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Michael DeNobile

Prof. A. Vardy

English 741

16 December 2009

“—I mean Negative Capability”:Keats’s Quest for the Poetic Ideal

I have leftMy strong identity, my real self,Somewhere between the throne, and where I sitHere on the spot of earth.

—Saturn, from Hyperion

In John Gibson Lockhart’s review “The Cockney School of Poetry No. IV” (1818) from the

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3, John Keats was a stupid, naïve, pigheaded dreamer with a

bad taste in poetry and politics, an abusive passion for writing, and a talent that was much ado

about nothing. Placing Keats in the Cockney School, Lockhart argued Keats’s work instilled a

“lower-middle-class vulgarity, lasciviousness, radicalism, and aesthetic lack of taste” (Wu 1008),

criticizing him for such things as his rhyming style and use of working-class diction. If one were

to summarize the career of Keats through Lockhart-colored glasses, one would be blinded from

the truth. The genius of John Keats lies in his constant endeavor for perfection of his poetic

craft: particularly in his development and demonstration of Negative Capability (to elucidate the

role of the poet). In earlier works, we see how he developed this poetic ideal, with his “Ode to a

Nightingale” as the culmination and (the closest) perfected demonstration of Negative

Capability.

Using Keats’s letters (specifically his letters to his brothers on negative capability, Clarke on

accumulated experience, Bailey on imagination, Reynolds on slow development, the voyage of

conception and the Mansion of Many Apartments, Woodhouse on poetic Character, and George

and Georgina Keats on the vale of soul-making and the intellect) to define special Keatsian

cognitive terms, I will establish Keats’s foundation for his development toward negative

capability. As these terms are defined, their relationship to each other will be speculated as part

of a fluid set of stages—Keats’s personally suggestive “how-to” on becoming an ideal poet. This

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all will demonstrate the true genius of Keats, why he has made a lasting impression on the poetic

world, and explain why John Keats was not a stupid, naïve, pigheaded dreamer.

1. Using Keats’s Letters as a Starting Point

Art enthusiasts, when wanting to study a painter’s style, usually starts with the works—to

understand van Gough, one observes “Starry Night” or his “Café Terrace at Night.” Likewise,

when studying a poet, or any writer for that matter, to understand their literary style and thematic

pursuits, one usually begins with the works themselves. Like golf balls in the rough, the mystery

of Keats and the wisdom of his masterpieces, however, are hidden in the pages of his personal

letters to his friends and family, spelt out like a textbook. As Edwards noted, “We find in

[Keats’s letters] a fascinating documentation of the development of one of the great minds of his

age—and one of the most sophisticated theorists on art and literature” (3), and even more so,

Young acknowledged that, through his letters, it was “possible to trace the evolution of Keats’s

poetic thought and technique as he matured and refined his ideas and beliefs regarding literature”

(273).

Keats was a diamond in the rough—an ore of a poet, if you will. His inherent genius,

combined with his passion and love of life, is only understood first in his letters before we even

approach his works. While he “occasionally yearned for solitude,” G. Scott explained how the

stereotype of the isolated romantic poet—confined to some lonely hut in the

wilds, generating poems in a visionary frenzy with ‘flashing eyes’ and ‘floating

hair’—could hardly be less appropriate for Keats. He is genial and gregarious,

inseparable from the tight network of his friends. (558)

In addition to his sociability, we find in his letters a “larger humanitarian mission” (G. Scott 588)

to teach the world about the “proximity of the mundane and the profound,” how there is a

“seamless integration of everyday life with the life of the mind” (G. Scott 556).

Knowing Keats’s life story, we can understand his quest to understand and find the answers

to some of man’s hard-asked questions, questions that he outlines in his letters. “Keats saw a

vital connection between poetry and the ‘real world,’” stated G. Scott, “the world of suffering

and misfortune that beset those closest to him” (557). In addition, we are “also invited [through

his letters] to see each work not merely as a discreet self-contained unity, but part of his broader

approach to such issues as death and loss, love and deception, stasis and change” (Edwards 7),

and as further noted by Edwards:

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Despite his seemingly otherworldly subject matter there is little that is aloof about

his work. Empathy and intense involvement are writ large in his poems—and

even more apparent in the compassion which pervades his friendships and his

letters. (13)

It is in his letters that we are introduced to the many hats that Keats wore: the man, the poet, the

philosopher, the teacher, and the lover. From the way he outlines his philosophies, to his

interactions with his friends, to his overwhelming passion for life and art, we discover the Keats

he was and the Keats he hoped to become.

Most critics should understand the justification used to study Keats’s letters before turning to

his work. While correspondence are usually seen as footnotes to an artist’s career, for Keats they

are focal points. The reason behind closely reading his letters, however, is in the

remarkable fact of the letters is that his most famous ideas—Negative Capability,

the Chameleon Poet, the Vale of Soul-making, the Mansion of Many Apartments

—appear only once. They are neither repeated to other correspondents nor

formalized in published essays, but remain provisional, bound within the specific

human context of a letter.” (G. Scott 555–556)

Before we visit his verse, we must first understand his cognitive jargon, his ideals for a poet, his

path toward perfecting the craft of poetic art. We must start with the philosopher-man-teacher

before observing the poet before his nightingale.

2. Reading Keats’s Letters to Discover His Process Toward Negative Capability

At the bicentennial celebration of Keats’s birthday in 1995, Walter Evert provided this

witness account:

It was through Keats…that I learned how to experience poetry, not merely

through emotional identification and intellectual analysis but as a miracle of rare

device, a structure of associative elements in which the building blocks of rational

order were reassembled to create something the mind could grasp and the tongue

describe but which never existed before, and whose existence changed all the

world around…. And through my fortuitous experience of Keats I can say that

for me, the primary experience of poetry is prior to all the agendas that poetry

may touch upon or lend itself to. (Ryan & Sharp 8)

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As we will discover later, as Keats learnt style and theme from his poetic forefathers, Keats

teaches us (in a more perfected way) the art and craft of poetry. If we were studying the

relationship of man to the divine, for example, Keats is to Augustine as Shakespeare is to Plato.

Borrowing partially from Bate’s article “Negative Capability,” I will attempt to outline

Keats’s path toward the negative capability ideal as follows: a) Native gift and accumulated

experience, b) “Slow development, maturity, rooted strength, leisure for growth” (19), c)

“Voyage of conception” (19), d) Stylistic copying and mimicry, e) Understanding the limitations

of tradition, f) Developing craft in illustration, imagery, and detail, g) Imaginative identity in

relation to sensation, memory, and imagination, h) Understanding and developing poetical

character, and finally i) Approaching negative capability.

2a. Native gift and accumulated experience

The first step in approaching negative capability is native gift and accumulated experience.

