Even in the long and illustrious history of the harsh treatment of wild and magical poets in the august institutions of higher learning, the purple shiner around John Keats’s eye stands out.
Part of this, of course, is the obsession the modern academy seems to have about not valuing poetry as poetry, that is, as something emotionally moving that gives harmonious pleasure. The “joy” is only in the intellectual discovery of its meaning. To “adore” a poem, today’s thinking goes, is to be an inarticulate philistine.
This becomes a problem for Keats in particular because of his sublime, perhaps unparalleled, mastery of the art of English-language poetry. It’s assumed, at best, that his composition of sounds, harmonies, rhymes, assonances and consonances, alliterations and rhythms is spot on, and thus not worthy of anything but lip service. Thus, his poetry as poetry is largely ignored, and the all-important way he says things is conveniently excluded from the “serious discussion” of his work in the millions of pages of “secondary literature” that have sprouted up like mushrooms around the rich soil of his name.
This would not be so bad – one can only expect so much blood out of an intellectual turnip – if the interpretations of what he means didn’t always paint him as a country simpleton without an actual thought in his head.
At the moment I’m thinking of a paper I recently read by one late professor Earl Wasserman that offered, with panache and verbal precision, a compelling argument that the major British Romantic poets all react to 18th century philosophical quandaries about the transactions between the mind and the sensuous world. The only problem was that what he said about Keats – that he was obsessed with losing his self and his identity through empathy into objects of sensory experience – is about 180 degrees from what Keats actually does.
If readers of Keats have learned nothing else, they should realize that he is a master of showing how his raw and ragged humanity just doesn’t fit in the plans of others, no matter how much he loves or admires them. The discomfort of love, for want of a better term, is at the poignant heart of his poetic genius, a fact one would think would not be lost on A KEATS SCHOLAR!
If you think Mr. Wasserman is an outlier, sadly you would be mistaken. Keeping the Keatsian threat within the barbed wire of the farm runs across institutions, eras, academic disciplines. That is easily verified for anyone who cares to look. What is harder to account for is why this apparent conspiracy exists to turn him into an oversensitive moron who did not appreciate the gift he gave to the world IN THE NAME OF RATIFYING HIS GREATNESS.
A Keats poem at random will make the point. My magic 8-ball chose “Bright Star,” which is short, “major,” and a good illustration of how at odds Keats’s poetic vision is from the conventional academic caricature. Here is the poem in full:
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.
The conventional readings of this poem assume that the first eight lines literally have nothing to do with the last six lines. That is, the poet had no actual plan, he just grafted two delicate and sensitive poetic moments awkwardly onto each other, the still aloofness of unchanging nature and the sweet feeling of wanting to be forever in one’s lover’s arms. Critical interpretations dress this up in all sorts of morbid speculations based on the supposition that this, the last known complete poem of Keats, is some kind of tragic statement on his imminent death (without any actual evidence, I might add).
Somehow, in all the extrapolation, the professional readers miss an obvious and rather pedestrian metaphor that the star in line 1 is the girl in line 10 – an analogy too sophisticated apparently for our country bumpkin. It’s certainly less trite and far more intriguing to attribute the qualities described to a woman than just to a star. She has “lone splendour … watching, with eternal lids apart … patient,” who like a monastic (“Eremite”) priest oversees the snow and blesses the ocean waters. From the vantage point of the speaker, she is removed, uncommunicative, cold yet loyal and strangely all-powerful. That the woman and the star are one and the same is pretty clearly conveyed on line 9: “yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, / Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.”
The speaker is a man hypnotized and dominated by this force of nature, equally loyal to her, but he gets nothing from her in terms of the melding of souls such commitment suggests. He wants more than an eternal “fall and swell,” but he is consigned to live forever this way, in the “sweet unrest” and overwrought emotions of love, when she might as well be a heavenly body, for all he knows and feels.
It’s really brilliant and heart-breaking if you open up to think about it. Most readers – non-professional poetry readers – would readily understand and embrace such an interpretation – if it were not for a pernicious system that makes authoritative hash out of the admitted difficulty of interpreting poetry. You don’t even have to step into Keats’ life story and confer special poignancy since this poetic moment occurs so near his early death (much less take it the next logical step and contemplate how death was for Keats a small price to evade being defined as a poet).
“Bright Star” is just one demonstration of the special cognitive dissonance that is the hallmark of Keats’s poetic genius, in poem after poem, from the unfathomable difficulties Endymion encounters in love to the way the art of the Grecian Urn – both dead and alive in effect -- leads the present admirers to their slaughter. The richness of Keats is in these moments, when one has to, with the characters, suck it up and embrace a beauty that cannot be embraced.
I know, I know, it’s called “negative capacity;” everyone pulls that term out of a Keats letter to define his rarefied spirit. Why, then, is no one seemingly willing to navigate how that quality is expressed, over and over again, in his poems?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer.
