On keats’s practice and poetics of responsibility

On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility G Douglas Atkins On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility Beauty and Truth in the Major Poems G Douglas Atkins Greenville South Carolina USA ISBN 978-3-319-44143-6 ISBN 978-3-319-44144-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44144-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950716 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made Cover illustration: Pattern adapted from an Indian cotton print produced in the 19th century Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland It is a strange habit of wise humanity to speak in enigmas only, so that the highest truths and usefullest laws must be hunted for through whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only —John Ruskin For Rebecca PREFACE For a man who died so young—just 25, about one-third of my age—John Keats was remarkably sensitive, sympathetic, capacious, and warm-hearted Reading his letters anew, I feel even more closely and surely the presence of another human being than when I read anyone else’s writing—that the letters are, of course, in the present tense no doubt contributes to this effect Perhaps for the first time, in any case, I begin here actually to read the letters, some of them (at least) as essayistic and dramatic Reading Keats, prose and verse alike, is an adventure in what it means to be a fully functioning human: an unblinkered recognition of the world, its evil, and its suffering that does not manage to eclipse the beauty that “is a joy for ever.” Keats is no more a poet for our benighted time than for any other His life was so difficult, his advantages few, and even so—or, perhaps, because of that—he found beauty enough to sustain him, and us, in the world, whose truth, he never forgets or allows us to, is painful, full of suffering, and too often tragic I can think of no better word to describe John Keats, warts and all, than “responsible.” His whole writing career extends only from 1814 to mid-1820, barely years, but these are wondrous In those years, writing makes all the difference; it is in, through, and by means of the writing, in verse and prose alike, that Keats’s ideas developed, with indications of change in point of view What matters most to apprehension of both continuity and change in the art and understanding alike is saturation in the poet’s work This little book I hope will be taken up, and found readable and useful, by academics, specialists, and non-specialists alike, as well as by ix x PREFACE the so-called general reader who has heard of Keats and desires an introduction to his poetry that takes seriously the ideas dramatized therein To borrow a distinction made decades ago by G Wilson Knight, the book you are holding aligns itself with “interpretation,” rather than “criticism.” Although I not subscribe to all of Knight’s notions, including the rein he gives to impressions and the imprecision with which he sometimes proceeds, I think his distinction between these two approaches in the main useful: “The critic,” he wrote, “is, and should be, cool and urbane, seeing the poetry he [or she] discusses not with the eyes of a lover but as an object; whereas interpretation deliberately immerses itself in its theme and speaks less from the seats of judgment than from the creative centre.” I want to signal, as well, that I see my work as “commentary,” rather than “criticism,” for I am little interested in (negative) judgment and very much committed to sympathetic engagement with the poet If I add, this time borrowing from Roland Barthes, that this book may be seen as a lover’s discourse, I perhaps have shown a penchant for such complex-ifying and perplexing as Keats himself might approve Whether or not he would approve, I find myself both within and outside the “camp” of the legendary Earl Wasserman, whose The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems, dating from 1953, remains “the gold standard” for close reading of the verse I am tempted to say that the tenor of the present book perhaps carries some of that of Wasserman’s book, while its texture is markedly different The form in which I write is essayistic (but the analysis, I hope, is not less scrupulous), and I am much less inclined than Wasserman to find the spiritual around every corner My “tone” is, then, less “fine,” but in that regard, it is closer, I believe, to Keats So as not to impede readability, I have kept endnotes to a minimum; in the Bibliography, however, I have listed those many books, articles, and essays that I have found most helpful, perhaps especially when I disagree with them For the sake of convenience, I have referred, except where otherwise noted, to Selected Poems, ed Douglas Bush (Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1959) With deep and abiding gratitude, I acknowledge my debt to E.D Hirsch, in whose seminar at the University of Virginia decades ago I first learned to read Keats Others bear responsibility for so much of the good here (and none of the wrongheaded and inarticulate): I mean Rus Hart, the late Irvin Ehrenpreis, the late Geoffrey Hartman, and Vincent Miller Once more, I am happy to acknowledge my considerable debt to Pam PREFACE xi LeRow, in the word-processing center back at the University of Kansas, who still comes to my rescue, now Emeritus, in preparing my work for submission in electronic form And happily and gratefully, I record my continuing debt to, and gratitude for, my children Leslie Atkins Durham and Christopher Douglas Atkins, their spouses Craig and Sharon, and my grandchildren, Kate and Oliver Finally, there is Rebecca, my Madeline and “a thing of beauty”; I am happy to dedicate this book to her CONTENTS On Reading Keats: Essaying Toward Reader-Responsibility Reading the Letters: “The vale of Soul-making” Some of the Dangers in “Unperplex[ing] bliss from its neighbour pain”: Reading the Odes Intra- and Inter-textually 33 Fleeing into the Storm: Beauty and Truth in “The Eve of St Agnes” 53 “For Truth’s Sake”: “Lamia” and the Reweaving of the Rainbow 67 Bibliography 85 Index 89 xiii 82 ON KEATS’S PRACTICE AND POETICS OF RESPONSIBILITY And if the presented forms are unbeautiful? They are demons Quoted from Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1975), 410, 49, 43, 47 10 An apposite, little-considered poem, is Ode [‘Bards of Passion’], written in late 1818 in a copy of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Fair Maid of the Inn and copied by Keats into a letter of December 1818–January 1819 to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana I quote it here—I not pretend that the diction is sharp or always successful, nor the rhymes always effective, but the themes treated shed some light, I believe, on the complexity of “Lamia.” Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new? Yes, and those of heaven commune With the spheres of sun and moon; With the noise of fountains wond’rous, And the parle of voices thund’rous; With the whisper of heaven’s trees And one another, in soft ease Seated on Elysian lawns Brows’d by none but Dian’s fawns; Underneath large blue-bells tented, Where the daisies are rose-scented, And the rose herself has got Perfume which on earth is not; Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine, melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries Thus ye live on high, and then On the earth ye live again; And the souls ye left behind you Teach us, here, the way to find you, Where your other souls are joying, Never slumber’d, never cloying Here, your earth-born souls still speak “FOR TRUTH’S SAKE”: “LAMIA” AND THE REWEAVING OF THE RAINBOW 83 To mortals, of their little week; Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim Thus ye teach us, every day, Wisdom, though fled far away Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new! 11 12 13 14 15 16 There is a doubleness here, not so much a complexi-fying or “perplexing.” In the letter to George and Georgiana, John Keats locates the theme in “the double immortality of Poets.” The quality of the poetry belies the seriousness of the ideas The “Bards of Passion and of Mirth” have souls made (Keats Selected Poems and Letters, ed Douglas Bush (Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 261 T.S Eliot, Animula (London: Faber and Faber, 1929); and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (London: Faber and Faber, 1954) T.S Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943) See also my T.S Eliot’s Christmas Poems: An Essay in Writing-as-Reading and Other “Impossible Unions” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 261 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poetry and Prose, ed Aubrey Williams (Boston, MA: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969) At the end of “Lamia,” Keats added as a note a quotation from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, in which appears a story of Lycius and Apollonius that he largely follows Clearly, Keats changed the thematic focus—but including the quotation does nothing to diminish the fictive nature of the poem, enhanced, of course, by, among other new features, the opening that Keats added regarding the god Hermes: Philostratus, in his fourth book de Vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold 84 ON KEATS’S PRACTICE AND POETICS OF RESPONSIBILITY The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with him a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius, who, by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like Tantalus’ gold, described by Homer, no substance but mere illusions When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece In Selected Poems and Letters 228 [From Part Sect Memb Subs 1] BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, M.H Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature New York: Norton, 1971 Atkins, G Douglas “A(fter) D(econstruction): Literature and Religion in 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Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1978 Keats, John The Letters of John Keats Ed Hyder E Rollins vols Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958 Keats, John Selected Poems and Letters Ed Douglas Bush Boston, MA: RiversideHoughton Mifflin, 1959 Keats, John The Letters of John Keats Ed Grant Scott Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005 Keats, John Poetical Works Ed H.W Garrod 1956 London: Oxford UP, 1966 Keats, John Poetry and Prose Ed Jeffrey N Cox Norton Critical Editions New York: Norton, 2008 Knight, G Wilson “The Priest-like Task: An Essay on Keats.” In The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision London: Oxford UP, 1941 258–307 Lytle, Andrew The Hero with the Private Parts Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1966 Miller, Hugh Essays vol London, 1856 Miller, J Hillis “Literature and Religion.” In Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions Ed James Thorpe New York: MLA 111–26 Motion, Andrew Keats New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998 Plumly, Stanley Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography New York: Norton, 2009 Pope, Alexander Poetry and Prose Ed Aubrey Williams Boston, MA: RiversideHoughton Mifflin, 1969 Pound, Ezra ABC of Reading London: Routledge, 1934 Pound, Ezra Selected Prose, 1909–1965 Ed William Cookson New York: New Directions, 1975 Roe, Nicholas John Keats: A New Life New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012 Rossetti, William Michael Life of John Keats London, 1887 Ryan, Robert M Keats: The Religious Sense Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976 Schneidau, Herbert N Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1976 Scott, Grant “Keats in His Letters.” In Cox, Ed Poetry and Prose of John Keats 555–63 Sharp, Ronald A Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979 Sisson, C.H The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays Manchester: Carcanet, 1978 Sperry, Stuart M., Jr “Romance as Wish-Fulfillment: Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes.” Studies in Romanticism 10 (1971): 27–42 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY Stillinger, Jack “The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Scepticism in ‘The Eve of St Agnes.’” Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 533–55 Stillinger, Jack “The Hoodwinking of Madeline” and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971 Stillinger, Jack Reading “The Eve of St Agnes”: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999 Waldoff, Leon “From Abandonment to Scepticism in Keats.” Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 152–58 Ward, Aileen John Keats: The Making of a Poet New York: Viking, 1963 Wasserman, Earl The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1953 White, E.B Essays New York: Harper & Row, 1977 White, R.S John Keats: A Literary Life Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 Williams, Rowan Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2005 Wolfson Susan J., Ed Cambridge Companion to John Keats Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001 Wolfson Susan J., Ed Reading John Keats Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015 Woodhouse, A.S.P The Poet and His Faith: Religion and Poetry in England from Spenser to Eliot and Auden Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1965 Wordsworth, William Preface to Lyrical Ballads In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, ed M.H Abrams et al vol 22 New York: Norton, 1993 141–52 Wordsworth, William The Prelude In The Norton Anthology Yost, George, Jr “Keats’s Early Religious Phraseology.” Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 579–91 INDEX A Abide and embrace two conflicting ideas at once, 24 Adonais, 11 Andrewes, Lancelot, 34 Anglo-Catholic Christianity, 34, 38 Animula, 21, 22, 41, 77 Annus mirabilis, 63 Another dimension, 64 Anti-Christian, 54 Apuleius, 39 Ariel or Christmas poem, 41, 77 Aristotelian rather than Platonic, 22 Asceticism, 54, 56 Ash-Wednesday, 23, 38, 63 Audience, 7, B Bailey, Benjamin, 13, 14, 26 Baldwin, James, 24 Barthes, Roland, Bate, Walter Jackson, 7, 40 Beauty and its relation to truth, 26 Beauty that Keats interested in as inseparable from the truth told in and by the representation, 48 Beauty & Truth, 27, 28 Between conception and expression, 37 Between Gods and humankind, 68, 71 Between the poet and the dreamer, 70 Biblical, 46, 63, 65 Binary opposite, 18 Binds us to the earth, 65 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 11 Blank verse, 70 Bloom, Harold, Brawne, Fanny, 10, 60 Brothers George and Thomas, 24 Browning, Robert, 44 Burden of Truth itself, 76 “Burnt, Norton”, 46, 47, 65 Bush, Douglas, 23, 29 C Calasso, Roberto, 68 Care and concern for the reader, 72 Change, 37, 47, 52, 58, 61, 64 Character as such, in the Odes, and even in “The Eve of St Agnes”, matters little, 35 © The Author(s) 2016 G.D Atkins, On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44144-3 89 90 INDEX Character of the responsible poet, 70 Character of the voice, 12 Christ, 12, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 34, 54, 60, 63, 64 The “chrysteain scheme”, 18, 19 Christian asceticism, 28 Christian Deity, 39 Christian liturgy and doctrine, 23 Church of England, 34 Circumstances, 7, 12, 16, 20, 21, 22, 28, 35, 41, 62, 70, 77 Clearly wants his readers to understand him, 17 Cockney School, 11 Co-existence, 48, 49 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10, 24 Combining essay and poetry, 23 Comparative, 36 Comparing their subjects with Eliot’s treatment of the same, 35 Comparison, 35, 38, 47, 49, 54 Comparison and contrast, 14 Complexi-fying, 76, 77, 78 Concerned with ideas, 43 Consolations, 12, 22, 37, 48, 49, 51, 52, 63, 64, 68 Contrast at the thematic heart, 68 Conversion, 64 A creation of imagination, 51 Creative criticism, The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, 77 D Dante, 70 Delight and melancholy as inseparable, 42 Desire purified into love, 61, 62 Difficulty, 13, 37 Dimensions, 77 Discontinuous, 69 Disembodied, 79 Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes, 17, 26 The Divine Comedy, 63 Doubleness, 38, 74 Dramatic monologue, 44, 73 Dreams/dreamer/dreaming, 12, 40, 41, 58, 60, 70, 72, 77, 78 Dryden, John, 68, 75 “The Dry Salvages”, 65 E Each word and phrase supporting the others, 22 “East Coker”, 36, 37, 38, 43, 46 Effete, ascetic, and morally and spiritually weak, 11 Egotistical sublime, 24, 72 Either/or, Eliot, T.S., 2, 3, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 61, 63, 65, 77 Elizabethan, 35 Elytis, Odysseus, Embodied/embodiment, 23, 51, 60 End is not thematic but rhetorical, 46 Endymion, 10, 27, 42 Entirely separate from one another, 72 “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds”, 27 Essay(s)/essaying/essayistic, 5, 6, 7, 21, 22 An Essay on Criticism, 79 Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing, “The Eve of St Agnes”, 2, 11, 28, 35 The experience of reading, INDEX F A faery tale, 62 The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, 25, 26, 34, 70 The familiar, Fantastic character of the story, 62 “Faring forward”, 38 Feast of the senses, 28, 56 The Finer Tone, 56 Fitzgerald, F Scott, 24 Fleeing into the storm, 62, 64 Four Quartets, 38, 46 “Fragment of an Ode to Maia”, 29 Frame/framed/framing, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 76 From within the verse, 34 Fullest expression of Keats’s humanity, 50 G Genesis, 63 George(Keats), 10 George and Georgiana (Keats), 15, 27, 39 Gittings, Robert, The Golden Ass, 39 “Grander scheme of salvation”, 18 “The Grasshopper and the Cricket”, 28 Guaranteed to save, 78 “Gypsy” (Wordsworth), 13 H Hamlet, 79 Happiness, 10 Hartman, Geoffrey, Has no self, 14 Hermeneutics, Heroic couplet as right for this truthtelling, 75 Holderlin, Friedrich, 69 91 Holderness, Graham, Hoodwinked, and indeed raped, 56 “The Hoodwinking of Madeline”, 4, 63 “The ‘Hoodwinking of Madeline’: Skepticism in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’”, The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, How the verse and the prose work, How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats, Hunt, Leigh, 10 Hyperion: A Fragment, 68, 70 I The idea, 50, 71, 83n10 Ideas, 2, 12, 15, 26, 75, 76, 78 Of ideas and their expression, Ideas as embodied in