The readerly act is also the writerly act. And if the criticâs writing-up of that identification is also metaphorical, then we can bestow a slightly enriched meaning on Arnold Isenbergâs original phrase âsameness of vision.â We are all, writer, reader, and rewriter (the critic), engaged in a sameness of vision that is in some ways a sameness of writing.âJames Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life
The Victorians famously believed that Keatsâs poems mean ânext to nothing,â largely void of ideas but full of beautiful pictures. We have come a long way in the intervening 125 years or so. Now it appearsâto the ama-teur, anyway, the reader interested in the poetry as poetryâthat the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that we seem interested in, or able to deal with, little other than Keatsâs âideas.â By that is meant either those ideas manifest within the writing itself, or else the results of bringing outside perspectives to bear on the writing, biographical, historical, or theoretical.
This book is different. Because I am an ama-teur, rather than a specialist in Keats or the Romantics, I treat scholarship as a means, not an end. The ideas, in the letters and the poems alike, matter greatly, but my interests lie first in how the verse and the prose workâas writing, that is, not principally as expression of ideas. With Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis, I consider poetry (at least) in terms of the simultaneity that marks the birth of ideas and their expression.1 Necessarily, therefore, attention focuses on the poems and letters as works of literature, works of art.
The scholarship that appears (to this âoutsiderâ) to dominate critical commentary on Keats nowadays honors the newâwhich translates as discovered ideas or imported. A great deal of value attaches to this work (I think immediately, to name but one such writer, Grant Scott, editor of the magisterial ânewâ edition of the letters and author of the book The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts). But surely there is roomâamong the significant number of books on Keatsâfor a different kind, one that, without reducing or minimizing their importance, does not begin with ideas, or privilege them unduly.
While I write here about Keatsâs intersection with me, I am interested principally in recording and analyzing the experience of reading both the poems and the letters. Reading them is at once enjoyable, rewarding, and instructive. You both learn from the letters and the poems and derive pleasure by and from reading them carefully, attentively, and responsibly.
Unlike the great majority of commentators on Keats, moreover, I read both the verse and the prose. I mean the letters that T.S. Eliot greeted as âcertainly the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poetâ and that Lionel Trilling later praised as rivaling the poems in distinction. In spite of all, then, my work on Keats may earn the scholarly honorific of new in more ways than one. A postscript to my essay on âThe Eve of St. Agnesâ marks the direction of a possible new interpretation; my readings of the Odes include comparison with T.S. Eliotâs treatment of the same subjects; and my account of âLamiaâ is entirely new.2
As I was struggling to clarify what it is that we need, in general and in respect to Keats (and Eliot) in particular, in other words, and to refine my long-held sense of the inseparability of writing and reading, I came across the endlessly suggestive Mandel Lectures at Brandeis University given by the eminent âpractical criticâ James Wood, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. Reading The Nearest Thing to Life, I felt in the presence, and as if being gifted with the voice, of a writer who quite often says it better (âil fabbro miglior,â as Eliot said of Pound).3 âA lot of the criticism that I admire,â writes Wood with the courage of my convictions, âis not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate redescription.â4 (These words call to my mind the commentary of Andrew Lytle and, differently, William Maxwell,5 while reminding me of the bruises I still bear from an anonymous reviewer of a recent manuscript of mine, who, declining to recommend publication, thought I said little beyond what any reasonably attentive reader could see and appreciate.) We await an extended argument for âcommentaryâ (rather than âcriticismâ).
Wood continues, in apt words that help to explain and develop his position (and foreshadow mine here):
The written equivalent of the reading aloud of a poem or a play is a retelling of the literature one is talking about; the good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading, as De Quincey binds us into the story of his readerly detection [in âOn the Knocking at the Gate in Macbethâ].6
From this point, Wood proceeds to further elaboration, sparking a relation to Geoffrey Hartman while steering clear of anything like âcreative criticismâ (abjured by Eliot, incidentally, but advocated by Hartman, and recently reprised with modifications by the eminent Shakespearian Graham Holderness):
I would call this kind of critical retelling a way of writing through books, not just about them. This writing-through is often achieved by using the language of metaphor and simile that literature itself uses. It is a recognition that literary criticism is unique because one has the privilege of performing it in the same medium one is describing. [Critics in this mode] are speaking to literature in its own language. This speaking to literature in its own language is indeed the equivalent of a musical or theatrical performance; an act of critique that is at the same time a revoicing.7
As powerful a writer as he is, and well-established in both academic and âwriterlyâ circles, James Wood tiptoes around a very tempting notion: he speaks, as we have seen, of criticism as (re)description, and he refers to it as a âwriterly act.â He appears to resist, however, claiming that it is a rewriting, although at one point he does refer to the critic as ârewriter.â Wood resists with good reason, of course, any implication that the critic is on a par with the poet. There should be, in my judgment, no equating of writer and commentator, no claim that the reader creates the meaning of the text, being not simply the agent who reveals but he or she who makes that meaning. The death of the author, according to Roland Barthes, is the birth of the reader, an argument traceable, ultimately, to its beginnings in the Protestant Reformation, with its instauration of âthe priesthood of all readers.â The enfranchised reader is not responsible for textual meaning.
I thus resist the notion that literary commentary is a ârewritingâ of the original, calling text. Rewriting often (at least) implies revising, making different, perhaps making better, removing errors and missteps, shaping things anew. If this is what follows from James Woodâs astute observations, I would have to part ways. If by ârewriting,â we mean âwriting again,â why notâbetter, in my estimationâcall it putting-in-other-words?
