lengthy extract from Hazlitt's Letter to William Gifford when he concludes by noting, This is the sort of feu de joie he keeps up - there is another extract or two - one especially which I will copy tomorrow'. Then he modulates into a full-scale picture of the letter-writer in his study: for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper - which has a long snuff on it - the fire is at its last click - I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet - I am writing this on the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure - Besides this volume of Beaumont &Tletcher - there are on the tabl[e] two volumes of chaucer and a new work of Tom Moores call'd Tom Cribb's memorial to Congress - nothing in it - These are trifles - but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me - Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakspeare sat when he began T o be or not to be' - such thing[s] become interesting from distance of time or place. (11, 73) Keats's earnestness to receive a similar account of George and Georgiana suggests clearly that the epistolary self-portrait was intended as a keepsake, an 'enchaining' reminder of an absent brother and sister-in-law. In some ways, it served the function of the miniature or of the snapshot. If it is compared to Severn's painting of Keats in the act of reading, its characteristic qualities are immediately evident: although Severn includes some details such as the Shakespeare portrait on the wall7 which is both biographically specific and iconographically suggestive, Keats deliberately records the seemingly random clutter which is evidence of every-day life. These minute particulars are of value precisely because they are 'trifles' and aspire to no greater signi­ ficance. The scene arranges itself around the figure of Keats sitting with his back to the fire 'with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet'. The carelessness of this posture matches the apparently unplanned transition from the subject of Gifford and Hazlitt to the self-portrait and the informality of the domestic arrangements.

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Yet neither the insistence on particulars nor the improvisatory tone and mode can quite disguise the oddity of Keats's self­ presentation At the least, this is an image which captures the graceless unselfcon-sciousness of absorption with a self-aware­ ness which is acute and finely angled. But it is also possible that this literary represen-tation of carelessness is carefully calculated and that Keats is in fact posing for his picture. A letter of 13 March to Fanny Keats illustrates the complexity of Keats's attitude to 'attitude'. He is entertaining his sister with his own 'feu de joie' in which he constructs a childlike vision of the good life centred on a globe of goldfish: Then I would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva - and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading. (IL46) Martin Aske has alerted us to the ways in which this projection can be related to the strategies of engagement and disengagement which might inform the reading of pictures.8 What is most significant, perhaps, for an approach to Keats's self-portraits is his delight in the layerings of artifice and his acute sensitivity to the presentation of self. His desire to sit Tike the picture of somebody reading' strengthens the possibility that the poet with one foot askew and the other slightly elevated is animated by verbal and aesthetic artifice at least as much as by the needs of naturalistic portraiture. Readers need to remind themselves that letters are driven by their own literary and generic requirements even when they seem to be recording the facts of life with vivid and unstructured immediacy. No example illustrates this fact more tellingly than the unplanned appearance of the blackcurrant jelly. Sometime in February 1820 Keats was writing to Fanny Brawne and struggling once more with depression which he advised her to ascribe to the 'nerve-shaking nature' of his medicine: I shall impute any depression I may experience to this cause. I have been writing with a vile old pen the whole week, which is excessively ungallant. The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin'd to make blind es. (II, 262) Here Keats attempts to raise his own spirits and the spirits of his correspondent by concentrating first on the question of epistolary

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decorum and secondly on the materiality of his letter. Both per­ spectives are characteristic of his correspondence and both provide further circumstantial evidence of that aura of creative self-consciousness which envelops so many of the letters and recurrently foregounds the circumstances of their composition. Keats continues: However these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship thof [for though] a little disfigured by the smear of black currant jelly; which has made a little mark on one of the Pages of Brown's Ben Jonson, the very best book he has. I have lick'd it but it remains very purplue. I did not know whether to say purple or blue, so in the mixture of the thought wrote purplue which may be an excellent name for a colour made up of those two, and would suit well to start next spring. Be very careful of open doors and windows and going without your duffle grey. (II, 262) Here the letter progresses from one material circumstance to another, which is absorbed into the identity of the original text and becomes intimately part of its texture. At one level, the traces of jelly on the page seem to be a perfect example of that authenticating particularity which manifests the presence of life itself. In its inerasably sticky materiality, the jelly suggests how nature may resist or override the shaping control of art. In its randomness and triviality, it also provides one of those pleasures which characterise the experience of reading letters and journals since it seems to place the writer in a context which is unarguably 'real' precisely because such accidents belong to the medium of life rather than of art. It provides evidence of the quotidian and the banal which, temporarily at least, locates Keats in a world which we can recognise; this serves both to authenticate his humanity and to emphasise the inexplicable gap between such mundane circumstance and the achievements of the creative imagination. And if Keats did lick the page, we can easily imagine him with 'purple-stained mouth' enjoying an unusual physical sensation which could easily be equated with his 'palate-passion' (II, 64) for claret or the particularised delights of 'apricot nibbling - peach sc[r]unching - Nectarine-sucking and Melon carving' (II, 149). The purple smear on the page might also be compared to those tears of the heroine which are imagined as leaving their mark on the text in the tradition of epistolary fiction. As Linda S. Kauffman reminds us: 'Tear stains on the paper, as we have seen from Ovid onward, are visible signs of the body's

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pain, "permanent proofs" of the disproportion between the signified and the means of signifying, transmissions of the body to the text.'9 But these tears which assert the claims of the body are, of course, as fictional as the bodies they signal whereas Keats's jelly is not part of the encompassing fiction but a genuinely material intrusion on the life of the text. Such responses are hard to resist, and yet, if this passage brings us unusually close to the quick of Keats's life, it also provides unmistakable evidence of rhetorical strategies As Christopher Ricks and Eric Griffiths have noted, Keats's misspellings and mispunctuations sometimes come close to the heart of his creativity.10 In this case, they help to generate that sense of openended flow which achieves its ends not least because it exercises 'no irritable reaching after fact & reason' but holds itself alert to accommodate the unforeseen or the accidental or to follow the hintings of the processes of association. Here again the corrective tissue of dashes indicates a readiness to accept the promptings of the immediate, the unexpected and the improvisational in ways which are reminiscent of Sterne's model of punctuation.11 This apparent lack of system is itself an alternative system which is in keeping with Keats's lively responsiveness to the 'innumerable compositions and decompositions' (I, 265) of the words on his page. Where the decorum of poetry seems to have constrained him from exploiting the creative possibilities of misspelling, this letter with its improvisational fluidity is perfectly attuned to register the full range of linguistic potential which it identifies and liberates. With an almost Joycean capacity for maximising both the accidental and the ludic, Keats appropriates the unintended 'purplue' as a word of special expressiveness. This illustrates a kind of verbal inventiveness which has not always been associated with his poetry but which might be brought to bear upon it with interesting effects. It also demonstrates with exceptional clarity how even a text such as this, which might seem to provide irrefutable evidence of a direct link between words and life, is controlled by a literary intelligence in search of the most appropriate linguistic particularity. Jam on the page is translated into words on the page and the apparent digression is trium­ phantly claimed and appropriated in the interests of an authen­ ticity which is not primarily biographical but verbal. Keats's practice is put into interesting perspective by Vincent Kaufmann's account of the textualising process of the letter-writer: His milieu of choice is a minefield, a no-man's land hidden between text and life: an elusive zone leading from what he