characters, 79 Immanence/immanent/ immanentist, 22, 24, 27, 30, 40, 52 Immortal/immortality, 17, 42, 45, 71, 72 Immutability, 47, 52 “Impossible union”, 38, 65, 77 In, through, and by means of, 18, 22, 42 Incarnation, 23, 65 The Incarnation, 23 Incarnational Christianity, 21 Incarnational overtones, 17 Indirect, 22 Individuality, 14 “In its nearer and in its most remote contexts”, 34 Inseparability of writing and reading, Insisting on its own fictive nature, 44 Instead of a singular thing by itself, 38 Institutional Christianity, 40 Intense sympathetic engagement, 48 Intensity, 27, 34, 38, 56, 64, 69 92 INDEX Intermediary, 58 An Interpretion of Keats’s “Endymion”, 34 Intersecting, 4, 52 Into problems, 62 Into the raging storm, 28 Intra- and inter-textual, 34, 35, 36 J Journey toward understanding, 61 “A joy for ever”, 42, 65 Joy as inseparable from melancholy, 62 K Keats actually seems to collapse or dissolve into a larger I who is also a poet, 40 Keats and the speaker, 40 Keats literally embodies Autumn, 50 Keats’s intersection, Keats’s voice, 75 Keats the man and Keats the poet, 25 Keats thus gets inside, 48 Kenner, Hugh, 43, 51 Knight, G Wilson, 34 L “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, 48 A lack or absence, a want, 73 Lacks any temptation toward escape, 49 “Lamia”, 20, 27, 35, 60, 68, 69 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, 10, 35 “Lamia” disparages and denounces philosophy in philosophical terms, 79 Language of Keats’s poems as highly artificial, 35 Less an agent than a literary device, 44 Lies not so much in a way of seeing as in the observed truth, 52 Literary imagination, 58 Literary writing, 22 Literature and the Gods, 68 “Little Gidding”, 44, 52, 61 Logos, 23 To look through, 22 “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, 38 Lytle, Andrew, M Made-thing of great beauty, 12 Making all disagreeables evaporate, 27 Making of a soul, 21 Mallarme, Stephane, 69 Mansion of Many Apartments, 15, 18 Maxwell, William, Mean next to nothing, 1, 12, 44 Mediator, 63, 64 Medieval romance, 63 Medium, 21 Medium of a world like this, 18 The medium of the heart, Memoiristic pull, Metaxy, 24 Middle state, 38 Milton, John, 70 Ministrations of the earth, 28 Moi criticism, Montagues-versus-Capulets, 57 Mortality, 42 Motion, Andrew, 11 “Most heart-easing things”, 26 Multi-criticalism, Mutability, 12, 17, 28, 36, 41, 42, 45 Mystery, 58 INDEX N Narrative, 43 Narrator, 54, 57, 58, 62, 64, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78 The Nearest Thing to Life, “Necessarye coniunction”, 38, 77 Needs other, 73 Negative capability, 78 Neither historically nor biographically situated, 40 Neoplatonism, 39 No aesthetic escape, 12 No a priori notions, 17 Nor individualized, 40 Not a character, 44 Not expelled from the Garden, 64 Nothing naturalistic, 35 “Not only a decoration, but an angel”, 77 Nottcut, Henry Clement, 34 Not identified with Keats nor distanced from, 40 O Objectivist mode, 49 Observed, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, 26, 35 “Ode on Indolence”, 35 “Ode on Melancholy”, 34, 35 Odes, The Odes of John Keats, 34 “Ode to Fanny”, 60 “Ode to a Nightingale”, 35 “Ode to Psyche”, 12, 35, 68 Order does matter, 35 Order in which they are read, 36 The outside breaks in, 61 An outside moral order, 62 93 P Painting pictures, 44 Paradox, 24, 38 Parts of a certain whole, 35 Path toward salvation, 63 The perennial Romantic theme, 12 Perplexed/perplexes/perplexing/ perplexities, 12, 20, 68, 71, 72, 77, 79 Personages in the poems as fictive, 35 Personal and poetic responsibility, 10 Personal criticism, Personal/familiar/essayistic, Personality, 25 Perverted kind of romance, 56 Philosopher/philosophy, 72–76, 78, 79 “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings”, 75 Physician, 42, 44, 70 Physician to all men, 25 Pious frauds, 23, 63 Platonic, 24 Plumly, Stanley, Poem incorporates that verse, 79 Poem of ideas, 76 Poems, 10 The poems as things apart, 35 Poet and the dreamer, 26 Poet as also a philosopher, 13 Poetical character, 25 The poetic responsibility, 25 Poet of beauty, 11, 28 Poet-physician, 44 The poetry of earth, 28 Polar oppositions, 43 Pole of thematic action, 44 Pope, Alexander, 79 A positive in the negative, 62 Possibility of a new god, 68 Possible for men and not, 71 94 INDEX Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, Pound, Ezra, 3, 69 A practice of comparative reading, 34 Present-ness of the poem, 45 The priesthood of all readers, The problematic of writing, 38 Propensity for past participles, 40 Prufrock-like, 21 Putting in other words, 4, 26 Responsible reading, 49 Revision