Critical Essays on John Keats

Edited, and with an Introduction, by Hermione de Almeida

G. K. Hall and Company, Boston, 1990

From the Introduction: Intellectual Keats

“I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,” Keats writes to his brother George, in October 1818. His comment, made in the wake of the reviewers’ charged and hostile reception of Endymion, and after he had himself remarked that there was “no greater Sin after the 7 deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet,” was a modest statement of fact. It may seem surprising that this selection of essays should propose to assert the intellectual life and philosophical tenor and currency of Keats. But in fact—not withstanding the best efforts of serious scholars—the poet must repeatedly be rescued from some of his “friends.” These would include those contemporaries of Keats who alternately maligned the verse for political reasons and canonized the poet for emotional reasons; those nineteenth-century admirers who adopted Keats because of the poignant circumstances of his life as a sickly “pet lamb” for a sentimental Victorian farce; those late Victorian and early twentieth-century critics who found in the very accessibility of his verse sufficient image of a poet of little education and luxurious sensation; those Modernists, “aesthetic” critics who have appropriated the Victorians’ judgment of Keats as a sensual poet who did not need to think and made it an excuse for reading the poetry out of its context and in ignorance of what the poet knew; and those contemporary critics whose restrictive new history would liberate Keatsian criticism by containing the poet within his “Cockney” or working-class milieu so as to show how the biases of history (his, ours, theirs) are never sprung.

Like the other Romantic poets—and perhaps with greater urgency because of his firsthand knowledge of the charity hospital—Keats believed that the poet had to function out of an informed commitment to the welfare of the human community. His aspirations as a poet combined with his aspirations as a physician, and his scientific and practical knowledge of human nature learned in the wards and lecture-theaters of Guy’s Hospital joined and enhanced those philosophical ideas on the function of art that he was to acquire as a poet. Licensed to practice general medicine by the Society of Apothecaries in 1816, aware in early 1818 that by his own estimate he was not yet a philosopher and poet (“but my flag is not unfurl’d…and to philosophise / I dare not yet,” he wrote in the verse-epistle to Reynolds), Keats the poet between 1818 and 1820 came to see himself, ever increasingly, as a philosopher and humanist precisely because of the poetic ambitions and humanitarian aspirations of his intellect.

Seven of the essays in this collection, by Stillinger, Goellnicht, Lau, Ryan, Grob, Wolfson, and myself, were written specifically for this volume. Seven more, by Ward, Barnard, Kern, Parker, Clubbe and Lovell, Waldoff, and Bromwich, were published within the last ten years. In addition, I have included three essays, by Woodring, Sperry, and Ricks, that are representative of important work done on Keats between 1965 and 1978. Woodring’s essay on the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer mines the recesses of the sonnet for clues to Keats’s wide range of reading and the intellectual ferment of the poet’s mind during its composition; he shows how exploration becomes exultant discovery in the sonnet but also for the poet and for the reader of the poem, and he marks the kinship of all discoveries whether actual or imaginary. Sperry’s essay on the verse-epistle to Reynolds discusses the generation of associative images in the poem spawned, simultaneously by Keats’s re-creative viewing of a painting by Claude Lorrain called The Enchanted Castle, his creative depression following the completion of Endymion, and his overweening need as a physician to use his imaginative verse to comfort a sick friend; Sperry charts, thus, the ways in which the poet’s mind operated through periods of creative darkness.