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is to what he writes, where life becomes a work and the work becomes a life. The epistolary allows for the theory that no matter how far back we look, the writer's life has already been textualized, a life lived in letters, and that the work is never more than a kind of schematization, a shape given to the life.12 While Kaufmann is concerned to establish a division between life and letters which may be too diagrammatically extreme, his formulation does help to define the nature of Keats's endeavour and to indicate with salutary rigour how letters should not be confused with life. Keats ends his letter to Fanny by warning her to be careful of open doors and windows 'and going without your duffle grey'. This concluding advice moves from the attentive concern of a lover to a literary allusion which is not signalled by quotation marks. Fanny is gently absorbed into the world of Lyrical Ballads, and Keats demonstrates once again how allusive, knowing and literary he can be even at moments when his emotions are deeply involved. Another vivid example of how the seemingly innocent autobiographical notation must be approached with caution occurs in a later journal-letter (17 September 1819) where Keats is addressing himself directly to George. Both brothers are in difficulty, George because of his financial affairs in America, John because of 'the mire of a bad reputation which is continually rising against me' in the literary world. Faced with such problems, Keats provides his brother with a technique for conquering depression: But be not cast down any more than I am. I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out - then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write. (II, 186) Lionel Trilling sees this calculated resistance to depression as an example of Keats's heroism and his commitment to community rather than self: 'In fact adonize as I were going out' - how much this tells us about Keats. He never, he said, wrote a line with public intention, and yet when he wishes to summon up his most private faculties and bring them to high pitch, he does so by preparing himself as if for company. He had a passion for

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friendship and society. It is a statement that needs modi­ fication, but as at first we see him he has not the least impulse to hold himself aloof from the common pleasures of men - the community of pleasure, the generality of geni­ ality, are an important part of his daily life. And for quite a long time he believed that the development of his mind was scarcely less communal than were his pleasures.13 Trilling may well be justified in detecting this Targe generosity' in Keats but, understandably, he emphasises the humanistic impli­ cations of this account at the expense of other features which are equally suggestive. Keats, of course, is not going out and his programme is not just a technique for maintaining mental stability but a strategy for writing which is based on a deliberately dramatised presentation of self. Even the exercise itself may have been influenced by a passage in Tristram Shandy where Tristram elaborates an approach to the task of writing which is suggestively similar.14 And the unusual word 'adonize' features in Smollett's translation of Gil Bias, where it is an exact rendering of Lesage's m'adoniser: 'Three good hours, at least, in adjusting and adonizing myself'. Keats noted how Smollett 'pulls down and levels what with other Men would continue Romance' (1, 200); in 'adonize' he found a verb which allowed him to deflate or check his own pretensions while confirming that robust redeployment of Greek mythology which characterises the letters rather than the poetry. Certainly, Sterne, Smollett and their contemporaries left an impress on Keats's letters which is more pervasive than is usually acknowledged; even if Keats's resistance to the vapours owes nothing to the direct example of Sterne, it exhibits a high level of literary self-consciousness combined with an attention to the construction of self which is readily associated with Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey and which strongly qualifies any reading of the passage as unmediated self-expression. In parti­ cular, 'adonize' catches exactly that note of self-mockery which is characteristic of Sterne. Perhaps its quietly ironical exaggeration of self-regard could be connected to Keats's careless posture before the fire where the slight distortions of attitude might also be seen as gently self-mocking. Both these cases suggest that the figurings of self in the letters should not easily be equated with undifferentiated biographical reality. The tendency for life to become text and Keats's acute awareness of the transforming powers of his medium can be observed in a letter of 3-9 July to his brother Tom. Keats is analysing the influence of the kirk on Scottish life:

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Keats: Bicentenary Readings

These kirkmen have done Scotland harm - they have banished puns and laughing and kissing (except in cases where the very danger and crime must make it very fine and gustful. I shall make a full stop at kissing for after that there should be a better parent-thesis: and go on to remind you of the fate of Bums. (1, 319) If the effect of the kirk is to banish puns, Keats demonstrates an immediate and local resistance by giving licence to his own propensity for punning, only this time not just expressively but in opposition. As in the case of the blackberry jelly and the misspelling of 'purple', he observes the evolution of his own sentences and makes a creative opportunity out of the punctu­ ation. In fact, the 'full stop at kissing' is not placed immediately after the word but at the end of the clause which qualifies it; this clause is therefore deprived of its second or closing bracket for lack of a 'better parent-thesis'.15 The accidents of punctuation have liberated the ludic. At a primary level, these two sentences are concerned with the inhibiting effect of ecclesiastical authority and the pleasures, dangers and temptations of sex (as well as its outcome) but they are also reflexive and become their own subject. Text and topic are inextricably interwoven. Like the acknowledgement and celebration of 'purplue', this small example also illustrates an important characteristic of Keats's letters - that is their epistolary opportunism. A capacity to exploit, explore and develop their own verbal and syntactical potential is one of their most striking features. This attentiveness to the verbal medium is closely related to a high level of epistolary self-consciousness. Some letters permit themselves to create a densely allusive texture which is appropriate to the needs both of the letter-writer and the recipient. Others offer a space for verbal inventiveness where the emphasis is on performance, both self-delighting and calculated to please, amuse or enliven the reader. For example, Keats elaborates on the topic of clergymen for the benefit of his young sister: 'a great deal depends upon a cock'd hat and powder - not gun powder, lord love us, but lady-meal, violet-smooth, daintyscented lilly-white, feather-soft, wigsby-dressing, coat-collarspoiling whisker-reaching, pig-tail loving, swans down-puffing, parson-sweetening powder' (II, 56). Other letters allow Keats to assume a variety of literary styles and voices, including those of Sterne, Swift, Smollett, Radcliffe, the picturesque and the legal petition. Here the parodic is often overridden or overwritten by a kind of verbal gusto so that the effect is not so much to involve the

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reader in laughing at the ostensible target of the parody as to carry him or her joyfully along with the creative momentum of the language. Passages such as these demonstrate a high level of alertness both to the medium and to its stylistic potential. On one occasion, Keats promises a dissertation on letter­ writing (1,367) but, since 'a sheet of paper contains room only for three pages, and a half', he immediately compresses his account into tabular form. This table presents a classification which seems to conflate the book with the letter and which concentrates on the size and quality of paper ('Fools cap', 'Gilt edge', 'Strip') com­ bined with a comical sociology of usage ('Bath', for example, is 'used by Boarding schools, and suburbans in general', 'Octavo or tears' by 'All who make use of a lascivious seal'). This provo­ catively inconclusive 'dissertation' may owe something to the tabulations of Sterne and to his calculated digressions; it also serves to underline, however lightheartedly, Keats's recurrent concern with the tangibility of his text. Keats frequently alludes to the conditions of this medium, materially as well as generically. The 'faulty Quill' of the blackberry jelly letter with its 'blind es' is only one of many examples where the pen is brought into focus. This 'vile old pen' is both real and recalcitrant, one of those many obstacles to communication which impede the progress of the letter-writer. This very specific materiality marks it off from the instruments of poetry, which are granted a generic status and authority - 'O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen' ('Sleep and Poetry') or 'Give me a golden pen' ('On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour'). Nothing less than a golden pen would fulfil the requirements of romance, where 'blind es' would have no place. But the letters more often match the practice of the early verse letter to Charles Cowden Clarke which deprecatingly refers to 'my dull unlearned quill'; correspondingly, the pen of the prose correspondence is sometimes personified, endowed with its own unpredictable life and temperament. So Keats can complain that 'my pen seems to have grown too goutty for verse' (II, 5), or assert that 'though my pen may grow cold, I should be sorry my Life should freeze' (II, 31), or reassure his correspondents that 'my pen is no more garulous than my tongue' (II, 242) and that 'you may thank your Stars that my pen is not very long winded' (II, 104). On one occasion he collaborates with Charles Brown in a more grotesque personification: 'my modest feathered Pen frizzles like baby roast beef at making its entrance among such tantrum sentences - or rather ten senses' (II, 35-6) (here the stylistic excesses may be attributed partly to the presence of Brown and

