Chapter 7 John Keats
When Keats was eight, his father was killed by a fall from a horse, and when he was fourteen his mother died of tuberculosis. The odes are generally regarded as Keats’s most important and mature works. Whatever their subjects are, the poet’s abiding preoccupation with imagination always reaches out to unite with the beautiful. Among those works, he also suggests the undercurrent of disillusion that accompanies such ecstasy, the human suffering which forever questions the visionary transcendence achieved by art. The artistic aim of his poetry was to create a beautiful world of imagination as a resist to the sordid reality of his day.
Critical Perspectives
1.New Historicism
Nikki Hessell, in “John Keats and Indian Medicine”, argues that John Keats’s medical studies at Guy’s Hospital coincided with a boom in interest in both the traditional medicines of the sub-continent and the experiences of British doctors and patients in India. Despite extensive scholarship on the impact of Keats’s medical knowledge on his poetry, little consideration has been given to Keats’s exposure to Indian medicine. The poetry that followed his time at Guy’s contains numerous references to the contemporary state of knowledge about India and its medical practices, both past and present. This essay focuses on Isabella and considers the major sources of information about Indian medicine in the Regency. It proposes that some of Keats’s medical imagery might be read as a specific response to the debates about medicine in the sub-continent.[1]
Taro Takeuchi, in “Rediscovering the Regency Lute: A Checklist of Musical Sources and Extant Instruments”, argues that “Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,—/Tumultuous,—and, in chords that tenderest be,/He played an ancient ditty, long since mute ...”. These lines from The Eve of St Agnes, by John Keats, provide a reminder that the Romantic poets were fascinated by the lute. As if in response, around 1800 an instrument called “lute” or “modern lute” suddenly became fashionable. Most examples had an egg-shaped body, with ten single strings, and were built in London by craftsmen such as Buchinger, Barry and Harley. At the same time, older lutes from the 16th and 17th centuries were converted into “modern lutes”. This article contributes to a rediscovery of these forgotten lutes and their music in the Regency period. It presents the first census of the nine extant instruments, surveys the original musical sources, and considers matters of playing technique and contemporary instruction books. A surprisingly rich repertory is revealed, for these lutes played arrangements of contemporary popular tunes and dances, but there were also newly composed sonatas, rondos and lute songs.[2]
Richard Cronin, in “Keats and the Double Life of Poetry”, argues that Keats, unlike the other Romantics, has prompted not just a dispute as to the character of his political allegiances, but a dispute about whether he is appropriately regarded as a political poet at all. Keats’s recent critics are more familiar with the Poems of 1817 in which Keats emphatically and repeatedly identifies himself as an admiring associate of the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, but even in these poems the ambition to write a poetry that makes its impact on the non-poetic world alternates with a contrary tendency to define the world of the poem by its distance from the world outside it. In the Poems of 1820 the two tendencies persist, but, instead of working against one another, they allow Keats to resolve his contradictory ambitions and write poems that achieve a formal perfection that releases them from the contingent and yet continue to speak to the contingent world in which we all of us live our lives.[3]
Beth Lau, in “William Godwin and Cockney School Publishing Circles: Leigh Hunt, Charles Ollier, Taylor and Hessey and their Authors, Particularly John Keats”, presents on the relationship between author William Godwin and several publishers associated with the so-called Cockney school of writers, including the publishers and booksellers Leigh Hunt, Charles and James Ollier, John Taylor, and James Augustus Hessey. It uses Godwin’s diary to explore the connections between several overlapping social networks of authors and publishing firms. Topics discussed include the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.[4]
Stefanie John, in“‘Precision Instruments for Dreaming’: Anatomizing Keats in Pauline Stainer’s The Wound-dresser’s Dream”, examines allusions to Keats in the collection The Wound-dresser’s Dream (1996) by the contemporary British poet Pauline Stainer. Drawing on the Keatsian notion of dreaming as a metaphor for poetic creativity and responding to Keats as both poet and physician, Stainer explores the interface between sense experience and imagination. As dreams seem to encode hidden meanings, so Stainer’s writing evokes the impression that the textual riddles of her poems symbolize greater truths—while the nature of these truths is mostly left unclear. Through extensive use of allusion and surreal, sometimes opaque imagery she foregrounds the status of the poetic work as a linguistic construct. Yet she also maintains a Keatsian belief that poetry’s ability to embrace uncertainties and mysteries affords it a unique grasp on actuality.[5]