One must possess some level of poetic talent (in order to be a poet capable of negative

capability) and then accumulate experience through the craft of poetry and through the

experience of life itself. In his October 9, 1816 letter to Clarke, written upon his completion of

medical school and entrance into London literary life, we find Keats calling the simple act of

meeting Leigh Hunt a “pleasure” and “an Era in [his] existence” (Cox 9). Making reference to

his “Epistle to George Mathew” (Cox 10–11), we know that Keats already possesses some level

of poetic talent:

Of courteous knights-errant, and high-mettled steeds;Of forests enchanted, and marvelous streams;—Of bridges, and castles, and desperate deeds;And all the bright fictions of fanciful dreams:—

While a bit poetically rudimentary, the necessity of poetry exists: there is an imaginative

awareness of experience (“O thou who delightest in fanciful song,/And tallest strange tales of the

elf and the fay”), and while it was not necessary, there is meter and rhyme. The detail is

extraordinary, but truthfully a bit much (this will be discussed later). Nonetheless, as an

example, Keats possessed the native gift of poetry and delighted in the opportunity of

accumulated experience of writing poetry or simply being “acquainted with Men who in their

admiration of Poetry [did] not jumble together Shakespeare and Darwin” (Cox 9). Keats

believed that “a poem…emerges from the pains and pleasures of life, but these do not come to us

frankly professing their value as sensations; the poem refuses to associate the value of what is

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made of the experience with its utility of the experiencer” (Bromwich 184). While harsh critics

existed in Keats’s time, early on in his career and later with Lockhart, Woodhouse believed the

contrary, writing to his cousin Mary Frogley in 1818, “In all places, and at all times, and before

all persons, I would express and as far as I am able, support my high opinion of his poetical

merits—such a genius, I verily believe, has not appeared since Shakespeare and Milton” (275).

Keats was a force to be reckoned with, and he was just getting started.

2b. Slow development, maturity, rooted strength, leisure for growth

Minister and author Eric Butterworth once said, “Don’t go through life, grow through life.”

This implies that approaching life must be slow in development, attaining maturity in that

slowness, rooted in strength (just like plants grow in strength due to their root system), and

giving time for leisure to further aide in development. For this reason, slow development,

maturity, rooted strength, and leisure for growth are all lumped together as one step because they

spiral over each other. As noted by Bate in his criticism “Negative Capability”:

First [for Keats], the problem of form or style in art enters more specifically.

Second, the ideal toward which he is groping is contrasted more strongly with the

egoistic assertion of one’s own identity. Third, the door is further opened to the

perception—which he was to develop within the next few months—of the

sympathetic potentialities of the imagination. (13)

These “problems” he needed to work out in his craft indeed needed a “few months,” if not years,

in order to be realized and understood. The mere addressing of these problems also denotes a

maturity in Keats’s craft. Moreover, “as a reader [Keats] loved poetry which was ‘Full’ of

meaning, ‘rich’ in thought and capable of acting as a ‘starting post’ for the reader’s own

musings” (Edwards 8), which meant time, patients, maturity, and the fact that he “loved” reading

the poetry, one could argue the power of leisure. Indolence, for Keats, was “a characteristic of

the best poets, alternating moods of activity and indolence being, in fact, the rhythm of the mind

necessary for” the development of poetic craft (Muir 304).

In many of his letters, he takes pleasure in writing long, epic correspondence (which

undoubtedly took long stretches of time to compose), paying attention to minute detail. “This

cleft,” he wrote to Reynolds on April 17–18, 1817, “is filled with trees & bushes in the narrow

part; and as it widens becomes bare, if it were not for primroses on one side, which spread to the

very verge of the Sea, and some fishermen’s huts on the other, perched midway in the

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Ballustrades of beautiful green Hedges along their steps down to the sands.—But the sea, Jack,

the sea—the little waterfall—then the white cliff—then St Catherine’s Hill—‘the sheep in the

meadows, the cows in the corn’” (Cox 77). In the writing of a letter, he is forcing himself to

slow down over the “trees & bushes” and where the cleft “widens [and] becomes bare,” over the

“primroses” to “the very verge of the Sea,” down the “little waterfall” and “white cliff” then up

“St Catherine’s Hill.” Paying attention to detail is a sign of poetic maturity, and this example

shows how he’s using leisure to support his poetic growth.

I will leave off on a final thought on rooted strength. For Keats, “ambiguity and ambivalence

are sources of strength not weakness” (Edwards 9), and furthermore, “the excellence of art lay in

its intensity, but that…could be a kind of sensual intensity, a warm vagueness which suggested

rather than explained, an almost subliminal technique which provided so much of his poetic

power” (Sullivan 9). The rooted strength of poetry, Keats felt, was in the intensity of emotion

and detail, but leaving that emotion and detail to be determined by the reader through “ambiguity

and ambivalence” that was “suggested rather than explained.” As he stated in his letter to George

and Georgiana Keats from February to May 1819, “The only means of strengthening one’s

intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all

thoughts. Not a select party” (362).

2c. Voyage of conception

As stated earlier, Keats sought a “larger humanitarian mission.” He understood suffering very

well and hoped that poetry could aide in the understanding and endurance of suffering. In his

February 19, 1818, letter to Reynolds, Keats wrote,

I have an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life…. When Man has

arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves

him as a starting post towards all “the two-and thirty Pallaces.” How happy is

such a voyage of conception! what delicious diligent Indolence! A doze upon a

Sofa does not hinder it, and a napp upon Clover engenders ethereal finger-

pointings—the prattle of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a

strength to beat them—a strain of musick conducts to ‘an odd angle of the Isle’

and when the leaves whisper it puts a ‘girdle round the earth.’ (Cox 126)

Extending the idea of leisure for growth through Indolence, he adds how a certain level of

intellect opens passages for happiness. As Magill notes, “Following the lead of his

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contemporary William Wordsworth, though with a completely original emphasis, Keats’s

territory for development and conquest became the interior world of mental landscape and its

imaginings,” then goes on to say, “Keats initially sought to transcend reality, rather than to

transform it, with the power of the imagination to dream” (1773). Life throws some nasty

curveballs, but through the employment of the intellect combined with indolence, “a Man might

pass a very pleasant life.” The voyage of conception was also a way for Keats to attain

accumulated experience, even if that was simply resting “upon a Sofa,” napping “upon Clover,”

conversing with those “of middle-age,” listening to “the prattle of a child,” “a strain of musick,”

or “the leaves whisper,” all of these so-called mundane events could all be accumulated into

experience to support the growth of the poetic art.

2d. Stylistic copying and mimicry

While Keats was stylistically copying and mimicking many different kinds of poets from the

start of his literary career, this is an appropriate place for its explanation in the development

toward negative capability. As Woodhouse explained to his cousin, “[Keats’s] imitation of our

older writers, and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves

that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry;—

and few of its blossoms are either more profuse of sweetness or richer in promise, that this which

is now before us” (276). He followed Wordsworth “by internalizing the quest toward finding a

world that answered the poet’s desires, and he hoped to follow Shakespeare by making that

world more than a sublime projection of his own ego” (Bloom “John Keats” 5), and moreover,

he “followed the Shakespearean model of impersonality in art; that is, the surrendering of self to

the fullest development of character and object, and it is this impersonality, coupled with

intensity, that makes his poetry readily accessible to a wide range of modern readers” (Magill

1770).

The necessity of tradition for Keats went beyond the fact that Spencer, Shakespeare, and

Wordsworth were simply good poets. He had great purpose in employing access to these poetic

giants. Magill asserts:

Keats knew that he needed deeper knowledge to surpass Wordsworth, but there

was not much he could do about it. Though it was an attractive imagining, no god

was likely to pour knowledge into the wide hollows of his brain. “I am…young

writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness,”

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he wrote…, “without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one

opinion.” (1776)

Simply put, while Keats knew that to develop his craft, he needed accumulated experience.