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partly to the somewhat meaty context of the first part of the letter, for which Brown was responsible). By contrast, Keats's reflections on Bums present his pen in a different character: 'His Misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill' (1, 325). To some extent, these personifications might be regarded as an extension of Keats's own literary personality or even a projection of his changing moods; but, when the passages are read together, it seems that the pen is granted an independent existence with its own identifiable characteristics. It is jaunty, facetious, nimble, gossipy, and gives expression to an epistolary tendency to the playful and the gently irresponsible which is not appropriate for poetry and which acts as an animating antidote and alternative to Keats's darker reflections. Its independence is also comically related to Keats's difficulties in engaging with the recalcitrant medium of pen and ink, the limitations of notepaper and the frustrating ineptitudes of the postal service. If poetry is subject to the misunderstanding of readers and reviewers, letters are also exposed to the limitations of the medium and the fluctuations of the accidental. Sometimes Keats allows himself to explore these material con­ straints in ways which lead him to a revealing consideration of the generic. In a letter of 3 May 1818 to J. H. Reynolds he focuses on the processes of his writing with a materialistic immediacy that seems to redefine the significance of 'words on the page': Have you not seen a Gull, an ore, a sea Mew, or any thing to bring this Line to a proper length, and also fill up this clear part; that like the Gull I may dip - 1 hope, not out of sight and also, like a Gull, I hope to be lucky in a good sized fish. (I,28o) No ordinary printed text can do full justice to this letter. Woodhouse, who was responsible for copying the text of the original, recorded: 'Here the first page of the letter is crossed and the 2 first lines to this mark [that is, after 'Gull I may'] are written in the clear space left as a margin - & the word 'dip' is the first word that dips into the former writing' (1,280m). By using dip Keats brings into precise coincidence the anticipating figure of the seabird (with its slight traces of Milton) and the moment when the pen can be imagined to move below the bottom of the page to reappear in the vertically crossed additions to the main body of the text; dip also allows the possibility that the pen is also replenished from the inkwell at this moment of transition. He continues:

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*5 7

This crossing a letter is not without its association - for chequer work leads us naturally to a Milkmaid, a Milkmaid to Hogarth Hogarth to Shakespeare Shakespear to Hazlitt Hazlitt to Shakespeare and thus by merely pulling an apron string we set a pretty peal of Chimes at work. The physical appearance of the crossed page has prompted a sequence of associations and imaginative 'circuitings' (1,232) which embodies one of the main generic features of the letter - a creative irresponsibility which freshly embraces the playful and even the facetious. This might be compared to the opening of another letter to Reynolds, this time in verse: Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed, There came before my eyes that wonted thread Of shapes, and shadows, and remembrances, That every other minute vex and please: Things all disjointed come from north and south, Two witch's eyes above a cherub's mouth, Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon, And Alexander with his night-cap on Old Socrates a tying his cravat; And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth's cat; And Junius Brutus pretty well so so, Making the best of's way towards Soho. Although this verse letter is initially concerned with the disjointed phenomena of the world of dreams, it also allows itself the epistolary privilege of unmediated association. 'Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth's cat' and the jocular clumsiness of the rhyme between 'so so' and 'Soho' exert some genial influence on the course of this poem but, before Keats has finished, the 'shapes and shadows and remembrances' have reasserted themselves in so dark a vision of 'fierce destruction' that the poet intervenes in the sequence of association and flaps them away with the help of an insistently comical rhyme: 'Away ye horrid moods, / Moods of one's mind! You know I hate them well, / You know I'd sooner be a clapping bell / To some Kamschatkan missionary church / Than with these horrid moods be left in lurch'. The prose letter, which was written only a few weeks later, also shifts from the playful to the profoundly serious, changing both mood and mode. Keats continues: Let them chime on while, with your patience, - 1will return to Wordsworth - whether or no he has an extended vision or a

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circumscribed grandeur - whether he is an eagle in his nest, or on the wing - And to be more explicit and to show you how tall I stand by the giant, I will put down a simile of human life as far as I now perceive it; that is, to the point to which I say we both have arrived at - 'Well - I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments... (1,280) Returning to the subject of Wordsworth, whom he had discussed at length earlier in the letter, Keats continues both his sequences of flight and the practice of simile which had initiated the whole paragraph. His subsequent account of the sequence of mutual development, of Milton and Wordsworth, of religious history and a 'grand march of intellect' is one of the most sustained and extraordinary passages in the letters. As this example demonstrates, Keats seems to have needed his resting-places and his pauses for jocular relief. The contours of his letters show that his practice of epistolary licence provided an enabling context for more sustained and concentrated passages of writing. Keats may sometimes have lamented that he could establish 'no settled strain' in his letters but their very instability or open-endedness allowed him to approach the objects of his greatest concern by stealth or by sudden discovery and to relinquish them when it seemed appropriate, whether to resume them later (as in the present case) or not. If this served Keats's own psychological and creative needs, it may also have fulfilled one of the principles of epistolary decorum - that a correspondent should be treated with consideration and should never be bored by undue insistence. The letter to Reynolds is very specific about the obligations of the letter-writer. In this case, as in the case of the verse letter, Keats is particularly concerned to achieve a tone which is appropriate to the mental needs of a correspondent weakened by ill-health: What I complain of is that I have been in so an uneasy a state of Mind as not to be fit to write to an invalid. I cannot write to any length under a dis-guised feeling. I should have loaded you with an addition of gloom, which I am sure you do not want. I am now thank God in a humour to give you a good groats worth. (1,275-6) To transmit his own uneasiness would be unfriendly but the letter deliberately allows itself a structural unease. After a discussion of Wordsworth and Milton, of axioms in philosophy, reading Hamlet and venery, he tells Reynolds: 'Until we are sick, we understand not; - in fine, as Byron says, "Knowledge is Sorrow"; and I go on

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to say that "Sorrow is Wisdom" - and further for aught we can know for certainty! "Wisdom is folly" Keats continues: So you see how I have run away from Wordsworth, and Milton; and shall still run away from what was in my head, to observe, that some kind of letters are good squares others handsome ovals, and others some orbicular, others spheroid - and why should there not be another species with two rough edges like a Rat-trap? I hope you will find all my long letters of that species, and all will be well; for by merely touching the spring delicately and etherially, the rough edged will fly immediately into a proper compactness, and thus you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leven in it, of my fragments - If you cannot find this said Rat-trap sufficiently tractable - alas for me, it being an impossibility in grain for my ink to stain otherwise: If I scribble long letters I must play my vagaries. I must be too heavy, or too light, for whole pages - 1 must be quaint and free of Tropes and figures - I must play my draughts as I please, and for my advantage and your erudition, crown a white with a black, or a black with a white, and move into black or white, far and near as I please - I must go from Hazlitt to Patmore, and make Wordsworth and Coleman play at leap-frog - or keep one of them down a whole half holiday at fly the garter - 'From Gray to Gay, from Little to Shakespeare' - Also as a long cause requires two or more sittings of the Court, so a long letter will require two or more sittings of the Breech wherefore I shall resume after dinner. This running away is a deliberate indulgence of irresponsi­ bility and an allowed digression not unlike those of Fielding and Sterne. Keats enjoys this liberty and exploits its digressive potential with a reflexive self-concentration reminiscent of Sterne's digression on digressions. The key terms are particularly instructive. 'If I scribble long letters I must play my vagaries': this implies that a conjunction of the sustained requirements of a long letter and Keats's own frame of mind will necessarily result in a piece of writing which lacks formal or tonal unity and which may include the seemingly capricious. The work 'vagaries' comes sharply into focus when set alongside another letter to Reynolds (21 September 1819) in which Keats explains that his news from George is 'not the best': This is the reason among others that if I write to you it must be in such a scraplike way. I have no meridian to date