At any rate, the way of reading that I practice, is precisely a way, admittedly a point of view, and it opens a reading, rather than closes it. It always insists on the readerâs responsibility, beginning with obligations to himself or herself of being other than a passive receptacle. Another, primary responsibility is the readerâs to the poem and to the poet, with which and with whom she or he is (thus) intersecting. (In the course of this work, we will see, importantly, that this strategyâshall we call it?âmirrors the subjectâs, that is, Keatsâs, way of going about the writing of the primary texts.)
In order to pinpoint the character of my own position, I will mention some other approaches that differ from mine. I refer first to that promulgated by Jack Stillinger in his Reading âThe Eve of St. Agnesâ: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction. The book stems from his controversial earlier article on âThe Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in âThe Eve of St. Agnes,ââ which I consider at some length in my chapter below on this poem. From the time of that essayâs first publication in 1961, its inclusion 10 years later in his edited collection âThe Hoodwinking of Madelineâ and Other Essays on Keatsâs Poems, and the publication of the new book in 1999, Stillingerâs position changed. But the change more solidly affects his theoretical assumptions than his actual consideration of the one poem. He still, evidently, clings to many of the original sub-arguments: that Madeline is âhoodwinked,â that Porphyro is in reality a rapist, that the poem as a whole reflects Keatsâs considered âskepticism.â Over the years, however, Stillinger has come to believe, an advocate of diversity, that there is not one reading of such a work, but as many as there are readers: in an affirmation of multi-criticalism, Stillinger thus says that your reading is ok, mine ok too. What would, then, be the practical effect is the inevitability of imposition upon the poem, an outcome that amounts to something other than a reading. I mention this later version of Stillingerâs approach here since I will concern myself chiefly with his earlier reading in setting up my own arguments below in Chapter 4. As I have stated, my focus is the poems, and to a less extent the letters, and how they work as literary texts: not just what they say but how they say it, what they do (as well as say), and how one part is related to another and to the work as a whole (the issues of hermeneutics). It is a matter, in other words, of architectonics, not biography, even less so memoir or autobiography. Throughout, I work to insure that my writing is governed by my close reading, not by theoretical, ideational, or ideological imposition of a priori assumptions.
My book differs as well from Reading John Keats by Susan J. Wolfson, which appeared as mine was approaching production-stage and which is dedicated to Jack Stillinger. Preliminary attention finds it to be, in any case, a book well worth considering, with rather different interests: evidently, her title represents âreadingâ as both verb and adjective. Reading John Keats provokes us to reflect on what it is to âread, fail to read, misread, reread, read better.â
Another matter needs addressing by way of contextualizing my own efforts and situating them among the lively and growing number of books relating the poet, the poems, and the reader. Some of the solid efforts of the past quarter of a century or so might enlist under the general category of âpersonal criticism,â a notion that in the early 1990s I embraced, exemplified, and thus sought to advance, particularly in Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing. While I remain convinced of our need for, and the possibility of, a way of doing literary commentary displaying the readerâs engagement with the text and offered in a manner generally essayistic (rather than positivistic, distanced, and even contrarian and antagonistic), I am not drawn to the indiscriminate mixing of commentary and autobiography in once-vibrant feminist criticism and now in the efforts of the uber-prolific Harold Bloom.
Commentators on Keats have been more successful, I believe, than many in bringing the critic into the efforts of writing about a poet. For example, Susan Wolfsonâs aforementioned Reading John Keats appears to be an admirable balance of critical analysis and personal and reflective acknowledgment: illuminating without being âobjective,â low on autobiography without disengagement or dry-as-dust. The poet Stanley Plumlyâs intriguing Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography is perhaps even more interesting, although ultimately less satisfying. Something of a curiosity, this book evinces a major issue in all attempts to combine âthe personalâ with critical analysis and commentary. Plumly may be seen as neatly sidestepping some of the entailed problems by focusing his âpersonalâ considerations on the poet rather than the poems; even so, readers persist in asking about the poetry. More recently, Eric G. Wilson has forged a new and different path in How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats. The publisher describes it as âan innovative hybrid of biography, memoir, and criticism.â Even though the title smacks of the contemporary âself-helpâ craze, Wilson establishes from the beginning a definite and solid difference. But like Plumlyâs, Wilsonâs book generally sacrifices the poem to the poet, perhaps an instance of wisdom not likely learned from the poet.
It is extraordinarily difficult to find a way of marrying the personal/familiar/essayistic and the analytical/critical/âdefinite article.â I have been trying for 25 years or more; and indeed, I know of scarcely any successful attempts, a striking exception being E.B. Whiteâs paean to Henry David Thoreau, âA Slight Sound at Eveningâ (in which, incidentally, the self-observing is not so much observed as artfully constructed and rendered dramatically). As to How to Make a Soul, Wilson ends up writing a good deal about himself, and a good deal about the man and the poet John Keats. His interest sets him apart, however, from so many of the practitioners of what has been derisively labeled âmoi criticism,â little (self-)indulgence here, as a matter of fact. Wilson proceeds in, through, and by means of his private, individual experience to generalized, if not always universal, application. It is, then, essayistic, but the self that does the observing too easily becomes the self-observed, and in thus succumbing to the memoiristic pull, Wilson slides over from the familiar type of critical essay to the far more prevalent personal type (the familiar and the personal being the two major kinds of essay).
My preference for the familiar is obvious eno...