of the Edenic myth, 64 Rewriting of the original, Reynolds, John Hamilton, 15, 29 Rhyming, 23, 24 Roe, Nicholas, Role of reading, 69 Romantic, 44, 69, 74 Romeo-and-Juliet story, 54 Rossetti, William Michael, 12 Q The Quarterly Review, 11 S Salvific power of love, 63 Schemes of salvation, 63 Schoolmaster, 19, 20, 25, 39 Scott, Grant, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts, Secular recalling of the Fall, 64 Selected Poems and Letters, 23 Self observing, Sensuous delights, 58 Separation of one thing from, 35, 38, 73 Shakespeare, William, 24 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11, 13, 14 Shelley and Keats, 12, 14 Simultaneity of the speaking and the event, 45 Simultaneity that marks the birth, Skepticism, 4–5, 14, 31n44 “Sleep and Poetry”, 26, 68 “A Slight Sound at Evening”, Smiting as also and at once saving, 72 Socrates, 23 “Sonnet to Fanny”, 60 Soothing us and lifting our thoughts, 78 Sophist, 75 Sophist’s spleen, 74 R Ratiocinative, 74 Read both the verse and the prose, Reader’s discovery, 36 Reader’s engagement, Reader’s intersection with the poem, 49 Reader’s responsibility, Reading, 16 Reading John Keats, 5, Reading Keats’s poems, 34 Reading The Eve of St Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction, Real the dreams of Gods, 68, 71 Reasoned interpretation, 75 Refusal to stay still, 47 Religion of love, 60 Religious in nature, 63 Religious instinct, 23, 30, 31n44, 41 Religious language, 60, 61 Religious significance, 60 Religious terms, 64 Response his poems received, 10 Responsibility, 30, 65, 72, 74, 75 The responsible poet, 42 INDEX Soul-making, 16, 18, 19, 20–22, 24, 40, 69 Spenser, Edmund, 68 Spenserian stanzas, 28, 54 Sperry, Stuart, 35 Spirit-creation, 18 Squeezed words, 34 St Agnes, Eve, 54, 55–57, 60, 61, 64 Stanzaic form, 35, 68 Still and still moving, 38, 64 Stillinger, Jack, 4, 5, 56, 63, 64 Stillness, 48 Storm outside into positive opportunity, 62 Story of the same nature as the legend, 58 Supplement, 63 Supporting, 23 Symbiotic, 12 T Telling of truth, 68 Tension, 7, 38, 79 Tensional nature of existence, 38 Tension and acceptance, 24 Terms deeply religious, 59 There being no I here, 47 A thing of beauty, 65 Think of the earth, 70 Thoreau, Henry David, Thought as passion’s passing bell, 73 Time, 37 Timeless with time, 52 Time the preserver, 44 “Tintern Abbey”, 16 “To Autumn”, 28, 35 Tom (i e., Thomas Keats), 10 Tools of criticism, 14, 35 95 “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 25 Transcendence/Transcendent, 23, 24, 41, 50, 52, 61, 62 Trilling, Lionel, Truth, for Keats, 52 Truth and beauty, Truth and Beauty as unperplexed, 77 Truth is beauty, 49 Truth itself, 75 Truth-teller/truth-telling, 42, 62, 77 Tying us to the earth, 35 U Ubi sunt?, 51 Unchanging, 48 Un-Christian, 65 Understanding, 12, 15 Universal poetic voice, 40 Unperplexed, separated, 71, 73, 77 Unpoetical, 25 Until we have reached the end, 23 Unweaving of the rainbow, 20, 27, 75, 76, 79 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 12 V “The vale of Soul-making”, 16, 18, 21, 24, 40 A validation of the power of imagination, 56 Vendler, Helen, 34 Versifying pet-lamb, 39, 44, 75 Victorians, Virgin-like, 64 Virgin Mary, 63 Vocation of poetry, 36 Voice of the schoolmaster, 19, 25 96 INDEX W Ward, Aileen, Wasserman, Earl, 34, 56 The Waste Land, 38, 41, 43, 46 Wastelanders, 42, 50 What experienced, 60 What matters not him but the ideas, 44 What the characters stand for as ideas, 76 What words and not just what they say, 22 “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, 10 White, E.B., 6, Wilson, Eric G., Wit carries judgment within itself, 79 Wolfson, Susan J., Wood, James, The Nearest Thing to Life, Woodhouse, Richard, 14, 24 The Word, 23 Wordsworth, William, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 24, 40, 72 The “wordsworthian or egotistical sublime”, 12, 14, 25, 27 Work as literarytext, As works of literature, works of art, Writing concerned with meaning alone, 22 “Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition”, 23 .. .On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility G Douglas Atkins On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility Beauty and Truth in the Major Poems G Douglas... G.D Atkins, On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44144-3_2 10 ON KEATS’S PRACTICE AND POETICS OF RESPONSIBILITY [Y]ou perhaps at one time thought there was such... burden of both personal and poetic responsibility Before long, as he launched a poetic career, he knew he was destined soon to die: among the expressions of both knowledge and responsibility stands