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Interests from, or measure circumstances - To night I am all in a mist; I scarcely know what's what - But you knowing my unsteady & vagarish disposition, will guess that all this turmoil will be settled by tomorrow morning. (II, 167) Keats's vagarish disposition is 'disposed to wander, whimsical, erratic'; 'vagarish' is an even rarer word than the unusual 'vagarious' but presumably appropriate to the writer who apologised for his 'changes and variations of Mind' (II, 211). Yet the letter to Reynolds is far from apologetic: 'I must play my vagaries' indicates both that the wandering principle is built into the nature of the long letter and that Keats is committed to a pursuit of its promptings. OED cites only one example, from 1580, of 'play his vagary', which it defines as 'of a horse, to leave or refuse to follow the proper or defined course'. More generally, a vagary is 'a departure or straying from the ordered, regular, or usual course of conduct, decorum, or propriety; a frolic or prank, esp. one of a freakish nature' or 'A capricious, fantastic, or eccentric action or piece of conduct' or 'An erratic play of fancy; a fantastic, eccentric, or extravagant idea or notion'. Not surprisingly, one of the sources cited is Tristram Shandy. If personal failure of purpose or direction is improper or undesirable, this refusal to follow the regular course is essentially part of the formal licence conceded to the letter. In playing his vagaries, Keats may be imitating the intractable horse; he is also asserting a freedom to be playful within the boundaries of the genre. Like all gauges, draughts allows the players to pursue the spirit of recreation within the conventions of the code; Keats's double insistence on 'as I please' suggests a desire to follow his ludic possibilities even beyond the edge of the board. But draughts must be played in a pattern of blacks and whites, which suggests that the basic image may have been dictated by the physical appearance of the letter which Keats later refers to as 'chequerwork': the presence of draughts in the context also suggests that 'chequerwork may conceal a similar boardgame (checkers) within its more obvious denotative identity.16 Keats moves from draughts to the less constricted pastimes of leap-frog and fly the garter which enact in physical form the same process of passing over other bodies as the board-game. There is an unmistakeable progress here towards the uncomplicated pleasures of childhood, allied to the freedoms of half-holiday and the carnival incongruities which link the solemn Wordsworth - (the poet of 'the human heart') - and the comical Colman, force them into the undignified postures of leapfrog and enforce the festive regimen by 'keeping them down a whole half holiday'. The holiday spirit is

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further enacted by the comical transformation of Pope's 'From grave to gay, from lively to severe' where an Augustan formulation of appropriate style is appropriated and punningly redirected in the name of liberty. The paragraph ends with another punning assertion of physical reality ('sittings of the Breech'). This insistence on the freedom of the letter-writer comically identifies the Keatsian letter as one which does not conform to the regular shapes of an epistolary geometry that is less amenable to the claims of the erratic. Keats's method embraces the frag­ mentary and the irregular, 'it being an impossibility in grain for my ink to stain otherwise' (here again we are reminded of the immediately material presence of a text which is not bound by the conventions of printing, just as the literary form of the letter resists the influence of various formal models). The perfect figures of geometry (square, oval, orb, sphere) do not allow suffi­ ciently for the claims of the miscellaneous and the heterogeneous; the Rat-trap represents a pragmatic alternative to such classical shapes since their closed formal perfection is inadequate for the more open-ended expressive needs of Keats's correspondence. The effectiveness of the Rat-trap depends on the reader (in this case Reynolds) who by touching the spring may achieve a 'proper compactness', 'and thus you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leven in it, of my fragments'. The firm hint that the spring must be addressed 'delicately and etherially' and the concluding formulation in which 'with your own leven' is so compactly included both make it clear that the reader is allocated a significant role in the shaping of this text. Yet, although Keats makes claims on the recipients of his letters, these claims are greatly varied. Both the tone of the letter to Reynolds and Keats's declaration of an epistolary challenge to his reader are conditioned by the terms of their intimacy. Keats was peculiarly sensitive to the imagined presence of the addressee and took steps to achieve a style and a mode which was appropriate both to the reader and to the occasion. In this way, his sense of what was generically appropriate was shaped and modified by his sense of audience. So he apologises to John Taylor for a letter which had already included its own apology for 'hammering instead of writing' (II, 144): 'Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter - I hope that shortly you will be able to bear six times as much' (II, 157). So he finds it necessary to explain to Fanny Brawne that it is not possible to address her in a style which might generally be considered suitable for a lover:

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This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant - 1 cannot help it - 1 am no officer in yawning quarters; no Parson-romeo - My Mind is heap'd to the full; stuff'd like a cricket ball - if I strive to fill it more it would burst - 1 know the generallity of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoften'd so hard a Mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own Brain - But I conjure you to give it a fair thinking; and ask yourself whether't is not better to explain my feelings to you, than write artificial Passion Besides you would see through it - It would be vain to strive to deceive you. (II, 141) His mood dictates a style which is appropriate to his concerns and the current state of his mind ('My heart seems now made of iron'). Although he cannot change this, his sense of decorum impels him to provide a justification: You see how I go on - like so many strokes of a Hammer - 1 cannot help it - 1 am impell'd, driven to it. I am not happy enough for silken Phrases, and silver sentences - I can no more use soothing words to you than if I were at this moment engaged in a charge of Cavalry - Then you will say I should not write at all - Should I not? Yet this sense of decorum is dictated by his feelings for Fanny rather than by any anxiety about the traditional requirements of the love-letter. At times, he even resisted the temptation to address Fanny according to this convention because it was too literary. On 1 July 1819 he had told her that he was glad not to have had an opportunity to send her the letter he had written two days before because "twas too much like one out of Ro[u]sseau's Heloise'. Fortunately, 'I am more reasonable this morning'. An honest love-letter could only be written in the morning for at night 'my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should [think me] either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad' (II, 122). At a later stage in his relationship with Fanny, Keats specifically found fault with the 'romantic' insincerities of the correspondence between Rousseau and the Mesdames Latour de Franqueville and du Payrou: I have been turning over two volumes of Letters written between Ro[u]sseau and two Ladies in the perplexed strain

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of mingled finesse and sentiment in which the Ladies and gentlemen of those days were so clever, and which is still prevalent among Ladies of this Country who live in a state of resoning romance. The Likeness however only extends to the mannerism not to the dexterity. What would Rousseau have said at seeing our little correspondence! What would his Ladies have said! I don't care much - I would sooner have Shakspeare's opinion about the matter. The common gossiping of washerwomen must be less disgusting than the continual and eternal fence and attack of Rousseau and these sublime Petticoats ... Thank god that you are fair and can love me without being Letter-written and sentimenta­ liz'd into it. (II, 266-7) If Keats was careful not to fall into a style which was untrue to his own feelings, he always remained anxious to please. When George and Georgiana were on the point of sailing for America, he wrote: Ha! my dear Sister George, I wish I knew what humour you were in that I might accommodate myself to any one of your Amiabilities - Shall it be a Sonnet or a Pun or an Acrostic, a Riddle or a Ballad - 'perhaps it may turn out a Sang, and perhaps turn out a Sermon' I'll write you on my word the first and most likely the last I ever shall do, because it has strucke me - what shall it be about? (1,303) The immediate outcome is an acrostic poem which spells out Georgiana Augusta Keats with the first letters of its twenty-one lines. Here the ludic coincides with Keats's desire to 'accommo­ date himself' to the interests and predictions of a reader who is about to begin a new life. Writing to Reynolds about his visit to Burns Country, he switches without warning from a description of the scenery to a sudden concern for the needs of his readers: First we stood upon the Bridge across the Doon; surrounded by every Phantasy of Green in tree, Meadow, and Hill, - the Stream of the Doon, as a Farmer told us, is covered with trees from head to foot - you know those beautiful heaths so fresh against the weather of a summers evening - there was one stretching along behind the trees. I wish I knew always the humour my friends would be in at opening a letter of mine, to suit it to them nearly as possible I could always find an egg shell for Melancholy - and as for Merriment a Witty humour will turn any thing to Account - my head is sometimes in