Being young, he lacked that experience and education. The beauty of literature is that one could

experience others’ experiences vicariously through their work. He also understood with humility

that he could not possibly know it all, but there were others who could direct him. Levinson

explained, “He was not…permitted possession of the social grammar inscribed in that aesthetic

array, and this was just what Keats was after” (551), and that’s what he sought out to do. De

Reyes further affirmed: “It was thus to the two great masters of Life and Nature—Shakespeare

and Wordsworth—that the young poet turned. He went to them—not for inspiration—for that

was already his—but rather for direction of his intellect” (282).

It is important to note, however, that Keats was not seeking a plagiaristic Xerox copy of the

poetic greats, but a stylistic copy and mimicry that he could transcend and make his own. “He

dignified” Mathew’s poems and transcended “anything Mathew wrote,” and had brought “Hunt

more to life,” demonstrating “nothing of the routine mechanism of a copy” (Bate “Negative

Capability” 24). Keats’s poetry “opens itself to the Tradition, defining itself as a theater wherein

such contests may be eternally and inconclusively staged” (Levinson 554), but went well beyond

the tradition, because “with his new-found technical poise (the assured control of Miltonic blank

verse, the stillness he created with the Spenserian stanza and even his sudden expert use of the

Augustan heroic couplet, in Hyperion, The Eve and Lamia respectively) he seemed to be more

open to different styles but at the same time more confident that he could make these various

styles his own” (Edwards 38). In one of his early sonnets “To one who has been long in city

pent,” for example, we see a Keats immersed in and learning from tradition. The poem begins:

“To one who has been long in city pent,” making reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost and

Coleridge’s “To the Nightingale” (Cox 54).

2e. Understanding the limitations of tradition

While tradition is very important to draw on, it is very important to note that “somewhere in

the heart of each new poet there is hidden the dark wish that the libraries be burned in some new

Alexandrian conflagration, that the imagination might be liberated from the greatness and

oppressive power of its own dead champions” (Bloom “John Keats” 1). De Man further asserts

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how being a young poet in the shadow of poetic giants “measures his own inadequacy and

dwarfs the present” (538), and Magill further noted,

Keats struggled…with the existential issues of the artist’s life—developing the

talent and maintaining the heart to live up to immense ambitions. It is to be

doubted whether poets will ever be able to look to Shakespeare or to Milton as

models without living in distress that deepens with every passing work. (1773)

Keats needed to rely on the past without letting it destroy his future, what little of it he had. If

twenty-first century music artists, for example, measured their success in comparison to such

twentieth century artists as Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, or Diana Ross, they

would neither be able to live up to nor surpass these standards. The twenty-first century

musician can, however, borrow the music styles of their forbearers and make them their own in

order to better their own musical styles. And that is what Keats set out to do.

2f. Developing craft in illustration, imagery, and detail

As stated earlier in relation to slowing down and maturing in poetic craft, Keats started

paying attention to detail. At the beginning, when learning any new skill, Keats employed detail

and imagery way too much, and his closest friends were the first to admit it. George Mathew

(50–54) and even Leigh Hunt on two separate occasions described Keats’s imagery as “ill

management of a good thing” (Hunt “Leigh Hunt displays Keats’s’ ‘calm power’: 1820” 171)

and “super-abundance” (Hunt “Leigh Hunt announces a new school of poetry: 1817” 58).

Arnold noted Keats’s redundancy to detail on four separate occasions (Arnold “Arnold on Keats:

1848, 1849, 1852, 1853” 325–327). The Monthly Review called it “superabundance” (162);

Dallas said it was “excessive,” “extravagance,” “too rich,” and with “no proportion” (357).

Young noted, which may explain such harsh criticism on his detail, “His fervent tone and sensual

imagery appeared shockingly effusive to early nineteenth-century critics schooled in the more

formal neoclassical poetics of the eighteenth century” (273).

Some critics, however, were not willing to condemn Keats on detail so quickly. Clarke

declared, “The only fault in his poetry I could discover was a redundancy of imagery,—the

exuberance, by-the-by, being a quality of the greatest promise, seeing that it is the constant

accompaniment of a young and teeming genius” (406). Woodhouse “would at once admit”

Keats’s “great faults,” but the faults “are more than counterbalanced by his beauties…. His

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faulte will wear away—his fire will be chastened—and then eyes will do homage to his

brilliancy” (275). Jeffrey described at length:

They [Endymion and Lamia…and Other Poems] are full of extravagance and

irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive

obscurity. They manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be

claimed for a first attempt:—but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for

they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and

bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in

their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to

shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present. (202–203)

While each critic acknowledges that excess in illustration is a pitfall of poetry, they cannot help

but admire the “intoxication” and “enchantments” of Keats’s authorship.

Keats provides a defense to his use of detail in his February 27, 1818, letter to John Taylor:

1st. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it

should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear

almost a Remembrance—2nd. It touches of Beauty should never be half way

thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the

setting of imagery should like the sun come natural to him—shine over him and

set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight—but it

is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it—and this leads me to

another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had

better not come at all. However it may be with me I cannot help looking into new

countries with ‘O for a Muse of fire to ascend!’ (Cox 128)

For Keats, imagery should be but a “fine excess,” just enough to overwhelm the reader in “his

own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance”—a memory once lived by the reader.

More importantly, imagery should come naturally in poetry, ornamenting a poem “as the Leaves

to a tree,” otherwise “it had better not come at all”—the tree is better off bare. His redundancy

to detail might not have been an error at all, but his slow development and maturity, refining

itself “for a Muse of fire to ascend.” Symons notes, almost humorously, “Perhaps no poet has

ever packed so much poetic detail into so small a space, or been so satisfied with having done

so” (281). Whatever it may have been, Keats did something right. Caine observed, “His earliest

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works sparkled with the many-coloured brightness of a prism; his latest works began to glow

with the steady presence of a purer light” (279), and Smith asserted:

[Endymion] is displeasing to a pure taste, from its very flush of colour and excess

of sweetness. All form and outline are lost in the exuberance of ornament. In his

latter poems, Hyperion especially, he had learned to husband his strength, and had

acquired that last gift of the artists, to know where to stop. There is no excess,

nothing extraneous, everything is clear and well-defined, as the naked limbs of an

Apollo. (366)

Keats perfected his craft through an in-depth exercise in the use and understanding of detail and

imagery. While at the beginning, “all form and outline [were] lost in the exuberance of

ornament,” he later harnessed “that last gift of the artists.” He understood that the foundational

talent a poet needed was hidden in the power of illustration, naturally flowing from the poet. So

at the beginning, he used it in much excess, consulted his friends during revisions (Cox 128), and

trained himself “to know where to stop.”

2g. Imaginative identity in relation to sensation, memory, and imagination

In late 1817, early 1818, Keats attended William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets; this

had a lasting impression on him (Gittings 197). In one of his lectures, Hazlitt discussed the

relationship of sensation, memory, and the imagination, and used the anecdote of a boy that

burned himself to explain their relationship. If a boy were to burn himself on a stove, the

sensation of the burn teaches that it is painful to touch a stove. The memory of the sensation

teaches the boy never to touch the stove again, because if he will, he will burn himself. The

boy’s imagination stores the memory of the burn, allowing him to relive the sensation to ensure

that the event will never be repeated (Bate “Negative Capability” 24).

