Page 107 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes T.S. Eliot called them “certainly the most notable and most important ever written by any
English poet.” Keats spent a lot of time considering poetry itself, its impacts and constructs,
exhibiting a deep interest uncommon amongst his milieu that were more easily distracted by
metaphysics, fashions, politics or science. Eliot said of Keats’s conclusions; “There is hardly one
statement of Keats’ about poetry which ... will not be found to be true, and what is more, true for
greater and more mature poetry than anything Keats ever wrote.”

Some of John Keats’s letters from the period before he joined his literary circle are existent.
From spring 1817, though, there is a sufficient record of his impressive and prolific skills as a
letter writer. Keats and his friends, critics, poets, novelists, and editors wrote to one another
regularly, and Keats’ ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his everyday communications sharing
parody, news and social commentary. They glitter with critical intelligence and humour. Born
of an “unself-conscious stream of consciousness,” they are impulsive, filled with awareness of
his own nature and his weak spots. When his brother George went to the United States, Keats
wrote to him in detail, the body of letters becoming “the real diary” and self-revelation of
Keats’s life, along with inclosing an exposition of his philosophy, and the first drafts of poems
with some of Keats’s thoughts and his finest writing. Gittings calls them similar to a “spiritual
journal” not written for a specific other, so much as for synthesis. Keats also revealed on the
composition and background of his poetry, and certain letters often correspond to or anticipate
the poems they describe. In February to May 1819 he produced many of his finest letters”.
Writing to his brother George, Keats discovered the idea of the world as “the vale of Soul-
making”, anticipating the great odes that he would write a few months later. In the letters, Keats
created ideas such as the Mansion of Many Apartments and the Chameleon Poet, concepts that
gained common currency and capture the public imagination, despite only making single
appearances as phrases in his correspondence. The poetical mind, Keats argued:
has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; What
shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion [chameleon] 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 anything in existence; because he has no
Identity – he is continuously 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.

He used the term negative capability to talk about the state in which we are “capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason ...[Being]
content with half knowledge” where one trusts in the heart’s perceptions. He later wrote: “I am
certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What
the imagination 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” again and again turning to the question of what it means to be a poet. “My Imagination
is a Monastery and I am its Monk”, Keats notes to Shelley. Keats wrote to Reynolds in September
1819 “How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it ... I
never lik’d the stubbled fields as much as now – Aye, better than the chilly green of spring.
Somehow the stubble plain looks warm – in the same way as some pictures look warm – this
struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it”. The final stanza of his last
great ode: “To Autumn” runs:
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,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

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