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such a whirl in considering the million likings and anti­ pathies of our Moments - that I can get into no settled strain in my Letters - My Wig! Burns and sentimentality coming across you and frank Floodgate in the office - O scenery that thou shouldst be crush'd between two Puns. (1, 323-4) The anxious interruption of the description seems to carry no obvious justification in the immediately preceding context but it suggests a powerful underlying desire to please by anticipating the mood of the recipients 'at opening a letter of mine'. Whatever the source of his uncertainty, its effect is to break up the surface of his letter and to illustrate exactly that failure to achieve a 'settled strain' which it laments. This admission throws an interesting light on Keats's assertion of his right to play his 'vagaries': what sometimes presents itself as an inclination to pursue the possibilities of the playful could be identified on occasions as an incapacity to maintain a tone appropriate to the subject matter. This solicitude for his correspondents is a notable and recur­ rent feature of his long letters to George and Georgiana, whose unreachability afforded them special status. Keats was sharply conscious of the distance between them - 'sometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at present, a direct communication of spirit with you' (II, 3). In order to command the presence of the absent others, he resorted to a variety of techniques: Now the reason why I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I remember your Ways and Manners and actions; I known you manner of thinking, you manner of feeling: I know what shape your joy or your sorrow would take, I know the manner of you walking, standing, saunter­ ing, sitting down, laughing, punning, and every action so truly that you seem near to me. You will remember me in the same manner - and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock - you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room. (II, 5) This programme seems to involve a memory system which is centred on the precise figuring of the correspondent in a variety of attitudes. Here it would seem that to cut a figure or to be the subject of such a representation is essential to sustaining intimate communication or, in Keats's own terms, ensuring an impression of identity. His own self-portrait before the fire with 'one foot rather askew and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet' was written a little more than two months later in another

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long letter to George and Georgiana; its sharply delineated postures take on further significance when examined in the light of this earlier letter and its intensity of focus on 'shape', 'manner' and 'action'. These devices for structuring the other are given a further dimension in a letter of September 1819 where Keats explains to George and Georgiana the rationale of the serial letter: Tuesday - You see I keep adding a sheet daily till I send the packet off - which I shall not do for a few days as I am inclined to write a good deal; for there can be nothing so remembrancing and enchaining as a good long letter be it composed of what it may - From the time you left me, our friends say I have altered completely - am not the same person - perhaps in this letter I am for in a letter one takes up one's existence from the time we last met - 1 dare say you have altered also - every man does - Our bodies every seven years are completely fresh-materiald - seven years ago it was not this hand that clench'd itself against Hammond We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch i t ... for St Anthony's shirt. This is the reason why men who had been bosom friends, on being separated for any number of years, afterwards meet coldly, neither of them knowing why - The fact is they are both altered - Men who live together have a silent moulding and influencing power over each other They interassimulate. T is an uneasy thought that in seven years the same hands cannot greet each other again. All this may be obviated by a willful and dramatic exercise of our Minds towards each other. (II, 208-9) This admits a profound and existential uneasiness whose effects are more threatening to order and sequence than any moods of an unsteady and vagarish disposition. Here the long letter is presented as a counterforce to the dissolving effects of time and distance: it is 'enchaining' not only because it holds together even the seemingly miscellaneous fragments of a life ('be it composed of what it may') but because it links the separated correspon­ dents, through a deliberate act of inter-assimilation. The misspell­ ing ('interassimulate') exhibits those characteristics of the Keatsian creative unconscious so brilliantly noted by Ricks: it combines 'assimilate' and 'simulate' so that the shared process of mutual influence results not only in absorption but in a seemingly shared identity where each imitates or represents the other. Keats

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emphasises the need to impose one's will on events. There is an obvious similarity to his technique for defeating depression. Just as the act of 'adonizing' involves a calculated construction of self, so the epistolary programme requires 'a willful and dramatic exercise of our Minds towards each other'. Earlier in the same letter Keats addresses the problem with great ingenuity: I must take an opportunity here to observe that though I am writing to you I am all the while writing at your Wife - This explanation will account for my speaking sometimes hoitytoityishly. Whereas if you were alone I should sport a little more sober sadness. I am like a squinti[n]g gentleman who saying soft things to one Lady ogles another - or what is as bad in arguing with a person on his left hand appeals with his eyes to one one [for on] the right. His Vision is elastic he bends it to a certain object but having a patent sp[r]ing it flies off. Writing has this disadvan[ta]ge of speaking, one cannot write a wink, or a nod, or a grin, or a purse of the Lips, or a smile - O law! One can-[not] put ones pinger [for finger] to one's nose, or yerk ye in the ribs, or lay hold of your button in writing - but in all the most lively and titterly parts of my Letter you must not fail to imagine me as the epic poets say - now here, now there, now with one foot pointed at the ceiling, now with another - now with my pen on my ear, now with my elbow in my mouth - O my friends you loose the action - and attitude is every thing as Fusili said when he took up his leg like a Musket to shoot a Swallow just darting behind his shoulder. And yet does not the word mum! go for ones finger beside the nose - 1 hope it does. (II, 204-5) This nicely tuned sense of audience is also given explicit articu­ lation in a letter to Woodhouse which is almost exactly contem­ poraneous. Keats tells Reynolds, 'as I know you will interread one another - I am still writing to Reynolds as well as yourself' (II, 173). This suggests that letters to more than one correspondent (such as Tom and George Keats, Jane and Marianne Reynolds) might constitute a separate category ('double writing', as Andrew Bennett defines it, 'which figures its audience as split into two');17 at the least, the concept of interreading indicates a highly devel­ oped rhetorical sensitivity. The imagined presence of Georgiana has also stimulated a set of associations and a tone which, presumably, are calculated to appeal to her 'Amiabilities'. Both 'bitterly' and 'hoity-toityishly' appear to be Keats's own inventions

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in a comic mode which invokes both epic and tragedy (an allusion to Othello in 'yerk ye in the ribs') but which absorbs and transforms them into a form which draws its energy from exaggeration and over-animation. All of this is centred on a series of dramatic exercises, a sequence of vivid figurings derived in general from the comic tradition but especially from the example of the stage. The squinting gentleman and the catalogue of gestures carry a comic potential which is essentially dramatic or theatrical and which can be matched frequently in Keats's letters. Here they build to a local climax with the presentation of the poet himself in a series of postures which are grotesque or even impossible: 'now with one foot pointed at the ceiling, now with another - now with my pen on my ear, now with my elbow in my mouth'. This image of the poet throws some retrospective light on the self-portrait of Keats 'with one foot rather askew upon the rug'. The slight obliquity of that apparently naturalistic portrait has now been developed into 'now with one foot pointed at the ceiling, now with another'. At a basic level, Keats is filling the void between himself and Georgiana by exercising a capacity both to amuse and, superficially, to dramatise. This passage is animated by his choice to 'be quaint and free of Tropes and figures' and to exercise this freedom both by linguistic inventiveness and by creating a sequence of human figures in a variety of attitudes. Yet, at its very centre, this display is compromised by the concession that 'one cannot write a wink, or a nod, or a grin, or a purse of the Lips, or a smile'. Keats admits the inadequacies of language with such linguistic figuring and such a show of energy that he might seem at first to have triumphed over the difficulty. But, on closer inspection, the animation might appear to be excessive, implying by its surplus of energies both a power over language and a recognition that the dilemma cannot be resolved. Keats's comical self-portrait can now be seen both to assert the imaginative liberty of the writer and, at the same time/ to demonstrate its limitations. He concedes: 'O my friends you loose the action - and attitude is every thing'. The paradox is deeply engrained in the texture of the letters. Keats's descriptions of himself and of others are sensitive to action and attitude and to the language of the body. This alertness informs his presentation of individuals in action and the very nature of his language. So, he uses the posture of a man with his hands in his pockets in a number of contexts. For example 'When among Men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen - 1 feel

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free to speak or to be silent - 1 can listen and from every one I can learn - my hands are in my pockets I am free from all suspicion and comfortable' (1, 341). Or again: 'Brown and Dilke are walking round their Garden hands in Pockets making observations' (II, 59). These notations of gesture and attitude are employed to bring specific personified focus to one of Keats's most celebrated generalisations: 'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket' (I, 224). This nexus of examples illustrates how naturally Keats resorts to the figuring of attitudes and how those attitudes may generate the rhetorical figures of language itself. If we lose the action, the best substitute may be the 'attitudes' and action of language. Keats was recurrently aware of the limitations of such figurings but reluctant to forgo their possibilities. The dilemma may be reflected in the distinction he made between Shakespeare and Byron: A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life - a life like the scriptures, figurative - which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure - but he is not figurative - Shakspeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it. (II, 67) At one level, Keats rejoices in the mysteriousness of Shakes­ peare's life, in that artistic invisibility and impersonality to which Keats himself so often aspired as a poet. He also reacts strongly against that Byronic egotism which makes its own personality the subject of poetry. Byron's cutting a figure is an index of his super­ ficiality. While Keats's formulation implies the insubstantial flamboyance of one too easily concerned with an observing public, it might also suggest that hollowness and lack of depth and dimension which characterises the silhouette or cut-out (which was a recognised medium of portraiture in the Keats circle). The valuation is unequivocal but should be balanced against Keats's practice elsewhere. Keats also conceded it would be 'a great delight... to know in what position Shakspeare sat when he began "To be or not to be'" (II, 73) and his letters attempt to provide such pleasures for his correspondents by presenting both Keats and the figures he observed in a distinctive series of post-ures and attitudes. Can these be classified as figurative; might they not rather be examples of 'cutting a figure'? Keats is pulled both ways, trapped by the paradoxical nature of representation,

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recognising the limitations of language yet inventively and deliberately resisting them. Here, as elsewhere, he is sensitive to the nature of his medium and, here as elsewhere, the letters reveal a writer whose artistic self-consciousness is both a source of their creative momentum and one of their major attractions. NOTES

1. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self: N ine Essays in Criticism (New York: Viking Press, 1955), pp. 3-49. 2. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 3. John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life o f Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Susan J. Wolfson, 'Keats the letter-writer: epistolary poetics', Romanticism Past and Present, 6 (1982), 4 3-6 1. 4. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, The Courtship Correspon­ dence, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford and N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 13. 5. Cedric Watts, A Preface to Keats (London: Longman, 1985), p. 52. 6. Barnard, John Keats, p. 144. 7. David Piper, The Image o f the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 18 -19 ; Joanna Richardson, Keats and his Circle: A n Album o f Portraits (London: Cassell, 1980), p. 78. 8. See pp. 129 -43. 9. Linda S. Kauffmann, Discourse o f Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 316. 10. Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment, pp. 69ft.; Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice o f Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 36-7. 11. For the dash, see John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 12. Vincent Kaufmann, Post Scripts: The Writer's Workshop, tr. Deborah

Treisman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 6. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Trilling, The Opposing Self, p. 8. A comparison suggested by Cedric Watts. For parentheses, see Lennard, But I Digress. See M ary Russell Mitford: 'M y letter, first written horizontally ... then perpendicularly to form a sort of chequer-work' (Village Series, III, 1824; cited in OED). See also: 'I wish I had a little innocent bit of Metaphysic in m y head, to criss-cross this letter' (Letters, I, 246). 17. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience, p. 37.

Notes on Contributors

Martin Aske is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Cheltenham

and Gloucester College of Higher Education. He is the author of Keats and Hellenism (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and is currently compiling an edition of Romantic art criticism. Michael O'Neill is Professor of English at the University of

Durham. His books include The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry (Oxford, 1989). He has recently completed (with Donald H. Reiman) Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley's Poems in European and American Libraries for Garland's Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics series. David B. Pirie is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

Manchester. In collaboration with Sir William Empson, he edited a selection of Coleridge's poems (Faber, 1972; reissued by Carcanet, 1989). His publications include William Words­ worth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness (1982), Shelley (1988), and How to Write Critical Essays: A Guide for Students of Literature (1985); he is the editor of The Romantic Period, volume 5 of the Penguin History of Literature (1994). Gareth Reeves, Reader in English at the University of Durham, is

the author of two books on T. S. Eliot, and, with Michael O'Neill, of Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (Mac­ millan, 1992). He has published two volumes of poetry. At present he is writing a book, Englishing American Poetics, about the impact of American poetry on post-war British poetry. Fiona Robertson is a lecturer in English at the University of

Durham. She has published critical and editorial work on Walter Scott and articles on a range of other work in the Romantic period. Her current research investigates repre­ sentations of the United States in British Literature, 1790-1840. Nicholas Roe is Professor of English Literature in the School of

English, University of St Andrews. He is the author of

Notes on Contributors

17 1

Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), and The Politics of Nature (Macmillan, 1992). He co-edited Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Peter Laver (1985), and has edited and introduced William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry for the Penguin Poetry Library (1992) and Selected Poems of John Keats for the Everyman Library (1995). He is the editor of Keats and History (Cambridge, 1995) and author of the forthcoming John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford University Press). J. R. Watson is Professor of English at the University of Durham. He is the author of books on the Romantic and Victorian periods (Wordsworth's Vital Soul, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830, The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins) and editor of Everyman's Book of Victorian Verse. He has a particular interest in hymnology (Companion to Hymns and Psalms, 1988); his book The English Hymn is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Timothy Webb is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. His books include The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood, English Romantic Hellenism, Shelley (with David Pirie) and Shelley's 'Devils' Notebook (with P. M. S. Dawson). He has recently completed an edition of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, and he has edited selections of Shelley's poetry and prose for Everyman (enlarged edition, 1995) and Yeats's poetry for Penguin. He is the General Editor of the Penguin Yeats.

Index

Abbey, Richard, 35 Allott, Miriam, 4 3 ,5 8 Arnold, Matthew, 7 2 -3 'The Buried Life', 76 Ashbery, John, 8 8 ,10 4, i26n Aske, Martin, 2 ,8 - 9 ,1 2 9 - 4 3 ,1 4 9 Audubon, John James, 3 5 ,3 6 Bailey, Benjamin, 1 7 - 1 8 ,2 4 ,3 0 Baillie, Joanna, 29 Bakeless, John, 3 1 Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 3 1 ,3 9 Barbauld, Anna, 34 Barnard, John, 2, 2 7 ,47n, 5 9 ,14 4 ,14 6 Barthes, Roland, 108 Bate, Walter Jackson, 1 , 1 1 , 1 8 , 8 8 , loon, 10 m Bates, Milton, 99 Bayley, John, 1, 26n, 8 8 ,10 7 Bennett, Andrew , 2 ,1 4 4 -5 , *66 Bewell, Alan, 24 Birkbeck, Morris, 3 4 ,3 5 ,3 6 , 3 7 ,3 8 -4 1 , 4 4 , 45n , 47n Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 3 ,4 , 12 Blake, William, 3 1 Bloom, Harold, 7 ,8 8 -9 1,9 4 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 124 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Lord, 19 Bonnycastle, John, 2 1 Bowles, William, 29 Brand, John Popular Antiquities, 5 ,5 9 Brawne, Fanny, 3 3 ,4 9 ,5 0 ,1 1 9 ,1 4 9 , 16 1-3 Brooke, Stopford, 13 Brown, Charles, 7, 3 5 ,8 6 ,1 5 5 - 6 ,1 6 8 Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, Count of, 3 7 -8 ,4 0 Burke, Edmund, 138, i4 3n Bums, Robert, 4 2 ,1 0 5 - 6 ,1 5 6 ,1 6 3 -4 Butler, Marilyn, 45n Byron, Lord, 4 , 1 3 , 1 4 , 1 3 1 , 1 5 8 , 1 6 8

Campbell, Thomas, 2 9 ,4 1 Carey, William Paulet, 13 7 Cartwright, Major, 19 Chapman, George, 32, 34, 78 Chardin, Jean Simeon, 1 3 2 - 3 ,1 3 7 ,1 4 0 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5 1 , 5 8 , 1 3 1 Clampitt, A m y Voyages: A Homage to John Keats, 4, 4 1,1 12 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 2 4 ,76 'Recollections of John Keats', 3 , 1 1 12 ,18 -19 ,2 2 -3 ,3 1 Clarke, John, 1 1 , 1 8 - 1 9 , 22 Cobbett, William, 2 8 ,3 9 - 4 1 ,45n, 47n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18 ,19 , 29, 6 4 ,69n, 7 5 , 1 1 3 , 1 3 0 , 1 3 5 Colman, George, Jr., 160 Coltart, Nina, 6, 71, 74, 86 Coote, Stephen, 1 1 , 26n, 59 Cortes, Heman, 3 1 , 3 2 ,3 9 ,4 1 , 77-8 Cowper, William, 57 Croker, John Wilson, 25-6n, 77 Dante Alighieri, 78-9 De Almeida, Hermione, 46n De Man, Paul, 46n De Pauw, Cornelius, 37 ,4 0 Dickstein, Morris, 1 0 9 ,1 2 1 Diderot, Denis, 8 , 1 3 2 , 1 3 3 , 1 3 5 , 1 4 1 Dilke, Charles, 2 8 ,3 6 ,16 8 Diirer, Albrecht, 1 3 1 Dwight, Thomas, 29 Dyer, George, 19 Eliot, George, 62 Eliot, T. S., 75 ,8 8 -9 , 98 Empson, William, 6 ,1 2 4 ,1 2 5 Enfield School, 3 - 4 , 6 , 1 1 - 2 6 Everett, Barbara, 1 1 2 , 1 1 8 , 1 2 3 , i27n , 140 Fearon, Henry Bradshaw, 39 Fender, Stephen, 2 9 -3 0 ,47n

Index Fielding, Henry, 159 Flower, George, 38 Forman, M. B., 59 Franklin, Benjamin, 28 Fried, Michael, 8 - 9 ,1 3 2 - 3 ,1 3 5 ,1 3 7 , 1 3 8 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 1 Fry, Paul H., 1 Garrod, H. W., 59 Gifford, William, 16 ,14 8 Gilbert, William, 34 Gittings, Robert, 1 1 , 1 8 , 4 3 Godwin, William, 19 Goldsmith, Oliver, 62 Greenblatt, Stephen, 2 8 ,45n Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 1 3 2 - 3 ,1 3 7 ,1 4 0 Griffiths, Eric, 15 1 Hall, Robert, 22 Hammond, Thomas, 14 Harrison, Tony, 4 , 1 1 , 1 7 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 8 1 ,1 3 0 ,1 3 5 Hazlitt, William, 1 1 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 2 9 , 1 3 7 - 9 ,

148,157 Herschel, William, 2 1 Homans, Margaret, 1 Hone, William, 5 7 ,6 3 Houghton, Walter E., 53 H ull Advertiser, The, 61 Humboldt, Alexander von, 33 Hunt, Leigh, 1 5 -1 7 , 20, 75, 76, 77, 78, 13 1-2 ,13 9 The Examiner, 37 Imagination and Fancy, 5-6 The Indicator, /\.yn 'Preface' to Foliage, 15 Jack, Ian, 8 ,4 2 ,8 4 ,1 2 9 Jefferson, Thomas, 37 ,4 0 Jesus, 50 Joan of Arc, 55 -6 Johnson, C. B., 39 Jones, John, 9 1 -2 Joyce, James, 1 5 1 Kauffman, Linda S., 15 0 -1 Kaufmann, Vincent, 1 5 1 - 2 Keach, William, 15 Keats, Fanny, 13 9 -4 0 ,14 9 ,15 2 Keats, George, 4 ,5 ,2 0 ,2 7 ,2 9 ,3 0 ,3 5 - 7 , 3 8 , 3 9 ,4 1 ,4 2 ,4 3 ,4 4 ,46n, 69n, 1 0 6 ,1 2 9 ,1 3 0 ,1 4 5 ,1 4 8 ,1 5 2 ,1 5 9 , 16 4 ,16 5 Keats, Georgiana, 4 ,2 0 ,2 7 ,2 9 , 3 0 ,3 5 7 , 3 8 , 4 1 , 4 3 , 46n, 10 6 ,12 9 ,13 0 , 1 4 5 ,1 4 8 ,1 6 3 ,1 6 4 ,1 6 5 ,1 6 6

173 Keats, John The Cap and Bells, 65 'Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed', 1 0 2 - 3 ,1 5 7 Endymion, 1 7 ,1 9 , 23-4 , 25n, 4 9 ,7 9 8 0 ,10 4 ,10 7 ,115 ,119 ,12 1,13 9 The Eve o f St Agnes, 5 6 ,5 7 - 8 ,8 1 , 10 8 ,115 -1 8 ,12 9 ,13 1,13 2 The Eve o f St Mark, 2 ,5 ,4 8 -7 0 The Fall o f Hyperion, 3 1 , 46n, 9 1 ,10 3 , 110 -11,11 9 'G ive me your patience, sister, while I frame', 163 Hyperion, 6 , 2 1 , 8 0 - 1 , 9 1 , 1 0 4 - 5 , 1 3 1 'In drear nighted December', 60, 104 'Isabella', 12 3 -4 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', 4 3 ,5 6 Lamia, 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 1 7 - 1 8 Letters, 2 ,6 - 7 ,8 ,9 ,2 0 ,2 3 - 4 ,2 7 - 8 , 29,30, 3 5 - 6 ,3 8 ,4 1 ,4 2 ,4 9 ,5 0 , 5 2 ,5 8 , 60, 66, 67,68, 7on, 72 ,79 , 8 1,8 3 , 8 6 ,1 0 5 ,1 0 6 - 9 ,1 1 2 / X14/ 1 1 5 ,116 ,119 ,12 3 ,12 9 ,13 0 ,13 2 ,

135/ 137/138,139-40/144-69 'Lines Written in the Highlands'. See 'There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain' 'Lines Written on 29 M ay, the Anniversary of Charles's Restoration', 19 -20 'O blush not so! O blush not so', 60 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 6 ,1 3 , 4 1 , 4 9 ,8 2 -3, 9 0 ,9 6 - 7 ,1 1 2 - 1 4 ,1 2 0 , 129, i43n 'Ode on Indolence', 8 ,12 0 -3 'Ode on Melancholy', 6 ,12 4 -6 'Ode to a Nightingale', 7, 8, 75,84 , 8 5 ,9 2 - 4 ,9 5 ,1 0 8 - 1 0 ,1 1 8 - 1 9 ,1 2 1 , 12 2 'Ode to Apollo', 3 1 'Ode to Psyche', 7 ,4 9 ,6 3 ,8 8 -9 1, 12 2 -3 'Oh! how I love, on a fair summer's eve', 73 'On Fame', 9 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', 2 ,4 ,6 ,2 1 ,2 2 ,2 7 ,2 8 - 9 , 3 1 - 3 , 3 4 , 4 1 , 4 3 ,4 4 ,7 7 - 8 ,8 5 ,1 3 1 'On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour', 15 5 'On Peace', 19 'On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once A gain', 130 'On the Grasshopper and Cricket',

6,75-6

Index

174 'On Visiting the Tomb of Bum s', 4 2 ,10 5 -6 'Sleep and Poetry', 2 , 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 9 , 23, 25n, 4 4 ,6 8 ,1 0 2 ,1 0 4 ,1 3 1 ,1 5 5 'Sonnet to Sleep', 84 'There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain', 4 2 ,10 5 ' 'Tis the "witching time of night'",

28-37

'To Ailsa Rock', 42 'To Autum n', 7, 9 4 -6 ,9 7 -8 ,9 9 ,10 0 , 1 1 2 ,118 ,1 19 -2 0 ,12 9 'To Charles Cowden Clarke', 103, 'To 'To 'To 'To 'To

155

George Felton M athew', 3 1 Hope', 19 Kosciusko', 19 Leigh Hunt, Esq.', 76 -7 M y Brother George' (epistle), 30 'To M y Brother George' (sonnet),

73 'W hat can I do to drive aw ay', 4 ,5 , 2 7- 2 9 , 33- 4- 3 8 , 4° , 46n 'W hen I have fears that I may cease to be', 104 'W hen they were come unto the Fairy's Court', 4 3-4 'W hy did I laugh tonight? N o voice w ill tell', 8 4 -5 ,10 4 'Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition', 49 'Written on the D ay that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison', 15 Keats, Tom, 2 8 , 3 5 ,4 1 ,8 6 ,1 5 3 Lasinio, Carlo, 1 3 0 , 1 3 2 ,1 3 4 ,1 3 5 Leavis, F. R., 6 ,14 4 Lempriere, 79 Levinson, Marjorie, 1 - 2 , 3 , 4 , 1 3 - 1 5 , 32, 3 3 - 4 , 10 0 -m , 1 0 7 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 6 , 1 3 0 Lipking, Lawrence, 146 Locke, John, 19 Lockhart, John ['Z '], 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 4 , 1 6 - 1 8 , 24/ 77 Luke, David, 64 Mathew, George Felton, 2 0 ,3 1 ,7 6 McGann, Jerome J., 1,4 4 -5 0 ,9 8 -9 Mellor, Anne K., 1 1 5 - 1 6 Milner, Joseph and Isaac History o f the Church o f Christ, 52 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 18 Milton, John, 1 9 , 8 4 , 1 1 0 , 1 3 1 , 1 3 7 , 1 4 0 ,

147,156,158 Mitford, M ary Russell, 169

M onthly Magazine, The, 74 N ew M onthly Magazine, The, 65 N ew ey, Vincent, 1 O'Neill, Michael, 1 - 1 0 ,1 0 2 - 2 8 Orcagna, Andrea, 135 Ovid, 150 Pirie, David B., 2 ,3 ,5 ,3 2 ,4 8 - 7 0 ,1 1 9 , 120 Pliny, 37 Poor Robin's Almanack, 61 Pope, Alexander, 1 5 , 3 4 , 5 1 , 1 6 1 Pratt, M ary Louise, 3 1 Priestley, Joseph, 1 8 ,1 9 Quarterly Review, 15, 25~6n, 40 Radcliffe, Ann, 154 Reeves, Gareth, 6, 7 -8 ,8 8 -10 1 Reynolds, J. H., 64, 6 6 ,1 1 8 ,1 5 6 ,1 5 8 6 1 ,1 6 3 -4 , *66 Ricks, Christopher, 1, 6, 74, 8 8 ,144,

151-165 Robertson, Fiona, 4 -5 , 2 7-4 7 Robertson, William, 29, 3 1 - 2 , 3 2 - 3 Roe, Nicholas, 2, 3 - 4 ,6 ,1 1 - 2 6 ,4 4 ,4 7 0 ,

59 Rogers, Samuel, 29 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 58, 7on Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16 2 -3 Russell, Lord William, 19 Ryland, John Collett, 18 ,19 , 20, 2 1,2 2 ,

26n

Savage, William, 39 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1 3 1 , 1 3 9 Scott, Grant F., 1 2 9 ,14 0 -1 Scott, Walter, 30 Selden, John, 19 Severn, Joseph, 9 ,3 5 ,1 4 0 - 2 ,1 4 8 Shakespeare, William, 8 4 ,1 3 0 ,1 3 5 , 14 8 ,16 8 Hamlet, 8 5 - 6 ,10 6 ,15 8 ,16 8 Love's Labour's Lost, 81 Othello, 7 1 - 2 ,8 6 ,1 6 7 The Tempest, 116 Twelfth Night, 80 Venus and Adonis, 1 1 3 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 4 ,3 1 Adonais, 3 , 1 3 , 8 5 A Defence o f Poetry, 108 The Revolt of Islam, 29 Smith, Adam , 3 2 -3 Smollett, Tobias, 1 5 3 ,1 5 4

Index Southey, Robert, 19, 29 Joan o f Arc, 5 5 -6 Spenser, Edmund, 39 ,4 3, 8 4 ,1 3 1 The Faerie Queene, 24 Sperry, Stuart M., 1 Steiner, George, 7 1, 78, 79, 8 3-4 Stendhal, 130, i42n Sterne, Laurence, 1 4 5 - 6 ,1 5 1 ,1 5 3 ,1 5 4 ,

155,159,160 Stevens, Wallace, 7 - 8 , 88, 94-100 T h e Course of a Particular', 95 T h e Death of a Soldier', 99-100 'Sunday Morning', 7, 96-8 Stillinger, Jack, 5 0 -1 ,5 9 Swift, Jonathan, 154 Sydney, Algernon, 19 Taylor, John, 23, 38 Thelwall, John, 19 Traini, Francesco, 135 Trilling, Lionel, 1 4 4 ,1 5 2 - 3 Trott, Nicola, 110 Vane, Sir Henry, 19 Vendler, Helen, 1, 6, 7, 8 8 ,9 1-2 ,9 4 , 96,

*75 9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 9 ,1 1 4 ,1 2 0 ,1 2 4 , i27n, i28n Vemet, Joseph, 133 Wakefield, Gilbert, 19 Walker, Carol Kyros, 42 Ward, Aileen, 1 1 Washington, George, 28 Watkins, Daniel P., i27n Watson, J. R., 6-7, 7 1-8 7 Watts, Cedric, 14 5 -6 Webb, Timothy, 2, 9 ,14 4 -6 9 West, Benjamin, 9 ,1 3 5 - 9 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 2 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 19 Woodhouse, Richard, 6 7 ,1 0 7 ,1 1 5 ,1 1 6 , 15 6 ,16 6 Wordsworth, William, 1 4 ,1 9 , 74, 78, 8 0 ,1 3 8 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 7 , 1 5 2 ,1 5 7 - 8 , 1 5 9 , 160 The Excursion, 34 'Ode [Intimations of Immortality]', 112 The Prelude, 146 Yeats, W. B., 71, 73, 8 4,10 9