The entire process interested Keats; however, the last part about the imagination was of great

importance. Understanding sensation and memory, and their relationship to the imagination, he

sought to understand truth and accumulated experience:

The superiority of the future over the past expresses, in fact, a rejection of the

experience of actuality. Memory, being founded on actual sensations, is for Keats

the enemy of poetic language, which thrives instead on dreams of pure

potentiality. (De Man 543)

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Because actuality tended to prevent future experience, even negative experience (the re-burning

of the boy, for example), Keats felt that accumulated experience, like tradition, had their

limitations because it led to memory; thus, the poet must develop an imaginative identity to add

accumulative experience in “dreams of pure potentiality.”

Keats further developed his notions of the imagination in his November, 22, 1817, letter to

Benjamin Bailey. Keats writes:

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. (Cox 102)

Actuality is not necessarily truth (“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—

whether it existed before or not”). What is true lies in Beauty, which exists in “all our Passions

as of Love.” Keats needed to find a way to access truth through an imaginative identity.

The problem, however, was that to develop an imaginative identity requires, as already

described, denying memory. To deny memory requires the denial of one’s own personal

identity:

In our life of uncertainties, where no one system or formula can explain

everything—where even a word is at best, in Bacon’s phrase, a ‘wager of

thought’—what is needed is an imaginative openness of mind and heightened

receptivity to reality in its full and diverse concreteness. This, however, involves

negating one’s own ego. (Bate “Negative Capability” 18)

Understanding the difference between personal and imaginative identity, Keats sought to negate

his own ego, just like Shakespeare did (Bloom “John Keats” 5). From having a native gift and

accumulating experience, understanding the importance of slow development and maturity,

rooted in strength, and the use of leisure for growth, establishing the voyage of conception,

relying on tradition through stylistic copying and mimicry while understanding the limitations of

that tradition, developing craft in illustration, imagery and detail, to attending the lectures with

Hazlitt where he learns of imaginative identity and the importance of negating one’s ego, Keats

begins to understand his self-designated negative capability. In order to do that, having

understood that a poet needs to negate his ego, he first needed to define the character of a poet.

2h. Understanding and developing poetical character

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During the years approaching the composing of his odes, Keats kept on trying to find the

right way of expressing the true character of a poet. “In the odes,” as Fraistat noted, “Keats is to

isolate and examine in closer detail the questions raised in the narratives [earlier poems] about

the nature of desire, enchantment, and the imagination—all centering around the question of the

poet’s proper relationship to poetry and to his world” (598).

In his October 27, 1818, letter to Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes at length poetical

character:

As to the poetical Character itself…it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything

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 much delight in

conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights

the camelion poet. …A poet is the most unpoetical of anything 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 unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. (Cox 295)

Step one, for Keats, was to deny personal identity. The poet must separate himself “in gusto” for

his craft, for better or for worse (“foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated”). The

poet must be ever changing (“the camelion poet”) amongst the “unchangeable” (i.e. “The Sun,

the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women”). He does not mean that they are unchangeable in the

sense that they do not evolve character, for he notes that they “are creatures of impulse,” but that

they are unchangeable in having identity. The “poet is the most unpoetical of anything in

existence; because he has no Identity”—and that is why the poet must be ever changing. In

addition, being in or a part of the observed object was more important to Keats than the existence

of the poet in the creation of the craft. In his November 3, 1817, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Keats

wrote, “The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I

take part in its existince and pick about the Gravel.” The poet “takes part in [a Sparrow’s]

existince,” recreating his imaginative identity to further the development of his art.

On the subject, G. Scott further notes, “Such protean versatility allows Keats to explore a

remarkable range of human character and emotion without judgment; that is, it allows him to

entertain the very real existence of evil in the world…alongside the existence of good…in

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isolation from any moral prerogative” (562). This is a restatement of Keats’s notion that “the

strengthening of one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a

thoroughfare for all thoughts.” The job of the poet is not to sway the reader on a particular

thought, but by denying the self and memory, personal philosophy and politics has no place in

true poetic art.

One of the best poetic examples demonstrating the ideas of the chameleon poet is Keats’s

fragment “Where’s the Poet?” (Cox 296).

’Tis the man who with a manIs an equal, be he King,

Or poorest of the beggar-clan,Or any wondrous thing

A man may be ’twixt ape and Plato (Cox 296)

The true poet must be able to be a “King” and a “beggar,” an uneducated “ape” and a philospher

“Plato,” all at the drop of a hat. The true poet needs to put on any hat he wishes, whenever he

wishes, in pursuit of true art.

Keats not only tried to be a chameleon poet in his poetry, but also in how he published his

works. The multiplicity of published versions of his poetry “has ramifications for the ontological

identity—sometimes called the ‘mode of existence’—of any specific work in the canon….”

(Stillinger 15). The development of the poet had to be chameleon in nature, and so too did the

development of the art itself. This also has lead to the multiplicity of different Keats: “the Keats

of the boldly inscribed fair copies; the Keats first known to the public in the magazines and the

three original volumes; the posthumous Keats, creator of the one hundred poems first published

after his death; the personal Keats seen in the privacy of his surviving letters; the Keats who was

the beloved friend at the center of what we now call the Keats Circle; the Keats of the various

portraits; and the Keats who served as artistic collaborator” (Stillinger 23).

Truth therefore is tipped on its head, and unity in Keats’s poetry becomes blurred. Abrams

discussed, concerning the primary issue of the mid-twentieth century New Critics, “who read

Keats’s poems with the predisposition to find coherence, unity, and ironies; it is no less the issue

for poststructural theorists, who read the poems with the predisposition to find incoherence,

ruptures, and aporias” (Abrams 36). Analysis of his poetry grows difficult; critique needs to deal

with the development of his craft and poetic philosophy instead of reading his work within the

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lens of a traditional critical theory, to look at his technique and development of “metamorphosis

and biological and natural imagery” (Young 274).

While Keats proposes that the poet not have “a select party” of thought, the only opinion held

by the poet should be the importance for the creation of art itself. “Only on one subject does he

profess to have any fixed opinions,” Massoon observes:

namely, on his own art or craft. “I have not one opinion,” [Keats] says, “upon

anything except matters of taste.” This is one of the most startling and significant

sayings ever uttered by a man respecting himself. If I am not mistaken, the

definition which Keats here gives of the poetical character corresponds with the

notion which is most popular. Though critics distinguish between “subjective”

and “objective” poets, and enumerate men in the one class as famous as men in

the other, yet, in our more vague talk, we are in the habit of leaving out of view

those who are called “subjective” poets, and seeking the typical poet among their

“objective” brethren, such as Homer and Shakespeare.” (374)

It’s this objectivity that goes along with Keats’s notion of the poet being the most unpoetical

thing. A subjective poet inserts his opinions into his writing; the objective poet denies his ego

—“the poet has…no identity—he is [therefore] the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.”

