1 KEATS VIEW ON POETRY AND THE POETIC CHARACTER

When Keats was alive, or immediately after his death, his genius was not generally perceived, . (Keats, dying, expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his tombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water.)" and later, when critics and readers began to appreciate him , they still had a partial understanding of his work and too often thought of him as a man who lived only for sensuous impressions, devoted entirely to the pursuit and worship of beauty. Literary criticism focused on the philosophical implications of Wordsworth writings but limited the discussion of Keats to the aesthetic aspects of his poetry. However, as Sir Andrew Motion, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009 and wrote the biography of Keats which inspired the film Bright Star, said of keats.: like all important writers he turns in the wind of history, showing new facets (fsit) of his genius to each succeeding generation. In the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's poetry expanded and he began to be treated as a serious thinker and literary theorist , concerned with difficult human conflicts and the nature of poetry. Keats's letters contributed to this re-assessment. John Keats has over 240 surviving letters, which were addressed to family and friends and written mainly over the last five years of his life. These letters typify the predominant nineteenth-century means of communication and contain everyday inquiries about health, social planning and arrangements, and general gossip. However in these letters Keats also discusses his personal relationship with poetry, his theories of Beauty and Truth, the Imagination, Negative Capability and Soul making, concepts which are still used by literary critics to the present day.

I will read some fragments of these letters in which those concepts are developed and then discuss them.

Imagination: in a letter of November 22nd 1817 to benjamin bailey he writes: I am certain of nothing but of 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.() . The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, - he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning - and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts! It is a 'Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come.

The allusion is to Milton `s Adam who dreamed of Eve and waking found her to exist. His Ode on a Grecian Urn contains the lines- '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' These lines have been much debated, but I will follow the interpretation given in The Romantic Imagination, that states that Keats saw imagination as a power which both creates and reveals through creating. Through the imagination Keats sought an absolute reality to which a door was opened through his appreciation of beauty through the senses. When the objects of sense laid their spell upon him he was so stirred and exalted that he felt himself transported to another world and believed that he could almost grasp the universe as a whole . The more intensely a beautiful object affected him, the more convinced he was that he had passed beyond it to something else. In a passage from his long poem Endymion he says Feel we these things?that moment have we stept Into a sort of oneness, and our state Is like a floating spirits. But there are Richer entanglements, enthralments far More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,

To the chief intensity:

As regards Reason or science he says in Lamia, another of his long poems,

Keats's "Lamia"; Part II, lines 231-38

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine, Unweave a rainbow, There is a famous dinner , in which Wordsworth was present, and where in a toast Keats proposed confusion to the memory of newton When later asked why he said it was because newton destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it Echoes of this belief can be found in D H Lawrence, who wrote: Knowledge has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas with spots, and also in Poe `s sonnet To Science. Poetry is true because it corresponds to concrete experience and integral objects, from which science abstracts qualities for purposes of classification and generalization. Negative capability Sunday [21 Dec. 1817] Hampstead Sunday MY DEAR BROTHERS I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-

He goes back to this subject and refers to it as THE CHAMELEON POET TO WOODHOUSE, OCTOBER 27TH 1818

As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion 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 any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually 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 un poetical of all God's Creatures. In reflections first inspired by Keats, Julio Cortazar spoke of participation. Participation for Cortazar refers to a way of relating with the things of the world. To know, is to objectify, to objectify is to project outside of oneself, as if the thing were strange. By contrast, The essence of the participation lies, precisely, in erasing all duality; in spite of the principle of contradiction, the subject is at the same time him or herself and the being in which he or she participates. ANALYSIS , THUS, DEPENDS ON SEPARATING SUBJECT AND OBJECT.- ART IN GENERAL IS WHERE THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SUBJECT AND OBJECT DISSOLVES

Keats shares strong affinities with literary modernism, the desire to enter the psyches of vast number of characters without getting emotionally involved, which is central to the artistic practice of Joyce. This opposition to preconceived ideas, stressing on doubts and mysteries, participation in all types of experience and negation of identity to self brings negative capability close to deconstructionist concepts of indeterminacy of meaning and free play Keatss preference for remaining in the state of uncertainties, mysteries, doubts rather than reaching after fact and reason echoes deconstructive programme of Barthes and Derrida. Keats on "The Vale of Soul-Making" TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA KEATS.["The Vale of Soul-Making"] 'The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken into HeavenWhat a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please 'The Vale of Soul- making. Then you will find out the use of the world'
2. A name, especially a descriptive nickname or epithet acquired through usage over a period of time.

For Keats, the whole purpose of life is that its an opportunity to create a soul or an identity. While the Christian view is that life redeems usfor Keats it is almost the reverse: that we can redeem life, give it value and meaning if we see it not as a vale of tears, but as a vale of soul-making. My passions are all alseep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this side of faintness-if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lillies I should call it langour-but as I am I must call it Laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me () This

is the happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind. I have this moment received a note from Haslam in which he expects the death of his Father-who has been for some time in a state of insensibilityThis is the world-thus we cannot expect to give way many hours to pleasure-Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and burstingWhile we are laughing the seed Of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events-while we are laughing it sprouts is [for it] grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck- sprout: a new part growing on a plant

To John Hamilton Reynolds

From Hampstead, February 19th, 1818

Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel - the points of leaves and twigs on thich the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful ciruiting. Minds would leave each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless points, and at last greet each other at the journey's end. An old Man and a child would talk together and the old Man be led on his path and the child left thinking. Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour and thus by every germ of spirit sucking the sap from mould ethereal every human might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furze and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees!

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced-Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it... Keats presents himself as what he recommended a poet should be, a shape-changing figure, who might be best described as a camelion Poet.
.. Keats's voice, is never comfortably his own, and it can therefore be more

than his own, an impersonal voice that speaks out beyond the contours of its own discrete identity

So Keats public persona is at times one of poesy and imagination, far from any direct connection with everyday life. Although Keats is using the first person in starting, the meads or meadows he is writing about are ones of imagination. This is obvious from the first line of the poem starting as it does with the words O what can ail thee, knight at arms. The scene is therefore one of medieval times, and the woman one of myth or fancy. The personae who is the I in these lines is the knight at arms who is being questioned in the first line, a knight who

Truth is neither an accumulation nor a progressive understanding; truth opens out from moment to moment, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow, and what is true for one man may not be true for another Unlike Wordsworth's, his voice is neither central nor dominant. Wordsworth : The author projects himself in his writing to sublimate the ordinary by filtering it through a new point of view, conveniently enough, his own. So negative capability and the vale of soul-making are not antithetical notions: negative capability refers to the act of poetic composition; for a poet to create as richly and freely as he or she desires, it is necessary to get beyond the limits of ego and personality to see a thing from multiple points of view. With his vale of soul-making idea, Keats is not talking about writing poetry, but about every human being.. So hes throwing off the Christian system of salvation in favor of a more existentialist one.