James Robert Allard, in “Bureaucracy, Pedagogy, Surgery: Keats, Guy’s, and the ‘Institution’ of Medicine”, argues that John Keats’s time as a medical student provided much fodder for the imagination of readers of all persuasions. In particular, “Z”, in the fourth installment of the “Cockney School” essays, took pains to ensure that readers knew of his time training to be an apothecary, working to frame Keats, first, as connected to the lowest branch of medical practice, and, second, as having failed as badly at that unworthy pursuit as he did at poetry. But what would “Z”, or any of his readers, have known about the training of an apothecary, about medical pedagogy, about the internal workings of the profession? As outsiders, what could they have known, beyond perception, conjecture, and opinion? And on what were those opinions based? This essay reads “Z”’s comments in the context of first-hand accounts of the state of contemporary medical pedagogy, seeking to account both for “Z”’s dismissal of Keats to “the shops” and for the continuing fascination with his connections to medicine in these terms.[6]
Grant F.Scott, in “New Severn Watercolours from the Voyage to Italy with Keats”, rediscovers of three of Joseph Severn’s watercolours from his 1820 journey to Italy with Keats, which provides an important visual counterpart to his famous journal-letters. Together with a number of other sketches he made onboard the Maria Crowther, these works offer us a new perspective on the voyage. The watercolours form part of the Charles Lee Smith Papers at Wake Forest University, an archive that also contains other significant Keatsiana, including an inventory of Keats manuscripts and relics which were found in Severn’s room after his death. The provenance of the watercolours lends us a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Lady Maureen Watson and her daughters as they flee the threat of Hitler’s invasion and try to establish a new life in North Carolina.[7]
Meiko O’Halloran, in “Sage, Humanist, and Physician to All Men: Keats and Romantic Conceptualisations of the Poet”, argues that in the aftermath of the French Revolution which failed to give birth to a hoped-for new egalitarian age in Britain, radically-minded poets were forced to confront the question of what their role was in a post-Revolutionary age. This article examines Keats’s distinctive contribution to the debates of his day by exploring his crafting of the figure of the poet in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. What do Keats’s sympathetic portraits of the fallen Titans and the unrealised perfection of Apollo have to tell us about his conceptions of the poet? Meiko begins by looking back to influential models of the epic poet by Dante, Milton, and Macpherson which Keats and his contemporaries inherited, before examining the extraordinary debate with Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion in which the poet-narrator defends the poet as “a sage, /a humanist, physician to all men”, only to destabilise his own claim to the title.[8]
Ou Li, in “Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine”, discusses Keats’s affinity with Pyrrhonian scepticism as recorded by Sextus Empiricus in Outlines of Scepticism in the following aspects: the investigative, non-dogmatic attitude towards the truth, the ability to set out oppositions and to realise the equipollence in opposed accounts of the truth, suspension of judgement, and the goal of tranquility. It also speculates on the implication of the common medical background Sextus and Keats shared by linking the ethical values of ancient scepticism to the humanitarian concerns of medicine that might have shaped Keats’s scepticism. Although the connection between Keats, Sextus, and medicine is speculative, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—carefully studied by Keats—mentions Sextus, from which we can assume Keats’s exposure to Sextan scepticism. The Renaissance revival of Pyrrhonian scepticism provides us with stronger evidence about its indirect influence on Keats through Montaigne and Shakespeare as its important inheritors.[9]
Kyoung-Min Han, in “ The Urn’s ‘Silent Form’: Keats’s Critique of Poetic Judgment”, offers criticism on the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by English poet John Keats. He discusses the equation of beauty and truth in the poem as well as the conflict between sensation and philosophy in the poem. He also explores Keats’s philosophical education, focusing on philosophers Immanuel Kant and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Also discussed is Keats’s use of ekphrasis.[10]
2.Philosophical Study
Richard C. Sha, in“John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality”, presents an examination into the writings of the English Romantic poet John Keats from a materialist perspective. Richard seeks to analyze Keats’s aesthetics within the framework of materialist possibility, as opposed to determinism. Further discussion is offered regarding Romantic philosophies of matter and ideals, readdressing their implications on literary aesthetics.[11]
3.New Criticism
John Barnard, in “Keats’s ‘Forebodings’: Margate, Spring 1817, and After”, discusses poet John Keats’s writing style or poetic romance focusing on the letters he wrote to essayist Leigh Hunt and painter Benjamin Robert Haydon as he wrote his poem Endymion in Margate, England. Topics include Keats’s selfrepresentation, use of ironic moments, usage of humor, sexual pun, romance and anti-romance, presentation of female sexuality, and description of state of mind. Several poems by Keats are mentioned like Sleep and Poetry and On the Sea.[12]
Stacey McDowell, in “Shiftiness in Keats’s Ode on Indolence”, identifies a kind of shiftiness at work in Keats’s Ode on Indolence. Apparent both in the poem’s depiction of indolence as a wavering between mind states, and in its wordplay, ambiguity and structural instability, this shifty quality presents an unsettling, more mischievous side of Negative Capability. This quality may account, too, for the peculiar textual instability of the ode, which has seen the order of its stanzas variously rearranged by critics and editors over the course of its bibliographical history. The essay concludes by considering the indolence of the poem’s title in relation to a pun contained in its epigraph, which raises questions about what drives poetic creativity and considers the distinction between the labour of professional authorship versus ideas about inspiration and organic composition.[13]
Gregory Tate, in “Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy”, considers the connections between myth and sympathy in Keats’s poetic theory and practice. It argues that the Ode to Psyche exemplifies the way in which Keats uses mythological narrative, and the related trope of apostrophe, to promote a restrained form of sympathy, which preserves an objectifying distance between the poet and the feelings that his poetry examines. This model of sympathy is informed by Keats’s medical training: the influential surgeon Astley Cooper and The Hospital Pupil’s Guide (1816) both identify a sensitive but restrained sympathy for patients’ suffering as an essential part of the scientific and professional methods of nineteenthcentury medicine. However, while The Hospital Pupil’s Guide claims that mythological superstition has been superseded in medicine by positivist science, Keats’s ode suggests that myth retains a central role in poetry, as the foundation of a poetic method that mediates between imaginative sympathy and objective impartiality.[14]
Robert K. Lapp, in “Authorship in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: An Integral Approach”, discusses the authorship in 1811 citing reference to the romantic poetry of John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; a critical approach derived from the Integral Theory of philosopher Ken Wilber that refocuses the understanding of the author function in general; the articulation of the authorship of poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld in the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.[15]
4.Canonization Study(https://www.daowen.com)
David Havird, in “‘Passion Before We Die’: James Dickey and Keats”, discusses the way American poet and novelist James Dickey was inspired by the work by English Romantic poet John Keats, who believes that the world is a vale of Soul-making. Dickey described Keats as one of the great human presence in the whole of history in his 1968 commencement address at the University of Carolina. David says Dickey’s May Day Sermon could be a retelling of Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes, despite him claiming that it is a retelling of a local folk myth. In The Sheep Child considered as his most notorious poem, Dickey profanely subverts the idea contained in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn.[16]
5.Reader-Oriented Criticism
Alexandra Paterson, in “‘A Greater Luxury’: Keats’s Depictions of Mistiness and Reading”, discusses depictions of mist or mistiness in the poetry of poet John Keats as it relates to the experience of reading. Topics include the use of the term mist in the poem Paradise Lost, by John Milton, its use in Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale, and an 1818 letter from Keats to poet John Hamilton Reynolds. Also noted are Keats’s sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, the role of a Muse in an 1818 sonnet by Keats, and the relationship between hearing and seeing in Keats’s work.[17]
【注释】
[1]Hessell N. “John Keats and Indian Medicine”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):157-166.
[2]Takeuchi T. “Rediscovering the Regency Lute: A Checklist of Musical Sources and Extant Instruments”. Early Music, 2018, 46(1):17-34.
[3]Cronin R. “Keats and the Double Life of Poetry”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):147-156.
[4]Lau B. “William Godwin and Cockney School Publishing Circles: Leigh Hunt, Charles Ollier, Taylor and Hessey and their Authors, Particularly John Keats”. Romanticism, 2011, 17(2):186-194.
[5]John S. “‘Precision Instruments for Dreaming’: Anatomizing Keats in Pauline Stainer’s The Wound-dresser’s Dream”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):230-241.
[6]Allard J R. “Bureaucracy, Pedagogy, Surgery: Keats, Guy’s, and the ‘Institution’ of Medicine”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):203-212.
[7]Scott G F. “New Severn Watercolours from the Voyage to Italy with Keats”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):213-229.
[8]O’Halloran M. “Sage, Humanist, and Physician to All Men: Keats and Romantic Conceptualisations of the Poet”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):177-190.
[9]Li O. “Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):167-176.
[10]Han K M. “The Urn’s ‘Silent Form’: Keats’s Critique of Poetic Judgment”. Papers on Language ＆ Literature, 2012, 48(3):245-268.
[11]Sha R C. “John Keats and Some Versions of Materiality”. Romanticism, 2014, 20(3):233-245.
[12]Barnard J. “Keats’s ‘Forebodings’: Margate, Spring 1817, and After”. Romanticism, 2015, 21(1):1-13.
[13]McDowell S. “Shiftiness in Keats’s Ode on Indolence”. Romanticism, 2017, 23(1):27-37.
[14]Tate G. “Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy”. Romanticism, 2016, 22(2):191-202.
[15]Lapp R K. “Authorship in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: An Integral Approach”. English Studies in Canada, 2012, 38(2):49-70.
[16]Havird D. “ ‘Passion Before We Die’: James Dickey and Keats”. The Southern Literary Journal, 2013, 45(2):90-102.
[17]Paterson A. “‘A Greater Luxury’: Keats’s Depictions of Mistiness and Reading”. Romanticism, 2012, 18(3):260-269.