Just like a catalyst dissolves during a chemical reaction, speeding up the reaction and

disappearing without a trace after that reaction, Keats also felt that as part of the poetical

character, metamorphosis and dissolving into poetry were ideal elements of a good poet. Magill

takes note of “a recurring theme in Keats’s work…was the fantasy of poetic metamorphosis,”

establishing:

The sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ introduces the wish

for transformation that will enable the poet to reach Shakespearean achievement.

The metaphor is consumption and rebirth through fire, as adapted from the

Egyptian legend of the phoenix bird…. The narrator-poet lays down his pen for a

day so that he might ‘burn through’ Shakespeare’s ‘fierce dispute/ Betwixt

damnation and impassion’d clay.’ To ‘burn through’ must be read two ways in the

light of the phoenix metaphor—as reading passionately through the work and as

being burned through that reading. (1774)

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Here, the adaptation of the phoenix legend, of “consumption and rebirth,” is about dissolving and

metamorphosis, where the “narrator-poet” takes part in the process by laying “down his pen” to

“‘burn through’ Shakespeare’s ‘firece dispute/ Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay.’” With

the dual meaning of “burn through,” we see Keats’s depth of sensory perception, and his

meaning of when he wrote to Percy B. Shelley on August 16, 1820, to “‘load every rift’ of your

subject with ore” (Cox 524), that the reader may be able, through detailed language, discover the

multiple meanings of the subject for themselves—not that the poet defines everything for the

reader. As Brooks underlines, “[Keats’s] process of dissolution is suggested by the imagined

movement away from the world of clear outlines and sharply drawn distinctions into a world of

shadows and darkness” (101).

Another note on dissolving is Keats’s view of love; as we see in Lamia, “Keats saw in the

self-annihilating, or ‘identity-destroying,’ power of the imagination an analog to love” (Fraistat

594). Keats developed this notion, it seems, in his correspondence with Fanny Brawne. On July

1, 1819, for example, he writes:

I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you

on Tuesday night—’twas too much like one out of Rousseau’s Heloise. I am

more reasonable this morning. …Ask yourself my love whether you are not very

cruel to have so entrammelled [to hamper or obstruct by entangling] me, so

destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write

immediately and do all you can to console me in it—make it rich as a draught of

poppies to intoxicate me—write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least

touch my lips where yours have been. (Cox 349–350)

This thing called Loved has taught Keats about irrationality (“I am more reasonable this

morning,” implying that he was less reasonable “on Tuesday night”), the cruelty of

“entrammelling” (which has led to the destruction of his freedom), and a want for her to write

him with a letter so “rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate” him. While these expressions

articulate his love, they are negative images supporting how we become “self-annihilated,” or

“identity-destroyed,” in love.

While his Mansion of Many Apartments was more to establish a comparison for human life,

one could argue its application as part of the development of the poetic character. In his May 3,

1818, letter to John Reynolds, Keats describes:

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The first [of the apartments] we step into we call the infant or thoughtless

Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think—We remain there a

long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide

open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length

imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle—within us—

we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of

Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere,

we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in

delight: However, among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous

one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man…whereby This

Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on

all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages

—We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a Mist—We are now in that

state—We feel “the burden of the Mystery.” (Cox 245)

Another way of putting this would be: before a poet relizes his native gift, he would be in the

“infant or thoughtless Chamber.” Accumulating experience, through slow development and

maturity, rooted strength, and leisure for growth, the poet could embark on the voyage of

conception, in the bliss of the “Chamber of Maiden Thought,” revelling in the art of stylistic

copying and mimicry (while understanding the limitations of those he is copying), developing his

craft in illustration, imagery, and detail. There comes a time, however, when understanding the

relationship between sensation, memory, and imagination, that through imaginative identity, that

the poet must negate his ego, deny his self, and thereby transitioning into the development of the

poetical character, enter into passages that are “gradually darken’d” and “all leading to dark

passages—We see not the balance of good and evil”—the poet is not to moralize what he sees,

but report through these new experiences the objects and sensations he is feeling, and more

importantly, if these objects and sensations are sufferable, the poet must not flee for an escape.

As Muir noted:

When the poet turns from the imaginary world of his creating to the actual world,

his imagination is “Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind.” [Keats] is dissatisfied with

escapist poetry, and not strong enough to cope with the problems of good and

evil. He convinces his “nerves that the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak,

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Pain, Sickness and Oppression.” The “Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes

gradually darken’d” and he feels the “burden of the Mystery”. Such speculations

inevitably interfere with the enjoyment of the present, so that the “Epistle to

Reynolds]” Keats declares that “It is a flaw/In happiness, to see beyond our

bourn,— /It forces us in summer skies to mourn,/It spoils the singing of the

Nightingale.” (305)

We will delve deeper into “the singing of the Nightingale” later.

In sharp contrast to the misty Mansion of Many Apartments, Keats proposes a positive

purpose in life in his February to May 1819 letter to George and Gorgiana Keats:

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out

the use of the world…I say “Soul making.” Soul as distinguised from an

Intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but

they are not Souls till they acquire identitites, till each one is personally itself. …

This is effected by three grand materials…Intelligence—the human heart…and

the World or Elemental space…for the purpose of forming the Soul or

Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. (Cox 330)

Keats speculates here on the possibility of “every human being” containing “a spark of divinity

called soul.” This soul, however, “does not attain an identity until that soul, through the medium

of intelligence and emotions, experiences the circumstances of a lifetime” (Magill 1771). De

Man expands on this saying, “The pattern of Keats’s work is prospective rather than

retrospective; it consists of hopeful preparations, anticipations of future power rather than

meditative reflections on past moments of insight or harmony” (537). We are not in a vale of

tears—“meditative reflections on past moments”—possibly hurtful memories of negative

sensations—but in a world “of hopeful preparations, anticipations of future power”—a vale of

soul-making. Chandler clarifies all of this, arguing that “this exercise is just as obviously an

effort to recuperate the concept of the soul from those who would deny it outright. The sense of

a historical present, defined by the tension between enlightenment analysis and Christian

superstition, seems very much assumed in Keats’s rhetoric here” (633–634). Keats believes in

the existence of divinity as soul, but not in the traditional sense of the “chrystain [Christian]

religion” (Cox 330).

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The final piece of poetical character is hidden in Keats’s study of Hazlitt and his thoughts on

passion. In one of his marginal notes when reading Hazlitt’s gusto, Keats’s scribbled, “If we

compare the Passions to different tuns and hogsheads of wine in a vast cellar—thus it is—the

poet by one cup should know the scope of any particular wine without getting intoxicated—this

is the highest exertion of Power, and the next step is to paint from memory of gone self storms”

(Bate “Negative Capability 27–28). Another throw back to the denial of escapist poetry (“the

poet by one cup should know the scope of any particular wine without getting intoxicated”),

Keats’s understanding of Hazlitt’s passion, or gusto, is that it is “the highest exertion of Power,”

and its purpose is “to paint from memory of gone self storms”—that is, to use gusto to relate

accumulated experience to the reader. In Hazlitt’s own words from his essay On Gusto, he

discusses how “there is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character

of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in giving this

truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but

always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists” (597). Gusto

and passion are the glue necessary to keep the different aspects of the poetical character together,

in the understanding of all objects containing “character of power,” and it’s the poets ultimate

purpose to provide “this truth of character” in contrast to how the poet feels about the object

(“the truth of feeling”) “in the highest degree,” where gusto resides.

Having all the pieces of the puzzle necessary in building his philosophy, and the glue, gusto,

to keep it all together, Keats could now venture forth in constructing the ultimate ideal of a

poet’s craft: negative capability.

2i. Approaching negative capability

Keats’s journey was centered around one elusive goal, which he briefly describes in a

random letter to his brothers George and Tom, and never speaks of ever again. On January 5,

1818, he wrote, “Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went

to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so

enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Cox 109). Negative

capability seems to combine most, if not all, of what was discussed above from native gift to

poetical character. Bromwich described negative capability as “a mood of susceptible imagining

that can lead to poetry, because it does not settle in certainty or any wish for enlightenment or

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edification. It seems a mood of nervous (not irritable) unease, whose peculiarity is that it never

tends to resolve itself into satisfaction” (184–185). Edwards speculated that “this type of

creative mind can make a positive strength out of doubt; it opposes the definite and the dogmatic

in favour of paradox and uncertainty” (51). Masson went on to contended that it was the “quality

that forms men for great literary achievement…a power of remaining, and, as it were,

luxuriously lolling, in doubts, mysteries, and half-solutions, toying with them, and tossing them,

in all their complexity, into forms of beauty, instead of piercing on narrowly and in pain after

Truth absolute and inaccessible” (374). Hough expands on negative capability as growing

“naturally into a strong active and dramatic tendency, a wish to participate in the life of others,

and an understanding of other people that is everywhere evident in the letters” (302).

It is important to note, however, that the purpose of negative capability is to foster the

process of imaginative development, not thrwart it, while harnessing the true character of an

object in gusto. “If I understood [negative capability],” commented Levine, “I do not take him to

mean I could stop thinking and live the rest of my life as a cabbage or even take too seriously the

thrush…. [H]e meant to follow Solomon’s direction and ‘get wisdom—get understanding’”

(Levine 209). Negative capability is meant to drive a poet to understand something about life,

humanity—something—especially through the study of an object.

Keats understood that a poet could not truly attain pure negative capability. “Coleridge, for

instance,” he continued to write to his brothers, “would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude

[truth-likeness] caught from the Penetralium [innermost part] of mystery, from being incapable

of remaining content with half knowledge” (Cox 109). One could, however, come close.

One way was striving for disinterestedness. This deals with denying the ego, as discussed

above, but in such a way that the ego does not obstruct discovering the true character of the

poetic subject (as always, in gusto). De Man notes:

Already in Endymion, when Keats is speaking of love and friendship as central

formative experience, he refers to these experience as ‘self-destroying’…. ‘Self-

destroying’ is obviously used in a positive sense here, to designate the moral

quality of disinterestedness—yet ‘destroying’ is a curiously strong term. The

phrase is revealing, for a recurrent pattern in the poetry indicates a strong aversion

to a direct confrontation with his own self; few poets have described the act of

self-reflection in harsher terms. (541–542)

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De Man considers Keats’s “self-destroying” view of love—indicating “a strong aversion to a

direct confrontation with his own self,” or ego—in relation to disinterestedness as a positive

aspect of poetical character. Muir expands this by explaining how Keats “was anxious to

achieve a state of non-attachment, and he was filled with a desire to find a meaning in human

suffering so that his own and that of others could in some way be justified” (305). By becoming

non-attached, or disinterested, the poet can write on an object without getting subjected to his

suffering; this in turn frees up the poet to find the best means in justifying that suffering.

The second way in which Keats approached negative capability was the Wordsworthian wise

passivity, which Keats liked to call Indolence (Muir 304). Wise passivity, according to Symons,

gave Keats “the capacity to enjoy sensation without being overcome by it. He was not troubled

about his soul, the meaning of the universe, or any other metaphysical questions, to which he

shows a happy indifference, or rather, a placid unconsciousness” (280). Symons goes on to say

how Keats “is willing to linger among imaginative happiness, satisfyingly, rather than to wander

in uneasy search after perhaps troubling certainties” (280).

Now that we have an understanding of Keats’s complex cognitive structures, let us look at

his work which combined all of them fluidly, smoothly, and poetically: “Ode to a Nightingale.”

3. A Close Reading of “Ode to a Nightingale” in light of Negative Capability

The choice of a nightingale, besides the fact that most Romantics from Wordsworth to

Coleridge, and later to Claire choose the same bird for its poetic power, Keats seems to have a

life-long search for the right bird to objectify as his gusto subject. First, he tried “a silver dove,”

possibly echoing Mary Tighe’s Psyche, even speaking of the dove’s “immortal quire [choir]”

(Cox 5). While the dove served its purpose for the young Keats, he seems a little naïve in saying

“Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?” implying that “any grief” does not “impair” “our

joy” because of the existence of the silver dove. He tries another bird image later in “On Sitting

Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” with the line “Give me new Phœnix wings to fly at my

desire” (Cox 114). The phoenix is a beautiful image for dissolution and metamorphosis, and

very poetic, but the only problem with the phoenix is that it is not real; it exists only in

mythology. A better muse, especially for the Romantic, would come from real nature. In his

“Epistle to Reynolds,” amongst a “gentle Robin…/Ravening a worm,” we hear “It is a flaw/In

happiness to see beyond our bourn,—/It forces us in summer skies to mourn,/It spoils the singing

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of the Nightingale” (Cox 136). In the “Epistle,” a year before he wrote Nightingale, he found the

perfect bird to honor an ode.

In stanza one of Nightingale, we are introduced to the poet’s aching heart, “drowsy numbness

pains,” possibly hoping to be killed by hemlock or dulled by an opiate (more likely using the

drugs symbolically for a wanting of forgetfulness—“Lethe-wards had sunk”). This is not the

first time Keats has used such imagery in his poetry. In one of his first poems he ever published,

he wrote:

Fill for me a brimming bowl,And let me in it drown my soul:But put therein some drug designedTo banish woman from my mind:For I want not the stream inspiringThat fills the mind with fond desiring;But I want as deep a draughtAs e’er from Lethe’s waves was quaft (Cox 4)

In “Fill for me a brimming bowl,” we find the poet wishing to be drowned in a “drug

designed/To banish woman from my mind,” to forget them “As e’er from Lethe’s waves was

quaft.” Here, nineteen-year-old Keats wishes to clearly escape the “fond desiring” of the woman.

Twenty-four-year-old is wise to know that one cannot escape the suffering of such knowledge,

whether it is a woman he would never be able to love or knowing of his own mortality. Edwards

notes that Keats “settles on an unusual explanation” for the way he’s feeling: “‘being too happy

in thine happiness’—the power, so prized by Keats, of empathy. Here the intensifier ‘too’

indicates the poet’s awareness that even empathy, the instinct which connects us most nearly

with our fellow humans, can be a form of escapism” (41).

In stanza three, the poet seems to consider dissolving philosophically, physically, and

poetically. “Fade far away,” sings the poet, “dissolve, and quite forget/What thou among the

leaves hast never known,/The weariness, the fever, and the fret/Here, where men sit and hear

each other groan” (Cox 458). The hope in Nightingale is that the poet’s song becomes like the

bird’s song, sung with “full-throated ease.” In stanza three, he is telling the nightingale to “fade

far away,” and “dissolve” into nature, which is a hope that the poet could too dissolve into nature

(philosophically). The poet wishes for the bird to also physically dissolve “among the leaves,”

which could also be interpreted that the poet wishes to “leave the world unseen” and “fade away

into the forest dim” physically in nature (as seen in stanza two). Stanza three goes on to say,

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“The weariness, the fever, and the fret/Here, where men sit and hear each other groan,” alluding

to a poetic dissolve, where the poet, by getting lost in nature, can find the means possible to

forget or at least objectify human suffering. Then “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”

and when “leaden-eyed despairs,/Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes” seems to be a

revisiting of when the had “fears that [he] may cease to be,” when he felt that he should “never

look upon [beauty] more,” standing alone “on the shore/Of the wide world…and [thought]” (Cox

119). In “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” the poet feared he would “never…relish in

the faery power” but is able to revel in it in Nightingale, at least for a short while.

The poet wishes the nightingale “Away! away! for [he] will fly to [it] at the start of stanza

four, so he may pursue the song through imagination and Poesy. This is the miracle at the center

of the poem; in the midst of the despair, darkness, and confusion, the poet’s song and the bird’s

song become identical (“Already with thee!”). This is a moment in the poem where, in gusto, the

poet hopes to achieve a level of negative capability (“Though the dull brain perplexes and

retards”), by denying the poet’s ego (by making the poem not be about himself anymore) and

instead change focus to the bird’s song, through the appeal of recreating the poet’s imaginative

identity to be that of the nightingale’s.

Midway through stanza one, the poet enters the ode’s Chamber of Maiden Thought, “being

too happy in thine happiness,” while listening to the nightingale sing with “full-throated ease.” It

becomes “dim” at the end of stanza two, and the “tender…night” arrives in stanza four. Midway

through stanza four, the poet enters the dark passageways (“here there is no light”), becoming

exposed to the “verdurous [luscious] glooms and winding mossy ways” and caught in the Mist in

stanza five (“soft incense hangs upon the boughs,/…in embalmed darkness”). Brooks also notes

that as Keats “moves toward imaginative identification with the nightingale, he moves into a

region of ‘verdurous glooms’ and into the ‘embalmèd darkness” (101); this seems to be an

acknowledgement of the Chamber of Maiden Thought in that the poet “moves…into the

‘embalmèd darkness.”

In stanza five, the poet (and the reader) are forced into a slow development and maturity in

the poem with beautiful detail. We are brought to the “feet” of the poet, imagining the “soft

incense [hanging] upon the boughs” “in the embalmed darkness” (embalmed conjures death

imagery, adding to the slowing-down effect). We are then invited into “the grass, the thicket,

and the fruit-tree wild;/White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine.” Time quickly matures with

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the “Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;/And mid-May’s eldest child,/The coming musk-

rose, full of dewy wine.”

Here, Keats seems to be revisiting themes he discussed in one of his very early sonnets,

“After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains.” In that sonnet, through the use of negative

modifiers, he introduces us to the moment when the individual physiologically perceives spring

—that is, after the “oppression” of winter, that “long dreary season,” when finally a “relieving of

[the] pains” of “anxiety” caused by the want of spring to be now. However, Keats does not

describe the moment itself, but the feelings, physiology, and perceptions involved—the internal

states of the individual that are changed by the realization that spring has arrived. For example,

he employs the simile “Like Rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains” to compare “the

eyelids” playing “with the passing coolness” to further develop the “feel of MAY” (Cox 15).

This subtle use of the tactile feeling successfully slows down time in the sonnet because the

reader is forced to meditate up-close on the dripping “Rose leaves” and the poet’s “eyelids,” just

like we are forced to slow down in Nightingale to meditate up-close at the poet’s “feet” and “the

grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild.” It is also interesting to note how Keats always

connects the human body to nature; Brooks notes how man’s self-consciousness detaches him

from nature, but this detachment allows him to see nature as “harmonious and beautiful” (100).

At the end of “After dark vapors,” Keats chooses to conjure the image of “a Poet’s death.”

The purpose of this moment could be two-fold. First, by associating death with all the gentle

images of regeneration, death is no longer something to escape from, but an experience to

embrace and understand. Second, the choice of a Poet dying could be a reference to negative

capability, that by the Poet allowing himself to be lost in this intimate time of realizing spring, to

get caught and seized by the elements of nature, the Poet dissolves and “dies” until the scene,

allowing the reader to experience the moment as “harmonious and beautiful.”

Back in Nightingale, in the darkness of the passages of the Chamber of Maiden Thought, the

poet is open to listening in the darkness (“Darkling I listen”) as it is growing ever darker. In

addition, “darkling” seems to also be term of endearment for Death, because the poet “for many

a time/[has] been half in love with easeful Death,” making Death more of a lover to be embraced

than an enemy to fear and reject. This love affair with Death becomes so powerful for the poet

to the point of “ecstasy”—the poet no longer is considering oblivion through an excess of drug

use but an excess in art and poetry in the metaphor of the nightingale’s song. “Death is a

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horrible dissolution and falling away,” Brooks notes, “but it is also the climax of ecstasy. It is

the alienation and separation but it is also integration and fulfillment” (100).

It is very interesting how Keats coincides the poet’s ecstatic rush with his love affair with

Death. In stanza six, the poet

Call’d [Death] soft names in many a mused rhyme,To take into the air [his] quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroadIn such an ecstasy! (Cox 459)

De Man states, “[D]estruction now openly coincides with the appearance of love on the scene, in

an overt admission that, up to this point, the moral seriousness of the poems had not, in fact been

founded on love at all” (544). Bougler further asserts, “Awareness of the existence of such

beauty becomes excruciating torture in the presence of death, unless death itself be transformed

into the most sensuous experience of all” (307). Death, an experience man naturally wants to

shy away from, is something for the poet lovely, envisioning whispering sweet-nothings in the

ear of Death (“Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme”), to the point that he finds it “rich

to die,/To cease upon the midnight with no pain,/…/In such an ecstasy!”

This love affair, however, does not end with Death, but continues on in the sensual song of

the nightingale (“Still wouldst thou sing”), but melancholy enters here because the poet knows

that he can get close enough to the song, but he could never become as the bird (“I have ears in

vain”). “Logic and the dull brain,” writes Brooks, “would have it that the nightingale, though felt

by the hearer in the Ode to be an immortal bird, is simply another instance of Beauty that must

die” (99). The poet’s ecstasy in the song (the “high requiem”) will come to an end in nature (“a

sod”). Shackford explains, “Men indeed, as a race, survive, but the individual, with all his

hopes, his aspirations, his ‘identity’, his potential power of creation, passes, becoming again an

integral part of nature,—a sod” (283).

Out of this ecstasy, the poet celebrates and curses the nightingale’s immortality. He first

celebrates in admiration of how “No hungry generations tread [it] down,” and how even “In

ancient days,” the nightingale’s song was heard “by emperor and clown.” This celebration turns

to melancholy when the poet speculates “the self-same song” finding “a path/Through the sad

heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,/She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”

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Some critics have argued that Keats’s claim of the bird’s immortality a bad metaphor for the

art he was trying to create. As Tate wrote,

[Stanza seven] is the only stanza, as some critic has remarked, which contains a statement

contradictory of our sense of common reality. …Keats merely asserts: song equals

immortality; and I feel there is some disparity between the symbol and what it is expected

to convey—not an inherent disparity, for such is not imaginatively conceivable, but a

disparity such as we should get in the simple equation A = B, if we found that the

assigned values of A and B were respectively I and 3. (293)

Critics like Tate contend that because the bird can die; therefore, it cannot be “imaginatively

conceivable” that just because the bird can sing, and all nightingales have similar songs, that that

makes the song (or the bird for that matter) immortal. Neither should the argument that just

because the bird does not know it will die that that supports its immortality.

Nightingale was not Keats’s first poem to be accused of illogical reasoning. In his “Eve of

St. Agnes,” there is a scene where he has moonlight pass through a stained-glass window and

evoke color. As a natural fact, light emitted from the moon is not strong enough to create such

an event. Lowell defends Keats by arguing:

What if Keats did make the mistake of supposing that moonlight was strong

enough to transmit the colour values of stained glass, does it matter a jot? Would

any one wish these stanzas away because they are false to fact? The truth of art is

not necessarily the truth of nature. Where a poet has made undeniable beauty, the

critic does well who refrains from applying a rule of thumb. (287)

Does the viewer of impressionist art hold the pixilation of the artists’ masterpieces against the

painters because the dotting does not seem “true to nature”? Of course not. What the artists

have made “undeniable beauty,” causing the viewer to “refrain” from accusing the art to be

“false to fact.” Fogle claims,

The imaginative ideal is in a sense more true because it is more valuable, and the

Ode to a Nightingale celebrates the poetic imagination. As it opposes the ideal to

the actual, imagination against commonsense reason, imagination and ideal still

predominate. They stand to their opposites as high against low, apex against base,

action against reaction. Ideal and actual meet only as extremes, joined in the

circle of experience. But the full power of the poem comes from adding the

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deadly question, is not the worse the true, the better the illusion? Should we not

change the meaning of truth? (“Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale” 39)

For Keats, truth is not actuality, but as stated in the Ode to a Grecian Urn, “Beauty is truth, truth

beauty” (Cox 462). If we allow reason, to use a Keatsian term, to “entrammel” our imagination,

we miss the trees for the forest.

It would be too easy to use actuality to support our claims, especially in scientific

experimentation. But poetry is not about the exploits of deductive reasoning. And any critic to

accuse Keats of “bad poetry” because of the apparent illogical argument of the “immortal Bird”

might have forgotten Keats’s love, study, and stylistic copying of Shakespeare. For it was

Shakespeare who said:

Not marble, nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturn,And broils root out the work of masonry,Nor Mars his sword not war’s quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till the judgment that yourself arise,You live in this, and dwell in lover’s eyes. (169)

In Keats’s study of Shakespeare, he would have learned the immortal power of poetry—that is,

how “not marble, nor gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,” how

“stone” may be “besmear’d with sluttish time,” how “war’s quick fire shall burn/The living

record of your memory,” how “death and all-oblivious enmity” will one day “wear this world out

to the ending doom,” but the poet’s subject will “live in this [the poem]—immortally. He copied

Shakespeare but made it his own.

A poet’s work will live on eternally though he will not. In John Clare’s “The Progress of

Rhyme,” he has his nightingale sing with him as a duet (Bate 127–128). This means, just as the

poet’s poem is his song, the nightingale’s song is its poem. Therefore, just like Shakespeare’s

verse will live eternally, it is imaginatively conceivable to believe that the nightingale’s song will

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live immortally, though the bird will not. In gusto, by calling the Bird immortal, Keats was

describing the true character of the nightingale in the poetic imagination.

Suddenly, in the heightened ecstasy, one word, forlorn, tolls the poet back to reality. The

almost sensual ecstasy is short lived, and the poet is rematerialized, so to speak, in his “sole

self.” “[I]t is at this point,” writes Edwards, “that the poet is brought back to his ‘sole self’ out of

his visionary haven. He turns on the fancy, calling his imagination a ‘deceiving elf,’ for not

proving a reliable refuge from the world of pain, merely a temporary and fleeting escape” (43).

Muir notes, “Reality breaks in on the poetic dream and tolls the poet back to his self. Fancy, the

muse of escape poetry, is a deceiving elf. Keats expresses with a maximum of intensity the

desire to escape from reality, and yet he recognizes that no escape is possible” (306).

Critics seem to have forgotten the importance of Lamia in Nightingale, however. As

discussed earlier, Keats saw dissolution as an “analog to love.” The poet in Nightingale is

dissolved into the sensual song of the nightingale, brought to the point of ecstasy, where “never

was the voice of death sweeter” (Hunt “A commentary on two poems: 1835, 1844” 283), and

then brought back to his own body. This is analogous to the lovers in Lamia who dissolve into

one another in sexual intercourse, brought to the point of (short-lived) ecstasy, and then brought

back to their own bodies, or “sole selves.” The Dalai Lama in his book Advice on Dying and

Living a Better Life describes the short-lived ecstasy part of sexual intercourse, more commonly

known as an orgasm, as a “little death” (119). Therefore, just as a lover must deny his or her ego

in order to participate in the sensual song of sexual intercourse, brought to the point of (short-

lived) ecstasy in a “little death,” and then brought immediately back to reality, forever

transformed by the experience, the poet in Nightingale is at one point wooed by Death to the

point of ecstasy, brought back to his “sole self,” and forever transformed by the experience;

“Never was the voice of death sweeter.” But the concept of the “little death” was not the Dalai

Lama’s original thought. He admits to borrowing it from Shakespeare, la petite morte, with

sexual “death” euphemisms strewn throughout Shakespeare’s work (i.e. “I die in thy lap” from

Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing). Keats would have known about this in his study of

Shakespeare. This note on the “little death” adds another dimension to the Nightingale poem,

making it a non-traditional love poem, where instead of a lover, the muse is Death.

As the poet reflects on his experience, like a lover in bed, listening to the song of the

nightingale fade off into the distance, he asks, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that

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music:—Do I wake or sleep?” Keats never answers the question and leaves it up to the reader to

decide. Reason would dictate that it must have been a dream, but we must not let reason hamper

the imaginative possibilities. It also would be too easy for Keats to choose one or the other—

actuality would dictate that it would have to be either waking or sleeping. The Keatsian answer,

I surmise, would be both. As Unger argued:

The answer to the question…‘Do I wake or sleep?’—is, Both. In the structural

imaginative arc of the poem, the speaker is returned to the ‘drowsy numbness’

wherein he is awake to his own mortal lot and no longer awake to the vision of

beauty. Yet he knows that it is the same human melancholy which is in the

beauty of the bird’s ‘plaintive anthem’ and in the truth of his renewed depression.

His way of stating this knowledge is to ask the question. (301)

This answer would leave a rationalist unkempt and fussed. How could a man be both waking

and sleeping? That would be an impossibility. However, it seems that this is Keats laughing in

spite of rational thought, finally creating a master work where a poet “[was] capable of being in

uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any [irritability] reaching after fact & reason.” In his

Ode to a Nightingale, Keats came his closest in reaching his poetic ideal of negative capability.

So he was a dreamer, but he surely was no stupid, naïve, pigheaded dreamer.

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