Keats learned much about service to humanity and the pains of human existence during his clinical year at Guy’s Hospital and, before that, in the Edmonton practice of the surgeon to whom he was apprenticed for five years. The three essays on chemistry, embarrassment, and the silent imagination that follow Clubbe and Lovell’s assessment of the poet’s “strength of mind” in his letters are all diverse attempts to explain aspects of Keats’s actual and imaginative medicine. Goellnicht calls up his considerable knowledge of medical—specifically chemical—courses that the poet took at the Borough Hospitals’ Medical School to address the meaning of composition for Keats. Ricks, in his whimsical “Keats and Blushing,” uses early psychology texts and the literary practice of portraying embarrassment begun by Milton to describe what he calls Keats’s “intimate” knowledge of “a physiology of the mind.” Waldoff’s essay on the imagination and its workings discusses the unconscious dimension in cognitive activity and uses contemporary psychologies of the subconscious to address Romantic creativity and the transformative power of Keats’s particular kind of creative thinking. My essay, on “Romantic Evolution,” places the poet squarely within the Romantic debate on life that was sparked by the public quarrel between John Abernathy and William Lawrence over the Hunterian “principle of life”; evidence in poems like the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the Hyperion fragments reveal Keats’s full knowledge and deliberate evocation of ideas on life and extinction from the new science of evolution that alternately terrified and exhilarated intellectuals during the revolutionary era.

“I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect,” Byron opined in 1813. This was not Keats’s opinion, now was it true of Keats. From the evidence presented by the essays in this collection, we can be certain that Keats could hold his own ground intellectually among the best contemporary minds and within the larger ferment of ideas in his age and that he was a philosopher by his own high requirements of himself.

Noumenal realms, happiness, embarrassment, melancholy, politics, religion, gender, laughter, skepticism, paganism, Christianity, evolution, immortality, misperceptions of sentiment, geography, medicine, astronomy, navigation, practical chemistry, blushing psychology, Kant, Hazlitt, Byron, Freud, John Hunter, the extinction of beauty, the irremissibility of pain, skeptical Moderns, foolishly fond Victorians, disassociated contemporary critics, and gendering readers of all hues—any survey of the subjects in this collection of essays will attest to the vigor and range of Keats’s intellectual life and the vitality of his existence as a subject of contemporary dialogue. In an age of warring and self-destructive ideologies when it is considered unfashionable to speak of serving humanity, suspect to speak of democracy, embarrassing to place human love at the center of one’s artistic inquiry, foolish to hold to a Renaissance ideal of character, and ridiculous to wish to be a philosopher and humanist when meaning has been dismantled, deconstructed, and banished from the earth, Keats has nevertheless survived by doing all these things. He has kept his humanizing place among the greatest English poets, and his values and ideas still confront us and endure with the best of his critics.

Additional Information on Critical Essays on John Keats

Description

Hermione de Almeida’s edition of Critical Essays on John Keats in the series Critical Essays on British Literature consists of seventeen essays dating from 1965, with seven published during the last decade and seven more original studies written specifically for this volume. Together they represent a cross-section of the best in current American and British critical opinion on Keats. Most of de Almeida’s selections deal with larger aspects of Keats’s poetry, philosophy, and source material. Several original essays present new historical evidence of major influences on the poet’s works and include details of the social and gender biases of Keats’s contemporaries that influenced the poet’s early reception.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: Intellectual Keats

Hermione de Almeida

“That Last Infinity of Noble Mind”: Keats and the Idea of Fame

Aileen Ward

On Looking into Keats’s Voyagers

Carl Woodring

The “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds”

Stuart M. Sperry

Endymion: “Pretty Paganism” and “Purgatory Blind”

John Barnard

Keats and the Problem of Romance

Robert Kern

Reading Keats’s Plots

Jack Stillinger

“Keats” [from Inescapable Romance]

Patricia A. Parker

Keats the Humanist

John Clubbe and Ernest J. Lovell, Jr.

Keats’s Chemical Composition

Donald C. Goellnicht

Keats and Blushing

Christopher Ricks

The Silent Work of Imagination

Leon Waldoff

Keats and Byron

Beth Lau

“Keats” [from Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic]

David Bromwich

The Politics of Greek Religion

Robert M. Ryan

Romantic Evolution: Fresh Perfection and Ebbing Process in Keats

Hermione de Almeida

Noumenal Inferences: Keats as Metaphysician

Alan Grob

Feminizing Keats

Susan Wolfson

· Hardcover: 365 pages

· Publisher: G. K. Hall (July 1990)

· ISBN-10: 0816188513

· ISBN-13: 978-0816188512

· Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches