Keats and Hellenism: An Essay

Keats and Hellenism

Keats and Hellenism An Essay MARTIN ASKE Lecturer in the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature University of Hong Kong

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TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

Contents List of illustrations

page ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Note on the text

xii

Introduction

I

i

8

Fictions old and new

2 Towards Endymion

38

3

Flowers of speech

53

4

The fall of Hyperion

73

5

Silent forms

IOI

6

Lamia', or, Antiquity Decomposed

128

Notes

H3

Select bibliography

175

Index

187

We are always talking of the Greeks and Romans; they never said any thing of us. William Hazlitt

But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. Wallace Stevens

Illustrations Figure i. Henry Fuseli, 'The artist in despair over the magnitude of antique fragments' (c. 1778-80) page 36 Figure 2. The Portland Vase, reproduced from Henry Moses, A Collection of Vases (London, 1814)

114

Figure 3. Plate xxm, reproduced from Thomas Kirk, Outlines from the Figures and Compositions upon the Greek, Roman and Etruscan Vases of the late Sir William Hamilton, second edition (London, 1814)

122

Figure 4. Plate xvn, reproduced from the same

123

Acknowledgements This essay was originally written as a doctoral thesis under the benign guidance of Dr John Beer, and I hope that it still bears a trace of his sound wisdom and poetic intelligence. I am indebted to Dr Elinor Shaffer for her continued interest in the work. Her specific criticisms have always been helpful, and her many aids to reflection I have valued immensely. I shall always remember two stimulating conversations with Dr Theodore Redpath. The unfailingly brilliant and pithy advice of my good friend and colleague, M. A. Abbas, kept me going through the heat of an Oriental summer. An opportunity to attend Professor Geoffrey Hartman's seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory helped me clarify some theoretical issues. Several constructive comments from the Cambridge University Press's anonymous readers gave me much to think about. I thank Terry Moore and his colleagues for the vigilant care of the typescript on its way to publication. Finally, I am grateful to David Lowe, of Cambridge University Library, for helping to bridge the gap between East and West. It is with good reason that Patricia, my wife, became my most trenchant critic, since she had the misfortune to witness the writing of the essay almost from its inception. Like the poet, she believes that English must be kept up, and I hope that her distrust of 'isms' and other opacities has purified the work of too many Miltonic inversions. What follows is, more than anything else, a tribute to both her encouragement and her forbearance.

XI

Note on the text All quotations of Keats's poetry are taken from The Poems of John Keats, edited by Jack Stillinger (London, 1978).

Xll

Introduction A good deal has been written on the theme of Keats's Hellenism. For several reasons (the traditional prestige of classical mythology, Keats's obvious relation to Romantic Hellenism as a whole, our ample store of information about the texts at the poet's disposal) Keats's use of classical fictions has been a favourite area of occupation for literary historians. Much labour has been expended on tracing the classical imagery in, say, Endymion, or the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', to a wealth of verbal and visual sources apparently available to the poet. While acknowledging the value of this kind of study, the following essay proposes a rather different approach for reading the representation of antiquity in Keats's poetry. Instead of assuming that the classical fictions are incontestably given and present in a specific poem (conveying a certain meaning determined by the context), this essay begins its argument at an earlier stage, so to speak, insofar as it explores the very difficulty and uncertainty of antiquity's representation in a modern text. Poetic influence, says Geoffrey Hartman, is 'personal, seductive, perverse, imposing'.1 The influence of classical antiquity on Keats plays itself out as a psychic drama in and between the lines of the Keatsian text, as a narrative which is both romance and elegy. Keats appeals to antiquity as a supreme fiction, that is, an ideal space of possibility whose imaginative rehabilitation might guarantee the authority of modern poetry. Yet an acute awareness of his own irreversible modernity necessarily engenders in the poet a contrary sense of the alterity of Greece, its difference from, and possible indifference to, his own moment in the history of poetry. In which case the persistence of the ancient fictions might not be as liberating and benign as the poet would like. 'Romantic literary psychology', according to Harold Bloom, is a 'psychology of belatedness3? Keats's fear that he had touched the beautiful mythology of Greece 'in too late a day', his lament to Richard Woodhouse that there was no longer anything original to be written in poetry, his sense of indolence and oppression at the 'overpowering idea' of the dead poets - these anxieties reveal the

2

Keats and Hellenism

extent to which Keats was aware of the belatedness of his own situation vis-a-vis antiquity.3 Bloom suggests that Keats is 'peculiarly and overtly conscious of the anxiety of influence', and I take Bloom's basic thesis poetic influence is a psychic drama between poet and precursor(s) - as offering a useful theoretical approach to Keats's Hellenism.4 For all its extravagant rhetoric, Bloom's theory has the virtue of setting aside older and largely sterile 'source-hunting' notions of influence ('the passing-on of images and ideas from earlier to later poets')5 in favour of a more dynamic model which redefines the problem of influence in terms of a certain view of literary history. Adapting one of Bloom's own precursors, Freud, one might say that, according to this view of literary history, the whole progress of poetry rests upon the opposition between successive generations of poets.6 The belated poet's relation to his precursors, like the child's relation to his parents, involves defiance as well as respect, fear as well as loyalty. The anxiety of influence includes an awareness on the part of the poet that the romance with his classical Muse might pass from idyll to nightmare, from enchantment to thraldom. Hence the necessity for strong misreadings. Bloom cites Freud : 'Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli.'7 Antiquity might be found to press its claims too importunately, to the extent that it becomes a compulsive presence which the poet finally has to exorcize from his imagination. The history of Greece's tyranny over English poetry has yet to be written; Keats's struggle with the tyrannical demands of his classical Muse would form a major chapter in such a history. Bloom's theory of poetic influence, when applied to Romantic verse, has been criticized by Marilyn Butler for resting on Very simple notions of history'. Against the 'vulgar wisdom' about Romanticism, to which Bloom apparently subscribes, Butler prefers to emphasize the need for 'an awareness of the historical process, and a feel for the community which generated art and provided its public'.8 But it may be that a poet lives, consciously or unconsciously, by an idea of history which is different from that of the critic. And certainly Bloom has shown that the 'community' which generates art necessarily includes the community of dead poets, who might be felt by the modern writer to be 'outrageously more alive than himself'.9 Now it may be plausible to view Romantic Hellenism (what Butler calls the 'cult of the

Introduction

3

South') as a collective activity, as a response, from the margins of the social and literary establishment, to a given historical situation. But within that activity important differences occur, and the privatization of the response which we find in Keats might be one of the more crucial differences. If Keats can be regarded as a 'pagan', his is not the paganism of 'sophisticates' like Peacock and Shelley, whose Hellenism constitutes an 'ideological cult', serving their conscious opposition to prevailing social and political moralities.10 Keats's Hellenism is, precisely, not cultivated, but can be read, rather, as the site of a problem which has to do with the modern poet's vocation, with the poet's search for a viable identity at a moment in history (in the history, that is, of literature, of fictions) which the poet himself knows to be belated. The persistent and often compulsive resort to classical mythology in Keats's verse discloses an essentially psychohistorical problem which, amongst other things, begins to contest T. S. Eliot's influential proposition, in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', that the past is always somehow gratifyingly present and available to the modern writer. Although I have made use, where appropriate, of 'background' material, what follows is primarily an essay in practical criticism. If I treat certain poems by Keats as so many stages in a narrative (the story of Keats's romance with ancient Greece), it is because, like Geoffrey Hartman, I take the individual poem as 'recapitulating a vision of literary destiny or constitutive of it'. It should be possible, as Hartman suggests, to consider how a poem 'tells the time of history - without accepting a historical determinism'.11 Thus I have endeavoured to read certain poems as they revise or consolidate one another and as they inscribe themselves as critical events in the history of poetic fiction. In this way, perhaps, might the demands of close reading, and the need for a larger vision of literary history, be reconciled. Keats's letters testify that the poet's romance with antiquity is always less obvious and explicit than his encounter with Shakespeare, for example. The poet is more reticent about Homer than about Shakespeare. After all, Shakespeare is present as a material and visible text, an 'object' to which Keats has access and which he can possess. The title of Caroline Spurgeon's book, Keats's Shakespeare, implies that Shakespeare could somehow belong to Keats in a way that classical antiquity could never belong to him. Keats read Shakespeare, says Spurgeon, and 'marked him,

4

Keats and Hellenism

quoted him, and parodied him; thought of him, brooded over him, steeped himself in him; the music of his lines haunted him, stimulated him to write, sustained and delighted him'. 12 But the ideal space of Greece can never be inhabited in this easy intimate way because it is a supreme fiction which can only be materialized, as it were, fragmen tarily, or prismatically, through Spenser, Chapman, Milton, and the like. 'Greece' is always something more than a text or collection of texts; as a fiction it is, finally, unrepresentable, unimaginable. At the beginning of 1818 Keats was able to say that 'I have great reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakspeare to his depths.' Two months later he wrote to J. H. Reynolds : 'I long to feast upon old Homer as we have upon Shakespeare . . . If you understood Greek, and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, 't would be, from its mistiness, perhaps a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self.'13 Whereas Shakespeare can be read and understood (and feasted upon - consumed), Homer can never be literally understood (Keats does not know Greek) nor can he be enjoyed except through his 'mistiness'. Yet it is precisely this 'mistiness' which renders Homer threatening as well as alluring; the clouds obscure any text with which the poet might have been able to familiarize himself. Keats's anxiety of influence arises from the fact that antiquity is signified by the absence of a material text which the poet can make his own. According to Freud, anxiety has 'a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object',1* and it is the indefiniteness, the lack of stable objective reference, which makes Keats's Hellenism such an anxious and hazardous affair. The model of Romantic Hellenism established by Winckelmann in the latter half of the eighteenth century is a powerful and compelling one; it comes to be adopted by Goethe and Schiller, Hegel, Arnold and Pater. According to this model, the perfection of Greek art consists in its balance and tranquillity, its consummate adequacy. Schiller contrasts the 'naive' mode of the Greeks with the 'sentimental' style of modern Christian art. In these terms, modern art might be regarded as 'inadequate', and it is precisely the inadequacy of modern or 'sentimental' art which marks its profundity, its constant struggle, as Pater observes, 'to express thoughts beyond itself. Christian forms of art, says Pater, are 'inadequate to the matter they clothe; they

Introduction

5

remain ever below its level'. A work of Greek art, on the other hand, suggests nothing 'beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite image.' 15 Keats might well have been familiar with Schiller's differentiation of the 'naive' from the 'sentimental' through Hazlitt's review of August Wilhelm Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature (translated in 1815). The contrast between 'naive' and 'sentimental' modes reappears as a distinction between the 'classical' and the 'romantic'. Hazlitt paraphrases Schlegel thus : The most obvious distinction between the two styles, the classical and the romantic, is, that the one is conversant with objects that are grand or beautiful in themselves, or in consequence of obvious and universal associations; the other, with those that are interesting only by the force of circumstances and imagination. A Grecian temple, for instance, is a classical object: it is beautiful in itself, and excites immediate admiration. But the ruins of a Gothic castle have no beauty or symmetry to attract the eye; and yet they excite a more powerful and romantic interest from the ideas with which they are habitually associated. The great difference between ancient and modern poetry, then, is that the one more frequently describes things as they are interesting in themselves - the other for the sake of the associations of ideas connected with them; that the one dwells more on the immediate impressions of objects on the sense - the other on the ideas which they suggest to the imagination. The one is the poetry of form, the other of effect... The one seeks to identify the imitation with an external object, - clings to it, - is inseparable from it, - is either that or nothing; the other seeks to identify the original impression with whatever else, within the range of thought or feeling, can strengthen, relieve, adorn or elevate it.16 Keats comes closest to invoking the 'naive' style when he speaks of the 'naked and grecian Manner' intended for Hyperion', in the same sentence he inadvertently echoes Schiller's terminology when he writes of Endymion that it contains 'many bits of the deep and sentimental cast'.17 In fact Keats cannot help but produce a modern 'sentimental' art, a discourse whose essential inadequacy is signified by its inability to represent the desired object other than in terms of excess or lack. Hence my discussion of both Endymion and Hyperion in terms of 'error'

6

Keats and Hellenism

and 'failure'. This has nothing to do with an unfortunate lapse which the writer could have avoided. These texts constitute, rather, a necessary failure, since they expose the idea of an adequate restoration of ancient modes as an illusion, an impossible nostalgia. Their systematic deviancy, as arabesque and fragment, would seem to confirm the radical extent to which they begin to question some of the assumptions of Winckelmann's Hellenism. Contributing to this indeterminacy of representation is the subversive entry of parerga into the Keatsian text. A frequent tendency towards ornamental or 'floral' ('parergonal') language in Keats's poetry discloses a psychic need, a desire to leave a final embellishment or signature on the ideal Text of Antiquity, given the impossibility of the modern poet ever recovering that Text in its original plenitude. The language of Keats's Hellenism, we might say, unfolds as a chain of signifiers which multiply themselves in the ironic knowledge that they can never finally stop to produce an ultimate Signified. A note, lastly, on the function of Hazlitt in this essay. I agree with David Bromwich that Keats's discovery of Hazlitt amounted to 'the discovery of another self, and that 'no other encounter between poet and critic has been so fortunate for literature'. I also agree that 'the record of Hazlitt's influence is much fuller, more convincing and more subtly connected with the practice of Keats's poetry, than anyone has yet shown'.18 I have usually preferred, however, to invoke Hazlitt to support matters of detail along the way, rather than to worry the question of Hazlitt's 'influence' on Keats overmuch. I suspect that a similar kind of essay could have been written, with Hazlitt the protagonist instead of Keats. If more attention were devoted to his art criticism, a convincing case could be made for Hazlitt's anxiety towards the past, and for the possibility that he engages in strong misreadings of poets and painters alike. But that is another Romantic story. A more systematic appraisal of the relation between Keats and Hazlitt, as well as the relation between Hazlitt and Hellenism, I reserve for another place, another time. Meanwhile, the frequent intervention of Hazlitt's voice in the following essay should remind us that the line dividing poet and critic might suddenly become much less well defined than we are often inclined to think. 'As literary history lengthens, all poetry necessarily becomes verse-criticism, just as all criticism becomes prose-poetry.'19 Keats's verse-criticism and Hazlitt's prose-poetry

Introduction

7

belong to that single text which finds itself written in the lengthening shadow cast by the high monument of classical antiquity.

i

Fictions old and new

I should like to begin with a few general observations. In his essay, 'Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences' (1742), David Hume remarked that when the arts 'come to perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally, or rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive in that nation, where they formerly flourished'.1 A few years later, Joseph Warton came to the conclusion that 'in no polished nation, after criticism has been much studied, and the rules of writing established, has any very extraordinary work appeared'. 2 Such comments might appear to be abstract formulations. In fact they are critically relevant to the time in which they were expressed. They are, one might say, theoretical symptoms of a tendency that was to become increasingly marked as the Enlightenment approached the threshold of Romanticism. As an age of criticism which was also heir to a formidable tradition of literature, the second half of the eighteenth century seemed to confirm the apergus of Hume and Warton, insofar as it came to witness a decline in the art of poetry. This was no eccentric suspicion : by the end of the century it had become accepted as a real fact of literary life. A reviewer for one of the leading journals lamented that poetry 'is almost extinct among us'. The editors of another journal found it necessary to draw attention to 'the extraordinary circumstances of the time, unfavourable, from various conspiring causes, to literary efforts'. Surveying the 'poetical creeds' to which the old poets adhered, another writer concluded that 'the variety is by this time exhausted, and they pall by repetition; on which account the loftier walks of the muse have been gradually abandoned, and the heroic poem and ode have dwindled to the tale and the song'.3 By the time Hazlitt was lecturing on the English poets, in 1818, the notion that 'literature is on the wane in this country'4 8

Fictions old and new

9

had become an historical commonplace : 'Our poetical literature had towards the close of the last century, degenerated into the most trite, insipid, and mechanical of all things, in the hands of the followers of Pope and the old French school of poetry.' 5 With Keats's poignant remark, that 'there was nothing original to be written in poetry; that its riches were already exhausted & all its beauties forestalled', the line of feeling initiated by Hume reaches, for the purpose of this essay, its most critical point.6 The awareness of a decline in the art of poetry manifested itself in a recognition of the virtual obsolescence of the ancient fictions. The myths that had nourished writers in the great age of English poetry had lost their vitality; they were no longer available as a source of power and interest. 'Mythological machinery', said John Scott with reference to Lycidas, 'is managed with so much difficulty, that in modern composition it seldom fails to disgust.'7 As a gauge of contemporary opinion on this theme, Samuel Johnson's more famous critique of Milton's poem is perhaps exemplary : In this poem there is no nature for there is no truth; there is no art for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind . . . . Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen deities, Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Aeolus, with a long train of mythological imagery such as a college easily supplies.... With these trifling fictions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be polluted with such irreverent combinations.8 Since it violated doctrinal as well as psychological and aesthetic principles, classical mythology in its modern guise could no longer be invoked as a serious and adequate source of poetic language. The essential problem of fiction in poetry, to which Johnson's polemic draws attention, has been summarized by Basil Willey : Though Pope and his contemporaries were debarred by their intellectual climate from using any great system of commonlyaccepted symbols, as Dante and Milton could, they could still employ mythological material for other purposes . . . . They could use it consciously, for technical convenience and for purposes of 'delight'. It is in this manner that the mythologies of the ancient world are generally used by eighteenth century poets. These poets

io

Keats and Hellenism

employ their personifications and their other mythological apparatus in full awareness that they are 'fiction'. They are 'fictions' of proved evocative power and of long association with poetic experience, and they can thus still be made use of to assist in producing poetry out of the dead-matter of modernity. But fictions they are still felt to be, and they cannot therefore be used with full conviction. Their employment involves the deliberate exploitation of obsolete modes of feeling, a conscious disregard of contemporary truth-standards. A number of factors were to coalesce and create by the begining of the nineteenth century a situation in which apparently few alternatives were open to the aspiring poet: The new poet must... either make poetry out of the direct dealings of his mind and heart with the visible universe, or he must fabricate a genuine new mythology of his own (not necessarily rejecting all old material in so doing). Keats and Shelley often follow the second of these methods; Wordsworth typically follows the first.9 But the real problem is relegated by Willey to a parenthesis : if Keats's Hellenism begins with a desire to 'renew archaic modes', to 'reanimate the ancient fictions',10 it is precisely the relation between 'a genuine new mythology' and the 'old material' which will become problematic. To what extent is the modern poet, aware of his belated status in his appeal to the great fictions of the past, actually free to reject or not to reject the literary burdens which he has necessarily inherited ? If modern poetry, according to John Aikin, is to establish itself as something more than 'a perpetual repetition of the same images, and in almost the same language', there must be a radical demystification of poetic language, a redemption of the external world from art: Although fictions of some kind have been justly accounted the very soul of poetry, and cannot be rejected without depriving it of its choicest ornaments, yet false representations of natural things, the real properties of which are commonly known, and are equally capable of poetical use, cannot stand the test of sound criticism. And especially, the trite and hackneyed fables of ancient poets, when copied by modern writers, must appear as frigid and uninteresting as they are extravagant and unnatural. 11 The Scottish poet Allan Ramsay was commended by Alexander Tytler for practising the kind of naturalism advocated by Aikin :

Fictions old and new

11

To a just taste, and unadulterated feelings, the natural beauties of the country, the simple manners, rustic occupations, and rural enjoyments of its inhabitants, brought into view by the medium of the well-contrived dramatic fable, must afford a much higher degree of pleasure, than any chimerical fiction, in which Arcadian nymphs and swains had intercourse with Pan and his attendant fauns and satyrs.... [Ramsay] was familiarly acquainted with rural nature from actual observation; and his own impressions were not weakened or altered by much acquaintance with the classical commonplaces, or with those artificial pictures which are presented by the poets.12 Aikin's claim, that any appeal to the classical commonplaces would produce 'confused, obscure, incongruous and false delineations* of nature, 13 is symptomatic of a more general dissatisfaction with the fictions of antiquity. Roger Kedington's Critical Dissertations on the Iliad of Homer (1759) taxed the patience of at least one reviewer. The enthusiasm which led the author to describe Homer's epic as 'the purest fountain, a luxuriant garden, a vast treasure, a most rich mine, a most capacious mirror' elicits the exasperated retort: 'Must the Iliad at this time of day be the standard of poetical perfection? Must every epic poem sing of bloodthirsty Heroes, and jarring Gods and Goddesses?' The critic notes, however, that changes are taking place, in spite of what Kedington may claim : We have the satisfaction to perceive, that their Godships are going out of fashion; and, to the honour of modern taste, all the pagan mechanism of poetry is exploded by the best writers.... In these days of refinement, it shews great inelegance of taste, and depravity of sentiment, to vindicate and admire all the unnatural images and descriptions of the Iliad.14 In other words, the poetry of Homer is everything that modern taste is not: unrefined, inelegant, depraved, unnatural. Since Homer appeared to transgress all principles of decorum, and since the eighteenth century was scarcely equipped to approach a phenomenon such as Homer with sufficient historical objectivity (the literary ventures of Blackwell and Wood notwithstanding), 15 it was perhaps inevitable that a double standard should be applied : 'Homer, as a Poet, will always command the admiration of every Reader of taste : but that the Iliad is a proper model for poetry at this day, is what, perhaps, no man of judgment will allow.'16

12

Keats and Hellenism

The 'fabulous absurdities' of classical mythology were certainly not 'proper entertainments for rational and enlightened minds, or worth the attention . . . bestowed upon them'. 17 Thus, despite a troubled awareness of poetry's decline, it was nevertheless felt that the text of antiquity was scarcely redeemable, particularly as a means of restoring the fictions of poetry to their once exalted status. There has been a grievous outcry of late in this nation that men's wits are no longer equal to the production of any noble work in Poetry, and that some late poetasters are so much cried up and read, that the great masters of the art are disregarded. And indeed it is certain that Homer and Virgil are at present less relished than Voltaire, and Terence's comedies are not so much prized as O'Keefe's. And yet any attempt to recuperate ancient poetic modes could be taken only as a needless betrayal of the triumph witnessed by the eighteenth century, the conquest of the mythical by the critical or rational spirit: It is true, that some have laudably endeavoured to restore the declining age of Poetry, by recurring to the usage of simple ballads and legendary tales; yea, and in this way have succeeded so well, that men would hardly believe their works to be produced in an age of literary research. But it is surely an overfondness for antique Poesy which makes men admire her swaddling-clouts; and we may suspect the age of doating, when it returns to the gewgaws and rattles that delighted its infancy.18 Somewhat ironically, it happened to be Coleridge who was praised as embodying the Enlightenment refusal of myth. 'Too long', proclaims the critic of one of Coleridge's early publications, 'has the modern copied the antient poet, in decorating folly with the elegant attractions of verse. It is time to enthrone reason on the summit of Parnassus; and to make poetry the strengthener as well as the enlivener of the intellect; - the energetic instructor as well as the enchanting amuser of mankind.' In the desire 'to consecrate his lyre to truth, virtue, and humanity', Coleridge, apparently, 'makes no use of an exploded though elegant mythology'.19 We may note the full sense of 'exploded' here : classical mythology has become not only bankrupt, through excessive and unoriginal use, but actually shattered, irretrievable. Its insubstantiality virtually presupposes its 'elegance' - elegant or meretricious in the way, for example, that

Fictions old and new

13 20

Thomas Moore's verse was later held to be elegant. Coleridge himself was to admit, in the essay 'On Poesy or Art' (1818), that 'imitation of the antique may be too exclusive', largely because 'it induces an efTort to combine together two incongruous things, that is to say, modern feelings in antique forms'.21 Perception of this very incongruity enabled Coleridge and Wordsworth to pursue their innovative programme for poetry, while it also redefines the problem parenthetically noticed by Willey : how to inscribe the modern in the forms of antiquity? It is a question which the narrative of Keats's encounter with the beautiful mythology of Greece endeavours ceaselessly to answer. 11

If the period in question is to be considered in its synchronic complexity, the preceding remarks need to be placed in a larger context. The age which began to witness a sharp decline in the status of the ancient poetic fictions also witnessed a development which interrupts or at least modifies that decline. I refer to the knowledge of the ancient world, Greece in particular, that had been gradually accumulating from non-literary sources. Several important archaeological discoveries, notably at Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748, sustained a deep reverence for antiquity which was quite independent of the poet's distrust of classical mythology in its purely literary guise. Joseph Warton recorded that 'the ruins of Palmyra, the antiquities of Athens and Spalatro, and the Ionian antiquities, by WOOD, STUART, ADAM and CHANDLER, are such magnificent monuments of learned curiosity as no country in Europe can equal'.22 The Society of Dilettanti, founded in 1732, sponsored an archaeological expedition to Greece, yielding one of the most comprehensive publications of its kind.23 The appearance of the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens (1762), by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, invited this comment from one of its readers : [There is] no part of Europe ... which more deservedly claims the attention and excites the curiosity of the lovers of polite literature than the territory of Attica, and its capital Athens; and this not only on account of the figure it makes in history, from its production of the greatest men both in arts and arms, but also on account of the antiquities still remaining there; monuments of the good sense and elevated genius of the Athenians, as well as the most perfect models of what is excellent in Sculpture and Architecture.24

14

Keats and Hellenism

That ancient Greece might offer 'the most perfect models' for the modern architect or sculptor is a proposition which, significantly, came to be held in spite of the rejection of Homer as an adequate model for poetry. If it were true, as Robert Adam claimed, that 'the buildings of the antients are in architecture, what the works of nature should be with respect to the other arts; they serve as models which we should imitate, and as standards by which we ought to judge', it may be that the influence of antiquity in the plastic arts could be transparent and unproblematical in a way that it could not be for literature. Adam rehearses his argument in a later publication : Architecture has not, like some other arts, an immediate standard in Nature, to which the artist can always refer, and which would enable the skilful instantly to decide, with respect to the degree of excellence in any work. In architecture, it must be formed and improved by a correct taste, and diligent study of the beauties exhibited by great masters in their productions; and it is only by profound meditation upon these, that one becomes capable of distinguishing between what is graceful and what is inelegant; between that which possesses and that which is destitute of harmony.25 Whether or not Adam's distinction, between the principles of architecture and the 'immediate standard in Nature' applicable to 'some other arts', be criticized as specious, it was for such reasons that publications like The Antiquities of Athens would, it was hoped, 'contribute much toward improving and fixing our national taste in architecture, by directing it to those admirable models furnished by ancient Greece and Rome'. 26 Thus the plastic arts, unlike literature, might enjoy an untroubled, univocal relation to the past. Pope's famous alliance of 'Nature and Homer' (Essay on Criticism) had become restricting rather than liberating for the writer; it was precisely due to the elision of 'Nature' that architects and sculptors could return to antiquity with a confidence denied to the poet. Or rather, it was less difficult for the architect or sculptor to subsume 'Nature' in a reverence for antiquity, confronted as he was with the relatively intelligible, determinate and mensurable forms of actual buildings and statues, than it was for the poet, burdened by the more importunate demands of language itself. In response to a plan for a National Gallery, which would 'take in Originals both of Painting & Sculpture by considering every valuable original

Fictions old and new

15

that is brought into England or can be purchased Abroad as its objects of Acquisition', Blake wrote to George Cumberland that 'the immense flood of Grecian light & glory which is coming on Europe will more than realize our warmest wishes'.27 And it was left to that failed visionary, Benjamin Robert Haydon, to record in 1816 the climax, not only of decades of archaeological activity in Greece and Italy, but also of the kind of hope expressed in Blake's letter : 'This year the Elgin Marbles were bought, and produced an Aera in public feeling.'28 But it is significant that the source of a radical transformation and improvement in taste, whereby 'England might one day rival Greece', would be found not in Homer, or Pindar, or Sophocles, but in the realm of the non-verbal : 'Any comparison that will establish the superiority of the Elgin Marbles above all other works of art, will essentially contribute to refine and advance the taste of the country.' 29 It was Hay don's conviction that great works, and great works only, pregnant with sublimity of conception and Greek design, a r e . . . the only means of enabling us, with a firm step, to take our station between Italy and Greece; for let us not be content while our country is entitled only to be put on the right or left of them.30 Haydon's belief in ancient Greece as a model promising the advancement of English art expands into a vision of the destiny of the nation as a whole.31 His idea of progress is rendered not in temporal but in spatial, geographical terms: cour station between Italy and Greece'. According to Geoffrey Hartman, this fusion of historical and geographical progress had already become the 'largest of Enlightenment cliches'; for Thomson, Gray and Collins, as well as for the Romantic poets, 'the idea of a Progress of Poetry from Greece or the Holy Land to Britain is essential'.32 But perhaps it remained essential, as an 'idea' or rather an ideal, precisely because such progress could never be finally realized for the modern poet; it was something that could only ever be imagined or desired. To Haydon in 1816 it certainly seemed that the migration of the spirit of Greece to the homeland had become a reality : Thank God! the remains of Athens have fled for protection to England; the genius of Greece still hovers near them; may she, with her inspiring touch, give new vigour to British Art, and cause

16

Keats and Hellenism

new beauties to spring from British exertions! May their essence mingle with our blood and circulate through our being.33 But we shall find that Haydon's sense of closeness to 'the genius of Greece', inspired by the monumental presence of the Elgin Marbles, is missing in Keats. The ambiguous feelings registered in the two early sonnets, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles', suggest that the poet is rather more sensitive than Haydon to the problems arising from the collision of antique and modern. He is also less glib in his response to 'Grecian grandeur' : 'Forgive me, Haydon, that I cannot speak/Definitively on these mighty things' ('To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles'). Moreover, 'Chapman's Homer' announces the centrality of the text If it is Chapman's Elizabethan translation of Homer which is compared to 'a new planet', the 'Pacific', what, then, of the original, the primary, unmediated text of antiquity itself? The remains of Grecian grandeur may produce in the poet a 'dizzy pain', but they also bracket the main problem, the question of writing itself. Perhaps the Elgin Marbles could speak definitively to the modern artist in a way that the language of the ancient fictions could no longer speak to the poet: the nonverbal fragment is more eloquent than the verbal.34 Keats's sonnet turns on the irony that it is not Homer but Chapman's Homer whom the poet hears 'speak out loud and bold'.35 It would seem, then, that the dwindling prestige of classical antiquity became a problem which was specific to poetry rather than to other forms of art. As a recent critic has observed, it was a problem of finding a discourse adequate to poetry's demand for supreme and signifying fictions : the classical canon 'could no longer surcharge language with references or bind these references into a significant whole'. Traditional mythology had degenerated very nearly to the condition of mere language, limited in referential capacity and lacking the power to proliferate into complex systems of articulation. At best... [it] could provide an occasional limited metaphor, but not an organizing principle as it did, say, for Spenser.36 In other words, the ancient fictions could no longer be expected to contribute towards the production of content or meaning in poetry. Yet this formulation does not, perhaps, go far enough. For prior to the need for 'meaning' was the problem of reinvesting English poetry with, precisely, the 'mere language' of fiction.

Fictions old and new

17

in The conflicting responses to antiquity, characteristic of the late Enlightenment and the beginnings of Romanticism, can be related to the emergence of what we are accustomed to call 'historicism'.37 Although the present essay can do no more than briefly skirt the margins of this important development, it seems appropriate to note some of the ways in which the new historical consciousness impinged upon the fate of the classical fictions in the decades prior to Keats. Vico, Rousseau and Herder were the major initiators and exponents of historicism. Opposed to the belief in the continuing triumph of Reason, the ideal of 'perfectibility' expounded by the French philosophes, they revealed the manifold possibilities of the past, the values enshrined in the history of different cultures. They exposed the fallacy of adopting contemporary civilization as necessarily the most perfect paradigm in the evaluation of man's previous achievements. As previous epochs in history acquired new and autonomous significance, the hitherto unbroken line of historical development became radically fractured. Once past cultures came to be accepted as possessing an irreducible value of their own, they became involved in a process of differentiation and discontinuity. Whereas the classic Enlightenment idea of Natural Law subsumed the individualities of the past in a diachronic uniformity, historicism shed light on the synchronic layers of the past, on the indivisible selfhood of a work of art, or a whole culture, in the context of its own particular time. Although it was not until 1800 that one of the major texts of historicism, Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91), was translated into English,38 the perspectives fostered by historicism had already been slowly evolving in England, in a less theoretical form. I am thinking in particular of the activity of antiquarians, who were concerned not so much with the ruins of Greece but rather with the antiquity of Britain itself. A reader of the first volume of a publication by the newly founded Society of Antiquaries, entitled Archaeologia: or Miscellaneous Tracts, relating to Antiquity (1770), observed that 'there is no study from which more information may be derived, or which offers to the curious a larger field for research and amusement, than that of the antiquities of different ages and

18

Keats and Hellenism

nations'. This type of publication was intended to supply a particular deficiency, as we can see from a remark prompted by the appearance of Mallet's influential Introduction a VHistoire de Dannemarc (1755-6) : T h e learned on this side of the Alps have long laboured at the Antiquities of Greece and Rome, but almost totally neglected their own; like Conquerors who, while they have made inroads into the territories of their neighbours, have left their own natural dominions to desolation.'39 The point, extravagantly made, had substance nevertheless. It was perhaps inevitable that the antiquary often came to be treated with indulgence and even exasperation. In a curt notice of La Sauvagere's Recueil d'Antiquites dans les Gaules (1770), one critic grants that the author has brought 'uncommon exactness and erudition' to his work, and yet: to what purpose, it may be asked, has he employed so much care and time in exhibiting the remains of a distant age? No reasonings are made from them with regard to arts, manners, or science. The department in the republic of letters, the most ridiculous and frivolous, is that surely, which is filled by the mere Antiquary. He weeps over ruins, which other men behold with indifference.40 V •

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Despite such misgivings, however, the antiquarians had an important role, as Arnaldo Momigliano has pointed out: In the eighteenth century a new humanism competed with the traditional one. It was organized in learned societies instead of being centred in the universities; it was fostered by gentlemen rather than by schoolmasters. They preferred travel to the emendation of texts and altogether subordinated literary texts to coins, statues, vases and inscriptions.... In the formation of the new historical method - and consequently in the creation of modern historical writing on the ancient world - the so-called antiquaries played a conspicuous part and posed essential problems. They showed how to use non-literary evidence, but they also made people reflect on the difference between collecting facts and interpreting facts.41 As a supplement to this exemplary account I would quote the following : In reconstructions of ancient texts and archaeological interests... humanist culture set out to create antiquity as a physical presence. The ancients were not to be abstract symbols or a repertory of debating points, but whole men in the fullness of another space. The space they inhabited served as a demanding model and critique

Fictions old and new

19

for the modern world; seen in perspective, it might provide ordering principles and finish for modern forms.42 I have already alluded to the problematic aspect of antiquity's restoration as a 'physical presence', but it is tempting to speculate how the role of the antiquaries in such a venture might impinge on the writing of poetry. Following the new investigations of northern European history in general and British history in particular, there began to emerge other fictions, other sources of myth besides those of Greece and Rome. The tendency was 'to give new life to those poetical Mythologists our ancestors; we should consult them, and attend, in the frightful gloom of their forests, to those mysterious incantations, in which is concealed the whole system of their religion and morality'. 43 As this kind of writing testifies, it was inevitable that history should emerge not only as a method of acquiring objective knowledge about the past, but as a realm of imaginative experience, as a revelation of new origins and myths (of new myths about origins). If 'machinery' were indispensable to the 'higher forms of metrical composition',44 it was natural for the writer, embarrassed by the failing machinery of classical mythology, to search the origins of other European traditions, to contemplate the various possibilities that new historical insights into the past might uncover. History and literature converged, as the 'new' mythologies were evaluated against those of Greece and Rome. Discussing the history of English theatre, Joseph Warton admitted that he could not 'forbear wishing that our writers would more frequently search for subjects in the annals of England, which afford many striking and pathetic events for the stage'. He continues : We have been too long attached to Grecian and Roman stories . . . . I have frequently wondered that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times, and the traditions of the old bards, which afford subjects fruitful of the most genuine poetry.... The ancients constantly availed themselves of the mention of particular mountains, rivers, and other objects of nature; and, indeed, almost confine themselves to the tales and traditions of their respective countries: whereas we have been strangely neglectful in celebrating our own SEVERN, THAMES, or MALVERN, and have therefore fallen into trite repetitions of classical images, as well as classical names.45 It is, then, the ground of myth and romance which must be changed.46

20

Keats and Hellenism

A powerful symptom of this desire for a specifically English genius loci is the growing interest in mediaeval, or Gothic, romance. Writers turned to Gothic romance for several reasons. It posed an alternative to classical mythology, and it offered an escape from the potential tyranny of Rationalism. Joseph Warton remarked that since the time that poetry has been forced to assume a more sober, and, perhaps, a more rational air, it scarcely ventures to enter these fairy regions. There are some ... who think that it has suffered by deserting these fields of fancy, and by totally laying aside the descriptions of magic and enchantment.47 Thomas Warton was more explicit in regretting that, as a result of the Reformation and the disappearance of the Gothic Middle Ages, we have lost a set of manners, and a system of machinery, more suitable to the purposes of poetry, than those which have been adopted in their place. We have parted with extravagancies that are above propriety, with incredibilities that are more acceptable than truth, and with fictions that are more valuable than reality. 48 By the turn of the century this feeling had become commonplace, but still continued pertinent, insofar as it tended to recapitulate the more general awareness of a decline in poetry. According to one writer, mythology had added the brightest plumes to pagan writers, and enabled them to soar to empyrean heights on the wings of superstition. But a purer religion, and a more refined taste, have restrained the flight of modern bards; and reason and truth, the best guides of the orator and the historian, have been found to damp the ardour of poetic enthusiasm.49 Friedrich Schlegel actually took this 'dampening' to constitute the history of poetry itself, a 'progress' that might, indeed, be ironically interpreted as its opposite, a regression : In all countries it has been the fate and progress of poetry to begin with the wonderful and the sublime, with the mysterious majesty of the gods, and the elevated character of the heroic times - and ever afterwards to descend lower and lower from this lofty flight to approach nearer and nearer to the earth - till at last it sinks - never to rise again - into the common life and citizenship of ordinary men.50

Fictions old and new

21

One of the most eloquent advocates of romance had been Richard Hurd, who asked : 'May there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far, in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?' And again the demise of romance is regretted. Not only has the Age of Reason lost 'a world of fine fabling', but even Spenser and Tasso, the acknowledged masters of romance, 'came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed'.51 Nevertheless Hurd insists upon 'the preeminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the classic', arguing that the current popular tales of Elves and Fairies were even fitter to take the credulous mind, and charm it into a willing admiration of the specious miracles, which wayward fancy delights in, than those of the old traditionary rabble of pagan divinities.... The mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic Enchanters shook and alarmed all nature.... You will readily apprehend that the fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but, on a change of the scene, more sublime, more terrible, more alarming, than those they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic.52 This polemical opposition of Gothic romance to classical antiquity eventuated as a commonplace in critical thought: It is observable that sublimity of genius has been generally attended with a strong affection for the daemonry of the ancient northern fable. Milton was particularly fond of i t . . . . This passion seems natural. There is something sublime in the Celtic mythology, in the idea of ancient hardyhood, and the feats of former times, that is peculiarly adapted to a natural grandeur of imagination. In the mythology of the Greeks, every thing seems little, seems puerile by comparison.53 The reference to Milton (incongruous if we recall Johnson's critique of Lycidas) should remind us, somewhat belatedly, that the debate on myth was closely related to another argument, concerned with the possibility of a modern epic poetry. Since the verse of Homer and Virgil was the most famous repository of classical mythology, it was natural to associate epic and myth - each form as it were constituting the other. It is noticeable that from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, as the debate on myth became more intense, translations and editions

22

Keats and Hellenism

of the modern European epic poets (Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, Tasso) were published in abundance. 54 Since they were held to embody the most inspired imaginative use of romance, the works of these poets provided an opportunity for a revaluation of myth. Moreover, it was in the realm of epic that criticism was boldly put into practice. 55 And if the attempts by Hole, Sayers, Gottle, Pye and Southey to recreate the epic visions of their great precursors resulted in failure, this does not detract from the audacity of their enterprise. That the critical justification of such exercises was utterly serious is evident from a review of Richard Hole's 'Northern Enchantment', Arthur (1789). In contrast to the poetry of the ancient Greeks, says the critic, the poetry of 'our northern ancestors' was 'obliged to have recourse, for its machinery, to new superstitions, and to substitute Gothic demons in the place of Grecian deities'. Yet poetry 'sustained no loss' because of this : Nothing is, perhaps, more truly adapted to its genius, than the Gothic fictions and manners. The military institutions and customs of chivalry, united with the gloomy theology and fables of the North, which included a system of magic, enchantment, and prodigy, opened a spacious field to the epic adventurer. The old romancers, though they wanted powers to cultivate it to perfection, serve to demonstrate... its extensive capabilities. Ariosto, Tasso, and our Spenser, have employed them to singular advantages; and had Homer flourished in the Gothic age, the supposition is not extravagant, that he might have produced a work superior to the Iliad itself, as he would certainly have found greater scope for his genius. In the refined gallantry and military fanaticism of this period, there was more of the tender as well as of the terrific; and more to engage the softer affections of the heart, as well as to harrow up the soul, than the civil and religious state of ancient Greece presented to his observation or to his fancy.56 It is, of course, precisely the extravagance of the supposition 'had Homer flourished in the Gothic a g e . . . he might have produced a work superior to the Iliad itself - which is of interest here, since it betrays the extent to which classical mythology had by this time become subsumed in the general fascination for Gothic romance. Frank Sayers's Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology (1790) elicited a similar response: 'The mythology of Greece and Rome is become trite and insipid; we require some substitute for it, particularly in heroic and epic composi-

Fictions old and new

23

tion. Neither in itself, indeed, is to be compared with that of the North, in respect to gloomy grandeur and wild magnificance.' 57 In fact, these commonplace images of the sublime, 'gloomy grandeur' and 'wild magnificence3, suggest that the critic, eager to emancipate poetry from the traditional fictions, ignores the formal demands of 'heroic and epic composition'. There was always a danger that exponents of the Gothic would be reduced to purveying atmosphere and nothing more. Questions of narrative structure were obviously of secondary importance: the crucial activity was to uncover new fictions appropriate to the 'higher forms' of poetry. This is evident from a review of Sayers's Poems (1792), in which the critic argues from within a notably broad historical perspective : So essential is machinery to the higher forms of metrical composition, that every race or school of poets has patronized some system of ideal existences. The Greek and Roman versifiers drew unrivalled advantage from the established polytheism of their countries. The Troubadours of the Crusaders introduced among the poets of Italy and Spain, a wild recurrence to Arabic wizardry. Milton, Klopstock, and others, have endeavoured to familiarize a theory of Christian mythology, composed of the seraphs and fallen angels of the Talmud and the Apocalypse. . . . Of all these poetical creeds, the variety is by this time exhausted, and they pall by repetition; on which account the loftier walks of the muse have been gradually abandoned, and the heroic poem and ode have dwindled to the tale and the song. Our author has sought out among the religious books and traditionary ballads of the Goths for a new race of fictitious beings.58 This simple diachronic survey of the use of different mythologies, closing with an awareness of the 'exhaustion' of 'poetical creeds', reflects, perhaps, a more ominous consequence of the historical consciousness. From historicism sprang the notion of historical discontinuity : by denying the necessary superiority of the present, it allowed for the possibility that the past might be anterior qualitatively as well as temporally. Fifty years earlier, William Collins had suggested precisely this point, in his Verses Humbly Address3d to Sir Thomas Hanmer (1743) : Each rising Art by slow Gradation moves, Toil builds on Toil, and Age on Age improves. The Muse alone unequal dealt her Rage, And grac'd with noblest Pomp her earliest Stage.

(29-32)

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Keats and Hellenism

The modern poet's problem of rewriting the language of fictions patently disproved the fundamental Enlightenment belief that each historical period fulfils and excels the previous one. Thus the displacement of the classical tradition by the appeal to Gothic romance was attended by an anxiety, both literary and historical. The potential value of hitherto unknown sources of fictions coming to light through new methods of exploring the past was diminished by a certain psychological doubt, registered by Hartman in the following terms : The growth of the historical consciousness, its multiplying of disparate models all of which press their claim, amounts to a peculiarly modern burden, an overhead weighing on the individual like a new theology. To be aware of the past is to be surrounded by abstract potentialities, imperatives that cannot all be heeded, options exhausting the power of choice.59 In a late essay, 'English Students at Rome' (1827), Hazlitt will express sympathy for the young art student who becomes 'distracted and puzzled by the variety of incompatible claims upon his ingenious and sincere enthusiasm', when 'all the great schools, and all the most precious chef d'oeuvres of art, at once unveil their diversified attractions to his astonished sight'.60 Such formulations invite the possibility that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, writers had become distracted by an excess rather than dearth of poetic fictions. It was not a lack from which the modern poet suffered but rather an overexposure to the multiplicity of 'disparate models' beckoning from the past. At least one other of those options needs to be discussed, in its relation to the displacement of the supreme model of antiquity.

IV

At the end of a long review of his Specimens of the Classic Poets (1814), the author, Charles Abraham Elton, was advised to accommodate his book 'to the reigning taste of the times. It must be some tale, oriental, feudal, or domestic. But no epic, no gods or goddesses, classical learning has had its day - he must try some more appropriate machinery.'61 The fortunes of the 'domestic tale' have no place in this essay, and I have glanced

Fictions old and new

25

at the origin and development of the 'feudal tale'. The 'oriental', however, requires some comment. On the one hand, Orientalism, as it emerged during the latter half of the eighteenth century, may be considered as one aspect of a broader kind of Hellenism.62 On the other hand, it is precisely the Oriental tale which, since it 'constitutes a different order of poetic architecture from that of the classical Epic', 63 might offer the modern poet another possibility for a new language of fictions. Romanticism inherited from the Enlightenment a vision of the Orient which did not need to obey geographical precision : 'Asia' included Asia Minor, Egypt, Arabia. Nor was it confined to the didactic 'Eastern Tale', which, by the time of its culmination in Johnson's Rasselas (1759), had been 'familiar for half a century'.64 Displacement of the classical tradition involved a gradual association of the Orient with the mystique of origins. This was largely due to radical innovations in biblical scholarship, as practised by Lowth, Herder, Michaelis and Eichhorn, which came to recognize the Old Testament, the most famous document of origins, 'simply as literature, as Oriental literature'. 65 The 'utility of Oriental learning in the interpretation of Scripture' soon became a commonplace, and it was not surprising that the new insights fostered by the higher criticism impinged on a more secular level; it was scarcely a matter of polemic to admit that 'the connections among Oriental scholarship, Biblical criticism, and poetry were close indeed'.66 Paradoxically, however, as the interpretation of biblical literature became more historical and critical, the desire to locate the beginnings of poetry in an ideal space of origins involved a more imaginative and indeed 'mythopoeic' activity. 'Specifying points of departure', writes Edward Said, 'grew increasingly problematical during the eighteenth century', and it is tempting to consider the later Enlightenment as unprecedented in its concern with the subject of origins.67 Rousseau's primitivism may be seen as a symptom of the imaginative and ideological appeal to origins, while the prevailing notion of 'original genius' is a complex manifestation of the same interest. And for mythographers like Jacob Bryant and William Jones, the imaginative power of origins was essential to their speculations on the archaeology of myth. 'The" most philosophic minds', observed Edward Gibbon, 'can seldom refrain from investigating the infancy of great nations.'68

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But there is also something quasi-religious, as well as 'philosophic5, about this return to origins, as Ernst Gassirer has pointed out: The true character of mythical being is first revealed when it appears as the being of origins. All the sanctity of mythical being goes back ultimately to the sanctity of the origin. It does not adhere immediately to the content of the given but to its coming into being, not to its qualities and properties but to its genesis in the past. By being thrust back into temporal distance, by being situated in the depths of the past, a particular content is not only established as sacred, as mythically and religiously significant, but also justified as such.69 Vico and Herder had declared the importance of historical growth and change, of 'coming into being' as opposed to 'the content of the given', and the result was a numinous sense of the sacredness or at least the mystique of origins. Of course, the enlightened rational man of taste, proud of his critical sensibility, could not afford to ponder too long on the implications of this new awareness. Acknowledgement of the unique status of origins was often tempered by a certain sober pragmatism : It hath ever been a favourite employment of the human mind to trace backwards events to an unfathomable obscurity: imagination here hath been indulged to an excess almost as romantic as in exploring futurity, and hath created a field of seemingly more probable, tho' equally illusive speculation, forcing its researches far beyond the limits of any means of information. Something however there is highly captivating in the earliest history even to sober minds.... As the individual rises from the imbecility of infancy to the strength of manhood, and thence sinks into decrepitude; so has the species its stages of perfection: and to retrace the steps by which a nation, now perhaps in the fulness of refinement, ascended from barbarism to its present state, gives a pleasure irresistably engaging.70 This 'pleasure', 'irresistably engaging', is of course a moral pleasure primarily; the use of history as a source of instruction was an eighteenth-century commonplace. Moreover, the writer's typically Enlightenment sense of history as a natural progression from 'barbarism' to 'refinement' (a movement experienced by each individual nation) prevents a more imaginative response to origins. Speculation 'beyond the limits of any means of information' is futile because 'illusive'. Voltaire was more explicitly sceptical on this point: 'All the origins of nations are evidently fables. . . . The first histories were written only from the imagi-

Fictions old and new

27

nation. Not only did every people invent its own origin, but it invented also the origin of the whole world.' 71 The modern age, it would seem, had released itself from the need to indulge in such vain imaginings. At the same time, however, other writers were becoming conscious of the psychological and aesthetic motives of retracing history's furthest limits. A review of John Brown's Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (1763) opens with a useful formulation : The mind of man is led by an irresistable desire to investigate the origin and first principles of things. His eye, repelled by those impenetrable barriers which shut up futurity, looks towards the past for entertainment; and travels, under the guidance of historic information, to the remotest aeras that man has recorded of his own existence. When history and tradition drop the directing line, conjecture takes it up; and, calling analogy and probability to her aid, leads the credulous traveller through ideal ages and worlds of her own creation.72 Again the obvious importance of 'historic information' is noted. But with the suggestion that history and tradition might yield to 'conjecture', whereby the mind loses itself in 'ideal ages and worlds of her own creation', the dividing line between fact and fiction seems to disappear. The further the historian or poet retreats into the past, towards the beginning of things, the more actively must the imagination come into play. We can see, then, that the fiction of an original site becomes privileged with an essential authority, and for this reason alone it was inevitable that the association of the Orient with poetry's origins should help displace the traditional primacy of classical antiquity. The editor of a volume of Collins opens his 'Observations on the Oriental Eclogues' by noting that the genius of the Pastoral, as well as of every other respectable species of poetry, had its origin in the East, and from thence was transplanted by the Muses of Greece; but whether from the continent of the Lesser Asia, or from Egypt... it is not easy to determine . . . . However, though it should still remain a doubt through what channel the Pastoral travelled westward, there is not the least shadow of uncertainty concerning its oriental origin. The ancient Greeks, apparently, were but imitators or mediators of fictions more ancient than themselves :

28

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Those ingenious Greeks, whom we call the Parents of Pastoral poetry, were probably no more than imitators of imitators, that derived their harmony from higher and higher sources, and kindled their poetical fires at those then unextinguished lamps which burned within the tombs of oriental genius.73 What emerges is the rudimentary beginning of a theory of comparative literary history and influence. Richard Hole thought that the study and translation of the Arabian Nights might lead to interesting discoveries relative to the progress of ideas from one nation to another. A scientific translator would not only be induced to trace many of these stories to a classic origin; but likewise to retrace some of the classic fictions to their primitive eastern derivation. Literary history seems to comprise a series of gradual temporal and geographical displacements : 'In the middle ages the Arabians borrowed largely from the Greeks; and they, in much earlier times, derived from the banks of the Ganges, and not unfrequently through the medium of Egypt, the greater part of their literature and mythology.' 74 Thomas Warton had supposed that the 'fiction of the Fairies' had been 'brought, with other fantastic extravagancies of the like nature from the eastern nations, while the European Christians were engaged in the Holy War'. 75 Observing that 'the imagination of this story consists in Arabian fiction engrafted on Gothic chivalry', Warton cites Chaucer's Squire's Tale as an example of 'one of the many fables which the Arabians imported into Europe', and he concludes that the fictions of both Chaucer and Spenser are often 'fraught with Oriental fancy'.76 By shifting attention away from the exclusively classical tradition in English poetry, Warton, Hole and other writers contributed to the growing prestige of Oriental literature as origin or prototype. And the historian too, the 'votary of history' as well as the literary critic, aware that 'our knowledge of antiquity extends little beyond the shores of the Mediterranean', must now be 'curious to pierce the veil which has hitherto enveloped the antiquities of the East, and the origin of nations'. 77 But within the development of Orientalism an interesting turn occurs. On the one hand, the exotic fictions of 'Oriental fancy' were invoked as an alternative to classical mythology, as we can see from the comment prompted by Joseph Champion's translation of The Poems of Ferdosi (1785) :

Fictions old and new

29

In poetry, we sigh for some kind of novelty. What Mr. Gibbon calls the elegant mythology of the Greeks, is so hackneyed and threadbare, that it rather fatigues than amuses. How delightful, then, is the prospect of a new poetic world.78 Yet the conception of a 'new poetic world' as radically different and separate from the old world of classical antiquity was already being qualified by the syncretist studies of ancient mythology undertaken by Jones, D'Hancarville, Bryant and others.79 Though purporting to be scientifically accurate in their uncovering of the different layers of myth's ancient archaeology, the mythographers adopted a procedure that was essentially and necessarily imaginative. Most of their shared assumptions were elaborate fictions. And by a strange paradox they helped to re-establish the high status of the classical fictions. If much of the activity of Enlightenment thought was dedicated to finding out what men had in common, this was particularly reflected in the mythographers' repeated conviction that apparently disparate mythologies shared a common origin, that they inhabited an ideal, primal space in which historical differences unravelled themselves into a purity of exact and original resemblance. As Elton observed, the clue of the Grecian mythology is its connexion with other mythologies. The light of oriental erudition has discovered an affinity between the religions of Egypt, India, and Greece; a fact which demonstrably proves the high antiquity of the system. The source of it must necessarily be explored in those remote ages when some point of connexion subsisted between these different nations.80 The motive behind this desire to imagine a common centre, an original and originating 'point of connexion', was partly devotional : one way of reconciling pagan and Christian versions of history was to view the former as an obscure allegorical mutation of the latter. Thus Jacob Bryant, wishing to 'divest tradition of fable' and thereby 'reduce the truth to its original purity', claimed that his researches might lead to 'a more intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures', since 'our faith depends upon historical experience'. But the 'truth' had hitherto been concealed by the 'chaotic state' of ancient mythology, and it was necessary to realign the 'vast chasms and interruptions' of history, to 'reduce . . . the scattered fragments to order'.81 At the same time, of course, the 'connexion' between mythologies was not a

30

Keats and Hellenism

thesis confined to Christian apologetics. Although it has been proposed that his Asiatic Researches 'culminate in a defence of the traditional valuation of the Bible as superior in antiquity, in wisdom, and in literary value to the sacred writings of any other nation', the pioneering scholarship of William Jones had implications outside the domain of theology.82 Jones was profoundly affected by the possibility of an original centre of civilization. 83 In an essay, 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India' (1784), he endeavoured to trace 'a resemblance between the popular worship of the old Greeks and Italians and that of the Hindus', in order to support the 'grand hypothesis' that 'there was originally some central country, from which not only the principal nations of Asia, Africa, and Europe were derived, but whence America was peopled'.84 Jones rehearses the same theory in his 'Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus' (1786), and his conclusion is notable for the eloquent ease with which he disposes of the various nations in his purview. The Hindus, he suggests, had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians, the Phenecians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians', whence, as no reason appears for believing, that they were a colony from any one of those nations, or any of those nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country.85 The elegant felicity with which Jones embraces different cultures is characteristic of the mythographers' imaginative procedures. It is again evident, for example, when D'Hancarville observes that the edifices described in Gough's Comparative View of the Ancient Monuments of India (1785) are connected with theological principles formerly common to the Greeks, Tartars, Indians, and Japanese. These principles... all go back to the symbolic worship of the Scythians, which in the West became changed into Hellenism, was destroyed by Christianity, and in the East assumed the form which it still retains among the Japanese, Tartars, and Indians. 86

The swift, flowing relationships and transitions ('connected with', c go back to', 'became changed into', 'destroyed by', 'assumed the form', 'still retains among') not only express the dialectic between synthesis and dispersal, unity and separation, which operates as a common metaphor in pre-Romantic historiography, but also

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31

suggest a new freedom in the exploration of history and, implicitly, of the myths 'beyond' history. The assumption that the destinies of nations originally overlapped or coalesced would clear the way for the possibility of a syncretism of ancient fictions, a mythological 'doubling5.87 One of the consequences of all this semi-mythopoeic speculation is that 'Greece' itself becomes infinitely expanded in its scope as an imaginative locale. Indeed, the actual history of Greece bears witness to this, as Gibbon pointed out: 'The territories of Athens, Sparta, and their allies, do not exceed a moderate province of France or England : but after the trophies of Salamis and Plataea, they expand in our fancy to the gigantic size of Asia, which had been trampled under the feet of the victorious Greeks.'88 John Gillies observed that 'the history of Greece, the country to which we are indebted for our general acquaintance with antiquity, will naturally expand into the history of the Eastern world'.89 Consider these two sentences : 'The powers of the Greek are vastly beyond those of any other tongue. Whatever the Asiatics describe is always felt and almost seen : motion and music are in every tone.' 90 The 'Greek' and the 'Asiatic' blend here imperceptibly; the simple geographical relation bespeaks not only a more general awareness of the Oriental nature of ancient Greek, but also the possibility of that overlapping which seems at once to fulfil and transcend the late Enlightenment critique of classical mythology. William Ouseley argued that a knowledge of the Grecian language, ancient history, and mythology, is indispensably necessary to him who would aspire to perfection in the Persian, either as a linguist or an antiquary. Mutually reflecting light upon each other, these languages will rightly guide the etymologist through many a wearisome and intricate derivation, and enable the curious Orientalist to explore the dark recesses of Antiquity.91 Thus Greece acquires new significance as a kind of threshold to the Orient. According to William Gell, 'there is no part of the world' like Greece, which offers an opportunity of witnessing and comparing with so much ease the opposite customs of Europe and Asia; or of changing the scene with such rapidity: for when the classic traveller is satisfied with the simplicity of the heroic ages in the mountains of Arcadia . . . he may descend in the course of one hour into the plain, and, drinking coffee in a cup set with rubies, realize the splendid

32

Keats and Hellenism

visions of the Arabian Nights in the court of the Pacha of Tripolizza.92 And though Greece is not actually mentioned by name in his account, it is surely implied by Hazlitt as the site of a confluence of the fictions of mediaeval romance and Orientalism. Of the heroes of mediaeval romance Hazlitt writes that the Holy Land was the grand object of their pilgrimage: but by it they entered into communication with the fine and rich countries of the East. Their geography was as confused as all their other knowledge... but these fanciful voyages afforded the romance writers the means of embellishing their recitals with the most brilliant colours. All the softness and the perfumes of the countries, the most favoured by nature, were at their disposal: All the pomp and magnificence of Damascus, of Bagdad, and Constantinople, might be made use of to adorn the triumph of their heroes; and an acquisition more precious still, was the imagination itself of the people of the East and South; that imagination so brilliant, so various, which was employed to give life to the sombre mythology of the North.** This form of geographical 'doubling' is repeated in the fluid landscapes imagined by the romantic poets. Thomas Warton had noted precisely this quality in Spenser's model, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso : This spirited Italian passes from one incident to another, and from region to region, with such incredible expedition and rapidity, that one would think he was mounted upon his winged steed Ippogrifo. Within the compass of ten stanzas, he is in England and the Hesperides, in the earth and the moon. He begins the history of a knight in Europe, and suddenly breaks it off to resume the unfinished catastrophe of another in Asia.94 If it seems but a short step from Warton's Ariosto to the mode of Endymion, it is because the intervening period had witnessed a growing synthesis of disparate mythologies and fictions, enabling a Romantic poet like Keats to site his narrative in 'a syncretic geography which covers immense distances in time and space'.95 Whereas the traditional images within the classical canon had been in danger of becoming reduced to fixed, inalienable types, mere paraphernalia on the surface of language, the new syncretist context re-established the classical fictions within a broader field of imaginative possibility, an ideal space in which antiquity once more promised to exert its authority over the modern.

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33

The preceding excursions into literary history are intended to place Keats's romance with antiquity in as wide a perspective as possible. One of the reasons why previous critics have tended to produce rather lame conclusions on the subject is that they have failed to take into account the profoundly overdetermined image of ancient Greece which Keats inherited from the Enlightenment. Far from being a transparently available source of meaning, classical antiquity became, rather, a cluster of potentialities, a maze of fictions, a frame of reference whose edges (limits) remain unstable and blurred.96 Wasserman has argued that the entire eighteenth-century syncretic study of myths was necessary before classical mythology, now reinterpreted, was again vital and rich enough as a poetic syntax and vocabulary. Only after the many quests for the key to all mythologies could classical mythology again be felt as a kind of universal truth and conceived of as a complex whole, rather than a set of discrete inherited terms.97 But the notions of 'universal truth' and 'complex whole' are as inadequate as Kathleen Raine's proposition that Romanticism witnessed the redemption of classical polytheism as 'a language of qualitative and metaphysical discourse'.98 Such formulations miss the crucial problem of Romantic Hellenism, which centres on the ambivalent and opaque relation between ancient and modern, the difficulties encountered by the poet as he endeavours to retrieve the past. Stephen A. Larrabee has drawn attention to the discourse of naive and nostalgic impressionism traditionally expended on the theme of Keats's Hellenism. He cites Arnold, Palgrave, and de Selincourt;99 but others are not lacking. John Churton Collins believed that Keats's appeal to antiquity was simply 'the result of natural temper and sympathy'.100 Another critic invites us to read 'the Greek element in Keats' as 'the instinctive answer of deep to deep'. In the early poetry 'the Greek element is slight'; Endymion 'in mood and style is distinctly Spenserian, not Homeric; but its subject matter is wholly Attic and is regarded through a loving though uncritical eye'. As for the later poems* Hyperion, Lamia, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'Ode to Psyche', these are 'classic in the noblest sense of the word, and as nobly Grecian as anything in our language'.101 'For Keats Greece was a beautiful paradise', rhapsodizes one critic.102 And Douglas

34

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Bush concludes that 'in his classical moments Keats is a sculptor whose marble becomes flesh5.103 The common assumption of post-Romantic and modern criticism, as Larrabee points out, is that Keats was 'the most "classical" and presumably the most "Greek" of the English Romantic poets'. And Larrabee is undoubtedly right to warn that although Keats's major poems 'reveal his fondness for classical themes .. . the idea that Keats possessed a Grecian spirit is more difficult to maintain'. 104 To speculate whether Keats possessed a Grecian spirit is as futile as to speculate whether he wrote 'like a Greek'.105 Yet Larrabee himself, despite realizing that cto class Keats as a "Greek" may encourage unprofitable criticism', succumbs to the language of what Leavis might have called ejaculatory criticism : 'Frequently, under the influence of that living spirit of Greece, calm thoughts and epic shapes came round him. The poet then sang, for a time, in full-throated ease.'106 Such writing, one suspects, is far more nostalgic and idealizing than the poetry which it seeks to explain. In a limited sense, of course, Keats's Hellenism is indeed the result of 'natural temper and sympathy' insofar as it is not the result of rigorous scholarship and deep meditation on the texts of antiquity. It is a commonplace that Keats's knowledge of ancient Greek was negligible. In the spring of 1818 he announced to J. H. Reynolds that he 'shall learn Greek', but by the following year the ambition had come to nothing : CI do not think of venturing upon Greek.'107 The point is that Keats did not need to learn Greek - perhaps, in the end, he did not even want to. 'If you understood Greek,' he says to Reynolds, 'and would read me passages, now and then, explaining their meaning, 't would be, from its mistiness, perhaps a greater luxury than reading the thing one's self.'108 Keats evidently desires to mediate or even to displace his relation to antiquity through other voices, other texts, as though a naked encounter were too painful and importunate. In order to be made manageable, the sublime fictions of antiquity may need to be translated after all, through Chapman, Spenser, Tooke and Lempriere. Charles Cowden Clarke could not remember that Keats 'even commenced learning the Greek language. His uncommon familiarity - almost consanguinity with the Greek mythology, I suspect is to be traced to his reading.' 109 It would seem that the space of Greece, its mythological presence, is produced in the very act of reading. The poet is one of Hazlitt's readers, one of those persons 'who

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are in the habit of reading novels and romances, are compelled to take a deep interest in, and to have their affections strongly excited by, fictitious characters and imaginary situations; their thoughts and feelings are constantly carried out of themselves, to persons they never saw, and things that never existed'.110 'You would lift your eyes from Homer,' says Keats, 'only to see close before you the real Isle of Tenedos.'111 Thus the landscape of antiquity emerges, as a purely imaginary space, from the poet's creative encounter with Chapman's Homer and other texts. The question of Keats's 'ignorance' of ancient Greek is, then, a false problem, and it seems misleading to argue, as a recent critic has done, that Keats was 'impeded by the fact that he hankered after classical legend yet never troubled to master Latin, Greek and the reading in mythology that should go with it'.112 On another level Keats's small Latin and less Greek is symptomatic of a larger trend : When we turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth we are conscious of a change in the relations between learning and literature. There is an estrangement between them which had scarcely existed in the previous century. . . . The scholars went their way and the poets went theirs, and they had little contact with one another. . . . It is true that on both sides there is a love of ancient Greece, but it is a long way from the Museum Criticum to Endymion or Hellas.113 This separation involved a release of the act of writing from its obligations to academic classicism. Intent on producing something 'original', the modern poet sought to be liberated from the kind of 'secondariness' that even as great a scholar as Porson had no qualms about expressing : I doubt if I could produce any original work that would command the attention of posterity. I can be known only by my notes; and I am quite satisfied if, three hundred years hence, it shall be said that one Porson lived towards the end of the eighteenth century who did a good deal for the text of Euripides.114 For Keats, of course, this would not suffice; his engagement with antiquity would take a different form. Classical Greece does not present itself as a language to be mastered, or a text to be edited, but as a supreme fiction, an ideal space that might yield a host of fine poetic imaginings. Yet Keats's romance with antiquity should not be sentimentalized; the ground on which it occurs is as potentially enchanted and daemonic as one of

Keats and Hellenism

Figure i. Henry Fuseli, 'The artist in despair over the magnitude of antique fragments' (c. 1778-80), reproduced from Carolyn Keay, Henry Fuseli (London and New York, 1974), by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library and of Academy Editions, London.

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Spenser's magical landscapes. 'Nostalgia' would be a scarcely adequate term to describe the poet's longing for antiquity's absent realms, since the longing itself is complicated by other tensions. In spite of the ambiguous status of classical mythology, it was still possible for a writer of the late Enlightenment to celebrate 'the classical remains of antiquity', which 'supply us with inexhaustible sources of the most refined enjoyment' and are 'poured forth, without effort, from the memory, to delight the imagination, and to improve the heart'. 115 But as Fuseli's sketch of 'The artist in despair over the magnitude of antique fragments' (c. 1778-80) should remind us (Figure i)3 antiquity might enter the modern consciousness in more oppressive forms. It was the fate of 'Greece' to fragment itself in a deeply ambivalent way, and Keats's poetry traces this ambivalence.

2

Towards Endymion

Much of Keats's early poetry, from the verse epistles to Endymion, is motivated by a desire to experience the plenitude of beginnings, that privileged moment which marks the origin of a specific poem and, by implication, the originality of poetic consciousness. As Edward Said observes, the demand for a locatable beginning might be a 'necessary fiction', particularly for the act of writing. Aware of himself as a modern poet who would have to write against the whole weight of literary history, Keats faced a problem which Said defines thus : 'Other writing serves to displace present writing, to a greater or lesser extent, from its absolute, central, proper place.'1 The powerful authority of the ancient fictions, enshrined in the texts of Homer and Spenser and Milton, would engender an imaginative need for a new beginning, where the modern poet might assert his originality by departing from the great models of the past. And yet it is the very ability to 'depart' which becomes problematic; Keats might find that he cannot so easily close the supreme Text of Antiquity, for fear of severing himself from the richest origins of poetic consciousness. 'To begin is always uncertain, nextdoor to chaos', writes Angus Fletcher : 'To begin requires that, uncertainly, we bid farewell to some thing, some one, some where, some time.'2 It did not take long, of course, for Keats to recognize the poignant relation between beginnings and valediction, between writing and loss. Endymion marks the beginning of the poet's bid for a place in the 'Temple of Fame', and yet the Preface concludes with a gesture towards antiquity which is both homage and valediction : 'I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness : for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewel.'3 It is, then, this double movement of departure and return which complicates the poet's response to the beautiful mythology of Greece. A contemporary journal suggests that the golden age of 38

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39

Greece 'may be denominated the spring of the world, and its productions, even in their decay, retain much of their freshness, and the bloom, and the beauty, of that delightful season'.4 Keats's fiction of beginnings is often conveyed through an implied association of Greece and spring - or, by temporal analogy, dawn. In the sonnet 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.', for example, the poet's lament for the disappearance of antiquity's 'glory and loveliness' (1) is framed by references to 'early morn' (2) and 'early May' (8). In 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill' we are invited to attend 'the early sobbing of the morn' (7), while in a later poem,*the fragment 'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!', the repeated echo of the goddess's name in 'May I sing' (2) and 'may I woo' (4) suggests that the cspring-like' mythology of ancient Greece is invested with the hope of poetic inspiration.5 Ideally, then, the poet desires a beginning which would involve not.a break from the past but a restoration of ancient fictions, their repetition in a finer tone. But the return itself is always already problematic for the modern poet. In 'Sleep and Poetry', for example, Keats prays that his 'young spirit' might 'follow/The morning sun-beams to the great Apollo' (59-60) where 'Apollo', of course, signifies not only the god of the sun but also the god of poetry and music. It was a commonplace that 'the language of the Greeks was the language of poetry', 6 and Keats appeals to the fiction of melodious Apollo in his endeavour to rewrite the vanished discourse of antiquity and so restore the authentic language of Poesy itself. But already in the early poetry Keats is often to be found voicing a fear that the melodious text of antiquity is now closed to him, that, as he says in the epistle 'To My Brother George', he should 'never hear Apollo's song' (9); his 'golden lyre' is only 'dimly seen' (12). In the 'Specimen of an Induction to a Poem', he wonders how he might 'Revive the dying tones of minstrelsy' (32), a line which anticipates the image of 'minstrel memories of times gone by' in Endymion (1, 435). Against the poet's desire, then, to hear once again those 'tunes forgotten' sung by antiquity (Endymion, 1, 316), arises a suspicion that modern discourse is inadequate to the rewriting of the ancient fictions - a suspicion betrayed in this sudden outburst of rhetoric, from Endymion :

4°

Keats and Hellenism Aye, the count Of mighty poets is made up; the scroll Is folded by the Muses; the bright roll Is in Apollo's hand: our dazed eyes Have seen a new tinge in the western skies: The world has done its duty. Yet, oh yet, Although the sun of poesy is set, These lovers did embrace, and we must weep That there is no old power left to steep A quill immortal in their joyous tears. (n, 723-35)

As a figure of the belated poet, Endymion himself is a victim of the disappearance of antiquity's sublime language. He is condemned to overhear the melodies of the past at the moment of their dying away, at the point of their dissolution into irretrievable loss and absence. He tunes into the dialogue of Alpheus and Arethusa : 'What melodies are these?/They sound as through the whispering of trees' (11, 933-4). For a brief while Endymion is able to 'give ear' (11, 935) to the discourse of these two mythical figures. And then, suddenly, silence : At this, sudden fell Those two sad streams adown a fearful dell. The Latmian listen'd, but he heard no more, Save echo, faint repeating o'er and o'er The name of Arethusa. (11, 1008-12) Perhaps the 'two sad streams' falling 'adown a fearful dell' allegorize the disappearance of mythic language into the abyss of history, leaving but the echo of a name, whose faint repetition mocks the belated poet's desire to restore its original plenitude. 11

The sonnet, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', crystallizes some of the problems attending Keats's desired return to the beautiful mythology of Greece. Its opening quatrain picks up a familiar motif from the early poems : Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. ( 1-4) The old poets are imagined as occupying 'realms of gold', enchanted landscapes through which the belated poet is obliged

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to travel in his desired recuperation of the past. T o find a place where I may greet the maid' ( T o George Felton Mathew', 54): the poet's encounter with his ancient muse is typically rendered as a quest for the most appropriate ground on which that encounter might take place. For poetry itself is imagined as a divine landscape, an horizon of possibilities in which the poet desires to share : O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen That am not yet a glorious denizen Of thy wide heaven . . . Vistas of solemn beauty, where I'd wander In happy silence, like the clear Meander Through its lone vales. ('Sleep and Poetry', 47-9, 73-5) Like Endymion the young poet is a traveller, a classical tourist of poets and poems, savouring each literary delight as it yields itself to his senses : Then will I pass the countries that I see In long perspective, and continually Taste their pure fountains. First the realm I'll pass Of Flora, and old Pan: sleep in the grass, Feed upon apples red, and strawberries, And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees. (99-104) The tone here is so confident, the language of pastoral so innocent', that we may, after all, suspect such writing to betray an element of nostalgic desire, particularly if we set these lines against a much later poem. Is there not a sharp and poignant contrast between the opulent images of Keats's early vision and the 'refuse of a meal/By angel tasted or our Mother Eve5 witnessed by the poet in The Fall of Hyperion (1, 30-1)? As the reference to 'our Mother Eve' suggests, the belated poet's imaginative experience of origins (the tasting of cpure fountains') might be a profoundly ambiguous affair, more like a tasting of forbidden fruit (already hinted, perhaps, in Teed upon apples red'). The springs of Helicon might contain impurities, poisoned waters which the poet imbibes at his peril. It is, indeed, the very possibility of an originary poetic experience which the sonnet on Chapman's Homer begins to question. The poem registers with fine economy a disturbance in Keats's imaginative life. Eager to test all possibilities, the aspiring poet is hit by the shock of a new and powerful vision :

42

Keats and Hellenism Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.

(5~10)

At the most obvious level these lines celebrate the excitement of 'newness5, the chance discovery of hitherto unknown realms of experience. Yet I think the language desires to achieve something more. A recent critic has proposed that 'language mimetic of an originatory action seems closer to a literal, natural source than speculative language about origins'.7 As the presence of 'First' in the sonnet's title already suggests, the poet's experience is privileged because of its sense of 'firstness'. Certain images are perceived for the first time; or rather the poet feels that he is the first to discover a new object. Thus the reading of Chapman's Homer acquires the force of a primary or 'originatory' action; Keats's epiphanic encounter with Homer seems to promise a transcendence of temporal difference, and history is forgotten, as the modern poet comes face to face with his ancient muse. And yet, of course, it is in the very movement towards epiphany that the poem begins to deconstruct itself. The name 'Homer' represents the most privileged site of the beautiful mythology of Greece - the 'pure serene' of an origin - but no sooner is the name spoken than it is displaced by another name, 'Chapman'. And it is, I think, precisely this displacement which signifies, for the modern poet, the impossibility of a pure, unmediated return to origins. One of the conditions of 'beginning', writes Said, is 'a true freedom to reverse oneself'.8 Such freedom - the freedom to retrace the landscape of history and enter once again the ideal space of Homer's 'demesne' - Keats's sonnet explicitly desires and secretly recognizes to be impossible. For such a reversal to happen, the poet's vision of antiquity must be redeemed of all intervening obstacles, of the burdens and discontinuities imposed by history. In pursuit of the sublime, Dugald Stewart had noted 'the bias of the mind to connect together the ideas of antiquity, and of elevated place\Q Keats's nostalgia for the ancient fictions involves a desire for a free passage across the hazardous terrain of history, a crossing which is also a form of transcendence. Like Cortez staring ('with eagle eyes') at the Pacific, the poet gazes back across the wide expanse

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of history to the highest monument of ancient Greece, and yet his vision cannot avoid being mediated and refracted through Chapman. Both literally and metaphorically, the Elizabethan poet must translate Homer to Keats. And in the process something is lost. According to Leigh Hunt, even Chapman, 'whose translation [of Homer] contains more of his spirit than any other, seems to have purposely roughened it, in despair of being strong enough'.10 Perhaps no translation of the text of antiquity can ever be adequate to the strength of the original. (That Chapman speaks out 'loud and bold" might also give rise to the profoundly ironic possibility that the voice of the translator could even, indeed, erase - drown - the original voice.) Ironically, then, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' turns a promise of 'firstness' into an acknowledgement of lateness. Keats's poem surmises the impossibility of the belated poet finding the liberty to reverse himself. No sooner does he enter the landscape of history than objects (poets, poetry, literature) begin to interfere and block his way. 'I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular', declared Keats impatiently : 'Let us have the old Poets.'11 But his loyalty to the past could not prevent Keats from being forced into an awareness of his own irreversible modernity.12 Thus 'the Memory of Great Men', 13 enshrined in the supreme fiction of antiquity, might block rather than uphold the modern appeal to origins. Any progress of poetry, through its sheer cumulative effect, would at the same time threaten an exhaustion of poetry. 'Poetry itself, says J. Hillis Miller, 'comes to stand as an implacable barrier between man and what makes poetry possible.'14 The eighteenth century had already known that the burden of literature was quantitative as well as qualitative : 'The great mines of invention have been opened long ago, and little new seems to have been discovered or brought to light by latter ages.'15 Robert Wood, pondering on the genius of Homer, concluded that 'the importance of mere priority, if properly considered, will appear much greater, than we are apt to imagine'.16 The consequent burden for a modern, belated poet is well defined by William Duff : Many of the most splendid images of Poetry have been already exhibited, many of the most striking characters in human life have been delineated, and many of the most beautiful objects of nature, and such as are most obvious, have been described by preceding Bards. It will be very difficult therefore for their successors to select

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objects which the eye of Fancy hath never explored, and none but a Genius uncommonly original can hope to accomplish it.17 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' testifies that this feeling of belatedness was fundamental to Keats's own experience, and we can trace a plausible continuity between his fear that 'there was now nothing original to be written in poetry; that its riches were already exhausted', and a later confession : 'I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing. . . from the overpowering idea of our dead poets.'18 Indeed, Keats's romance with antiquity might be read in terms of his increasingly sharp awareness that imaginative surrender to the old poets threatened self-immolation on the altar of the past. Homer, then, was considered the supreme poet of beginnings, embodying the virtue of 'priority'. He is William Duff's Original Genius : A Poet of real Genius, who lives in a distant uncultivated age, possesses great and peculiar advantages for original composition, by the mere antiquity of the period in which he lives. He is perhaps the first Poet who hath arisen in this infant state of society; by which means he enjoys the undivided empire of Imagination without a rival. . . . The whole system of nature, and the whole region of fiction, yet unexplored by others, is subjected to his survey. . . . The objects with which he is surrounded, have an appearance of novelty which, in a more cultivated period, they in a great measure lose; but which, in that we are speaking of, excites an attention, curiosity and surprise, highly favourable to the exertion of Genius.19 Alexander Gerard likewise focuses on the privilege of priority, and makes specific reference to Homer : Our idea of his invention is immensely raised, when we consider . . . that he had no model, by which he could direct his conceptions, or from which he could receive so much as a hint of his grand designs. . . . In general, the first rank is assigned to those who have invented, when there was no example or model of which they could avail themselves, when their predecessors had made no preparation for their discoveries, nor given any hint which could suggest them; and who have, notwithstanding these disadvantages, brought their designs to a considerable degree of perfection. It is on this account, that Homer stands without a rival in the poetic world.20 This emphasis on the unassailable priority of Homer's genius became a commonplace, and Keats would have found ample

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confirmation in his own reading. John Lempriere observed that since he wrote 'without a model', Homer 'deserves a greater share of admiration'. 21 And Chapman himself, in his 'Preface to the Reader', claimed that 'of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best. No one . .. before him . . . was there any whom he imitated : nor after him, any that could imitate him.' 22 When read in the light of this tradition, Keats's sonnet cannot be taken simply as a record of a new and liberating experience. Silently proclaiming its own privileged anteriority, the name 'Homer' - immediately displaced and screened by 'Chapman' - must necessarily reaffirm the modern poet's belatedness. The imagery of 'watcher' and 'planet' signifies an irrevocable distance separating the viewer and his object: the poet, it seems, is like Endymion another astronomer, a moon-gazer who can only glimpse antiquity's 'pure serene' through the refractions of a telescope. He can never be anything more than a sublunary spectator or voyeur of that ideal plenitude. As we shall see in Endymion, the 'planet', in its figuration as Cynthia, will remain elusive, virtually ungraspable, as it forever slides beyond the poet-hero's consciousness. Or else the object, swimming into the poet's ken, is so bright that it produces in the beholder a feeling of what another sonnet calls 'a most dizzy pain' ('On Seeing the Elgin Marbles', 11). The luminosity of ancient Greece was, of course, a commonplace of Romantic Hellenism : 'Over the land hovers a light, brighter than that of suns, softer than that which vernal skies shed on halcyon seas, the light that rises from the tomb of virtue, genius, liberty!' 23 If Keats himself is never able to speak in this lyrical tone, it might be because it is precisely the brightness which becomes problematic : 'brighter than that of suns', the light shed by antiquity threatens to overwhelm the belated poet as an overexposed space of blank and blinding whiteness.24 Already in Endymion the brightness of the moon-goddess seems importunate : Once more I rais'd My sight right upward: but it was quite dazed By a bright something, sailing down apace, Making me quickly veil my eyes and face. (1, 600-3) Now I begin to feel thine orby power Is coming fresh upon me : O be kind, Keep back thine influence, and do not blind My sovereign vision. (in, 180-3)

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Keats and Hellenism

With a strange kind of compulsion, the verse insists on overrepresenting Cynthia's brightness, as we can note from the excessive internal rhyming of CI . . . my sight right. .. quite . . . bright', and from the curious echo of 'orby' in 'O be5.25 At this point we might recall the final sentence of the Preface to Endymion : 'I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness : for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewel.' If it is the fate of the modern poet to dull its brightness every time he desires to invoke the beautiful mythology of Greece, then Keats, while seduced by the image of Greece in the way that Endymion is seduced by Cynthia (and, later, as Lycius will be seduced by Lamia), is at the same time actively concerned to resist violating its brightness. Or else to resist the brightness itself. Is the poet in danger of sharing the fate of Milton, whose lines on the 'wandering moon' in II Penseroso (67-70) are, said Hazlitt, 'as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her'? 26 At a relatively early stage in his creative life, Keats considers bidding farewell to the beautiful mythology of Greece, as though he already suspected that the power of antiquity's sidereal light might threaten his survival as a modern poet.

in

I have suggested that Keats's desire for a return to the beautiful mythology of Greece is fraught with problem. The poet's endeavour to rewrite the ancient fictions is thwarted, or at least complicated, by a suspicion that the very conditions of rewriting are lost to him for ever. On the very threshold of his career, then, Keats may already be haunted by an anxiety over the possible impossibility of moving beyond the threshold. The silence to which Cortez and his men are reduced, at the end of the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, hints at the final danger confronting the modern poet: might he be struck dumb by the peremptory voice of Chapman's Homer? Instead of supporting the belated poet's effort towards creative freedom and originality, the ancient fictions might on the contrary prohibit the very act of writing. This anxiety can be detected in Keats's remarks on the composition of Endymion. For example : T hope soon to be able to resume my work - I have endeavoured to do so once or

Towards- Endymion

47

twice but to no Purpose - instead of Poetry I have a swimming in my head - And feel all the effects of a Mental Debauch lowness of Spirits - anxiety to go on without the Power to do so.'27 As a strategy to ward off the threat of silence, the habit of speaking of his literary production in terms of sheer volume acquires for the poet a therapeutic value : 'I read and write about eight hours a day'; 'I am getting on famous with my third Book - have written 800 lines thereof, and hope to finish it next week'; 'I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry'.28 In the next chapter I shall have more to say on the production of '4000 Lines' from 'one bare circumstance'. But at this point I want to suggest that Keats's early romance with antiquity comprehends, as it were, three 'moments' : firstly, a desire to reinvoke the beautiful mythology of Greece as an imaginative model; secondly, a suspicion that such a move is hazardous, if not impossible; thirdly, a desire to compensate for the consequent sense of loss in whatever way might still be available.29 These moments coalesce, appropriately enough, in the very first poem of the Poems of 1817, the dedicatory sonnet, 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.'. The first eight lines presuppose the first moment, while actually expressing the second : Glory and loveliness have passed away; For if we wander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the east, to meet the smiling day: No crowd of nymphs soft voic'd and young, and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May.

{l~^>)

The third moment, promising some kind of compensation, emerges in the last six lines : But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time, when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please With these poor offerings, a man like thee. But how, precisely, does the poet console himself for the loss registered in the opening lines? The key phrase, it would seem, is the 'leafy luxury' (13) felt by the poet on realizing that his

48

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verse appeals to a man of Hunt's taste. And this phrase, 'leafy luxury', belongs to what I would call Keats's language of flowers - a language which dominates the early verse, including Endymion. In a poetry which consciously harks back to the world of Elizabethan pastoral we would indeed expect a wealth of references to 'the realm . . . /Of Flora' ('Sleep and Poetry', 101-2). And what Keats's language of flowers is intended to convey is, I think, the pleasure of writing. One sonnet opens thus : 'Give me a golden pen, and let me lean/On heap'd up flowers' ('On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour', 1-2). Or consider these lines from 'Sleep and Poetry' : O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen That am not yet a glorious denizen Of thy wide heaven; yet, to my ardent prayer, Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air, Smoothed for intoxication by the breath Of flowering bays, that I may die a death Of luxury . . . . . . a bowery nook Will be elysium - an eternal book Whence I may copy many a lovely saying About the leaves, and flowers. (53~9> 63-6) Towards the beginning of 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill' the poet imagines 'many pleasures' (26) : 'So I straightway began to pluck a posey/Of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy' (27-8) where the pun on 'posey' /poesy might allow the couplet to be read as a modest metaphor of writing itself. Indeed, this relation, between flowers and writing, is made more explicit later in the poem, when a 'meek and forlorn flower' (172) is imagined as the inspiration for 'the tale/Of young Narcissus, and sad Echo's bale' (179-80).30 Moreover, the fact that the sonnet in which we find the phrase 'leafy luxury' is addressed to the author of Foliage might remind us that Keats's language of flowers is frequently used to invoke images of Hunt - and, through Hunt, Spenser.21 Keats says of his friend that 'In Spenser's halls he strayed, and bowers fair,/ Gulling enchanted flowers' ('Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison', 9-10). The 'Specimen of an Induction to a Poem' concludes with an appeal to Spenser, in which the poet presents himself as following in the footsteps of Hunt, Spenser's arch-disciple. The poem ends with Keats desiring to see 'wide plains, fair trees and lawny slope : /The morn, the eve, the light, the shade, the flowers' (66-7). Perhaps we can be more precise,

Towards Endymion

49

then, and say that the 'leafy luxury' felt by the poet expresses the pleasure of writing flowers of speech in the manner of Spenser. 'Flowers of speech', of course, is a phrase which designates not so much the imagery of flowers but rather figurative language, in particular a certain stylized diction heavily dependent on periphrasis and euphemism - what we might call an embellished style. And of this style Spenser was traditionally held to be the supreme exponent. One of his eighteenth-century commentators, John Hughes, observed that 'the embellishments of description are rich and lavish in him beyond comparison; and as this is the most striking part of poetry, especially to young readers, I take it to be the reason that he has been father of more poets among us than any other of our writers'. Spenser seems indeed 'to be possessed of a kind of poetical magick; and the figures he calls up to our view rise so thick upon us, that . . . his abundance betrays him into excess, and his judgement is overborne by the torrent of his imagination'.32 It is the suggested tendency to excess which I want to note here. Hazlitt said of Spenser that his language was 'full, and copious, to overflowing',33 and it may be precisely the overflowing copiousness of Spenserian flowers of speech which pushes the 'leafy luxury' of Keats's language towards overluxuriance and excess. This tendency was noted by Hunt himself, when he referred to the 'superabundance of detail' in the Poems] another reviewer thought the volume marred by its 'injudicious luxuriancies'.34 What I want to propose is that the leafy luxuries of Keats's early Spenserian language express the pleasures of writing; but also, more fundamentally, that this style affords a language of consolation. 'Excess in Youth is Necessary to Life', said Blake.35 On account of its very excess (its luxury), Keats's language of flowers compensates - indeed, overcompensates - for the sense of loss felt at the disappearance of classical antiquity (the extinction of its glory and loveliness). The language of flowers is the language of desire : conveying an illusion of new opulence and plenitude, it yearns to cover over the absence of antiquity. If we return, then, to the first eight lines of 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.', we can note the strategic importance of the movement towards the 'shrine of Flora'. In the very act of expressing loss and absence the poem already seeks to introduce a contrary language, a language whose function is to compensate for that loss.36 It is as though the initial recognition of loss actually generated a countervailing movement, whereby Keats's flowery style

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Keats and Hellenism

('Roses, and pinks, and violets5) grows out of the preceding sense of barrenness. As the verb 'adorn' suggests, the flowers have an ornamental function; but they grow out of, and wreathe themselves around, what is, essentially, a lack. It is the absent text of antiquity which the modern poet's language of flowers desires to embellish.

IV

A recent critic has said that 'practically every idea and motif in Poems of 1817 can be seen as following from the opening proposition of the dedicatory sonnet'.37 This claim seems particularly apposite if we look at the relation between 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.' and the first poem of the volume proper, 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill'. Considering that 'I stood tip-toe' immediately succeeds the dedicatory sonnet, the longer poem might be read as a direct response to the questions of loss and compensation raised in the sonnet. As a prolonged exercise in 'leafy luxury', 'I stood tip-toe' might well acquire significance from being a single excessive flower of speech, generated from the lack announced in 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.'. And so the poem initiates, on a substantial scale, that movement of compensation which will be further elaborated in Endymion. Certainly the poem abounds with floral imagery - there are allusions to 'bowery clefts, and leafy shelves' (21), 'lush laburnum' (31), 'leafy nets' (34), 'em'rald tresses' (82), 'bowery green' (84), 'evening primroses' (107), and so forth. But the point about this wealth of imagery is not that it has any particular local or 'referential' interest but that as a whole it reflects, by a process of metonymy, the entire poem as a single flower of speech, thus uncovering a psychic need on the part of the poet. The language of flowers is, as I have already suggested, a language of desire, and 'I stood tip-toe' initiates a desire for a rhetoric which will make up for the loss of poetry's founding fictions. This desire for a compensatory language becomes associated in the poem with a concern for narrative. We can surmise that 'I stood tip-toe' proved to be a false start to Endymion, since Keats actually refers to the poem as 'Endymion'. 38 That Keats was immediately aware of the problem of writing narrative poetry is evident from the fact that, towards the middle of 'I stood tip-

Towards Endymion

51

toe', the question of narrative intervenes as the poem's theme. The moon is invoked as 'Maker of sweet poets' (116) and 'Mingler with leaves' (119); indeed, as an image 'lifting her silver rim/ Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim/Coming into the blue with all her light' (113-15), the moon not only anticipates the symbolic figure of Cynthia in Endymion but also recalls the image of the 'new planet' swimming into the poet's ken, from 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. As such, then, the moon shines as a synecdochal image of the ideal space of antiquity, the 'pure serene' from which poetry originates : Thee must I praise above all other glories That smile us on to tell delightful stories. For what has made the sage or poet write But the fair paradise of Nature's light?

(123-6)

What is significant is that Keats imagines delightful stories composing a landscape of flowers, a figurative site of luxury and excess : When it is moving on luxurious wings, The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings: Fair dewy roses brush against our faces, And flowering laurels spring from diamond vases; O'er head we see the jasmine and sweet briar, And bloomy grapes laughing from green attire; While at our feet, the voice of crystal bubbles Charms us at once away from all our troubles: So that we feel uplifted from the world, Walking upon the white clouds wreath'd and curl'd. (131-40)

In a sonnet written shortly after 'I stood tip-toe', the poet compares a 'pleasant tale' (the tale in question is, appropriately, Chaucer's The Floure and the Leafe) to 'a little copse' ('This pleasant tale is like a little copse', 1) : 'The honied lines do freshly interlace,/To keep the reader in so sweet a place' (2-3). This sense of narrative as an hospitable landscape recurs, of course, in Keats's metaphor of a long poem as 'a little Region to wander in'.39 And the sweet places imagined in CI stood tip-toe5 seem designed, precisely, to keep poet and reader enchanted in (and by) a landscape of flowers; as Hazlitt said of Spenser, 'the poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys'. 40 On one level, of course, we might say that this is a mood of simple -

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Keats and Hellenism

and simplistic - escapism. But beyond this, I think, Keats's language of flowers conveys a more important psychic truth : to write narrative is to body forth a landscape (a little region to wander in) in which the poet might find a new sense of plenitude, given the initial proposition of loss. For the poet, then, to write narrative is to save himself from the consequence of antiquity's elision, which is silence. Hence the poet's envious allusions to the delightful stories of Cupid and Psyche, Syrinx and Pan, Narcissus and Echo : it is not the stories themselves but the very possibility of their telling which becomes crucial to the poet. And so Keats's poem slides towards the ostensible subject of its own telling, the story of Cynthia and Endymion. But it is precisely at this moment that the poet's own confidence, as a narrator, begins to waver. Once again he is in danger of being dazzled and struck dumb by the bright light issuing from the ancient fictions : Queen of the wide air; thou most lovely queen Of all the brightness that mine eyes have seen! As thou exceedest all things in thy shine, So every tale, does this sweet tale of thine. O for three words of honey, that I might Tell but one wonder of thy bridal night!

(205-10)

There follows a passage in which the poet discreetly skirts round his subject - and then the poem comes to an abrupt halt: Cynthia! I cannot tell the greater blisses, That follow'd thine, and thy dear shepherd's kisses: Was there a Poet born? - but now no more, My wand'ring spirit must no further soar. (239-42) At the most obvious level the question, 'Was there a Poet born?', refers to the union of Endymion and Cynthia. Within the poem's larger economy, however, the question might be read as selfreferential, so to speak : the 'Poet' is Keats himself, and 'I stood tip-toe', as the first poem in the poet's first volume, desires to enact some kind of self-inauguration, the birth of the poet into poetry. Hence the importance of narrative. The poem's final lines hint that the poet himself can be born out of his ability to narrate the story of Endymion and Cynthia, to tell their 'greater blisses'; In other words, Keats might not consider himself truly born, as a poet, until he has told a story. A threshold has been reached, which has yet to be crossed.

3

Flowers of speech

Endymion sustains and elaborates that compensatory movement initiated by the language of flowers in 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill'. I have suggested that the earlier poem is somehow generated from the sense of loss announced in the dedicatory sonnet with which it is, at the beginning of Poems, juxtaposed; thus Endymion might be read as a further stage in this movement. As a narrative written out of a lack, it establishes itself as the story of 'leafy luxury' which 'I stood tip-toe' endeavoured but failed to be. We have already seen how the Preface to Endymion ends on a note of valediction, and potential loss : 'I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness : for I wish to try once more, before I bid it farewel.'1 It may be, then, that the tension existing between the Preface's conclusion and the poem proper repeats the tension between 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.' and 'I stood tip-toe' - Keats's ambitious 'test of Invention' will be secretly motivated by the same recuperative, compensatory drive as 'I stood tip-toe' had been.2 Indeed, Keats's fear of tarnishing the lustre of the ancient fictions is the most powerful and conclusive symptom of a lack of confidence which characterizes the Preface as a whole, and for which the narrative itself immediately sets out to compensate. Worried that his long poem might be nothing more than 'a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished', 3 the poet needs to write himself into a mood of apparent confidence and control : Therefore, 'tis with full happiness that I Will trace the story of Endymion. The very music of the name has gone Into my being, and each pleasant scene Is growing fresh before me as the green Of our own vallies. 53

(i, 34-9)

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The narrative's composition is imagined as an efflorescence of a landscape of flowers, obeying the natural organic rhythm of the seasons : So I will begin Now while I cannot hear the city's din; Now while the early budders are just new, And run in mazes of the youngest hue About old forests; while the willow trails Its delicate amber; and the dairy pails Bring home increase of milk. And, as the year Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer My little boat, for many quiet hours, With streams that deepen freshly into bowers. Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story. O may no wintry season, bare and hoary, See it half finished : but let autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end. (i, 39-57) It seems to be a strategic move (a kind of redemptive prolepsis) to foreshorten the experience of writing by telescoping beginning, middle and end within the space of a few lines, whereby the poet might deflect his anxiety about the poem remaining 'half finished' (rather than composing itself as a deed accomplished). Yet there is already a hint that this ideal vision of writing is premature, that it betrays itself as a rhetoric of consolation. From the emphatic 'I/Will trace' and 'I will begin' the tone moves to the less confident 'Many and many a verse I hope to write' ('Many and many a . . .' - will the writing of Endymion depend on a poetic mania, a manic compulsion, on the poet's part, to write, whatever the cost?), suggesting that the state described by the poet as 'with full happiness' is rather a wishful happiness, a desired confidence rather than an actual one. The metaphor of narrative as a landscape of flowers (a benign 'little Region to wander in')4 further disenchants itself in these next lines:

Flowers of speech

55

And now at once, adventuresome, I send My herald thought into a wilderness: There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress My uncertain path with green, that I may speed Easily onward, thorough flower and weed. (1, 58-65) The poet had imagined himself as someone who could 'smoothly steer' the course of his poem, but now the 'path' of narrative is 'uncertain5, barely traceable, a 'wilderness' which might also be a void. By a strange regressive detour, then, the poem, while trying to overcome the negative feelings expressed in the Preface, has been returned to a sense of that original absence from which it had arisen and which it evidently cannot forget. To 'dress' the path of narrative 'with green' is to ornament it with the language of flowers, and yet, as we have just seen, the language of flowers possesses an inherent tendency to deconstruct itself. It may be that the poet, as Hazlitt said of Coleridge, 'misses his way by strewing it with flowers'.5 The hint of a qualitative difference between 'flower' and 'weed' suggests that the rhetoric of consolation is a difficult and hazardous one to sustain. Nevertheless, Keats's language of flowers inscribes itself at different levels in the text of Endymion. As 'lord' of 'flowers, garlands, love-knots, silly posies,/Groves, meadows, melodies, and arbour roses' (iv, 937-9), Endymion himself is one of Flora's devotees. He tells his dream of the moon-goddess to Peona (herself a flower, almost), lying on a 'couch, new made of flower leaves' (1, 438), situated in a 'bowery nest' (1, 539). And the 'enchantment' of his dream (1, 573) originates from a landscape of flowers : There blossom'd suddenly a magic bed Of sacred ditamy, and poppies red : At which I wondered greatly, knowing well That but one night had wrought this flowery spell. (i> 554-7) Moreover, through the dancing poppies stole A breeze, most softly lulling to my soul; And shaping visions all about my sight Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light. (1, 566-9) It is characteristic of Keats to revert to the language of flowers as a euphemism for sexual play : 6

56

Keats and Hellenism Our feet were soft in flowers. There was store Of newest joys upon that alp. Sometimes A scent of violets, and blossoming limes, Loiter'd around us; then of honey cells, Made delicate from all white-flower bells.

(1, 665-9)

Endymion's second vision of Cynthia's 'bright face' (1, 895) transforms itself into a sensation of leafy luxury : There came upon my face, in plenteous showers, Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers, Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight, Bathing my spirit in a new delight. (1, 899-902) Finding himself lost in a nether region of 'gleaming melancholy' (11, 223), Endymion yearns for 'a bed of flowers' (11, 330), and it is not surprising that his emergence from the underworld depends upon a floral enchantment: Sweeter than the rill To its old channel, or a swollen tide 1 o margin sallows, were the leaves he spied, And flowers, and wreaths, and ready myrtle crowns Up heaping through the slab . . . . . . The floral pride In a long whispering birth enchanted grew Before his footsteps. (11, 339-43, 345~7) Such examples from the text could be multiplied. If I refrain from citing more, it is not because Endymion, as Walter Jackson Bate plausibly remarks, 'does not encourage detailed attention',7 but because this particular aspect of Keats's language of flowers, though explicit and pervasive, is not, perhaps, the most important one. More notable, I think, is the way in which this language inscribes itself as a kind of metacommentary - from within the text - on the narrative. Thus the language of flowers in Endymion might be seen to have the same function as that in 'I stood tip-toe' : it is, essentially, self-referential, insofar as it comments insistently on the mode of the poem as a whole. For what is Endymion if not a single, prolonged textual embellishment, with its '4000 Lines' ornamenting the 'one bare circumstance' of Grecian story?8 So each embellishment within the text repeats metonymically the larger embellishment of which it is a part and which is the poem itself.

Flowers of speech

57

We might consider, for example, this description of the bower of Adonis : Above his head, Four lily stalks did their white honours wed To make a coronal; and round him grew All tendrils green, of every bloom and hue, Together inter twin'd and trammel'd fresh: The vine of glossy sprout; the ivy mesh, Shading its Ethiop berries; and woodbine, Of velvet leaves and bugle-blooms divine; Convolvulus in streaked vases flush; The creeper, mellowing for an autumn blush; And virgin's bower, trailing airily. (n, 407-17) This is the language of Spenserian copiousness. A kind of cornucopian rhetoric, it pours itself forth and clearly luxuriates in the sense of its own excess.9 The passage seems gratuitous, yet it has a function, which is, precisely, to represent gratuitousness and excess. Keats's language of flowers discloses the status of the episode as a whole : no matter how one might recuperate this interlude with Venus and Adonis,10 the scene is, essentially, nothing more than an embellishment to the main narrative, helping to fill out its 'one bare circumstance'. The same might be said for the encounter with Alpheus and Arethusa. Alpheus pleads with Arethusa in these terms : I will delight thee all my winding course, From the green sea up to my hidden source About Arcadian forests; and will shew The channels where my coolest waters flow Through mossy rocks; where, 'mid exuberant green, I roam in pleasant darkness, more unseen Than Saturn in his exile; where I brim Round flowery islands, and take thence a skim Of mealy sweets, which myriads of bees Buzz from their honied wings : and thou shouldst please Thyself to choose the richest, where we might Be incense-pillow'd every summer night. (11, 988-99) The 'winding course' described by Alpheus might also refer to the mode of embellishment of which this moment is an example this seductive language of flowers wreathes or winds itself around the narrative, in the hope, once again, of furnishing the illusion of plenitude.

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At this point we might recall that it was Spenser who was traditionally considered the master of poetic embellishment. But Leigh Hunt remarked that even Shakespeare was 'evidently alive to all the use and dignity of classical allusion', while Hazlitt paid tribute to 'the characteristic elegance of the allusions' in Lycidas}1 Endymion is the willing heir to older modes of embellishment, but at least one writer has been irritated by this allusive moment in Keats's poem : This still alarm, This sleepy music, forc'd him walk tiptoe: For it came more softly than the east could blow Arion's magic to the Atlantic isles; Or than the west, made jealous by the smiles Of thron'd Apollo, could breathe back the lyre To seas Ionian and Tyrian. (11, 357-63) A propos this passage Amy Lowell declares that the proper names 'clutter up the lines and destroy the musical effect entirely . . . Apart from the classical allusions, the passage does not exist . . . It is florid and empty, inappropriate and uninteresting.' 12 The terms of Lowell's critique express, albeit negatively, the same point which I have been trying to make. The interest of Keats's 'florid' language arises precisely from the fact that the passage 'does not exist' apart from the classical allusions. It is not that the allusions are themselves 'empty', but rather that they function to conceal emptiness, to render concrete what is otherwise an absence. There is, in other words, no text beyond the flower of speech.

11

T must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry.'13 Keats's declaration of intent towards Endymion finds its theoretical echo in Derrida's notion of the supplement. Inheriting the term from Rousseau's discussion of the relation between speech and writing, Derrida writes that 'the concept of the supplement . . . harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary'. On the one hand, the supplement 'adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence'. On the other hand (at the same time), however, the supplement adds 'only to

Flowers of speech

59

replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void . . . Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement . . . is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.'14 Keats's language of flowers embellishes the supreme text of antiquity as a supplement, tacitly acknowledging its own inferiority or secondariness, its mediated status vis-a-vis the original plenitude of antiquity (just as writing is condemned by Rousseau 'as destruction of presence and as disease of speech').15 But what, then, is the Void', the £originary lack5,16 for which this logic of the supplement must at the same time compensate? It is, precisely, the beautiful mythology of Greece, which is 'present' as an imaginary ideal but whose glory and loveliness have in fact passed away. The strange but necessary cohabitation of the supplement's two significations is already discernible in the phrase, 'one bare circumstance'.17 The single circumstance shaping the narrative is the story of Endymion and Cynthia, one of the 'beautiful Tales' which, said the poet in a letter to Fanny Keats, 'have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece'. And yet the circumstance is already 'bare' - that is, void, bankrupt, emptied of content. 'Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about,' says Keats to his sister; 'I will tell you.' He gives a brief account of the story, a summary which is far more precise and lucid than the poem can ever be : Many Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus - he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solitry among the trees and Plains little thinking - that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him - However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass, she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively [for] a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming.18 This is the poem's 'one bare circumstance', but what the 4000 lines of narrative will do is to erase even this brief moment of lucid telling, as they simultaneously obliterate and compensate for the poem's originary lack (the origin, that is, which is also a lack). Thus Keats's language of flowers obeys the logic of what Derrida elsewhere calls, following Kant, the parergon, an ornamental 'supplementary hors d'oeuvre' which is 'against, beside,

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and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished' and which is 'summoned and assembled like a supplement because of the lack - a certain "internal" indetermination - in the very thing it enframes'.19 The internal indetermination constituting the lack within Endymion is precisely the poem's ostensible subject or story, the beautiful tale which Keats desires to represent but which can only ever inscribe itself as a negative presence within the text.20 There is another way in which the supplement defines its essentially two-fold significance for Keats. The very notion of a language of flowers as parergon or embellishment would seem to be paradoxical. For if we look beyond the metaphorical nuance of 'flowers of speech' as signifying an ornamental style (a style of excess which is not natural), we return, eventually, to the flower itself, purely and simply as a natural object. We have already noticed these two senses at work in Keats's language of flowers, when the poet, towards the beginning of Endymion, imagines £each pleasant scene' of his narrative 'growing fresh before me as the green/Of our own vallies'. But this ideal mode of natural composition must soon yield to the other possibility of a floral style, which has to do with 'dressing' the story's 'uncertain path with green'. The Romantic principle of natural inspiration is summed up in Keats's axiom that 'if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all'. 21 In other words, poetry must originate as naturally as leaves or flowers. Relevant here are some remarks by Paul de Man on Holderlin's line : 'nun aber nennt er sein Liebstes,/Nun, nun miissen dafiir Worte, wie Blumen, entstehn'.22 From this line we can infer, says de Man, that 'the fundamental intent of the poetic word is to originate in the same manner as [flowers]'. But de Man proceeds to suggest, in a subtle and sophisticated argument, that words do not and cannot originate like flowers. 'How do flowers originate?' asks de Man : They rise out of the earth without assistance of imitation or analogy. They do not follow a model other than themselves which they copy or from which they derive the pattern of their growth. By calling them natural objects, we mean that their origin is determined by nothing but their own being. Since words, on the other hand, are signs for things, they must always 'originate like something else ("like flowers")'. Although

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'it is in the essence of language to be capable of origination', language can never achieve 'the absolute identity with itself that exists in the natural object'. 23 To put it another way, words are signs which divide arbitrarily into signifier and signified, and this division, as Saussure was to emphasize, can never be healed. The psychic pressure behind the analogy of words and flowers is suggested by de Man in these terms : 'It is in experiencing the material presence of the particular flower that the desire arises to be reborn in the manner of a natural creation. The image is inspired by a nostalgia for the origin of this object.' 24 This formulation seems particularly useful in our analysis of Keats's language of flowers. The luxuries of Spenserian embellishment in Endymion and elsewhere signify a desire to materialize a return to the beautiful mythology of Greece, to re-present 'Greece', as an origin, in a dream of plenitude. To write in this way would be for Keats, as it is for Derrida's Rousseau, to aim at 'the greatest symbolic reappropriation of presence' 25 - specifically, the 'presence' of antiquity in all its glory and loveliness. And yet, as de Man reminds us, this nostalgia for presence can never be satisfied, since it is impossible for poetic word and natural object (signifier and signified) adequately to coincide. Thus the material plenitude of Keats's language of flowers, failing in its desire for perfect representation, must finally disenchant and deconstruct itself, since the origin which it seeks is always already beyond its reach. All this language can do is to cover over the origin's absence, to 'dress' the wilderness with flowers of speech, in its errant and endless search for a pure representation of that beautiful Greece with its beautiful tales. 'The very music of the name has gone/Into my being' {Endymion, i, 36-7). 'Poets know of the act of naming', says de Man, 'as implying a return to the source, to the pure motion of experience at its beginning.' 26 Perhaps the name of Endymion, in concert with the host of other proper names scattered throughout the text, intervenes as an alternative mode of achieving the rhetorical reappropriation of antiquity's presence. 27 But I would say that these names are themselves parergonal signatures to a Name which remains ineffable, beyond representation. We might denote this proper term 'the beautiful mythology of Greece', or 'Antiquity', but its status as an absent referent means that any endeavour to express it involves, at the same time, its displacement and erasure. (Over)compensating for the absent referent,

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Keats's language of flowers constitutes an endless periphrasis surrounding, but never touching, a proper term whose essence, like the Grecian Urn, is always other, resisting appropriation. Or like Cynthia, who, though desired by the poet-hero as a 'completed form of all completeness' (i, 606), only ever appears in the text as a faint silver lining on the horizon of consciousness, an elusive promise of 'argent luxuries' (m, 186). If the moongoddess is to represent for Endymion the fulfilment of his wanderings, the 'goal of consciousness' (11, 283) - symbolically, the final coincidence of poet and muse, of the errant language of flowers and its originary proper term - then the centrality with which she is conferred only ever manifests itself, paradoxically, on the margins of the poem's landscape. At the end of his story, the poet is no more able to tell the greater blisses of Endymion and Cynthia than he had been at the end of 'I stood tip-toe'. The moment of their union (already mediated through the intervention of the Indian Maid) is also the moment of their disappearance : 'They vanish'd far away!' (iv, 1002). As Friedrich Schlegel observed : 'The highest thing can only be said allegorically, just because it is inexpressible.'28 Constituted by a language of flowers which wreathes itself nostalgically around an absent referent, in a compulsive play of embellishment and excess, Endymion invites itself to be read, in the terms proposed by Roland Barthes, as a 'text' rather than a 'work'. Keats's text 'practises the infinite deferral of the signified. . . . Its field is that of the signifier.'29 The field of Endymion is, indeed, a landscape of language - a language in quest of a transcendental signified. What, then, of the content of the poem's beautiful tale? Elsewhere Barthes has written that 'what goes on in a narrative is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly nothing. What does "happen" is language per se, the adventure of language, whose advent never ceases to be celebrated.' 30 The absence of referential content in Keats's adventure of language was noted by the poem's first readers, and indeed is surmised by Endymion himself : I have clung To nothing, lov'd a nothing, nothing seen Or felt but a great dream! (iv, 636-8) P. G. Patmore begins his review of the poem with the suggestive remark that Endymion, 'if it be not, technically speaking, a poem, is poetry itself. He refers to the poem as 'a glittering

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c

shower of words' but says that as a tale, this work is nothing'. 31 From this it would seem that Keats's excessive attention to 4000 lines of poetry might exclude the possibility of content or meaning. A similar point is implied when Francis Jeffrey speaks of 'the thin and scanty tissue of [Keats's] story' as 'merely the light frame work on which his florid wreaths are suspended', and when another reviewer chides 'the Author of Endymion' for having 'beat out the gold of ancient fable into leaf thin enough to cover four long cantos of incoherent verse'.32 Thus language comes to erase that which it had desired to represent. And this might be the profound irony of the logic of the supplement as it compels the language of flowers along the uncertain path of narrative: the more it seeks to replenish, the further it displaces, and deviates from, its ideal origin. This is precisely how the narrative of Keats's romance with antiquity disenchants and deconstructs itself. The metre of the poet's antique song is stretched over a void.

in

Modern criticism has found it difficult to accept the parergonal language of leafy luxury in Endymion. Alexander Smith's condescending remark, dating from 1857, on the poem's 'style of babyish effeminacy', where the reader is 'smothered in roses' and the story 'lost in ornament', has set the dominant tone of more recent criticism.33 Hopkins spoke of Keats's verse 'at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury', 34 while Robert Bridges saw Endymion as 'crowded to excess' with images, so that the reader 'feels like a sightseer in a gallery overcrowded with pictures, which by degrees he ceases to regard with attention'.35 Keats's 'little Region to wander in' has been troped as 'overluxuriant', 'labyrinthine and overgrown, a little wilderness amid whose tangles one can wander happily but at the risk of becoming lost'.36 Impatient with, and perhaps embarrassed by, the poem's lack of formal coherence, critics have reduced Endymion to an 'amalgam of visual and other sense impressions', a 'medley of incongruous elements', a 'rambling storehouse of pleasures' and an 'absurd rigmarole'. 37 Dissenting voices are rare. Noting the *unrelatedness of themes' in Endymion, and that 'such thematic unrelatednesses are quite

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common in long poems', Jack Stillinger has suggested that 'as a critical value, "unity" is overrated these days', and that 'we shall have to relax a little in the matter of coherence'.38 In a more general context, Kenneth Burke has attributed 'the increasing proportion of fragmentary poems', since the beginning of the nineteenth century, to 'an increased emphasis upon lyrical associationism, and a decreased emphasis upon rationally extricated dramatic plot'.39 Marilyn Butler likewise claims that in the second decade of the nineteenth century 'there is a movement, affecting both poetry and the novel, in the direction of sustained self-sufficient narrative. . . . [There is] a new emphasis on a flowing story which appears to set up a dynamism independent of any character.'40 Might it be possible to retrace Endymion as a text obeying something like the fragmentary mode of lyrical associationism, a flowing story whose floral excesses question the hitherto privileged assumptions of coherence and unity ? As a way of addressing this problem, we can note that the poem's first readers responded more positively to the language of flowers in Endymion. Keats's metaphor of narrative space as 'a little Region to wander in' is embellished by Patmore into a veritable gallery of parergonal excess. The author of Endymion, says Patmore, has raised a glittering and fantastic temple, where we may wander about, and delightedly lose ourselves while gazing on the exquisite pictures which every here and there hang on its sunbright walls the statues and flower-vases which ornament its painted niches the delicious prospects opening upon us from its arabesque windows - and the sweet airs and romantic music which come about us when we mount upon its pleasant battlements.41 Patmore introduces the notion of wandering, but, unlike more recent critics, he does not regard the reader's exitless stroll through Keats's landscape of flowers as a source of danger or anxiety; if we 'lose ourselves', we do so 'delightedly'. Jeffrey also reads Endymion as a 'wandering' text, and the language of his criticism repeats that of Patmore in other important ways : The thin and scanty tissue of his story is merely the light frame work on which his florid wreaths are suspended; and while his imaginations go rambling and entangling themselves everywhere, like wild honeysuckles, all idea of sober reason, and plan, and consistency, is utterly forgotten. . . . A great part of the work indeed, is written in the strangest and most fantastical manner that can be

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imagined. It seems as if the author had ventured everything that occurred to him in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression - taken the first word that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new cluster of images - a hint for a new excursion of the fancy - and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as they extended, and were only harmonized by the brightness of their tints, and the graces of their forms.42 Patmore and Jeffrey both speak of the poem's 'glittering' and 'fantastic' ('fantastical') appearance; Patmore imagines the text's parergonality in terms of 'the statues and flower-vases which ornament its painted niches', while Jeffrey appeals to the imagery of 'florid wreaths' and 'wild honeysuckles'. And both writers invoke the figure of arabesque. The term is suggestive, and perhaps crucial. As a text rather than work, Endymion is, in Barthes's words, 'structured but decentred, without closure'.43 If we are to locate a structure beyond - or rather, constituted by - the text's embellishments, I think it is this, the arabesque, which might help define the errant mode of Keats's poem.44 IV

If Endymion is, indeed, an 'interminable arabesque of connected and incongruous figures' (Jeffrey), it would seem difficult to define the text's structure in conventional terms. In his review of Keats's poem, Patmore noticed that 'there is no connecting interest to bind one part of it to another. Almost any two parts of it might be transposed, without disadvantage to either, or to the whole.' Endymion, then, is 'not a poem, but a dream of poetry; and while many of its separate parts possess that vivid distinctness which frequently belongs to the separate parts of a dream, the impression it leaves as a whole is equally indistinct and confused'.45 These are perceptive observations, yet they stop short of a further possibility - that the concept of 'whole', or 'wholeness', is finally irrelevant to the narrative mode of Endymion. Given the emergence of the powerful notion of organic unity, theoretically formulated by Kant and taken over by Coleridge, it was inevitable that Patmore should assume a necessary relation between part and whole, even though he realizes

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that Endymion is not easily accessible as a whole : cIt is not our object to give a distinct idea of the work as a whole . . . [It is] difficult, if not impossible to state its peculiar beauties as a whole.'46 As embellishment or parergon, the part, it seems, is always formally assignable to a whole. But what if Endymion were to practise a more subversive kind of parergonality, where the part detaches itself from, contests and indeed abolishes the whole?47 As a 'feverish attempt5 rather than a 'deed accomplished', the poem might be fated to emerge, as it were, stillborn, in a state of potential fragmentation, thus precluding the very possibility of wholeness. Remarking that 'the Authors intention' in Endymion appeared to be that 'no person should possibly get to the end of it', Shelley suggested that Keats would have done better 'if he had printed about 50 pages of fragments from it', instead of the whole poem.48 The observation is astute, and radical in its implications. The text might be rendered more readable only if the implicitly hierarchical relation between fragment and whole (between ornament and main design, margin and centre) be reversed, or dispensed with altogether.49 Thus the arabesque flourishes of Keats's language of flowers would seem to question the possibility of structural coherence and unity within the text. We might well expect the gradual writing of the poem's four books to trace the emergence of a frame, with each book representing a side, until a vacant grid is shaped, whose 4000 lines offer sufficient space to receive and accommodate 'the highest & the finest gleams of poetry'.50 The image of the frame, ideally conceived, should guarantee the reconciliation of the text's parts into a whole. 'The common end of all narrative', said Coleridge in 1815, 'is to convert a series into a Whole : to make those events, which in real or imagined History move in a strait Line, assume to our Understanding a circular motion - the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.' 51 Yet it is precisely this teleological demand of narrative - that it be supplied with an end and a middle as well as a beginning, and thus compose itself into a frame or circle - which is refused by Endymion, whose fragmentary 'gleams' weave and course through the narrative without ever settling into an orderly whole. The text-as-arabesque is discontinuous not only with Coleridge's provocative notion of the narrative circle but also with more conventional theories of narrative seriality. According to Lord Kames, a long poem

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ought to resemble a sentence or period in language, divided into members that are distinguished from each other by proper pauses; or it ought to resemble a piece of music, having a full close at the end, preceded by imperfect closes that contribute to the melody.52 Neither Kames's linguistic period nor Coleridge's circle, however, is commensurate with the radical openness of Endymion. 'To combine a number of particulars to one end is not to omit them altogether', observed Hazlitt.53 But what if the combination of particulars tended to omit the end itself, so that all that remained of the poem were a centreless repetition of 'imperfect closes' (Kames) or 'particles' ?54 In a text whose 'foundations' are, as Keats admitted3 'too sandy', any sense of a stabilizing structure would yield to a different kind of architecture, made of 'movable parts'. 55 Dispensing with the frame, and revelling in the dissemination of the parts of a text, rather than in their safe return to a whole, the text-as-arabesque encourages the play of digression and arbitrariness.56 On account of its very structure the ornament, as a characteristic sign of the arabesque, is digressive and indeed subversive, since it not only departs from but actually contests the main design or subject, by insisting on its own errancy. The point about Endymion, of course, is that the ostensible subject becomes erased through the arabesque turns of its language of flowers. To recall Alexander Smith, the story is, precisely, 'lost in ornament'. Another Victorian critic, D. M. Moir, similarly remarked that 'we often lose the thin thread of story altogether in the fantastic exuberance of ornament and decoration'.57 Yet to criticize Endymion for being 'difficult to read consecutively because of the remarkable meandering of the narrative', which 'proceeds away from the fable without ever quite losing sight of it',58 is misleading, since 'fable' and 'narrative' refuse to be separated - the beautiful tale is from the beginning completely subsumed under the narrative's floral embellishments. Within the economy of the arabesque, the straight 'consecutive' line is itself an accident, without special privilege. Thus 'meandering' is not a sign of failed coherence, but constitutes, rather, the centreless structure of the Keatsian text.

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'Do not the Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading : which may be food for a Week's stroll in the Summer?' 59 It may be that this evocation of a long poem is essential to a proper reading of Endymion. What matters for Keats is not linear coherence but the luxury of ornament, those 'images' which are 'so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second Reading'. At this point it is perhaps worth recalling that Abraham Tucker had begun to expand the limits of orthodox linear associationism by conceiving of a mental landscape where trains of images 'multiply and run into one another', where the imagination is 'like a wilderness, cut into a number of little alleys, communicating by gentle, almost imperceptible windings'. 'Woven together' in this way, our associations 'give a greater play to the imagination, and produce a greater variety in the shapes of our ideas, than if they were all stretched out in one, long, dull, straight line'.60 This is the generosity of the arabesque : it suspends the need to order its parergonality into 'one, long, dull, straight line' and invites a more playful tracing of its fictions, transforming poet and reader alike into connoisseurs of chaos. And so, emulating the copious excesses of The Faerie Queene and other Elizabethan models, Endymion reveals the poet - as Hazlitt remarked of Spenser - 'guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination'. Indeed, Hazlitt's reference to a lack of 'bone and muscle' in Spenser confirms the kinship of Keats and Spenser in this context: elsewhere he says of Endymion that 'all is soft and fleshy, without bone or muscle'.61 On the level of language and style, the influence on Keats's early verse of Spenser, William Browne ('the most genuine of Spenser's disciples', according to Leigh Hunt) 62 and, of course, Hunt himself, is obvious and pervasive. In the verse-epistle, 'To My Brother George', the poet refers to 'my soft verse', and the writer of Endymion is more in love than ever with 'Spenserian vowels that elope with ease' ('To Charles Gowden Clarke') and 'labyrinths of sweet utterance' ('To G.A.W.').63 But might the absence of 'bone and muscle' noticed

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by Hazlitt in Keats and Spenser also have to do with the question of structure and its anatomy? Hazlitt's remarks could be reformulated thus : in both The Faerie Queene and Endymion there is no identifiable skeleton or spine, no firm organizing principle around which the text's embellishments might wreathe themselves. And it is precisely the absence of a determinate structure which constitutes, for Hazlitt, one of the pleasures of reading Spenser : 'We wander in another world, among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys.' It is not simply that Spenser creates a superior world for the reader's delectation; what needs emphasizing, once again, is the invitation to 'wander'. Elsewhere Hazlitt muses that Spenser is 'one of the poets that I have always read with most pleasure, and can wander about in for ever with a sort of voluptuous indolence'.64 So the pleasure of Spenser's text lies in its generosity towards the indolent reader, who can wander through the landscape of the narrative in a kind of revery. There are no bounded zones in this text, no prescribed routes, insisting that the reader abide by the rules of a strictly ordered structure. And Endymion is another such text. Keats's poem requires a reader akin to the reader of Barthes's Text, an 'idle subject' who strolls along the side of a valley at the bottom of which runs a wadi . . . What he sees is multiple and irreducible; it emerges from substances and levels that are heterogeneous and disconnected: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, bursts of noise, high-pitched bird calls, children's cries from the other side of the valley, paths, gestures, clothing of close and distant inhabitants. 65 To wander thus, indolently and desultorily, is to experience the fullest possible consolation for the absence of antiquity's glory and loveliness. Lost in ornament, poet and reader might forget, temporarily, the lack which stands at (as) the text's origin.

VI

Hazlitt's comment on the absence of 'bone or muscle' in Endymion occurs towards the end of his essay, 'On Effeminacy of Character' (first published in 1822, in the second volume of Table-Talk). People of an effeminate disposition, says Hazlitt, are given to 'ease and indolence', and 'lie on beds of roses'. Such

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people 'live in a luxurious, endless dream', where 'every sensation must be wound up to the highest pitch of voluptuous refinement'.66 Already we can perceive a close affinity between Hazlitt's language of effeminacy and the language of flowers. Also notable are traces of Hazlitt's response to Spenser, who, we recall, encouraged in the reader 'a sort of voluptuous indolence'. In his Lectures on the English Poets, Hazlitt observes that Spenser's 'poetical temperament was as effeminate as Chaucer's was stern and masculine',67 and that the author of The Faerie Queene '[gave] himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of "flowery tenderness" '. The 'genius' of Spenser's poetry, continues Hazlitt, is 'inspired by the love of ease' and is dedicated to 'an endless voluptuousness of sentiment'.68 Spenser's leafy luxuries would thus seem to qualify him, in Hazlitt's terms, as an 'effeminate' poet. And having, at the beginning of his essay, characterized people of effeminate temperament as prone to lying 'on beds of roses' ('O think how I should love a bed of flowers', yearns Endymion), Hazlitt specifies 'an effeminate style' as 'florid' and 'fine'. So it is not surprising that he should invoke, as exemplifying a floral finery of language, the modern poet stylistically closest to Spenser : I cannot help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats's poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. His Endymion is a very delightful description of the illusions of a youthful imagination, given up to airy dreams - we have flowers, clouds, rainbows, moonlight, all sweet sounds and smells, and Oreads and Dryads flitting by - but there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable - we have none of the hardy spirit or rigid forms of antiquity. He painted his own thoughts and character; and did not transport himself into the fabulous and heroic ages.69 Hazlitt obviously reads Endymion as an endeavour to represent the beautiful mythology of Greece, as a text replete with parergonal images, which might have been culled from Leigh Hunt, William Browne, Drayton or Spenser. Yet Hazlitt also notices that Keats's poem harbours an essential lack - 'there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable'. This lack has to do with the absence of what Hazlitt calls 'the hardy spirit or rigid forms of antiquity'. Thus Endymion falls short of the model of antiquity proposed or rather assumed by Hazlitt. Now we might criticize Hazlitt for

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attending to the floral excesses of Endymion while ignoring Keats's endeavour to reinscribe the rigid forms of antiquity in the 'more naked and grecian Manner' of Hyperion.10 Yet this very emphasis might be taken to expose a significant limitation in Hazlitt's own model of antiquity. For what, precisely, is this model, and where does it come from? Its most direct source is the example of Milton (which Keats was to try to follow, of course, in his radically different treatment of Hyperion). The monumental epic style of Paradise Lost, giving an effect of sculptured 'palpableness and solidity', seemed to Hazlitt loyal to the mode of antiquity : Milton 'had the mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, and determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory'.71 Antiquity, then, is constituted by monumental forms, by the solid and palpable, whereas Endymion deviates or wanders from this model insofar as it sacrifices the monumental (the 'masculine') for the ornamental (the 'effeminate'). More indirectly, behind the images of antiquity's 'hardy spirit' and 'rigid forms' lies Winckelmann's seminal notion of 'eine edle Einfalt, und eine stille Grosse' (noble simplicity and sedate grandeur), which, apparently, is 'the most eminent characteristic' of ancient Greek art.72 Here again, antiquity is evoked as a space of monumental forms, cool, chaste, and lucidly structured.73 Winckelmann's vision offers the most powerful and compelling model of ancient Greece to Romantic (and post-Romantic) writers. But such a model, relying on ideals of formal simplicity and restraint, would have to banish the arabesque, with its ornamental, 'effeminate' style of excess. If this is indeed the case, it may be that the disjunctive turns of a text like Endymion actually work to question and subvert Winckelmann's model. Keats's floral style would thus contest and revise this model of antiquity by exposing its complex ideology, which is already betrayed, for example, in Hazlitt's appeal to antiquity's 'hardy spirit' and 'rigid forms'.74 We might call this an ideology of masculinity, or androcentrism. (Does not the subversiveness of Rococo art, with its endlessly lavish embellishments, lie in its scandalous mockery of 'masculine5 virtues?) Thus Hazlitt's sense of a lack of 'strength and substance' in Keats's poetry might expose Hazlitt's own nostalgia for an impossibly adequate representation of the past, a return to the Golden Age without problem or anxiety. Beginning with Winckelmann, this nostalgia at

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the heart of Romantic Hellenism has passed into modern criticism, so that Endymion is criticized for 'its lack, however much it may revel in classical ideas and associations, of the classical instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection'. As 'an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative 3, Keats's text deviates from and indeed violates the chaste model of antiquity established by Winckelmann.75 I would conclude, then, with a surmise that Endymion unveils and interrogates the powerful nostalgia shaping the premises of Romantic Hellenism. The text's language of flowers, indeed, scandalizes - it scandalizes conventional theories of structural order and of pure poetic diction, it scandalizes, too, our pious assumptions about the nature of classical antiquity. And the text exposes the poet's need to 'transport himself into the fabulous and heroic ages' as an impossibly Utopian task. Hazlitt is more confident about the possibility of return. While the future is 'like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view', the past is 'alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest'.76 But Endymion seems to acknowledge that the bright objects of antiquity might not be so easily redeemed, that history might intervene, as a dead wall or thick mist, to obstruct the modern poet's imaginative return to the ideal space of Greece. The virile discourse of Winckelmann's Hellenism represses the element of desire behind the modern poet's attempted recuperation of antiquity, and Endymion already testifies to Keats's profound sensitiveness to the ambiguity of such desire. It is in the text's language of flowers that the return of that repressed desire is most eloquently disclosed.

4

The fall of Hyperion

Endymion may be taken as an example of what a recent critic has called 'permissible failure' in Keats. 1 The text's language of flowers errs from the one bare circumstance of given story, and it is the impossible correction of that error which becomes the poem's secret theme. Endymion is about failure, and the potential authority of failure. In poetry as in life, 'though erroneous' things 'may be fine'.2 At one point Keats passes comment on his 'slip-shod' text: 'Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, & with that view asked advice, & trembled over every page, it would not have been written.' Keats's declaration that 'I was never afraid of failure' recalls an earlier remark, a propos Endymion, that 'one should not be too timid - of committing faults'.3 One of the faults apparently committed by the poet is to have written a text which offends canonical notions of Grecian simplicity : Endymion does not fit easily into the scheme of antiquity proposed by Winckelmann. Yet perhaps the modern poet should not be afraid of committing faults because some faults are unavoidable, or else in their committing certain truths are disclosed. It may be that the sense of error out of which Endymion is born anticipates the failure of narrative to represent adequately its founding fictions. Thus the recourse to narrative is in itself a sign of failure, but a failure which is necessary and even authoritative for the belated poet's hazardous romance with the forms of the past. In a letter to Shelley, Keats says that he 'would willingly take the trouble to unwrite' his 'poor Poem'.4 Might the alternative mode of Hyperion be read as an effort to 'unwrite' Endymion? The proposed epic's 'naked and grecian Manner' will seek to jettison the parergonal style of Endymion in favour of the monumental sublimity of Milton. The 'march' of narrative in Hyperion will be 'undeviating' : it will refuse to succumb to the error and 73

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errancy of arabesque, opting instead for the straight purposiveness of rectilinear narrative. As a corrective to the effeminately 'sentimental cast' of Endymion, Hyperion will be in the masculine mode.5 Such, at least, seem to have been the poet's intentions. Yet the fate of Hyperion might be taken to repeat the sense of failure which emerges in the writing of Endymion. Insofar as both poems are texts endeavoured rather than accomplished, they address the same problem : the necessary failure of belated narrative to frame coherently its representations of the past (the supreme fictions of antiquity). For all its ostensible differences, Hyperion is fated to deviate from its formal intention as much as Endymion had done. From ornament to monument: Keats would have found the monumental status of epic eloquently confirmed in Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets. Ten days before his comment on the proposed 'naked and grecian Manner' of Hyperion, Keats heard Hazlitt describe Dante as 'the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering'.6 The nearest equivalent in English verse to this severe monumentality was, of course, the sculptured 'palpableness and solidity' of Paradise Lost.1 T h e objects of epic poetry', says Hazlitt, 'affect us . . . by magnitude and distance'; thus Milton 'looks upon circumstances from the remotest elevation of thought and fancy'. 'Elevation' is the characteristic of Milton's sublime style : he 'raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation'. 8 Representing Milton in the language of sublime monumentality (elevation, magnitude, solidity, distance), Hazlitt recalls Dugald Stewart's association of antiquity with ''elevated place'.9 This is the high seriousness of Paradise Lost, that it establishes itself as a monument to the past: Milton had 'the mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, and determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory'.10 Yet the unambiguous presence of antiquity's 'mighty models' is precisely what the modern poet can no longer take for granted. Bernard Blackstone notes that the epic age had already passed 'centuries before Milton; only his colossal seriousness and virtuosity made possible the limited success he achieved'. 11 So Milton himself is threatened with belatedness; far from being a monument 'of equal height and glory', Paradise Lost would then be a monumental inscription on the sublimer Text of Antiquity, an epitaph to the history of epic. In which case, Hyperion, written in the wake of Milton,

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deviates still further from the mighty models of the past: the Keatsian text is a monument to Paradise Lost which is a monument to an earlier (and higher) sublimity. The history of epic would seem to be nothing more than a series of increasingly pale repetitions, in which the 'presence' of an 'original' becomes more and more problematic. In The Fall of Hyperion Keats will honour 'all the dead whose names are in our lips' (1, 45), but it may be that the old writers will prevent speech, stifle the modern poet's voice, precisely because their names will not go from his lips. 11

The relation between epic and history is a complex one. Ezra Pound defined the epic as 'a poem including history',12 but the question is how a text might include (or exclude) history. Can we speak of the epic-as-monument as an event inscribed within the space of history, as a certain kind of historical figuration? An epic poem, said Victor Hugo, 'imparts solemnity to history', since it narrates the 'doings' of civilization.13 The epic monumentalizes history, but history also monumentalizes the epic, since the text must always finally return to the space from which it had emerged. More precisely, the monument can be seen to mediate between epic and history as forms of narrative. We should remember that before and during the composition of Hyperion Keats was reading the great Enlightenment historians : Voltaire, Robertson, and (above all) Gibbon.14 Not only would Keats's reading of history sharpen his sense of antiquity as a space of temporal difference. The formal legacy of a text like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire might be, in its most general terms, the concept of history as writing, as narrative; historical discourse establishes itself, in Foucault's words, 'in its own volume, as a monument* }* Yet even though the historical fact might be 'ontologically privileged in its linguistic expression',16 the monumentalizing text of history cannot elude but will reaffirm the temporality of narrative itself. While honouring the representational endeavour of Gibbon's narrative, Hyperion nevertheless turns out to be 'historical' in a rather different sense, since it is troubled by its own belated narrative strategies. Hyperion, we might say, deconstructs Gibbon's History insofar as it allegorizes the 'pastness' of the past.

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That Keats was reading both Gibbon and Milton, as well as Dante, at the moment of beginning Hyperion marks a significant climax to decades of speculation on the alliance between epic and historical narrative. 17 Both forms confront the same problem of representing the past, whether as 'fictions' or as 'events'. 'We are framed by nature', said Kames, 'to relish order and connection',18 and towards the end of the eighteenth century, historical representation would opt for the order and connection promised by the undeviating, linear mode of narrative. Precedents were not difficult to find. In his 'Instructions for Writing History', Lucian had outlined a method for the historian in these terms : When he has collected all, or most of his materials, he will first make a kind of diary, a body whose members are not yet distinct; he will then bring it into order and beautify it, add the colouring of style and language, adopt his expression to the subject, and harmonize the several parts of it. The historian must attend to the parergonal ('the colouring of style and language') but such embellishment contributes to and harmonizes with the whole : history must be framed before it can be recuperated through narrative. 'The body of the history', continues Lucian, is only a long narrative, and as such it must go on with a soft and even motion, alike in every part. . . . One thing perfected, the next which succeeds should be coherent with it; knit together, as it were, by one common chain, which must never be broken: they must not be so many separate and distinct narratives, but each so closely united to what follows, as to appear one continued series.19 Historical narrative as 'one continued series', progressing 'with a soft and even motion' : this figure will dominate the form of late Enlightenment historiography. The opaque and alien content of ancient history might thus be recuperated according to the sovereign lucidity of form. Jacob Bryant, for example, was able to evade the problem of 'truth' in the ancient Greek historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon) by emphasizing that they 'shewed a great propriety of diction; and a beautiful arrangement of their ideas: and the whole was attended with a rhythm, and harmony, no where else to be found'. 20 It would seem that adequate historical representation depends, crucially, on the capacity of language to fashion structures of coherence, to create fictions of concordance between discrete events. If the

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historian, as George Kubler reminds us, is 'committed to the detection and description of the shape of time', 21 it is only through the detour of narrative that the cumbrous and unwieldy mass of history will shape itself. 'The writing of history', observed Goethe, 'is one way of ridding oneself of the burden of the past.'22 To shape history through narrative, reconstitute it within a discursive frame : this is the formal priority of late Enlightenment historiography. Without the frame, history dissolves into chaos. 'The manifestations of an event', said Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'are scattered, disjointed, isolated; what it is that gives unity to this patchwork, puts the isolated fragment into its proper perspective, and gives shape to the whole, remains removed from direct observation.' Once again the problem of narrative defines itself in terms of the relation between fragment and whole, a relation which further serves to align poet and historian : 'Differently from the poet, but in a way similar to him', the historian 'must work the collected fragments into a whole'. The historian is like the poet in that he can transform 'the disjointed fragments of direct observation' into a whole 'only through his imagination'.23 And like the poet he should conceive his project 'as a certain kind of story, with a roughly descried track of development towards a main conclusion'.24 In his History of Ancient Greece, John Gillies proposed 'to trace the intricate series, and to explain the secret connection, of seemingly detached events, in order to reduce the scattered members of Grecian story into one perpetual unbroken narrative'.25 The French historian, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, urged the absolute necessity of clearly marking out, at the beginning of a general History, that ultimate point to which it is intended to conduct the reader, and of entering into every detail which can discover to him how all the facts are intermingled, and united to each other; and how the last revolutions are the work of the first. This desire for narrative readability Mably finds fulfilled in Caesar's History of the Gallic Wars: 'I move forward with rapidity, and experience none of that fatigue and languor which are occasioned by the narrator who doubts, and hesitates at every step, and sees only by halves, or under perplexed points of view, the causes of the facts which he relates.'26 Such a narrative design, supported by the teleological premise of an 'ultimate point' (the sense of an ending), would guarantee continuity and, above all, order, which, as Mably claimed, 'is, of all points

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whatsoever, the most necessary to the composition of a work'. The sovereign need for order is explained by Mably in an important sentence : 'The Historian bends under the prodigious weight of his materials; and, if he cannot so arrange them as to form out of the whole one regular edifice, I shall lose myself in a labyrinth from whence no path is open to favour my escape.' 27 Is this not precisely the poet's burden as well? Intimidated by the prodigious weight of the ancient fictions, Keats will endeavour to unwrite (unravel) the labyrinthine mode of Endymion and erect in its place a monumental edifice adequate to that formal lucidity which is constitutive of antiquity itself. Tor the want of due order', says another writer, 'no compensation can be made, and every arrangement that breaks the detail improperly, defeats the purpose of all arrangement, which is perspicuity.'28 Nothing less than the saving perspicuity of form can withstand the pressure and oppression of history. Interestingly enough, it is in Robertson's History of America, one of the texts known to Keats, that Mably finds 'all Order is overthrown'.29 Gibbon himself was aware of the threat of history oppressing the writer as an insupportable burden. For example, he observes that 'the age of the great Constantine and his sons is filled with important events; but the historian must be oppressed by their number and variety, unless he diligently separates from each other the scenes which are connected only by the order of time'. 30 Gibbon's exemplary diligence in this respect was duly acknowledged by one of his readers : 'He is often obliged to collect scattered and imperfect hints from a great variety of sources, some of which are not of the purest kind; notwithstanding this, the narrative he forms from them is of so clear, distinct, and satisfactory a nature, as to do great honour to his discernment and penetration.' 31 Another review likewise focuses on the question of narrative method. Gibbon is favourably compared to the most readable of the ancient historians, notably Herodotus and Polybius, both of whom regard chiefly the order of events, and relate the rise, progress, and conclusion of one important action, before they proceed to other actions, depending at the same period of time. By this means, the thread of the narrative remains unbroken; the attention of the reader is kept awake; his affections are engaged; he sees the dependence of events on each other; and when he has finished his perusal

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of the work, he can look back with pleasure, recollect the order and connection of the several parts, and contemplate the symmetry and beauty of the whole. To this . . . mode of historical composition, the ancient critics universally gave the preference; and it is this mode which Mr. Gibbon has followed, with uncommon industry, and singular success. Commitment to the 'symmetry and beauty of the whole' is evidently the sovereign condition for that formal mastery of historical perspective which Gibbon is held to have attained : In a history of such extent and compass as that of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which the transactions of distant ages and remote countries verge to one point, and conspire to one end, he is often obliged to look back, and to anticipate, to combine in one view wide intervals of time and space, and to harmonize into one general system a variety of detached and seemingly discordant particulars.32 Gibbon has succeeded in recomposing and harmonizing the fragmentary events of history into the systematic structure of a frame, the effect of which is similar to Hazlitt's view of Raphael's Cartoons : 'We look through a frame, and see scripture-histories, and are made actual spectators of miraculous events.' 33 The (w)hole becomes an aperture through which we can see history. Scriptural or secular, Gibbon's History represents the triumph of narrative in monumentalizing the past as a visible text. From the concept of history as narrative it is, then, but a small step to the premise of formal artistic unity in the historical text. And it has been suggested that the genre most congenial to this structuring of history, for writers at the end of the eighteenth century, was the epic. The epic status of historical narrative allows the parergonal to coexist and harmonize with the writer's clearly defined central theme. 'Though he is not allowed to fabricate', says one writer, the historian 'is required to embellish. His ornaments, by being the genuine, though the best dress of his materials, must fix the reader's attention, without misleading his judgement.' 34 Concluding his account of Gibbon's History, the critic for the Monthly Review presumes that any well-versed reader would be delighted by an author 'who pours from his horn of plenty the treasures of distant ages, and remote countries; whose images are borrowed sometimes from the Gothic tournaments, and sometimes from the games of Greece; and whose fancy has been ennobled by the sublimity of Homer, and

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enriched by the luxuriance of Ariosto'. 35 Gibbon's work is evidently lauded for possessing qualities which are usually attributed to epic poetry. The source of this modern version of epic sublimity is to be found in 'the treasures of distant ages, and remote countries', in the felicitous doubling of classical and Gothic, Homer and Ariosto. Similarly, one of the 'great excellencies' of Adam Ferguson's History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) was, apparently, its tendency to affect the reader 'with high ideas of heroic virtue, and with the admiration of that energy of mind, and greatness of character, of which the annals of modern ages afford so few examples'. 36 In the references to 'heroic virtue', 'energy of mind', and 'greatness of character', we catch the tone of epic morality, a hankering after the sublime ethos of antiquity. Hayden White's proposition, that 'the Epic form . . . was not suited to the representation of historical events', would thus seem to be contradicted time and again by arguments for the radical involvement of epic poetry with history.37 The notion that 'the Epic Poem is but a Kind of fabulous History* became a commonplace.38 After all, the greatest poetry is ancient, and speaks about ancient things : It is by poetry that the characters and manners of remote ages are best and most truly preserved. Had they no other merit, Homer's works would be invaluable on the single account of the pictures of the manners of the remotest antiquity, and which we may be assured are drawn from nature.39 Thus Gibbon, exponent of an ostensibly 'rational' discourse, is not averse to bringing classical mythology into the service of 'historical truth'. Speaking of Tauris, he observes that on that hospitable shore, Euripides, embellishing with exquisite art the tales of antiquity, has placed the scene of one of his most affecting tragedies. The bloody sacrifices of Diana, the arrival of Orestes and Pylades, and the triumph of virtue and religion over savage fierceness, serve to represent an historical truth, that the Tauri, the original inhabitants of the peninsula, were, in some degree, reclaimed from their brutal manners, by a gradual intercourse with the Grecian colonies, which settled along the maritime coast.40 What Gibbon represents as an historical truth depends on a two-fold act of parergonal mediation : between historian and ancient text, and between that text and the anterior fictions upon

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which it is based. In this way does the epic historian embellish his theme. Recognition of the immense anthropological and historical value of ancient poetry (Homer in particular) goes back at least to Thomas Blackwell's Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) and to the work of Vico in Italy. 41 But the specific emphasis is on the notion that historiography (the 'art' of history) might have originated from epic poetry : As poetry is the first language of mankind, the first historians are poets. The bards, and the minstrels, who flourished in the dark ages of modern Europe, had their counter part in antiquity. They relate real events, though adorned with the colouring of fancy. History still appeals to Homer.42 Another writer went so far as to claim that cnot only the Greek writers gave a concurrent testimony concerning the priority of historical Verse to Prose; but the records of all nations unite in confirming it'. 43 It was perhaps inevitable that Herodotus, the 'historical poet',44 should have been extolled as the logical successor to Homer. 'His mode of composition', observed John Gillies, 'may be regarded as the intermediate shade between Epic poetry and history.'45 The narrations of Herodotus were also treated to a lengthy accolade by Lord Monboddo. 46 The idea of an original kinship between history and poetry is summarized by the Irish academic historian, Michael Kearney. He suggests that history's most early appearance seems to have been in poetical dress. Poetry is the natural expression of that ardour of affections, and vigour of imagination, which prevailed in the beginning of society; and history offered a subject well suited to the animated form it first assumed. Nothing was so likely to call forth the enthusiasm of the first bards as the achievements of their ancestors, the heroes of their tribes. . . . Imperfect as these first historical essays were, yet in some respects they were preferable to the more circumstantial chronicles that succeeded them; which, confined to a dry meagre detail of events, by no means displayed so just a picture of manners as the other.47 Recognizing the possible superiority of epic over chronological history, Kearney moves tentatively towards Mably's point that 'style is an essential part of History'. 48 It is a notion more amply and eloquently developed by Herder ;

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The philosophy of history belongs particularly to Greece; for the greeks alone possessed what might properly be called history. The orientals had their genealogies and fables; the northern nations, their tales; others, their poems: the greeks, in process of time, formed from tales, poems, fables, and genealogies, the sound body of a narrative, through all the members of which the current of vitality flows. Here, too, it's ancient poetry led the way, for it is not easy to relate a fable in a more pleasing manner, than was done in the epic poem: the division of the subject into rhapsodies introduced similar pauses in history, and the long hexameter was well adopted soon to form the melody of historical prose. Thus Herodotus succeeded Homer.49 It would seem that 'what might properly be called history' is for Herder precisely the writing of history, its representation as a narrative which would recover not only its themes from epic poetry but its form as well. The 'rhapsodies' of the epic cycle would be repeated in the episodes into which historical time divides itself, while the diction of epic would seem uniquely congenial to the discourse of historical narrative. This intimate formal affinity between epic and history will again be celebrated in Schelling's claim that true historiography 'depends on a synthesis of the given, the real, and the ideal; in the realm, however, not of philosophy, but of art - and only art'. 50 The artful coalescence of epic and history is reaffirmed by an appeal to what I would call the teleology of form. 'The first rule of History', asserts Mably, 'is to proceed rapidly to the end in view.'51 Omit the end, and we return to the possibility of the deviousness of arabesque, the subversive hovering of Endymion. Mably insists on precisely that undeviating march of narrative which Keats desires for Hyperion : This unity of action and of interest so strongly recommended to the Epic Poet, if he means that we should actually become a kind of parties concerned in all the enterprizes of his Hero, is not less necessary for the Historian: for, it is founded even upon the nature of the human mind which cannot employ itself on several objects at the same time, but must divide its attention, and consequently, feel a less animated impression, grow tired, perplexed, disgusted, and, at length, derive no benefit whatsoever from its application. Homer makes me interested in the return of Ulysses to Ithaca; and Virgil inspires me with an earnest anxiety for the establishment of Aeneas in Italy. They never forget that this is the great end of their Poem and, in order to rivet my attention they frequently

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recur to it. So, the Historian should never suffer me to lose sight of that point to which he has promised to conduct me. Then History becomes a kind of Epic Poem. It proceeds to its great mark through those impediments which are opposed against it by passions and the events of fortune.52 It is the fear of a chaotic wandering (the mind confronted by 'several objects at the time time') which enforces the necessity of a purposive, rectilinear thrust in the historian's narrative, a repression of discontinuity and obstacle ('impediments') through the saving fiction of a progressive teleology tending towards one 'great end'. Gibbon is also sensitive to the formal threat posed by the 'excursive line' (excursive : that which is beyond or outside the curved frame of narrative). Having observed that 'the fate of the Byzantine monarchy is passively connected with the most splendid and important revolutions which have changed the state of the world', he goes on to propose that it is in these new conquests that we must explore the causes and effects of the decline and fall of the eastern empire. Nor will this scope of narrative, the riches and variety of these materials, be incompatible with the unity of design and composition. . . . The historian's eye shall be always fixed on the city of Constantinople. The excursive line may embrace the wilds of Arabia and Tartary, but the circle will be ultimately reduced to the decreasing limit of the Roman monarchy.53 Desiring to maintain the fiction of a determinate teleology, Gibbon adopts the redeeming images of the circle and the centre in order to establish a frame for the rich variety of his materials, without which the narrative would break and scatter into a maze, a labyrinth of fragmentary excursions. Constantinople becomes the centre of a mythic, circular geography, whose perimeter ('the wilds of Arabia and Tartary' : beyond Arabia hovers the arabesque) represents the formal limits of narrative possibility. A final, explicit statement on the teleology of form emerges from the following comparison between Tacitus and Livy. Arthur Murphy's translation of The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, in four volumes (1793), invited the comment that as works of art, the histories of Tacitus . . . want the unity of design, the wholeness, the perpetual bearing on one great point, which is so beautifully managed in Livy, and which gives to his performance the majestic march and connected interest of an epic poem. . . . They are but a succession of scenes, each perfect in its

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kind and intensely interesting, but hanging together only by a chronological link, and not tending to one mighty catastrophe.54 This brief passage lucidly summarizes that grid of relations which the preceding observations have sought to uncover: the assumption that historical narratives can, indeed, be read as 'works of art 5 ; an emphasis on 'unity of design' and 'connected interest'; a commitment to the principle of 'wholeness'; the superiority of the teleological premise (a 'perpetual bearing on one great point', a 'majestic march' towards 'one mighty catastrophe') over the mere 'chronological link'. Such language, one might say, desires to speak a veritable ideology of form.

in

The question of form becomes a central problem in the writing of Hyperion. His reading of Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians would have reminded Keats, after the vagaries of Endymion, of the sovereign principle of formal coherence, if his narrative was to be undeviating in its redemption of ancient modes. Whereas the flowers of speech in Endymion had refused to settle into a frame within which the modern poet might happily inscribe his tribute to the beautiful mythology of Greece, the naked Grecian manner of Hyperion would endeavour to raise a monument to the formal perfection of antiquity by celebrating its own formal lucidity. Even if modern discourse were to find the content of the ancient fictions closed and untranslatable, nevertheless it might still be possible to recuperate antiquity in terms of form - of which, said a contemporary writer, the Greeks were 'unrivalled arbiters'. 55 According to Richard Woodhouse, Hyperion 'is that in poetry which the Elgin and Egyptian Marbles are in Sculpture'. 56 Byron called Hyperion 'a fine monument', while De Quincey imagined the poem representing 'the majesty, the austere beauty, and the simplicity of a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture'.57 More recently we have been invited to see Keats's epic as 'so thoroughly objectified as to assume the coolness of monumental sculpture'. 58 Yet the monumentality of Hyperion undermines itself in a startling way. The narrative remains unaccomplished : the text is a fragment, a diasparactive form (to

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borrow Thomas McFarland's special phrase). Immediately, then, the expectation of coherence and wholeness becomes complicated. The epic-as-fragment would seem to contradict the formal legacy of Enlightenment historiography, which had repressed any suggestion of discontinuity and fragmentation in order to privilege the related forms of 'series' and 'whole'. 'History is vague and shadowy', remarked Hazlitt, 'but sculpture gives life and body to it.' 60 Writers had been governed by a profound trust in the ability of narrative to release the hitherto unwritten text of history into discourse, to sculpture and embody the past as form so that the reader might gaze through the text at the 'whole edifice of antiquity'. 61 The historian, said Lucian, 'may be compared to Phidias, Praxiteles, Alcamenus'. Just as these 'eminent artists' give form to random materials, so the aim of the historian is 'to dispose and adorn the actions of men, and to make them known with clearness, and precision'. 62 Thus an historical narrative inscribes itself as a monument within the vast, blank space of history, with the historian himself assuming the guise of an elegant sculptor : Gibbon was praised by William Hayley because, 'Tho' rude materials Time's deep trenches fill,/ A radiant structure rises from thy skill.'63 Recalling Mably's image of 'one regular edifice', a reader of Gillies's History of Ancient Greece demanded that historical narrative should erect 'a regular structure, judiciously designed, and solidly compacted'. 64 But what if the scattered members of Grecian story refuse to compose themselves as an unbroken narrative, remaining instead as isolated fragments, 'remnants huge' {Hyperion, 1, 281) which defy systematic recuperation? According to Richard Woodhouse, Keats's epic 'would have treated the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the Sun, by Apollo - and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn's re-establishment with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome'. 65 But Woodhouse's account of the original plan bears even less relation to the actual poem than Keats's account of the Shepherd of Latmus (in his letter to Fanny) had done to Endymion. As a monument unaccomplished and disfigured, poised on the very threshold of narrative, Hyperion poses certain questions that challenge the assumption of narrative's capacity to monumentalize history. The first readers of Hyperion seem to have been impressed by

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the poem's fragmentary form. For Leigh Hunt it was 'a fragment - a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desert'. 66 J. H. Reynolds was to refer to 'the marvellous fragment of Hyperion'. 67 The 'fragment of Hyperion'', said Byron, 'seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Aeschylus' - a notion echoed in another description of the poem as 'a giant in ruins'. 68 By 1845 these observations had become commonplace : Hyperion is the greatest of poetical Torsos . . . It is perhaps better that it remains a fragment. Had only the two first Books of Paradise Lost come down to us, we question if they had not impressed us with a higher opinion of the author's powers than the completed work. Such magnificent mutilations are regarded with a complex emotion, composed of admiration, expectation, and regret.69 But I would say that the text's significance as an emblem of ruin is not simply attributable to the fact that it is unfinished. Hyperion manifests Keats's diasparactive sensibility in a more radical way. Is it possible to speak of the poem as internally fragmented, the text fragmenting itself from within, as it were, decomposing itself in the very act of composition? According to one critic, Keats had not 'evinced any want of taste in leaving it incomplete'.70 And it has been suggested that Keats himself refused to complete the poem - which was also the fate of 'a fragment of a poem' on Fingal's Cave, which, as Charles Brown recalled, 'I never could induce him to finish'.71 Perhaps a consequence of writing Endymion had been to remind Keats of the alternative form of an undeviating, monumental narrative. But it may also be that his reading of the Enlightenment historians exposed for Keats the ideology of impersonal ('objective') narration even while these texts seemed to honour it. So does the fragment of Hyperion expose the poet's own nostalgia in hankering after a narrative style which is, in some essential way, no longer available or adequate? 'In wishing to escape an adolescent style, that of Endymion, was Keats duped into an obsolescent one?' 72 In which case, Hyperion proceeds to deconstruct not only those monumental epic narratives (of Gibbon and Milton) which had served as models for the poem, but also the poet's own desire for a form which would be blissfully undeviating in its representation of the ancient fictions. What had begun, in Endymion, as a disruption of the formal hierarchy of whole and part, now emerges more provocatively as the insistence of the fragment - its explicit challenge to the authority of those very texts which had been present, so to speak, at the poem's inception.

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IV

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung above his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.

(1, 1-14)

'Deep' : with this initial cadence Hyperion seeks to enter the space of antiquity and its fictions. Keats's desire to 'occupy space effectively'73 issues in the endeavour to frame his theme in the way that a writer of history might frame past events and organize them into a coherent whole. The language mimes, once again, an 'originatory action',74 which will establish the poet within a fictive space of origins (the epic landscape of antiquity) and so clear a path for the undeviating march of narrative. The Titans themselves belong to Keats's originatory language. According to Edward Davies, the 'old poets' had 'regarded the Titans as the original and primitive race of mankind5.75 'The more ancient Gods', speculates Baldwin, 'seem to be merely names for the conceptions of the mind, and an explanation, partly poetical, and partly philosophical, of the origin of things.'76 Keats's landscape of mythic origins has been read from a different perspective. On the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin, Kenneth Clark has written that 'one cannot look at these valleys, with their overhanging forests and voiceless streams . . . without being reminded of the opening of Hyperion*.71 It was Poussin who impressed Hazlitt as a painter of beginnings. In the Education of Jupiter, for example, 'we are thrown back into the infancy of mythological lore'. Discussing 'a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin', Hazlitt remarks how 'one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter's canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things'.78 Is this not precisely the endeavour of Hyperion at its beginning, to speak the 'first integrity of things' and so establish its own integrity as an epic poem of high and sublime seriousness?

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Yet the formal gravity of the poem's beginning immediately begins to deconstruct itself. In his annotations to Paradise Lost, Keats observes that 'there is always a great charm in the openings of great Poems. . . . The first step must be heroic and full of power and nothing can be more impressive and shaded than the commencement of the action.'79 No modern poem, perhaps, is as burdened by the gravity of beginnings as Hyperion. But it is an ambivalent gravity, for the poem's beginning witnesses not the commencement but the end of action : the war is over, the Titans have been vanquished. Starting not in medias res but rather on the threshold of absence and loss, the poem's beginning acquires, by an ironic paradox, a premature sense of an ending. The poem emerges into a scene of inaction, immobility, silence. From the very beginning, then, Keats's epic threatens to collapse under an impossible contradiction : how can a narrative move beyond its origin when that origin is itself both beginning and end, start and finish squeezed together to a point where nothing might intervene, a vortex of narrative absence? The promise of undeviating progression inspired by 'Deep' turns ironically back upon itself, threatening instead a motion of infinite regression, backwards and inwards in the direction of a centre which is no centre but rather a lack, indeed an abyss. Once again, it seems, the poet is confronted with a vacancy, a bare circumstance which he must endeavour to fill with poetry. Either the frame does not fit, or else it is an illusion. Tar sunken from the healthy breath of morn', from the 'fiery noon' and 'eve's one star', the poem's landscape seems to witness the annihilation of time itself, reminding us of Saturn's loss of power. After all, Saturn and Time may be 'considered as the same deity, the Greek names for each differing only in a single letter; Kpovos being Greek for Saturn, and XPOVOS f° r Time'. 80 But the poem itself cannot escape the temporal and this is, essentially, a twilight of the gods. The paradoxical juxtaposition of beginning and end (dawn and twilight) is suggested in another of Hazlitt's references to Poussin. To go back in history is, we recall, to imagine its 'infancy', the 'first integrity of things'. But elsewhere Hazlitt says of Poussin's landscapes that 'they carry the imagination back two or four thousand years at least, and bury it in the remote twilight of history'. In the essay, 'On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin', Hazlitt joins in one sentence the images of 'the world in its first naked glory' and 'the gravity of

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history stamped on the proud monuments of vanished empire'. Speaking of the 'weight and concentration of historic feeling' in Claude Lorrain's Morning of the Roman Empire, Hazlitt observes how 'half-finished buildings and massy columns rise amidst the dawning effulgence that is streaked with rims of inextinguishable light'. 81 By a strange paradox, then, the landscape of beginnings is also the space of ruin and decay - as though the activity of temporal reconstruction involved the burial of the imagination under the monumental burdens of history. According to Jacob Bryant, it was precisely this dual nature, incorporating beginning and end, which characterized ancient representations of 'grayhair'd Saturn' : He was looked upon as the author of time; and often held in his hand a serpent, whose tail was in its mouth, and formed a circle: and by this emblem they denoted the renovation of the year. They represented him as of an uncommon age, with hair white as snow; yet they had a notion that he could return to second childhood. He was also said 'to have ruined all things; which however were restored with a vast increase'. 82 Hazlitt refers to 'the order of nature' as a 'perpetual renovation and decay', and this, of course, bears some affinity to 'Nature's law' expounded by Oceanus (11, 181).83 But Hyperion represents decay and ruin while stopping short of the promise of 'vast increase' : Apollo's dying into life precipitates the poem's silence. The 'natural sculpture' to which the immobile figures of Saturn and Thea are compared (1, 86) recalls Hazlitt's comment that the main figures in Paradise Lost 'convey to us the ideas of sculpture'. Doubtless Keats owed much to Hazlitt in his reading of Milton : Satan and Saturn are certainly akin in more ways than virtual homonymity. Hazlitt's Satan is represented as a great fragment, 'the clouded ruins of a god'.84 So, too, is Keats's Saturn ('Forest on forest hung above his head/Like cloud on cloud') : Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed; While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. (1, 17-21) Saturn is, then, a thing of fragments; parts of him are magnified, but never the whole. But I would also say that as an emblem of

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silent desolation the figure of Saturn is overdetermined. If we remind ourselves that in Hyperion Keats deliberately adopts a particular voice, the epic voice of Milton, it seems more than startling to find the beginning of his version of Paradise Lost denying the presence of any voice : Saturn is 'quiet as a stone', £ A stream went voiceless by', 'the Naiad 'mid her reeds/Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips'. The last two images are particularly intriguing, since they suggest a possibility of voice which has, however, been withheld. The Naiad might speak but steadfastly refuses to do so; a flowing stream would normally make some sort of sound, yet this one, like the Naiad, maintains silence. Why these muted voices, at the moment when the poet should be celebrating the eloquence of his epic muse ? Consider, for a moment, this intimate little picture which Keats gives of himself, in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law : I am sitting with my back to [the fire] with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet - I am writing this on the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure - Besides this volume of Beaumont Sc Fletcher - there are on the table two volumes of chaucer and a new work of Tom Moores. . . . These are trifles - but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me - Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakspeare sat when he began 'To be or not to be' - such things become interesting from distance of time or place. In another letter we find this witty self-portrait: 'In all the most lively and titterly parts of my Letter you must not fail to imagine me as the epic poets say - now here, now there, now with one foot pointed at the ceiling, now with another - now with my pen on my ear, now with my elbow in my mouth.' 85 Keats is at his most winning and playful in both these passages; the initial mood of Hyperion is far from playful, but I want to suggest that the representation of Saturn might be interpreted as a grotesque image of the writer's body - either the body of Milton ('any great Man long since dead'), the old poet in all respects now dead to his modern disciple, or else, more pertinently, the body of the writer of Hyperion, unable to write, bereft of inspiration, his imagination already defeated and deadened through his homage to Milton (what more eloquent image of the poet's hand, that no longer has the energy to write, than Saturn's

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old right hand . . . nerveless, listless, dead,/Unsceptred'?). As such, the poem's opening scene anticipates Keats's own epitaph to the whole 'Hyperion' project: 'Life to [Milton] would be death to me.' 87 In his attempt to restore the Miltonic style to life, Keats is in danger of sacrificing himself to that style. And this immediate surmise, that the modern poet is threatened with death at the hands of the old writers, would seem to contradict the ostensible content of Hyperion, where age resigns to youth cby course of Nature's law' (11, 181). Or is this vision of progress a symptom of desire, a fantasy which represses the real historical situation signified in the text's opening lines? Refusing to banish their names from his lips, the dead writers stifle the voice of the modern poet, and strike him dumb at the very moment when he desires to speak the sublime. Sculpture, in Hazlitt's opinion, 'though not proper to express health or life or motion, accords admirably with the repose of the tomb; and . . . it cannot be better employed than in arresting the fleeting dust in imperishable forms, and in embodying a lifeless shadow'.88 The poet-as-sculptor seeks to raise a monument to Milton and, beyond Milton, to the even more sublime poets of antiquity. As we have just seen, however, in his very act of architectural bravado the poet deprives his text of health and life and motion; all that is left for him to do is to embody lifeless shadows. Or else we could say that the statuesque figures which people the landscape of Hyperion mock the poet's desire for sublimity insofar as they intrude as bizarre distortions of the sublime. A contemporary reviewer thought that 'the picture of the vast abode of Cybele and the Titans - and of its gigantic inhabitants, is in the sublimest style of Aeschylus'.89 But Keats's elaboration of the 'Sad sign of ruin' (1, 336) yields a sublimity manque, a sublime immobility of death which parodies the desire for a sustained 'march of passion and endeavour'. 90 'Dungeon'd in opaque element' (11, 23), the fallen Titans, like the 'sculptur'd dead' in The Eve of St. Agnes (11), seem on the point of freezing into the landscape which surrounds them : Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. (11, 33-8)

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The obvious prototype for the image of 'a dismal cirque/Of Druid stones' is Stonehenge, which Hazlitt once described as 'that "huge, dumb heap," that stands on the blasted heath, and looks like a group of giants, bewildered, not knowing what to do, encumbering the earth, and turned to stone, while in the act of warring on Heaven5.91 The uncanny resemblance of Hazlitt's language to the landscape of Hyperion scarcely needs emphasizing. What needs to be said is that Keats's bewildered Titans encumber not only the earth upon which they have fallen : they encumber the text itself. As emblems of ruin they help to divert and immobilize the undeviating march of narrative. The landscape of the fallen Titans invites closer attention : It was a den where no insulting light Could glimmer on their tears; where their own groans They felt, but heard not, for the solid roar Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where. Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem'd Ever as if just rising from a sleep, Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns; And thus in thousand hugest phantasies Made a fit roofing to this nest of woe. Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon, Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge Stubborn'd with iron. All were not assembled: Some chain'd in torture, and some wandering. Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareus, Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion, With many more, the brawniest in assault, Were pent in regions of laborious breath; Dungeon'd in opaque element, to keep Their clenched teeth still clench'd, and all their limbs Lock'd up like veins of metal, crampt and screw'd; Without a motion, save of their big hearts Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls'd With sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse.

Creus was one; his ponderous iron mace Lay by him, and a shatter'd rib of rock Told of his rage, ere he thus sank and pined. Iapetus another; in his grasp, A serpent's plashy neck; its barbed tongue

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Squeez'd from the gorge, and all its uncurl'd length Dead; and because the creature could not spit Its poison in the eyes of conquering Jove. Next Cottus: prone he lay, chin uppermost, As though in pain; for still upon the flint He ground severe his skull, with open mouth And eyes at horrid working. (n, 5-28, 41-55) Harold Bloom has spoken of Hyperion as burdened by 'tropes of overrepresentation' : the poem's language 'tries to be stronger than the poem's language can sustain being'. 92 This passage might be cited to prove Bloom's point. Never does the poet seem to have expended so much work on his rhetoric. Yet what is this laboured scene if not a monstrous 'demonstration of history'? 93 If Hyperion is like a 'ruin in the desert' (Hunt), then this 'blighted moonscape' situates itself within the text as a blurred reflection of that desert, which is the desert of history itself.94 Nicolas Poussin was able 'to transport the imagination two thousand years back, to give natural objects a sympathy with preternatural events',95 and it is, of course, the 'preternatural events' of a mythic history which Hyperion endeavours to represent within its narrative frame. But I would say that the fragmented, wasted terrain occupied by the Titans parodies a certain conception of the landscape of history. Hazlitt begins the third of his Lectures on the English Poets (on Shakespeare and Milton) by comparing the notion of 'progress' in science and in art: 'This is the peculiar distinction and privilege of each, of science and of art: - of the one, never to attain its utmost limit of perfection; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once.' Labouring under a sense of its own belatedness, Hyperion repeats but also questions Hazlitt's vision of an implicitly benign anteriority : Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, and Ariosto, (Milton alone was of a later age, and not the worse for it) - Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek sculptors and tragedians, - all lived near the beginning of their arts - perfected, and all but created them. These giant-sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows; and the long line of their successors, in different ages, does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty they have not been surpassed.96 Are not Keats's Titans grotesque and violent distortions of his monumentalized precursors, those 'giant-sons of genius' who do

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not preside over the belated poet in the lucidity of grace and beauty but rather intrude as ghostly apparitions, 'spectral symbols' of a nightmarishly 'disproportionate size' ?97 It may be that ruins 'convey the perspective of time', 98 but for Keats the perspective becomes clouded and disrupted, a kaleidoscope of bewildering forms which interpose to obstruct his view. Instead of obeying the fertile progress of a 'stream which is forever flowing',99 history threatens to swamp and drown the poet with its 'thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse' (n, 8), or else to imprison him within its 'opaque element'. The Titans are represented as captives within what Keats was to call, in another context, 'the prison house of history'.100 Their fate is that of the poet as well. In seeking to redeem 'the grand, moribund symbols of the sublime mode', 101 Keats enters a graveyard of fragmentary monuments which threaten to crush him and his poem by their deadly immensity. If 'the rout in Heaven is like the fall of some mighty structure', 102 the fall implies the collapse of the structure of the narrative itself. Hyperion endeavours to raise a monument to the mighty models of the past, yet finally comes to rest as an epitaph to its own fragmentation.

The prison house of history in which the poet and his Titans are trapped is also a prison house of language. The condition of virtual aphasia imagined at the beginning of Hyperion extends to the Titans themselves, whose 'actions' are more or less confined to an effort to recover their voice?. In the middle of silence we overhear speeches, issuing from Thea's 'solemn tenour and deep organ tone' (i, 48), the 'region-whisper' of Goelus (1, 349), the 'murmurs' of Oceanus (11, 171), Clymene's 'hectic lips' (11, 250), the 'ponderous syllables' of Enceladus (11, 305). 'Speak! roar! shout! yell! ye sleepy Titans all' (11, 316) - thus Enceladus, admonishing the 'Giant-Gods' for their lethargy. By the end of Book 11, the initial aphasia has given way to the briefest concert of voices: There those four shouted forth old Saturn's name; Hyperion from the peak loud answered, "Saturn!" Saturn sat near the Mother of the Gods, In whose face was no joy, though all the Gods Gave from their hollow throats the name of "Saturn!" (11, 387-9O

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It is interesting that Book 11 should end in this way. I suggested earlier that the representation of Saturn at the beginning of Hyperion was overdetermined, insofar as the image invited us to think not only of Milton's Satan but also of Milton and of Keats as well. The repeated name of 'Saturn' at the end of Book 11 obviously echoes 'Satan' - but might it also echo, In a distorted form, the name 'behind' Satan, the repressed name of Milton - the name which has hitherto been on the poet's lips but which is soon to be banished thence? Thus the Titans' release from their aphasia parallels the release of the poet's voice from the Miltonic prison house of language. Hence the feeling of liberation with which Book in opens : Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace, Amazed were those Titans utterly. O leave them, Muse! O leave them to their woes; For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire: A solitary sorrow best befits Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief. Leave them, O Muse! for thou anon wilt find Many a fallen old Divinity Wandering in vain about bewildered shores. Meantime touch piously the Delphic harp, And not a wind of heaven but will breathe In aid soft warble from the Dorian flute; For lo! 'tis for the Father of all verse. Flush every thing that hath a vermeil hue, Let the rose glow intense and warm the air, And let the clouds of even and of morn Float in voluptuous fleeces o'er the hills; Let the red wine within the goblet boil, Cold as a bubbling well; let faint-lipp'd shells, On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris'd. (111, 1-22) Here, once more, are health and life and motion. Instead of voiceless streams the poet imagines bubbling wells; instead of dead leaves, roses glowing intense and warm. The reticent Naiad becomes a blushing maid, her reeds now emit sound (the 'soft warble' of a Dorian flute). Critics have felt uneasy about Keats's return to what Hazlitt called 'the enamelled ground of fairy fiction',103 to a parergonal style reminiscent of Endymion - as though the difficult labours of the first two books were somehow

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good for the young poet's development (equivalent, indeed, to learning Latin). Yet Richard Woodhouse recalls that Keats was particularly happy with the description of Apollo in Book in. 104 The syllables uttered from Apollo's 'white melodious throat' (in, 81) promise another voice, a 'new tuneful wonder' (m, 67) which might at last banish the tuneless numbers of the Miltonic style. So perhaps the restoration of Apollo as the golden theme is less a regression than a release, a moment of tact and insight in which the modern poet saves his integrity by acknowledging the impossibility of ever sustaining authentic epic monumentality for his belated poem.105 As Clymene had already testified (11, 270-94), the landscape of Book HI is full of beautiful sounds: Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, (in, 38-40) Apollo speaks 'melodiously' (in, 49), and he begins to hear 'sovran voices' (m, 115). Yet the narrative ends, abruptly, with a shriek (in, 135), and with that discordant sound we are forcefully returned to an awareness of the text-as-fragment. Interrupting the undeviating march of narrative, Book in intervenes, precisely, as a deviation, a further swerve within the unaccomplished text. Hazlitt refers to the first two books of Paradise Lost as 'two massy pillars of solid gold'.106 The first two books of Hyperion are erected as the foundations for the structure of Keats's projected epic, but the deviant third book breaks the frame, fragments the edifice. We recall De Quincey's comparison of the poem to 'a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture'. But the massy pillars of the first two books are embellished with a fragment of sculpture which does not enrich but, rather, deviously and ironically exposes the sterility of this revision of the Miltonic sublime. In seeking to rid the text of Milton's name, the new voice discovered in Book 111 also undermines the whole project of Hyperion. The foundations to the poem are as sandy as they had been for Endymion.107 Keats's desire to load every rift of his epic subject with the sculptured plenitude of a monumental style cannot, in the end, conceal the rift which divides ancient and modern. Across that rift echoes Apollo's shriek. And then, silence; perhaps the fragment has, after all, turned full circle.

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VI

On more than one occasion we have seen Hyperion compared to the sublime style of Aeschylus. Friedrich Schlegel had this to say about the most ancient of Greek dramatists : The subjection of the old gods and Titans - and the history of that lofty race being subdued and enslaved by a meaner and less worthy generation - these are the great points to which almost all his narrations and all his catastrophes may be referred. . . . Yet in the midst of the ruins and fragments of a perishing world, he delights to astonish us now and then with a view of that old gigantic strength.108 Hyperion endeavours to monumentalize the gigantic strength of the ancient fictions, but Keats's view of antiquity becomes increasingly clouded by the fictions themselves, which emerge as ruins and fragments of a landscape on the verge of perishing and dissolving into an abyss. Hazlitt's early Round Table view of antiquity seems contrastingly benign : As we shape towers, and men, and armed steeds, out of the broken clouds that glitter in the distant horizon, so, throned above the ruins of the ancient world, Jupiter still nods sublime on the top of blue Olympus, Hercules leans upon his club, Apollo has not laid aside his bow, nor Neptune his trident; the sea-gods ride upon the sounding waves, the long procession of heroes and demigods passes in endless review before us.109 But the ruinous elements within Hyperion disclose the space between, the void which can scarcely be concealed by the proliferation of fragments. Instead of a 'long procession' and 'endless review', the belated poet is allowed only brief glimpses of antiquity's pageant, a distorted vision alternating between fragment and vacancy. Or rather, the fragment is always threatening to 'invaginate' back into vacancy. 110 Although Keats had not yet started to write Hyperion at the time of his tour through Scotland with Charles Brown, the poem's conception had been with him for several months. 111 The northern landscape was not always to his taste ('the Clouds, the sky, the Houses, all seem anti Grecian & anti Charlemagnish'), 112 but Scotland had natural sublimities to which the imagination could respond. Here is Keats's depiction of Fingal's Cave : It is entirely a hollowing out of Basalt Pillars. Suppose now the Giants who rebelled against Jove had taken a whole Mass of black Columns and bound them together like bunches of matches - and

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then with immense Axes had made a cavern in the body of these columns - of course the roof and floor must be composed of the broken ends of the Columns - such is fingal's Cave except that the Sea has done the work of excavations and is continually dashing there. . . . The length of the Cave is 130 feet and from its extremity the view into the sea through the large Arch at the entrance. . . . For solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest Cathedrall At the extremity of the Cave there is a small perforation into another cave.113 The Titans enter a scene in which the dominant figure is one of pillars or columns hollowed out into caverns and perforations. And such, perhaps, is the contradictory structure of Hyperion an edifice whose roof and floor are composed of broken ends of hollow columns. Is not the 'whole Mass' constituting the voluminous monumentality of Hyperion in reality a mass of holes, a perforated landscape of vanished plenitude which has already been quarried and excavated long before the poet's arrival and which now survives only as a desert of huge remnants and 'sad spaces of oblivion' (11, 359) ? 'Talking of chasms,' wrote Keats, after climbing Ben Nevis, they are the finest wonder of the whole - they appear great rents in the very heart of the mountain though they are not, being at the side of it, but other huge crags arising round it give the appearance to Nevis of a shattered heart or Core in itself - These Chasms are 1500 feet in depth and are the most tremendous places I have ever seen - they turn one giddy if you choose to give way to i t . . . . Sometimes these chasms are tolerably clear, sometimes there is a misty cloud which seems to steam up and sometimes they are entirely smothered with clouds.114 Again the text suggests an absence at the centre of the sublime (the mountain appearing with 'a shattered heart or Gore in itself). The whole structure of antiquity which Keats had desired to represent in the naked Grecian manner of Hyperion becomes a hole-structure, a 'deformed gigantic edifice' floating over a chasm or abyss.115 The 'scotch Mist' which the poet had feared from Endymion now lingers unexpectedly in Hyperion,11* teasing the poet's vision as it teases him on the top of Ben Nevis : After a little time the Mist cleared away but still there were large Clouds about attracted by old Ben to a certain distance so as to form as it appeared large dome curtains which kept sailing about, opening and shutting at intervals here and there and everywhere; so that although we did not see one vast wide extent of prospect

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all round we saw something perhaps finer - these cloud-veils opening with a dissolving motion and showing us the mountainous region beneath as through a loop hole - these Mouldy loop holes ever varying and discovering fresh prospect east, west north and South - Then it was misty again and again it was fair - then puff came a cold breeze of wind and bared a craggy chap we had not yet seen though in close neighbourhood.117 What appeals to the poet here as 'something perhaps finer' ('I have an amazing partiality for mountains in the clouds')118 is repeated more ambiguously in Hyperion, as a kaleidoscope of chiaroscuro effects in which brightness and darkness, light and shade, consort uneasily together, so that Hyperion appears as 'a vast shade/In midst of his own brightness' and the process of time itself is inverted in the contradictory image of 'the dusking east' (11, 372-3, 375). For the belated poet, the perspective of history remains opaque and uncertain. Keats's vision of fragments emerges from a fragmented vision, in which antiquity folds back into the space between, the trace of an interval, a loop hole. If the modern epic poem, then, can never reoccupy the original space of those sublime fictions which it endeavours to represent, it is fated to remain, for all its desired monumentality, a parergonal text, a brief inscription or 'last embellishment' (Stevens) within the silent, spectral desert of history. And there is, significantly, no structure, or parent-text, to which the parergon might safely return. Somewhat ironically, it is Paradise Lost which Coleridge praises (in a lecture of 1819) for having achieved an unrivalled measure of wholeness : 'It and it alone really possesses the Beginning, Middle, and End - the totality of a Poem or circle as distinguished from the . . . strait line of History.5 All other epic poems, whose themes are 'from History', have 'no rounded conclusion - they remain after all but a single chapter from the volume of History tho' an ornamented Chapter'. 119 Coleridge's metaphor of the ornamented chapter is an eloquent one, but even this will not suffice for Hyperion. The poem is an ornament not in the Kantian sense of parerga (a part formally assignable to a coherent whole) but in the sense of a trace, or fragment, deprived of the whole. Or a chapter deprived of its Book : for History, in spite of Gibbon, can no longer be redeemed as a monumental text. If history is nothing but a ceaseless and centreless repetition of 'Creations and destroyings' (m, 116) -

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a continuous displacement without beginning or end' 120 - then the history of fictions is the history of fragments, of fragmentary deviations from other fragments, played out in a misty landscape in which the supreme fiction of antiquity seems forever on the point of fading forever from view.

5

Silent forms

In this chapter I should like to concentrate primarily on the 'Ode to Psyche' and the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', with briefer detours through the projected but unfinished ode, 'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!', and the 'Ode on Indolence'. 1 Composed shortly after the abandonment of Hyperion in the spring of 1819,2 the 'Ode to Psyche' and the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' continue to situate, in a different form, the problem of antiquity's representation, which had shaped both Hyperion and Endymion. Keats now returns to the dominant trope of the early sonnets on Chapman's Homer and the Elgin Marbles, the drama of an encounter between the poet and the forms of antiquity, with its attendant shock and suggestion of epiphany. There is, however, no simple return from narrative to lyric; Keats endeavours 'to circumvent the sonnet (now so habitual to him) and to develop a longer, more flexible form'. 3 We might go further and propose that, in the longer and more flexible form of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', in particular, the poet supplements Hyperion by turning to explore the very conditions of narrative. Interrupting Keats's brief epic, the ode might be read as a prologue to what might be possible for a narrative representation of antiquity. It traces the difficult emergence of rhetoric itself, in relation to the fictions and images which it desires to reinscribe in a modern text. Or the odes might be viewed as standing to Hyperion in the same way that Milton's sonnets, according to Hazlitt, stand to Paradise Lost : 'They are like tender flowers that adorn the base of some proud Column or stately temple.' 4 As floral embellishments to the broken monument of Hyperion, the odes shape a parergonal metacommentary on the failure of narrative to reanimate the ancient fictions. Psyche, latest and loveliest of the Olympians, is a parergonal figure, insofar as her relation to the 'work' (the poem) is always 101

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tangential, never wholly accomplished. Like the Grecian urn, she is a figuration of antiquity, an emblem of Keats's supreme fiction. Yet Lempriere reminds us that 'Psyche is generally represented with the wings of a butterfly',5 and in the ode Psyche will indeed be as elusive as the butterfly in Endymion, ever likely to disappear 'fairy-quick' (n, 93). The poet's representation of Psyche is further complicated by the fact that she is a belated member of the classical Pantheon : 'You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the Goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour - and perhaps never thought of in the old religion.'6 This might explain why the poet turns to Psyche as his mediator with antiquity : 'As a human "goddess" too late for the glory of mythology, Psyche is a perfect figure for Keats's own belated age.' 7 Psyche, then, would seem to be a particularly appropriate emblem through which the poet might define his relation to antiquity. But Psyche eludes representation. Keats speaks of her 'embodied as a goddess', yet the 'Ode to Psyche' fails to embody its shaping fiction, just as the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' will fail to embody the urn and its 'leaf-fring'd legend'. Despite the eagerness of the poet's 'greeting of the Spirit', which is required for 'things semireal . . . to make them wholly exist',8 Psyche will emerge into the poem tenuously and, in the end, ironically. In a typically fertile sentence, Hazlitt observed of Raphael's depiction of Cupid and Psyche (on the ceiling of the Farnesina Palace in Rome) that the artist 'surpassed himself in a certain swelling and voluptuous grace, as if beauty grew and ripened under his touch, and the very genius of ancient fable hovered over his enamoured pencil'.9 Raphael, evidently, was able to confer sensuous form on the hovering genius of ancient fable. But Keats's poem, equally enamoured of the ancient fictions, is scarcely able to contain Psyche in the same way; her presence seems indeed to hover in the text without ever settling and establishing itself. Thus we find the 'winged Psyche5 in a hovering embrace with Cupid : 'Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu' (17). 'Fluttering among the faint Olympians' (42), Psyche hovers between presence and absence, inside and outside, on the borders of the poet's mind and of the text itself. To invoke her as the 'brightest' of the Olympians is, within the poem's complex irony, a rhetorical strategy designed to conceal

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the shadowy vagueness of Psyche, her opacity and elusiveness. Or else her brightness, like the brightness of Cynthia and Lamia, threatens overexposure of the image, its withdrawal into blank invisibility. The Grecian urn, on the other hand, appears to be Keats's most concrete and determinate emblem of antiquity. Do we not think of it as a specific image, a tangible object, a rounded whole with shape and substance? This, at least, is evident from the kind of criticism which has desired to place Keats's poem in the tradition of ekphrasis, 'the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art'. But the poem, I would say, is anything but a simple 'description', or 'verbal transposition of the sensuous appearance of a Greek urn'. 10 For the urn will tease both poet and reader to the extent that it refuses to be aligned with any such tradition. To describe and transpose is precisely what the poem's discourse fails to do; it can only question and hesitatingly surmise. Burdened by the familiar difficulty of representation, discourse can scarcely release the urn into the riper dimensions of sensuous, objective being. 'Most of the odes', says Geoffrey Hartman, 'are a feverish quest to enter the life of a pictured scene, to be totally where the imagination is.'11 This would seem particularly true of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. For Keats, however, the scene of antiquity always threatens to turn into a screen, a blankness that obscures the poet's sight (site) of his supreme fiction. Far from providing 'the classic example of iconic verse', the ode remains fraught with difficulty in its 'picture-pondering', as the poet seeks vainly to enter the landscape of his imaginary scene.12 n

The opening lines of the 'Ode to Psyche' imagine an exclusive intimacy between poet and goddess : O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear, And pardon that thy secrets should be sung Even into thine own soft-conched ear. ( 1-4) And the subsequent tableau, of Psyche and Cupid 'couched side by side/In deepest grass' (9-10), might be read as an elaborate fantasy of this desired intimacy between poet and muse (in his commentary on Apuleius's version of the fable of Cupid and

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Psyche, Thomas Taylor observed that Psyche's 'invisible husband' is a symbol of 'pure desire').13 But we find the poet's 'tuneless numbers' curiously echoing back the goddess's 'secrets', as though these secrets which the goddess had presumably passed on to the privileged poet could only ever be relayed back to the goddess's 'soft-conched ear'. If Psyche is the source of quasidivine secrets, the gift of inspiration which she bestows on the poet seems only able to express itself as repetition - not repetition in a finer tone, but a repetition which is 'tuneless', less fine than the original. The rest of the poem seeks to liberate itself from the potential sterility of tuneless repetition, yet it will only be able to do so by elevating the poet's own voice at the expense of Psyche's. The 'Ode to Psyche' and the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' both disclose the poet's desire to make his supreme fiction audible; in each case, however, it is the poet's own voice which must somehow compensate for the object's intractable silence. The ode manque, 'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!', also reflects a concern for voice, and it may at this point be useful to see how this fragment resolves the poet's appeal to antiquity. Again the text yields a hint of the poet's desire for intimacy with the object of his apostrophe : Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia! May I sing to thee As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiae? Or may I woo thee In earlier Sicilian? or thy smiles Seek, as they once were sought, in Grecian isles, By bards who died content in pleasant sward, Leaving great verse unto a little clan? (1~^) The poet pretends that for his serenade there are options from which he might choose : should he adopt the voice of Virgil, or Theocritus, or Homer? It seems to be a question of finding a voice to which Maia will respond most readily, for she is, after all, an object which must be wooed and sought. In which case Maia is, despite the presumption of intimacy, no more a given presence in the poem than Psyche is in the 'Ode to Psyche'. Rather she might be an object of desire who needs to be coaxed into presence through the poet's own voice. Yet even in this brief fragment the desire itself takes on a complex form. The poem's first line harks back, obliquely, to the final moment of 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill': 'Was there a Poet born?' (241). If

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Maia is the mother of Hermes, and yet 'still youthful', might she not also be the mother of the poet himself, and allow him to be reborn into the Arcadian realm of those bards cwho died content in pleasant sward' ? In his imagination the poet becomes another Hermes, who was born, Lempriere tells us, in Arcadia, and to whom 'the invention of the lyre and its seven strings is ascribed'. 14 At the same time, however, the poem's language generates from within itself a different movement. The echo of 'Maia' in the repeated 'May F, as well as the insistent sound of T in the rhymes 'Maia' / 'Baiae', 'smiles' / 'isles', 'By .. . died', help to readjust the relation of goddess and poet, not in terms of mother and child, but indeed as the very opposite. On the level of sound 'Maia' herself is actually reborn out of the repetition of 'May I' that is how her presence is established, in the rhetorical act of the poet's song. In this sense, Maia and Psyche both stand in the same ambivalent relation to the poet. As classical fictions they are objects of desire which always seem to hover beyond the reach of the modern poet. As a way, therefore, of coming to terms with their irreducible elusiveness, the poet elaborates a compensatory fiction - the fiction that goddess or muse is finally dependent for her very existence on the authority of the poet's voice. But this fiction works more successfully (and more ironically) in the 'Ode to Psyche' than in the 'Mother of Hermes!' fragment. The 'Ode to Psyche' is a true ode insofar as it becomes a celebration; it celebrates the authority of the poet's own voice. But it is precisely here where the shorter text ceases to be an ode, and turns into an elegy. Whereas the poet's voice in the 'Ode to Psyche' gradually gains dominance, the poet's song in 'Mother of Hermes!' is finally imagined as dying away. 'O give me their old vigour' (9), pleads the poet; but rather than 'great verse' the bards' 'old vigour' inspires a song that is scarcely heard, an echo already on the point of dying away ('die away', at the end of line 12, itself dies away in the poem's concluding cadence, 'a day'). 'Content as theirs,/Rich in the simple worship of a day' (13-14) : although these concluding lines seem to register a tranquil assurance that the poet's song could indeed have participated in some kind of plenitude generated by 'old vigour', this is felt at the very moment of the song's - and the poem's extinction. The delicate conjunction of the ideas of death and 'Rich' anticipates a more famous moment in the 'Ode to a

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Nightingale' : Now more than ever seems it rich to die' (55). In both cases the moment is 'rich' because it bears witness to a plenitude on the verge of dissolving into the vacancy of death. One might say, then, that the poem's formal incompleteness endorses its theme - 'Mother of Hermes!' remains a fragment precisely because the poet's song has died away. Whereas the fragment of Hyperion pauses on the threshold of the poet's imaginative (re)birth (Apollo's dying into life), this fragment collapses the poet's birth and the death of his song into one brief moment. Any sense of prolonged imaginative life nourished by the classical fictions is elided in the poem's fragmentary form. As I have suggested, the poet's voice in the 'Ode to Psyche' does not die away, but rather increases in volume and authority. For all the conventional homage paid to her as a goddess, Psyche may be nothing more than an eloquent projection of the poet's voice, or, to put it another way, 'a pure creation of the poet's brain'.15 Psyche will be redeemed, but redeemed through rhetoric alone. The second stanza is notable for its obvious and less obvious repetitions : O latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy! Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star, Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky; Fairer than these ... (24-8) In the eyes of the poet, Psyche is, apparently, the fairest of them all. Yet an element of doubt about this statement creeps in when we remind ourselves that the repetition of 'Fairer' comes close to flattery (or consolation), and that we still hear in 'Fairer' the immediately preceding sounds of 'faded' and 'far', hinting that Psyche is still sufficiently distant to require a strenuous rhetorical effort on the part of the poet to bring her closer. Psyche's absence is then signified through a series of metonymic substitutions : ... though temple thou hast none, Nor altar heap'd with flowers; Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours; No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet From chain-swung censer teeming; No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. (28-35)

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Psyche's absence is conveyed through the repetition of negatives, 'none', 'Nor', 'no', and through the overdetermination of the apostrophic 'O' which ushers in this stanza and the next one as well ('O', the echo of 'no', is the cipher of absence, as it will also be in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'). But it is in the next stanza that the movement of negation and absence is halted and reversed by the intervention of T , the mark of the poet's voice. The presence of T is already implied in the repeated assonances of 'brightest', 'lyre', 'fire', 'retir'd', before finally coming to the surface here : 'I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired' (43). The extraordinary internal repetition of T in this line serves to establish the poet's authority once and for all. At the beginning of the ode the poet had been seen in a conventional posture of humility towards his muse; now he is fully in command. Even the subsequent repetition of 'Thy' in the rest of the stanza has the ironic rhetorical effect of echoing insistently the presence of T . So it seems that the only way to brighten the faint Olympians is for the poet to assert his own visionary and vocal authority. Yet this declaration of power has ambivalent consequences. The poet claims to be Psyche's champion, yet his benevolence is that of the despot. Psyche remains silently subservient, while the poet usurps the privilege of discourse; he is compelled to speak for his object, in the only way that remains available to his belated condition : Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep; And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in! (50-67)

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If the 'Ode to Psyche' is about 'mental life in the modern world',16 these lines enact the process whereby the ancient fictions become subsumed under the sovereignty of mental life. The space of antiquity becomes transformed into inner landscapes of the mind, where classical allusions are lulled to sleep and may perhaps never reawaken to breed the same. The 'wreath'd trellis of a working brain' spins for itself arabesques of thought, as a way of enmeshing the elusive fictions of the past. Thus it seems misleading to propose that Psyche's name 'recedes from the poem as her presence grows stronger there'. 17 Is it not, rather, that her name recedes because it is the presence of the poet's mind which grows stronger, at the expense, ironically, of the poem's founding fiction? The hovering Psyche is engulfed and all but extinguished in the recesses of the mind. It is as though the burden of the past depended for its alleviation on the modern poet clipping the wings of antiquity's fluttering fictions. The poet's inspiration signifies the expiration of Psyche. Either as gardener or lepidopterist, then, the belated poet has to subdue his fiction in order to make it manageable; he seems to cheat Psyche into submission by recreating her in the privacy of his own mind. And Psyche's clipped wings recall Hazlitt's belief that 'the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry'.18 Thus the last stanza of the 'Ode to Psyche' might be read as mapping, in brief, a history - the modern history of poetry, and the destiny of those fictions which had once made great poetry possible. At this point we should remember that both Hyperion and the odes were written during and after the time of Keats's regular attendance at Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets, at the Surrey Institution. In a sense, Hazlitt's Lectures trace the history of the decline and fall of poetry, the gradual and irreversible contraction of its once mighty empire of fictions. At the high beginning of this history stand Homer and Dante, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. At the end stands Wordsworth, the poet of mental life in the modern world. A poet like Milton, said Keats, 'did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done'. But perhaps Wordsworth is 'deeper than Milton' because 'it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind'. 19 Hazlitt was well aware that the grand march of intellect did not guarantee a progress of

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poetry, as was Friedrich Schlegel, who contemplated the 'fate and progress of poetry' as a tendency 'to descend lower and lower' from its original 'lofty flight - to approach nearer and nearer to the earth - till at last it sinks - never to rise again into the common life and citizenship of ordinary men'. 20 The final sentences of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets are reminiscent of Schlegel: I have thus gone through the task I intended, and have come at last to the level ground. I have felt my subject gradually sinking from under me as I advanced, and have been afraid of ending in nothing. The interest has unavoidably decreased at almost every successive step of the progress, like a play that has its catastrophe in the first or second act.21 The level ground of modern poetry was, in Hazlitt's view, occupied by Wordsworth, and it is significant that immediately before these concluding remarks he should quote a passage from 'Intimations of Immortality' (179-90), which ends with a reference to 'the philosophic mind'. Wordsworth's poetry, said Hazlitt, is 'not external, but internal; it does not depend upon tradition, or story, or old song; he furnishes it from his own mind, and is his own subject'.22 This ambivalent judgement would already have been familiar to Keats, from Hazlitt's essay on The Excursion in The Round Table. Wordsworth 'may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real subject.... He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought.' 23 The point about the 'Ode to Psyche' is that it suggests how the Wordsworthian mode might begin, of historical necessity, to replace more archaic modes of poetic discourse. As both classical fiction (a goddess to be worshipped) and emblem of soul or mind, Psyche might be said to situate the inevitable passage from 'external' to 'internal'. It is, however, characteristic of the ode that it should hover indeterminately, on the borders of fiction and mind, between the landscape of old song and the deep silence of thought. The poem ends, appropriately, with a threshold image. If the first stanza had projected the poet as a Cupid-figure, then the poem's final image, of 'a casement ope at night/To let the warm Love in !'3 suggests a consummation about to happen. But here the poem ends. A felicitous union is anticipated rather than realized. The 'embodiment' of Psyche remains problematic.

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Keats and Hellenism in

'Ode on a Grecian Urn' : Leigh Hunt described the ode as a poem 'on a sculptured vase',24 which is reminiscent of the eloquent image in Endymion of a 'gold vase emboss'd/With longforgotten story' (m, 126-7). Why does Hunt feel inclined to imagine Keats's poem as wrought upon something else? It may be that the poetic text itself is a parergonal trace which seeks to reinscribe itself on the silent, ineffable space of the absent image of the urn. In which case the poem is in some essential way both distanced and belated vis-a-vis the desired object of its attention. The poet's difficulty in representing the object of his attention as an accomplished image is already suggested in the poem's opening lines : Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.

( 1-4)

A desire for empathy with the object yields a language that is rich, perhaps too rich. 'In-feeling, in Keats,5 according to Hartman, 'is always on the point of overidentifying.'25 Might Keats already be in danger here of insisting too vehemently to bestow meaning on the urn, to exalt the object as signifier by overloading it with metaphor? David Simpson proposes that metaphor is 'the natural mode of expression of a mind in a state of excitement, but this excitement can be radically distorting'. As a 'trope of desire',26 the ode's inaugural metaphor appears to distort and indeed to ravish the urn's inviolable alterity. Immediately we are in the thick of a dense cluster of metaphorical associations, layers of possible meaning that perhaps call too importunately for attention. As the poet himself confesses, his rhyme will be no 'flowery tale', a floral verse that will flow undeviatingly, but will be an affair less 'sweet', more harsh and burdensome. Lines 3 and 4 have been described by John Jones as 'one of Keats's iceberg statements; the visible tip airs the vague and questionable commonplace that painting is, or can be, more eloquent than poetry; the r e s t . . . is immersed in his struggle with his chosen medium. Language is a discursive symbolism and takes time. Painting is not and does not.' The poet 'wants to write a Grecian Urn'. 27 Indeed the poet's iceberg statement

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already calls into question the overrepresented discursive symbolism of the opening two lines, thus anticipating the problematic stance of the poem as a whole. It may be that the urn is eloquent in a way that poetic discourse, even at its richest, can never be. Keats not only wants to write a Grecian urn but indeed has to write it — how else might this silent emblem of antiquity be summoned into significance? A problem, then, of expression : the poet will try to express, press out, a story (a narrative) from the urn's silent landscape. We might read further, in order to surmise the fuller implications of the poem's overrepresented beginning : What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

(5~10)

Even as perfectly symmetrical a whole as the urn cannot, it seems, prevent a two-fold parergonal deviation, a tendency towards arabesque hinted in the contrast between the perfection of the urn's imagined outline and the irregularity of the lines in the text itself. Not only is the legend 'leaf-fring'd',28 but the longforgotten story itself 'haunts about' the urn's shape, like an apparition hovering restlessly without ever being able to settle. Considering that the whole poem can be read as a parergonal inscription over an absent, or at least never completely represented, object, the 'flowery tale' at the urn's secret centre becomes displaced and 'unwritten' as an array of partial images which refuse to organize themselves into a visibly coherent picture. The relation between the text, the urn's form, and its content or 'legend', remains discontinuous and fragmentary, radically unaccomplished. In a contemporary collection of vase engravings we read that the various beautiful borders which surround these designs, were not so placed in the original vases, but served there, merely to ornament the handles, and other parts, nor were the border and figures, which are upon the same Plate in this work, always upon the same vase. Nothing can exceed the different borders, in simplicity, in variety, in elegance, in richness, or in beauty, and all modern ornaments sink in the comparison.29

U2

Keats and Hellenism

Here the parergonal forms of antiquity are made to cohere in terms of 'simplicity' and 'elegance', against which 'all modern ornaments sink in comparison'. Is the Keatsian text, as a late ornament seeking to append itself to the monumental fiction of antiquity, in danger of sinking under the pressure of its own overrepresented discourse, and thus losing sight of its 'object' altogether? 'The embellishments of a Vase, or of an Urn,' observed Archibald Alison, 'are beautiful, both from the diminution of their size, and from the delicacy of their workmanship.'30 But there is nothing delicately diminutive about the fragmented images constituting the urn's 'leaf-fring'd legend'. Rather they threaten to warp the urn's frame, to unfix the relation between content and form. 'To put a statue into motion,' observed Hazlitt, 'or to give appropriate, natural, and powerful expression to set features of any kind, is at all times difficult.'31 But Hazlitt's caveat is ignored as the poet worries the urn with a series of importunate questions. As Hartman points out, however, the figures on the urn 'resist the explainer-ravisher'; the effect of the poet's 'crescendoing questions' is that 'their very intensity of speculation seems to animate the urn until its mystery is in danger of being dissolved, its form broken for the sake of a message'.32 In fact the form does not break, and any 'message' emerges as a repetition of fragmentary images, unanswered questions that refuse to compose into a semblance of narrative within the urn's frame. The story lacks 'intelligible sequence'.33 In the face of a perpetual ambivalence generated by the repetition of 'What' and 'or' (proposing alternatives that come to nothing), the urn represents not a pageant or legend but rather unidentifiable fragments of a vision, amounting to so many intractable refusals to speak and to define. And might not the surmise of a 'mad pursuit' and 'wild ecstasy' indirectly and ironically refer to the poet's own activity? As an explainer-ravisher, he himself is engaged in a mad pursuit of a recalcitrant object, as he endeavours to redeem this emblem of his supreme fiction from silence. Returning to the poem's opening lines, we may clarify some of the metaphorical associations by surmising that it is the poet himself who assumes the role of the aggressive bridegroom-lover, as he tries to coax or indeed to violate the image out of quietness into significant discourse. The rest of the poem turns on the implied disharmony between the urn's silence and the poet's music loud and long, between the

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'slow time' of an irretrievable past and the more agitated tempo of the poet's questionings. Thus Keats's romance with antiquity threatens to take a somewhat violent turn> as the poet turns the urn in a desire to make it speak its eloquent but withheld narrative. He wants to write a Grecian urn, or else we might say that he endeavours to read the urn out of silence. But the poet finds himself deprived of the confidence of a scholar like Henry Moses, who could write on the subject of antique vases with enviable assurance : Tew remains of antiquity have excited more interest than vases. . . . By attentively studying the stories they record, the scholar has been enabled to throw much light upon the mythology, the history, the manners and customs of the ancients.'34 On the contrary, the more attentively does the poet seem to study the urn's 'leaffring'd legend', the more opaque becomes its content. 'The spatial, so-called plastic, work of art', writes Derrida, 'does not necessarily prescribe an order of reading. I can place myself in front of it, begin with the top or bottom, at times move around.' 35 Moses solves this problem by supplementing his account of the celebrated Portland Vase with two pictorial images, one of which is a view of 'that side of the vase which all who have set about to explain or describe the objects represented seem to have agreed in regarding as the first compartment',36 while the second is an impression of the vase's images flattened out, as it were, into a simple linear, two-dimensional surface (Figure 2). The first image, which can of course only represent part of the object, seeks to do justice to the vase's proper shape and dimension, while the second image facilitates the writer's reading of the vase's story. But one of the problems facing the poet in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is that he does not quite know where or how to begin his reading of the urn's legend, which steadfastly refuses to be flattened out into an intelligible narrative sequence. This lack of a proper mode of reading produces a certain bewilderment, a trace of which we can also find in the 'Ode on Indolence' : They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn, When shifted round to see the other side; They came again; as when the urn once more Is shifted round, the first seen shades return; And they were strange to me, as may betide With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore. {h~10)

Keats and Hellenism

Figure 2. The Portland Vase, reproduced from Henry Moses, A Collection of Vases (London, 1814), by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

Or rather we should say that the strangeness registered in the c Ode on Indolence' does not become disconcerting for the poet, as is the case in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Indeed, the mood which reigns in the 'Ode on Indolence' seems precisely opposite to that which we find in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', where all is restlessness, desire and disappointment. At a famous moment in one of the letter-journals to his brother and sister-in-law, Keats says : 'Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me : they seem rather like three figures on a greek vase - a Man and two women - whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement.'37 In his state of happy indolence, the poet refuses to be moved by the blandishments of these 'figures' which represent, one supposes, the most pressing concerns of Keats's life. And he remains unmoved because although he is able to identify each figure, in

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his state of indolence he prefers to watch them 'fade' (to borrow an important word from the 'Ode on Indolence') into indistinctness, and thus be spared the gaze of their alert countenance. Hence the pervasive imagery of hovering indistinctness in the 'Ode on Indolence' : the figures on the marble urn are evoked as 'shades' (8), 'shadows . . . muffled in so hush a masque' (11-12), 'ghosts' (51), and 'phantoms' (59). For a brief moment the poet thinks of rousing himself and following the beckoning figures, as though they were real forces to be reckoned with. But he lapses back into his mood of indolent revery, while Poesy, Love and Ambition fade once again into 'masque-like figures on the dreamy urn' (56). In the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', of course, the urn is anything but 'dreamy', as the poet desires to take the 'masque' for real (to unveil the imagined reality behind the mask), to bring the shadowy into distinctness. As I have suggested, the strangeness remarked by the poet in the 'Ode on Indolence' now becomes disconcerting, as we can see in the extended oxymoron at the beginning of the second stanza : Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

(11-14)

These lines, I suspect, tease the reader as much as the urn teases the poet. Their exquisite cadences scarcely conceal the possibility that the poet unashamedly pretends to overhear the silent discourse of antiquity. Hazlitt noted that the ear is 'oftener courted by silence than noise; and the sounds that break that silence sink deeper and more durably into the mind'. 38 But the only noise that will break the urn's silence is the poem's plangent rhetoric. The 'play' of the soft pipes is precisely this, a tease, an irony, a playing on or with the poet's apparently nostalgic susceptibilities. Might not the overt pun, in the assonance of 'ear'/'endear'd', briefly hint at the impossibility of ever believing in the paradox of the 'spirit' rehearsing unheard melodies ? Our reading of the Keatsian text comprehends two different though obviously related levels of discourse: the narrative manque situated on the urn, and the narrative of the poet's desire to read that narrative. Perhaps the elusiveness of the one testifies to the difficulty of the other. Indeed, the 'leaf-fring'd

u6

Keats and Hellenism

legend', far from being legible or translatable, begins to signify a profound rift between the poet and his supreme fiction : haunting about the shape of the urn, it hovers free-floatingly in middle air, in a space which is a vacancy or lack. Once again the frame (and what more promising a frame than the shaped and delimited surface of a vase?) appears unable to contain the longforgotten story of antiquity. In these following lines, the frame's invaginated structure is exposed, as the text's syntactic sheen becomes punctuated by gaps and pauses, intimating crevices and cracks in the image : Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

(15-50)

The rhythm falters and hesitates. It is as though the poem's rhetoric, burdened as it is by a long series of qualified negatives, were on the point of disintegrating, fragmenting its narrative endeavour and uncovering the inarticulate space between. We might continue the argument from the previous stanza and suggest that these lines express an oblique commentary on the poet's own condition. Has not the poet dared to approach the urn in the guise of a bold lover, bold to the extent of appearing a ravisher? Yet his romance with antiquity can never be consummated, it can only ever be a liminal affair. We might go further and interpret these lines as a virtual allegory of the poet's belatedness (which is, after all, the condition of his romance with antiquity). 'Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/ Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare' : consider for a moment 'leave' not in the sense of 'abandon' but as echoing 'leaffring'd legend'. To 'leave' is to surround or decorate with leaves. Tf Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.' 39 Keats's figure to express the natural flowering of poetry is not wholly unrelated to the image of the c leaf-fring'd legend', insofar as both harbour the notion of embellishment. But the relation becomes problematic when we read : 'nor ever can those trees be bare'. Symbolizing, perhaps, the abundance and fertility of the imagination's founding fictions, the trees in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' are in some essential way beyond the reach of the belated poet.40 He cannot embellish

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his song (and thus celebrate the natural fertility of Poesy) in the way that the ancient artist could 'fringe5 his legend. John Ruskin had this to say on the parergonality of flowers and leaves : Wherever men exist in a perfectly civilized and healthy state, they have vegetation around them; wherever their state approaches that of innocence or perfectness, it approaches that of Paradise, - it is a dressing of garden. And, therefore, where nothing else can be used for ornament, vegetation may; vegetation in any form, however fragmentary, however abstracted. A single leaf laid upon the angle of a stone, or the mere form or framework of the leaf drawn upon it, or the mere shadow and ghost of the leaf . . . possesses a charm which nothing else can replace; a charm not exciting, nor demanding laborious thought or sympathy, but perfectly simple, peaceful, and satisfying.41 In this version of the Golden Age, foliage acquires an almost sacred status. Milton's Adam and Eve likewise spend their time before the Fall tending flowers in the Garden of Eden. But in a burdened and belated culture, even this fundamental type of parergon is denied to the poet. As Herder lamented : 'When Homer had sung, no second Homer in the same path could be conceived : he plucked the flower of the epic garland, and all who followed must content themselves with a few leaves.' 42 Ruskin himself used the same imagery as a metaphor to express his own version of decline and belatedness : he observed how the human mind, in its acceptance of this feature of ornament, proceeded from the ground, and followed as it were, the natural growth of the tree. It began with the rude and solid trunk . . . then the branches shot out, and became loaded with leaves; autumn came, the leaves were shed, and the eye was directed to the extremities of the delicate branches; - the Renaissance frosts came, and all perished.43 So perhaps Keats's floral language, in the odes but also in the earlier verse, is a necessity rather than a luxury, the symptom of a desire to prolong contact with a world (a landscape of fictions) which has virtually disappeared but which seems to be indispensable to the flowering of Poesy. Otherwise the modern poet might be left with nothing but some 'skreaking and skrittering residuum' of language (Stevens); he is a gatecrasher at some divine fete champetre, condemned to pick up the litter : Tor empty shells were scattered on the grass,/And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more' (The Fall of Hyperion, 1, 32-3). And the poet will eat deliciously only to fall again, another Adam : 'down I

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sunk/Like a Silenus on an antique vase' (i, 55-6). Whichever way he turns, the belated poet is tempted with forbidden fruit. The remnants of the banquet on which the poet stumbles in The Fall of Hyperion might still be 'Sweet smelling' (1, 34), just as the urn's tuneless ditties might be 'sweeter than heard melodies'; but there is always a danger that the flowers of speech garlanded by the modern poet will be malodorous ones. IV

There is no main verb in the incantatory rhetoric of the ode's third stanza - as though any sense of temporal movement were to be elided. Perhaps the poet's invocations are intended to focus the urn's long-forgotten story more intensely, to magnify its impression on the mind : Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (21-30) But once again language threatens to overrepresent the scene. Images from the previous stanza recur and seem to be required to perform more feats of signification than in fact they are able to do (even the ironic assonance of 'ear'/'endear'd' is repeated in 'unwearied'). Certain phrases, notably 'happy' and 'for ever', are repeated until they become virtually meaningless; they suffocate, and are suffocated by, the immediate context. Again we witness the text's rhetoric tending to violate the urn's silent alterity. Overburdened by the importunate discursiveness of language, the urn is in danger of being effaced, or else of dividing and breaking under the strain : overrepresentation threatens fracture and fragmentation. Given the inability of the poet's discourse to reanimate the urn's silent story, the contrast intended by the stanza's final three lines would seem to be ironically misleading. The poet strives to redeem the urn according to the language of sensuous life : Tor

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ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,/For ever panting, and for ever young.' But these overtly 'human' terms serve merely to divert us briefly away from the essential inhumanity of the urn's figures. To borrow a suggestive phrase from Hazlitt, we might say that the urn's legend wants gusto : 'It has not the internal character, the living principle in it. It is a smooth surface, not a warm, moving mass.'44 This feeling becomes more explicit, of course, with the references to 'marble men and maidens' and 'Gold Pastoral' in the ode's concluding stanza. The whole poem moves towards a recognition of the irreversible alterity of Greece, the inhumanity and (in)difference of the past. 'What modern', lamented Hazlitt, 'can enter fully into the spirit of the ancient Greek mythology, or rival the symmetry of its naked forms?'45 There is a significant passage in the first of the Lectures on the English Poets which might have impressed Keats. 'The Greek statues', Hazlitt argues, are little else than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.46 I take these sentences as beautifully apt to the experience of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Antiquity, it seems, will always scorn the modern poet's advances. In which case the repetition of 'for ever', instead of yielding intimations of immortality (a perpetuity of some ideal plenitude), betrays rather a changeless state of unrealized humanity, a sterile rhetoric of consolation.47 In the face of this bleak surmise of a perpetuum immobile, it may be, then, that 'breathing human passion' offers a possibility of release, a descent from the heady but unsympathetic realm of antiquity ('far above') to the guarantee of a more authentic reality ('on earth'). Frank Kermode has proposed that 'the assurance [of] a timeless and motionless transcendent world reduces to insignificance the faits divers which seem to constitute the narrative of ordinary life'.48 But perhaps it is the incidental detail of ordinary life (the scandalous presence of burning foreheads and parching tongues) which will constitute for the belated poet a more genuine narrative than the long-forgotten story of antiquity.

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We might read the ambivalent implications of the stanza's concluding lines from another point of view. Without subscribing to the rather ambitious claim that the Anatomy of Melancholy 'provided Keats with hints for the main theme and much of the general philosophy' in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 49 we may nevertheless appeal to Burton's text for a possible gloss on the poem. Burton writes that 'pleasant objects are infinite, whether they be such as have life, or be without life'. He goes on to say that 'these things in themselves are pleasing and good, singular ornaments, necessary, comely, and fit to be had; but when we fix an immoderate eye, and dote on them over much, this pleasure may turn to pain, bring much sorrow and discontent unto us, work our final overthrow, and cause melancholy in the end'.50 Are not the discontent and melancholy which break through at the end of the third stanza a consequence of the poet's 'immoderate eye' desiring to focus too intensely on its object? In its rage for identification the poet's overrepresented discourse violates the decorum of the image as pleasant object and will indeed cause the heart to be left 'high-sorrowful'. A comment from one of Keats's older contemporaries affords an illuminating contrast. According to Dugald Stewart, 'the Beauty of the object increases in proportion to the rapture with which we gaze on it'. 51 This, perhaps, is the kind of simplified feeling that a lesser poem might have been to content to celebrate; but there is no room for nostalgic exaltations of Beauty in the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Burton's psychology is much the more astute, and more appropriate to the Keatsian text. If the poet gazes with rapture on the urn, it is not so much the urn's 'beauty' but rather its intransigence and indifference which make themselves felt: rapture turns into melancholy. In the poem's middle stanzas, then, the ambiguity of the urn's presence seems to be felt most keenly. With the fourth stanza the focus shifts, promising another perspective : Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

(31-40)

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What is, I think, remarkable about this stanza is that the details seem to emerge, as it were, from nowhere. The fact that there is little or no relation between this new scene and the previous stanza begins to confirm a suspicion that the poem, like the legend which it desires to recuperate, comprises a succession of discontinuous parts : the text is barely redeemable as a whole. It may be, then, that the form of the ode itself is given to internal fragmentation. Hugh Blair referred to the ode as the most ancient poetic form, close to music : 'Hence, that neglect of regularity, those digressions, and that disorder which it is supposed to admit.' 52 More recently, Thomas McFarland has proposed that c in no other vehicle available to the poet is the tension between fragmentation and wholeness so much the very essence of the form as it is with the ode'. 53 This statement is, I think, amply borne out by the fourth stanza of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. A narrative with intelligible sequence (a picture with a frame) is sought, but we are given only brief surmises, fragments of perception. The urn, it seems, only acquires existence as it is produced in the very act of the poem's composition. Or rather the image threatens to disappear in the folds of what Keats calls 'innumerable compositions and decompositions',54 creations and destroyings on the level of discourse which tend to displace indefinitely the urn's stable presence as an accomplished object. The urn enters the text with difficulty, fragmentarily, as a vague and shadowy form. Perhaps the fourth stanza tries to dress the urn's 'meagre outline' with, in Hazlitt's words, 'colouring' and 'adventitious ornament'. 55 But these images seem unable to transcend their own arbitrary status within the poem; they are adventitious and nothing more. Since they possess 'no narratively defined origin or terminus',56 it is impossible to discover where they come from, how they might be organized, what they mean. To put it another way, we could say that the fourth stanza is packed with signifiers which refuse to signify. In this sense, the poetic outline of the Grecian Urn is very different from Thomas Kirk's outlines from the figures and compositions on William Hamilton's vases. In Kirk's book, each plate, like the plate of the Portland Vase in the Moses volume, is a scene flattened out to represent the composition on a particular vase. And each detail in a plate is made to signify. Here, for example, is the account of one particular plate (Figure 3) :

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Figure 3. Plate xxm, reproduced from ihomas Kirk, Outlines from the Figures and Compositions upon the Greek, Roman and Etruscan Vases of the late Sir William Hamilton, second edition (London, 1814), by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

That this is a representation of a feast of Venus, is discernible by the dove, with the fillet placed near it, as well as by the branches of myrtle and the pearl girdles, which the goddess and her priestesses wear. Two symbols are placed on the symbolic pillar of Bacchus; one is a pine apple, indicative of that god as well as of Cybele, the other may probably be the bcetilus in the shape of a small urn, which denotes Venus; the armed figure signifies the god of war, whose connexion with the goddess, to whom this feast is consecrated, needs no explanation; she was often represented in armour, particularly, according to Pausanias, in her temples at Lacedemon and Corinth; several gems corroborate this testimony, (italics mine)57 By making details signify in this way the reader attains a complete mastery over the sign; the emblems of antiquity become perfectly legible. The text to another plate begins thus (Figure 4) : 'Whenever a female was represented sitting upon a stool, it was always a mark of dignity among the ancients, and when to this was joined the patera, or bowl, held near the head, it became a sign of some divinity. By these marks we may know, that this painting represents Geres, with two of her initiated priestesses near her' (italics mine) - and the account ends with a satisfied

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Figure 4. Plate xvn, reproduced from the same, by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

acknowledgement that 'the whole forms a composition at once simple and beautiful'.58 But the Grecian urn possesses no lucid signifying marks, and its long-forgotten story withdraws at the very moment when it seems to promise to make itself heard in the text. Thus the images which intrude in the fourth stanza barely function as images at all, since they refuse to form a composition that is intelligible, let alone simple and beautiful. They are, rather, signifiers of a lack, an absence around which the poem's language as it were tissues itself. The desired narrative remains still-born, on the threshold of presence yet imprisoned within a twilight zone bordering on presence and absence, silence and meaning. Keats might have been familiar with Hazlitt's definition of art as 'the microscope of the mind', which 'converts every object into a little universe in itself'.59 This is, perhaps, what the ode in its middle stanzas attempts yet fails to do with the urn - not merely to apprehend the image as a silent form but to convert it into intelligible content, to give it significant dimension ('a little universe') where consciousness might secure a vantage-point for itself. Instead, however, the modern poet's art, like the little town, is 'desolate', so late that it can no longer rehearse the ancient fictions which embellish the urn.

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The urn maps a landscape of absence, of vacancy, the O at the centre of 'desolate'. And the poem's fifth stanza begins and ends with the sound of this tuneless number ('O'/'know') : O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (41-50) At least one critic has commented on the 'lurching' assonance of 'O Attic shape! Fair attitude!'. 60 Perhaps the overwrought diction is meant to compensate for the initial 'O'. For the urn's shape (the shape, implicitly, of Keats's supreme fiction) would seem to be precisely this, an O, a cipher, not a rounded whole but a rounded hole, a frame without a middle, a form deprived of content. This initial O is a perfect sign of antiquity's silence, its problematic and devious presence within the modern text. The emblem invites the poet to gaze at it as through a frame, but all he glimpses are fragments or traces of a long-forgotten story which defies adequate recuperation. The last stanza of the cOde on a Grecian Urn' begins with an intimation of endings. O is an omega, and immediately collides with its opposite, the capital A in 'Attic'. A is for Antiquity, the original site of creative beginnings, to which the modern omegapoet is compelled to return. Thus O and A comprehend the destiny of Keats's supreme fiction, whose beginning and end dissolve in the vacant space of the urn's frame. The poet as the letter O : a framer without a story, he finds himself at the opposite end of that mythic time whose beginning is signified by the supreme moment of Antiquity. As a belated greeting to the beautiful mythology of Greece, the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is indeed an odeon where the melodies of ancient music have long since ceased to be heard; all that remain are 'ditties of no tone'. 'With brede/Of marble men and maidens overwrought'. We

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recall the image, in the first stanza, of the legend haunting about the shape of the urn. 'Overwrought' suggests both 'overrepresented' and 'superimposed' - reaffirming a suspicion that there might indeed be something adventitious in the legend's parergonal relation to the silent form over which it hovers. And is not this indeterminacy repeated in the activity of the poet himself, as he tries vainly to bring his discourse into alignment with the urn's narrative? In which case there is a further implication that the urn has been 'overwrought' by the text itself, by the violence of its desire to frame. This is the nature of the poem's active ravishment, that it violates the urn's silent form, seeking to tie it down, enmeshing it in the arborescent arabesques ('forest branches' and 'trodden weed') of discourse. The images forming the 'brede' confirm the impossibility of the urn's story ever emerging as a legible sign since they are imprisoned on the edge of the frame, overwrought upon a nought, the O of an outline. We can trace the images of 'forest branches' and 'trodden weed' back to the presence of trees and foliage in stanzas two and three, and to the 'flowery tale' in the first stanza. But Keats's floral language now seems to be flowing into an impasse, where the poverty implied in 'trodden weed' quietly mocks the endeavour to recuperate the urn's 'leaf-fring'd legend'. It may be that the text, like Hyperion, has overwrought itself in trying to monumentalize something which can only ever be rewritten as a parergonal trace, as a pale, marginal gloss that weaves itself elusively around an absent centre. The poet is left teased and thoughtless before the urn, which seems as inconceivable as 'eternity' (the urn, as a vocality, drifts down and loses itself in the ungraspable, inaudible sound-space of eternity). Hence the violent interruption of rebuke and outrage : 'Gold Pastoral!'. 'Cold' emphasizes the feeling of inhumanity already registered by the urn's 'marble' legend. In fact the phrase is an oxymoron. We scarcely need the testimony of the 'Ode to a Nightingale' to surmise that for Keats pastoral is replete with imaginings of 'sunburnt mirth' and 'the warm South'. Pastoral, we might say, supposes a vision of antiquity instinct with life, animated and warm. So why, in the last stanza of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', has Keats's version of pastoral gone cold? I suggest that this late utterance intervenes as a counterstatement to the earlier, more benign and hopeful invocation of the urn as a 'Sylvan historian'. 'Sylvan' belongs to the

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conventional rhetoric of pastoral: at this stage the poet thinks of the urn as a purveyor of Theocritean idylls, flowery tales which narrate the text of antiquity in its happiest guise. But this initial response comes to be revised and displaced during the course of the poem, reaching a climax in 'Gold Pastoral!'. Marble to the touch and to the heart, the urn's legend chills the poem's atmosphere; in vain does the poet try to bring life back into the frieze (Tor ever warm'). From the notion of the urn as a simple story-teller ('historian') the poet has moved to a bleaker recognition of the demise of antiquity's leaf-fringed legends. Such narratives remain cold and indifferent to the modern poet; they are pastimes which can no longer be adequately represented. There is, I think, an important break in continuity, an ironic swerve, between the first and second halves of the ode's last stanza. Or rather, the tone of rebuke betrayed in 'Cold Pastoral!' seems deflected, yet it persists, hovering and more muted, in an unexpected way : When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(46-50)

Critics have been and no doubt always will be perplexed by ' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" '. But how are we to read the rest of this concluding sentence, of which, after all, the poem's famous dictum is only a part? I would argue that these final cadences, sententious in diction and in tone, articulate a fine and appropriate irony in the poet's response to his dialogue manque with the urn. Hartman is right to observe that 'the Grecian urn's "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty" remains an extroverted, lapidary cry. However appropriate its philosophy, its form is barely snatched from a defeat of the imagination.' 61 Teased and defeated by the urn's silence, the poet adopts the rhetorical pose of a moralist; he becomes a composer of epitaphs which are eloquent yet meaningless. But within the ironic framework of the whole sentence, Keats's lapidary statement is appropriate neither as form nor as philosophy. Or rather, it is appropriate only insofar as it helps to register the irony of the whole utterance. In other words, the poet takes his revenge on the urn by moralizing it, by forcing it to speak a 'sublime commonplace'. 62 The irony of this gesture is missed by a certain kind of nostalgic

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criticism which interprets the poem's ending as a celebration of art's universality and permanence: 'The archaeological message of the urn is dead, its aesthetic message is alive "for ever".'63 Far from being a genuine 'friend to man', offering consolations of truth and beauty, the urn remains sublimely indifferent to the scandal of mortality, the wasting of generations where youth 'grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies' ('Ode to a Nightingale'). Hence the ambivalence of the poem's epitaph. According to Wordsworth, the 'first requisite' of an epitaph is that 'it should speak, in a tone which shall sink into the heart, the general language of humanity as connected with the subject of death'. 64 This is, perhaps, the duplicity of Keats's supreme fiction: inviting the belated poet's active engagement, it nevertheless refuses to humanize itself, and speaks instead the unmediated language of death. At the last, then, Keats's text turns ironically into an urnburial. If an epitaph 'presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven',65 then the poem's final lines, including ' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" ', engrave themselves on a tomb-text, as a late parergon to that which has already passed away in the phrase, 'Gold Pastoral!'. We are told that the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Romans, followed two different methods with respect to their dead; some they burnt, others they buried. The ashes of the former were carried from the funeral pile and put into vases, which were commonly placed in niches, made in the walls of the sepulchral apartments. The higher classes had their ashes put into marble urns highly sculptured.66 No matter how ornate and embellished the urn appears, it cannot defraud the reality of death. 'Truth with beauty', remarked Hazlitt, 'suggests the feeling of immortality.'67 But the ode's equation of truth and beauty implies a feeling of immortality which is deeply ambiguous, since it cannot evade the modern poet's inability ever to reawaken the urn's dormant narrative. The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' speaks the historicity of art, and its melancholy yet inevitable connection with the subject of death. As Hartley Coleridge was to conclude, the ideal space of antiquity might be nothing more than 'a mode, an emanation of nature, - a form she has assumed and laid aside'.68 It is in Lamia that the scenario of ancient Greece is reconstructed in order that it might be pulled down and laid aside, perhaps for ever.

6

Lamia; or, Antiquity Decomposed

I have traced Keats's Hellenism as a romance between the poet and his classical Muse. The representation of antiquity involves, precisely, a longing for presence, a desire to re-situate the sublime fictions of the past within the belated space of modernity. Keats's Muse is always feminine, whether disguised as Cynthia, Lamia, or Moneta; hence the poet's rhetoric of desire or romance, a lover's discourse addressed to the bright goddess. In Hyperion, certainly, it is the stern father-figure of Milton who presides over the narrative's endeavour to monumentalize antiquity, but we can sense the strain of his influence, an oppression which Keats evidently desires to soften when he transfers allegiance to Apollo (a god of flowers, standing 'ankle-deep in lilies of the vale') and Mnemosyne. Book m of Hyperion lightens the burden of the epic 'masculine' diction of the previous two books by returning to what Hazlitt called 'an effeminacy of style', which may, indeed, prove to be the most authentic idiom of Keats's romance with antiquity. 1 Earlier I suggested that the language of flowers in Endymion (an exemplary 'effeminate' style) works to question the conventional model of classical antiquity available to Keats. In the case of Lamia, we might say that it is a text which witnesses the ironic cohabitation of 'masculine' and 'effeminate' modes. Lamia overturns Hazlitt's judgement on Keats's effeminate style by marshalling its rhetorical energy (this might be the significance of Dryden's influence on Lamia, that it encourages a 'masculine' style) in order to expose the impossibility of representing antiquity in terms of 'strength and substance' and 'rigid forms'.2 Lamia unveils the 'palpableness' of antiquity as a monumental illusion. Here at last, then, would be the unexpected realization of the intentions shaping Hyperion: Keats discovers a more objective stance towards classical antiquity by ironizing the desire for naked Grecian ('naive') objectivity. 128

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Lamia might be seen to continue the exploration of those anxieties of influence which had beset Keats as early as Endymion. The poet had voiced a fear of dulling the brightness of Greece and its beautiful mythology. In Lamia, however, that fear becomes subsumed in an ironic recognition of the profound ambivalence of antiquity's brightness, its power to blind and blight as well as to illumine. Already in Endymion there are signs of a possibility that the moon's starry sway might not be wholly benign, as when the poet-hero appeals: 'Keep back thine influence, and do not blind/My sovereign vision' (in, 182-3). Overexposure to the Muse, 'ten-times bright and fair' (11, 170), threatens a kind of lunacy, a distempering of the senses which will manifest itself in Lamia as blindness. Repeating the poet's helpless fixation with antiquity's enchanting brightness, 'Blinded Lycius' (1, 347) succumbs too promptly to the argent luxuries of Lamia. As a 'silver planet' (11, 48), Lamia transfixes Lycius, whom we find 'bending to her open eyes' (n, 46) : the snake-charmer has himself been spellbound into a gesture of servitude. Endymion's first encounters with the moon are described in terms of 'enchantment', or 'fair enchantment' (1, 573, 918); Cynthia is an 'enchantress' (11, 756). Yet enchantment is close to enslavement (this problematic relation will also emerge, of course, in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'): the ephebe-poet bends as a vassal to his Muse. The 'chief intensity', ponders Endymion, is approached through 'Richer entanglements, enthralments far/ More self-destroying' (i, 798-800), and it is this potentially selfdestructive thraldom of desire which disturbs and perplexes Keats's romance with antiquity. In Endymion, the story of Glaucus and the consequences of his 'distemper'd longings' (HI, 375) intervenes as an ironic counterpoint to the main narrative. Circe is a 'Cruel enchantress' to whom Glaucus must submit, as a 'tranced vassal' (in, 413, 460) : With tears, and smiles, and honey-words she wove A net whose thraldom was more bliss than all The range of flower'd Elysium. (in, 426-8) Circe and Lamia are evidently akin. The former kindles a fire which is compared to 'the eye of gordian snake' (Endymion, in, 494). Lamia has a 'gordian shape' and 'Circean head' (Lamia, 1,

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47, 115), and, like Circe, she weaves her prey into a state of thraldom : The cruel lady, without any show Of sorrow for her tender favourite's woe, But rather, if her eyes could brighter be, With brighter eyes and slow amenity, Put her new lips to his, and gave afresh The life she had so tangled in her mesh.

(1, 590-5)

Lamia's hypnotic ocular power reminds us, perhaps, of the rolling eyes of Coleridge's Geraldine, who, like Keats's cruel ladies, seems to represent a romantic demonry, the imagination's witchery. And is it not precisely this fundamental sense of enchantment ''with its troubling implications of seduction and violation) whicn is denied in the conventional discourse of Romantic Hellenism, whether expressed by Winckelmann or by Hazlitt? Far from promising mutual enlightenment, the confrontation of ancient and modern threatens discord, imbalance, rupture. The modern poet's courting of the ancient fictions might prove to be a fatal mesalliance, a flirtation with Plutonian shades rather than with the bright Olympians. II

The writing of Lamia, in the summer of 1819, coincides with the beginning of the 'famous love letters' to Fanny Brawne. 3 While there is no question of recuperating the text solely through an appeal to biography, it nevertheless seems pertinent to observe that there is a 'particularly obvious' connection between Lamia and Keats's 'complex reactions to Fanny Brawne at this time'. 4 In particular, the prose of the letters and the couplets of Lamia share a rhetoric of desire : Fanny Brawne and Lamia are each 'an object intensely desireable'.5 Already enslaved by Lamia's enchantments, Lycius wonders how he might 'entangle, trammel up and snare/Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there' (11, 52-3). Keats appeals to Fanny : 'Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so en trammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.' Yet the consoling letter which Fanny must write will increase rather than alleviate the enchantment: 'Make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me.' The image of an intoxicating draught reappears in Lamia, suggesting once again the insatiable excess of desire :

Lamia; or, Antiquity Decomposed And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, And still the cup was full.

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(1, 251-3)

'I know not', continues Keats in his letter, 'how to express my devotion to so fair a form : I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair.'6 We have already noted from the 'Ode to Psyche' that the modern poet's devotion to the fair forms of antiquity can never be pure, since this may only be a veiled form of desire which will actually consume its object. And in Lamia, the devotion of Lycius to his lady will result in a similar dissolution. At the wedding-feast, with its atmosphere of 'bright eyes double bright' (11, 214), Lamia's fair form is brow-beaten by the colourless eyes of Apollonius. In a discourse which hovers on the limits of enchantment, it seems, by an ironic reversal, that the only word brighter than bright is blight. In another letter written at the same time as Lamia, Keats tells Fanny how he 'applied' his reading of fiction to their romance. He has been reading 'an oriental tale of a very beautiful colour'.7 The 'History of the Basket' concerns a city of melancholy men, all made so by this circumstance. Through a series of adventures each one of them by turns reach some gardens of Paradise where they meet with a most enchanting Lady; and just as they are going to embrace her, she bids them shut their eyes - they shut them - and on opening their eyes again find themselves descending to the earth in a magic basket. The remembrance of this Lady and their delights lost beyond all recovery render them melancholy ever after.8 Keats's account of the tale focuses on the seductive presence of 'a most enchanting Lady', and on the impossibility of ever embracing her. A moment of imposed blindness ('she bids them shut their eyes') leads to irreversible loss and melancholy. It is no doubt understandable that Keats should interpret his own emotional state in terms of the story. But the point is that the tale's thematic centre of brightness, enchantment and desire reemerges in a more sophisticated guise in Lamia. The imagery shaping Weber's oriental tale reappears as the discursive frame within which the poet comes to test the plausibility of sustaining his romance with antiquity. Indeed, certain aspects of the oriental tale recall Endymion. At the beginning of the earlier poem we find Keats's hero afflicted by a 'cankering venom' (1, 396), and the melancholy

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king Kemsarai is described in terms not dissimilar to the mode of Endymion : 'His eyes lost their vivacity, paleness obscured his complexion, and soon he appeared like a beautiful rose, which in the morning is the ornament of the garden, but fades at the heat of noon, and dies almost at the moment it has bloomed.' 9 Both Endymion and Kemsarai confide in a sister; in both cases their melancholy has been inspired by a brief glimpse of an enchanted world. Endymion's dream takes him 'high soaring' towards the moon (1, 584); in the magic basket, Kemsarai 'was in an instant so prodigiously high, that [he] soon touched the skies'. The king finds himself 'in a place of delight... in the midst of a garden . . . where the earth was enamelled with a thousand different flowers'.10 Endymion's first encounter with Cynthia is repeated in Kemsarai's lunar adventure : the enchanting Lady's attendant virgins 'like so many stars, stood up in the presence of the dazzling moon'. The king later asks this 'queen of beauty' whether she is 'a sun, or the shining star of the firmament',11 but it is as a moon-goddess (a lunary Muse) that the Lady defines her relation to both Endymion and Lamia. Although it has been claimed that she is 'not essentially sinister',12 the terms in which Lamia is described render her status deeply ambivalent. As a figuration of Keats's ancient Muse, she will be 'Bright' (1, 46), but her brightness is immediately tarnished in the following lines : She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd; And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries, She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self. (1, 47-56) In terms both of her colour, and of the things to which she is compared. Lamia seems here to be grossly overrepresented. Her parergonal finery would make her, in Kantian language, impure.13 We cannot effectively visualize the image because the image dazzles; its excess of detail does not facilitate but rather prohibits clarity of vision. So the modern poet's language seems indeed to 'dull' the ancient fictions as soon as it tries to redeem

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their lustre. Perhaps it is the poet's very desire to represent (and so repossess) the images of the past which sullies their brightness (violates their innocence). This tendency can be surmised in the more conventional language of Weber's oriental tale. The princess was 'magnificently adorned', and 'spread around her the most dazzling lustre'; she had 'dazzling eyes', a 'most enchanting voice', and a 'bewitching smile'. Thus the 'boundless love' and 'excess of desire' afflicting Kemsarai are a symptom of the king being dazzled, enchanted and bewitched by an object which he himself has overrepresented.14 It may be, then, precisely this overrepresentation (the want of balance or adequacy in the deviant operations of language itself) that constitutes the witchery, the seductiveness, of the image. The more ardently the poet desires to rewrite the ancient fictions, the more stubbornly these images refuse to yield their lustre unequivocally. 'You dazzled me', wrote Keats to Fanny Brawne.15 Lycius is dazzled by Lamia, by her 'brilliance feminine' (1, 92) and 'dazzling frame' (11, 89). Yet it is part of Lamia's demonry that, as an image, she can no more easily be 'framed' than the Grecian urn or Psyche; her lustre will not be contained. Her gordian shape participates in an alternating movement of dissolving and brightening, a chiaroscuro play of oppositions repeated in descriptive phrases like 'bitter-sweet' (1, 59), 'sweet and virulent' (1, 149). Thus Lamia's transformation into 'a lady bright' (1, 171) is rendered as a movement towards dissolution, a gradual melting and disappearing. She relinquishes the finery of 'her silver mail, and golden brede' (1, 158), but her humanization confirms rather than denies the 'swift counterchange' and 'specious chaos' with which she is associated (1, 194-5). There is, after all, something essentially disruptive and arbitrary in the nature of Lamia's magical powers : 'Where she will'd, her spirit went' (1, 205). She is devious, elusive, ungraspable; she will not be fixed or framed. Like the enchanting Lady in Weber's oriental tale, Lamia must always be other. It is not surprising, then, that Lycius should fear her loss as soon as he encounters Lamia : 'Even as thou vanishest so I shall die5 (1, 260). Lycius is transfixed not only by Lamia's actual presence but also by the possibility of her dissolution and absence: Tor pity do not melt!' (1, 271). In Weber's oriental tale, Kemsarai is reproached by the princess for ignoring the beauty of her virgins ('more shining than the stars'). He is the victim of

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'fatal desires', intensified by the prospect of no alleviation : T h e poison of her absence will destroy me.' And at the critical moment, when the princess agrees to yield, consummation turns into irreversible loss : 'The princess said to me with a melancholy accent, which I hoped soon to make her forget, Open your eyes; I obeyed her with transport, and found myself in that fatal basket which had brought me there.' 16 The romance in Lamia is consummated, but Lycius's error manifests itself in a fatal desire to legalize and validate the enchantment (and so neutralize its potential demonry) by subjecting Lamia to marriage. In this way will the Muse be officially certified, accommodated and possessed by the poet. His devotion issues as a will to mastery of the object. Like the Grecian urn (an unravished bride of quietness), Lamia will be exposed to the noise of outside, 'the hoarse alarm of Corinth's voice' (n, 61) - the silence of antiquity invaded by the sound of the modern. And Lamia will be subjected to the withering gaze of the modern, the importunate stare which extinguishes the desired object. In this respect Apollonius and Lycius are akin. The philosopher's 'sharp eyes' (i, 364) unsettle his pupil, as Lamia notices : 'Lycius! wherefore did you blind/Yourself from his quick eyes?' (1, 373-4). But it will be Lamia's fate to suffer from the collective gaze of both Apollonius and Lycius : the former fixes his eye 'Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride,/Browbeating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride' (11, 247-8). Powerless to console his bride, Lycius is forced, ironically, to repeat his mentor's gesture : 'He gaz'd into her eyes . . . More, more he gaz'd' (11, 256, 258). Whatever its motive, the gaze will be destructive (we recall, perhaps, the immoderate eye fixed by the poet on the Grecian urn, with its attendant pain and discontent). To face the image directly, without mediation, is to begin to efface it, to blight its original lustre : "Begone, foul dream! " he cried, gazing again In the bride's face, where now no azure vein Wander'd on fair-spaced temples; no soft bloom Misted the cheek; no passion to illume The deep-recessed vision : - all was blight; Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white. (11, 271-6) The poet's imaginative reconstruction of the space of antiquity requires a measure of lucidity or adequacy of vision, in the light of which the images of the past might be represented. But these

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lines from Lamia suggest the deviant activity of modernity's retrospective gaze, whose desire for presence merely serves to absent the image still further. At this point it might be profitable to draw a brief comparison with The Fall of Hyperion, where Keats again explores the problematic nature of visionary sight. The poet's unmediated gaze on Moneta's visage (the face of the past) produces a disquieting simultaneity of absence and presence of vision : But for her eyes I should have fled away. They held me back, with a benignant light, Soft mitigated by divinest lids Half closed, and visionless entire they seem'd Of all external things - they saw me not, But in blank splendor beam'd like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast. (1, 264-71) Moneta's eyes, visionless yet benign, contrast with the poet's gaze, which refuses to be calmed by the quiet power of their 'blank splendor'. Rather it is agitated by desire, by a rage for complete vision. Aching to see, the belated poet will always desire to see too much : As I had found A grain of gold upon a mountain's side, And twing'd with avarice strain'd out my eyes To search its sullen entrails rich with ore, So at the view of sad Moneta's brow, I ached to see what things the hollow brain Behind enwombed: what high tragedy In the dark secret chambers of her skull Was acting, that could give so dread a stress To her cold lips, and fill with such a light Her planetary eyes.

(1, 571-81)

Once again we seem to have a situation, comparable to the beginning of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', where a silent image will be ravished out of its quietness, pressed into expression. Desiring to read the secret contours of Moneta's countenance, the physiognomical poet endeavours to bestow life on a blighted image, impregnating the 'hollow brain' ('enwombed') with surmises of 'high tragedy'. 'Let me behold', insists the poet, 'What in thy brain so ferments to and fro' (1, 289-90). Moneta complies with the demand, but Keats's sudden access to vision brings him

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little joy. T o see as a God sees' (1, 304), the poet enters the space of his narrative, but his desired inclusion in this epic landscape bodes trespass, even voyeurism : 'I set myself /Upon an eagle's watch, that I might see,/And seeing ne'er forget' (1, 308-10). His apparently privileged view of the sublime images of antiquity oppresses rather than enlightens the poet: 'A long awful time/1 look'd upon them' (1, 384-5). So long and awful, in fact, that Keats begins to pay the price for arrogating this kind of vision to himself : And every day by day methought I grew More gaunt and ghostly. Oftentimes I pray'd Intense, that death would take me from the vale And all its burthens. (1, 395-8) The poet desires to reanimate the spectral images of antiquity only to find himself being wasted by the burden of vision : 'Instead of the myth becoming more human, the poet becomes less human.' 17 The more the poet scrutinizes, the more inscrutable becomes the visionary landscape. And a suggestion of relief 'Now in clearer light I stood,/Reliev'd from the dark vale' (11, 49-50) - is soon followed by the narrative's premature end, as though the poem might not be able to bear this new influx of lucidity. The unfinished text, in Hartman's words, 'punishes Keats's assumption of an identity, or his presumption that he can endure visions as of old'.18 The poet's 'quick eyes' (11, 53) run into vacancy, unable to prevent insight from turning into a new blindness. So the burden of light needs to be lightened, and returning to Lamia we can see that enlightenment must involve the extinction of the image. Keats's original anxiety of dulling the beautiful mythology of Greece yields to a recognition that the belated poet has no choice : in order to establish a minimum sense of mastery over the ancient fictions, he is compelled to tarnish the lustre of antiquity (disfigure its bright countenance). If its own visions are to survive, modernity cannot endure the gaze of the past, and so the enchanted look constituting the 'love trance' of Lycius (1, 241) becomes displaced as a violent gaze, the look that kills. 'Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!/Turn them aside, wretch!' (11, 277-8). Thus Lycius appeals to Apollonius, in a vain endeavour to reverse the gaze. The philosopher's 'lashless eyelids stretch/Around his demon eyes' (11, 288-9). We might note that Keats uses 'demon' in his representation of both

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Apollonius and Lamia. In which case the difference between sage and enchantress might not simply turn on the question of an opposition between romance and cold philosophy, imagination and reason. Rather it is a rivalry between one kind of 'demonry' (represented by Apollonius) and another, implicitly more archaic kind (represented by Lamia). For modernity, too, would seem to possess its daimon, an attendant spirit whose survival depends on the virtual exorcism of an older demonry that had threatened to vamp the modern : The sophist's eye, Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging. (11, 299-301) Might it be possible to read this as a secret image of the poet's desecration of his Muse, a ritual assassination occurring in the very act of writing? 'Like a sharp spear', a stroke of the pen vanquishes the Muse, going 'through her utterly' - a strange cadence, inviting us to pass from 'utterly' to utterance, as though the Muse's other discourse were to be finally renounced in order to clear a space for the poet's own voice, the language of modernity. In other words, Lamia's extinction might signify the moment of Keats's liberation from the enthralling fictions of antiquity. And that Lycius dies as well suggests a final severance of importunate identification between the poet and his hero. So the text is lightened by the loss of its two major protagonists; their demise is not so much a tragedy (there is nothing to be high-sorrowful over in this unsentimental poem) but rather a purge (a comic rather than tragic catharsis), a gesture of release. 'The new poem', observes J. Hillis Miller, 'both needs the old texts and must destroy them.' 19 Lamia needs the old fictions but invokes them in order to question and, finally, to destroy them. 'I shall never again behold that beautiful moon of the world', laments Kemsarai on his return to earth. 20 In Weber's oriental tale, loss of enchantment plunges the hero into a profound melancholy. But Lamia tempers its disenchantment with irony, as the narrative thrives on the instability of its founding fictions. A robustly ludic text, Lamia 'unwrites' Keats's earlier endeavours to represent antiquity by actively courting those 'innumerable compositions and decompositions' which occur in the production of narrative itself.21 The lunary dissolves in the lacunary, as

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Keats's ancient Muse withdraws at the very moment when her landscape seems most bright and hospitable. This time the lovers of Poetry find themselves wandering in a little region whose images can nourish only illusions. Corinth : a strong, 'masculine' cadence, suggestive of columns, plinths, monumentality. The text invokes proper names in order to delimit its classical space as a definite, mappable landscape : She fled into that valley they pass o'er Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas' shore; And rested at the foot of those wild hills, The rugged founts of the Peraean rills, And of that other ridge whose barren back Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack, South-westward to Cleone.

(1, 173-9)

He would return that way, as well she knew, To Corinth from the shore; for freshly blew The eastern soft wind, and his galley now Grated the quaystones with her brazen prow In port Cenchreas, from Egina isle Fresh anchor'd.

(1, 221-6)

Proper names and 'hard' sounds ('rugged founts', 'barren back', 'brazen prow', 'Fresh anchor'd') conspire with the rhyming couplets to engender the illusion of presence, an identifiable scene in which the text might situate and fix its fictions. The edifice of antiquity is structured from 'high marble doors' (1, 228), a 'pavement white' (1, 356), 'some arch'd temple door, or dusky colonnade' (1, 361), 'A pillar'd porch, with lofty portal door' (1, 379). In no other poem of Keats does the classical geography seem so solid and palpable. And yet the furniture which the poet designs for his narrative is, of course, only an illusion. What we find in Lamia is a theatre of images, an eloquent scenario which can be shifted around or dispensed with at will. Narrating the story in a letter to John Taylor (Keats's publisher), Richard Woodhouse tells how Lycius and Lamia 'live together in a palace in the Middle of Corinth (described, or rather pictured out in very good costume)'.22 We might note here the peculiar appropriateness of costume : the poet does not simply 'describe' but pictures out, dresses, embellishes the space of 'wide Corinth' (11, 93) with an array of objects, antique paraphernalia. And this tendency towards embellishment is represented within the narrative by Lamia's own prowess as a

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magician. Committed to the pomp and circumstance of the marriage feast, she wonders 'how to dress/The misery in fit magnificence' (11, 115-16). Like Porphyro in The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia has the power to dispense luxuries freely, but now Keats emphasizes, more overtly than in the earlier poem, the dubiety of such prestidigitation : 'Tis doubtful how and whence Came, and who were her subtle servitors. About the halls, and to and from the doors, There was a noise of wings, till in short space The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace. A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade. Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade Of palm and plantain, met from either side, High in the midst, in honour of the bride: Two palms and then two plantains, and so on, From either side their stems branch'd one to one All down the aisled place; and beneath all There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall. So canopied, lay an untasted feast Teeming with odours. (n, 117-33) Within the composition lurks a threat of immanent decomposition (a fear that the 'whole charm' might fade into a hole, return to vacancy). The rhetoric of this 'mimicking' approaches the perfunctory ('perhaps', 'and so on'), and the charade leaves its instigator 'In a pale contented sort of discontent' (11, 135) : is it permissible to say that Lamia's ambivalent state repeats the hovering indeterminacy of her magical scenery, whose content (substance) borders on its opposite, vacuity or discontent? But the parergonal insists on its representation, as if simultaneously acknowledging and mocking Lamia's equivocal powers : [She] Mission'd her viewless servants to enrich The fretted splendour of each nook and niche. Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first, Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees, And with the larger wove in small intricacies. (11, 136-41) 'Approving all, she faded at self-will' (11, 142) - yet we might

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wonder whether Lamia's approval is not reversed by her subsequent 'fading', as though she refused to gaze on arabesques of imagery which will not bear credence. The wedding guests enter this parergonal space as if crossing a magical threshold, into the frame of a picture : 'Arriving at the portal', they 'gaz'd amain,/And enter'd marveling' (11, 151-2). The 'Royal porch' opens on to a cornucopian scene, whose representation invites closer attention : Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room, Fill'd with pervading brilliance and perfume : Before each lucid pannel fuming stood A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood, Each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-swerv'd upon the soft Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimick'd as they rose Along the mirror'd walls by twin-clouds odorous. Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats insphered, High as the level of a man's breast rear'd On libbard's paws, upheld the heavy gold Of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told Of Ceres' horn, and, in huge vessels, wine Come from the gloomy tun with merry shine. Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood, Each shrining in the midst the image of a God. (11, 173-90) Perhaps these lines can be read as crystallizing the text's ambivalent, ironic stance towards the ancient fictions. The imagery conveys a sense, indeed, of 'pervading brilliance', of lustre and lucidity - that brightness which Keats saw in the beautiful mythology of Greece. And this pageant of sensations is conceived as something holy : the dinner-table is also an altar. Yet there is a hint that the holiness of the occasion is phoney, as well as frivolous (the wreaths of incense 'their light voyage took/To the high roof). This is, after all, part of Lamia's 'mimicking' magic, whose creations are without true content. 'Each shrining in the midst the image of a God' : so the banquet would seem to be a travesty of that 'simple worship' celebrated in an earlier poem ('Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!'). It is rather an idolatrous feast, involving homage to false gods. To worship the images of antiquity as if they were present and real ('sacred') is thus to err on the side of idolatry. Lamia exposes the danger of the modern poet making a fetish of the ancient fictions.

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in

Leigh Hunt spoke of the 'lovely poetic consciousness' in Lamia, a poem whose lines 'seem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty, like sea-nymphs luxuriating through the water'. 23 Yet Hunt's generous comment misses the irony informing the poem's consciousness: the text takes pleasure not only in the progress but also in the dissolution of its own luxuries. What is Lamia but a pageant or show staged for the reader, who passes through a little region of fine phrasing and fictions only to have the enchantment, in the end, abruptly dispelled? Keats's endeavour 'to play with his reader, & fling him off at last', which Richard Woodhouse apprehended in The Eve of St. Agnes, becomes more pronounced in Lamia.24" An impulse 'to turn romance almost inside-out' results in a sublimation of desire through play and irony.25 Keats was certain that Lamia had a 'sort of fire . . . which must take hold of people in some way give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation'. 26 That the text yields a possibility of either/or is a mark of its Schlegelian irony, as it hovers between enthusiasm and scepticism (self-creation and self-destruction) in the tracing of its fictions.27 And as we have seen, this unwriting of romance might be curative. Shortly before he began writing Lamia, Keats confessed : 'I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame.' 28 Keats's romance with his supreme fiction reveals the extent to which the dead poets are still importunately alive to the modern writer; their immortality signifies a power that might block the endeavours of the ephebe-poet. Yet the writing of Lamia simultaneously acknowledges and dissipates the overpowering enchantments of the past, as though Keats were beginning to find a way of bidding farewell to the ancient fictions. Lamia is finished by an eccentric footnote. The extract from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, forming the 'ground work of this story' and appended to the poem, seems to be consigned beyond the frame of the narrative, as a parergonal afterword. It is, however, precisely this footnote which accomplishes the text's deconstruction of its founding fictions. On a thematic level, Burton restates an obvious truth about Lamia, that 'all her furniture was, like Tantalus' gold, described by Homer, no substance but mere illusions'.29 But the formal function of Burton's sum-

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mary of the story is more complex. It is the poet's last embellishment to the narrative of his romance with antiquity. De Quincey, we recall, had described Hyperion as 'a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture', and I suggested that in fact the fragmentary third book does not enrich but rather fractures the edifice established by the previous two books.30 In the same way, I think, the footnote to Lamia undermines the ostensibly balanced binary structure of the text, whose two parts, repeating the pattern of its heroic couplets, combine together to form the impression of a distinct architectural unity (an authentic rhyming of parts). As a supplement to the cwork', the footnote behaves like Derrida's parergon, insofar as it uncovers the lack within the text, the vacuity of the poem's furniture. For what the footnote does is to expose the virtually infinite textual displacement absenting Lamia from the original space of antiquity ('wide Corinth'). Keats's poem must negotiate the Anatomy of Melancholy (with its bizarre internal archaeology : the passage has been quarried from Tart 3. Sect. 2. Memb. 1. Subs. 1.'), then 'Philostratus, in his fourth book de Vita Apollonii\ before approaching the story's original site - a spiralling movement downwards and inwards through textual mediations, towards a promised centre : cin the midst of Greece'.31 Yet this cadence discloses the last illusion, since there can be no such imaginary centre in which the modern poet might find a local habitation for himself and his fictions. The ideal space of antiquity must remain forever on the other side of the abyss of history. In the midst of Greece hovers a mist, teasing the poet's vision and forever eluding his grasp. Against the poem's accomplished structure, the footnote seems nothing more than 'a harmless piece of herculaneum',32 yet it precipitates a regression towards absence and silence, a relegation of the past to small print. Thus the Keatsian text plays out its valedictory tribute, sotto voce, to the glory that was Greece.

Notes Introduction 1. 'From the Sublime to the Hermeneutic', in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago and London, 1975), pp. 114-23 (p. 119). 2. A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), p. 35. 3. The Poems of John Keats, edited by Jack Stillinger (London, 1978), p. 103; The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins (1958), third printing, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 1, 380 (21 October 1818); 11, 116 (9 June 1819) (hereafter referred to as Letters). 4. A Map of Misreading, p. 153. For a complete elaboration of Bloom's theory of influence, see also Poetry and Repression (1976), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), The Anxiety of Influence (1973), and the introduction to Yeats (1970). Although my discussion of Keats's belatedness owes much to Bloom's work, I have not felt it necessary or useful to adopt the language of Kabbalah which dominates Bloom's theorizing. 5. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 3. 6. See Freud's essay, 'Family Romances' (1909), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), ix, 235-41 (p. 237) (hereafter referred to as Standard Edition). 7. A Map of Misreading, p. 12. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in Standard Edition, xvm, 3-64 (p. 27). 8. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 8, 9, 10. 9. A Map of Misreading, p. 19. 10. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 131. 11. 'On the Theory of Romanticism', in The Fate of Reading, pp. 277-83 (p. 280); 'Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's "To Autumn" ', in The Fate of Reading, pp. 124-46 (p. 126). 12. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study (London, 1928), p. 3. Compare John Middleton Murry: 'At all the crucial moments of [Keats's] life his reference and appeal lay to Shakespeare, not to the inanimate Shakespeare which is the name given to a volume of printed words, but to 143

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13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to pp. 4-9 a real presence, a living being whom Keats believed that he intimately understood, and who made demands upon Keats' loyalty from which in his moments of extreme agony he struggled in vain to escape' (Keats and Shakespeare (London, 1925), pp. 5-6). Middleton Murry's last point touches on the possibility of an anxiety of influence, but the main emphasis is on Shakespeare appearing to Keats as a 'real presence' and living being'. Letters, 1, 539 (27 February 1818); 1, 274 (27 April 1818). Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1956), in Standard Edition, xx, 77-175 (p. 165). One reason why there are far fewer explicit references to Homer and classical antiquity than to Shakespeare in Keats's letters may be that the poet's anxiety over his relation to antiquity leads him to repress overt signs of that relation: 'It is always the ego's attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going' (Freud, Standard Edition, xx, 109). 'Winckelmann' (1867), in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873), pp. 146-206 (pp. 176, 177, 178). The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1930-4), xvi, 61, 63 (hereafter referred to as Complete Works). Letters, 1, 207 (23 January 1818). Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York and Oxford, 1983), pp. 367, 369, 362. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 3.

1

Fictions old and new

1. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753-6), a new edition, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1800), 1, 139. 2. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756), fifth edition, 2 vols. (London, 1806), 1, 188. 3. European Magazine, 14 (1788), p. 19; British Critic, 6 (1795), p. i; European Magazine, 23 (1793), P- 268. 4. European Magazine, 24 (1793), p. 135. Hazlitt, Complete Works, v, 161. 6. Letters, 1, 380 (21 October 1818). For an illuminating account of this theme, see Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London, 1971); also John D. Scheffer, 'The Idea of Decline in Literature and the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century England', Modern Philology, 34 (19367), 155-78; and Randolph Starn, 'Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline', History and Theory, 14 (1975), 1-31.

Notes to pp. 9-14

145

7. Quoted in Milton 1732-1801: The Critical Heritage, edited by John T. Shawcross (London and Boston, 1972), p. 330. 8. Johnson's Lives of the Poets: A Selection, edited by J. P. Hardy (Oxford, 1971), pp. 94-5. 9. The Seventeenth Century Background (1934), third impression (London, 1946), pp. 296-7. 10. Geoffrey H. Hartman, 'Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci', in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (1970), second printing (New Haven and London, 1971), pp. 311-36 (p. 329); 'Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion', in The Fate of Reading, pp. 57—73 (p. 58). 11 An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (London, 1777), pp. 2, 35. 12. 'Remarks on the Genius and Writings of Allan Ramsay', in The Poems of Allan Ramsay, a new edition, 2 vols. (London, 1800), 1, cxxii, cli. 13. Monthly Review, 56 (1777), p. 339. 14. Monthly Review, 22 (1760), pp. 120-1. 15. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735); Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1769). 16. Monthly Review, 22 (1760), p. 128. 17. Monthly Review, 23 (1760), p. 7. 18. European Magazine, 10 (1786), p. 404. 19. Monthly Review, new series, 29 (1799), pp. 43-4. The publication in question was 'Fears in Solitude, written in 1798.... To which are added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight' (London, 1798). 20. See Hazlitt's comment on Moore in his Lectures on the English Poets: 'An airy voyager on life's stream, his mind inhales the fragrance of a thousand shores, and drinks of endless pleasures under halcyon skies' (Complete Works, v, 151). 21. Biographia Literaria (1817), edited by J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), 11, 260. 22. Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 11, 197. 23. See Lionel Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti, edited by Sidney Colvin (London, 1898). See also Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), pp. 1-12. 24. Monthly Review, 28 (1763), p. 303. Three more volumes were to follow: in 1787, 1794 (edited by Willey Reveley), and 1816 (edited by Joseph Woods). 25. Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (London, 1764), p. 1; The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Vol. 1 (London, 1774): quoted in Monthly Review, 53 (1775), p. 36.

146

Notes to pp. 14-16

26. Monthly Review, 42 (1770), p. 379. Winckelmann is quite adamant in his preference for antiquity over 'Nature': 'The pointing out of Nature as chiefly imitable, is leading us into a more tedious and bewildered road to the knowledge of perfect beauty, than setting up the ancients for that purpose.' He suggests that 'the more scattered and weaker beauties' which belong to 'our Nature' need to be 'ennobled' through the ideas of 'unity' and 'perfection' which the modern artist acquires by 'meditating on antiquity' (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, translated by Henry Fuseli (London, 1765), pp. 17-18, 19). 27. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman (New York, 1965), p. 678 (2 July 1800). 28. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, edited by Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960-3), 11, 76. 29. Annals of the Fine Arts, 3 (1818), p. 178. 'The remains of antiquity plainly demonstrate the progress of the Fine Arts in former times; and the same steps must again be trodden by those who are ambitious of arriving at the same results as the accomplished ancients. . . . The more we examine, the more strong will be the assurance, that whatever in the Fine Arts of later times is of a superior order, or distinguished for the beauty of its formation, is derived from the Greeks' (George Stanley, 'An Essay on the Superiority of the Ancient Greeks in the Fine Arts', Annals of the Fine Arts, 5 (1820), 37-57 (p. 39)). 30. Annals of the Fine Arts, 1 (1816), p. 170. 31. Compare Friedrich Schlegel, Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1795), edited by Paul Hankamer (Godesberg, 1947), p. 194: 'In Deutschland, und nur in Deutschland hat die Aesthetik und das Studium der Griechen eine Hohe erreicht, welche ein ganzliche Umbildung der Dichtkunst und des Geschmacks notwendig zur Folge haben muss' (In Germany, and in Germany alone, aesthetic study of the Greeks has reached such a peak that the result must necessarily be a total transformation in th art of poetry and in taste). 32. 'Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci', in Beyond Formalism, p. 318. 33. Annals of the Fine Arts, 1 (1816), p. 285. 34. In reply to Bacon's claim that Homer's poems have lasted 'five-and-twenty hundred years', without the loss of a syllable, Hazlitt says: 'Have not many of the Greek statues now lasted almost as long, without losing a particle of their splendour or their meaning, while the Iliad (except to a very few) has become almost a dead letter?' (Complete Works, x, 28). 35. As Harry Levin remarks, Keats 'says little of Homer and a great deal about Chapman' (The Broken Column (Cambridge,

Notes to pp. 16-20

36. 37.

38. 39.

147

Mass., 1931), p. 67). For further discussion of the poem, see Chapter 2, pp. 40-5. Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, 1949), p. 174The outstanding text on the subject is still, I think, Friedrich Meinecke's Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, translated by J. E. Anderson (London, 1972). See also: Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London, 1976); Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955); J. W. Thomson and B. J. Holm, A History of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (New York, 1942); Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing (New York, ig33)- The following should also be consulted: Leo Braudy, 'Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton, 1970); Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, translated by T. Churchill (London, 1800). Monthly Review, 43 (1770), p. 357; Monthly Review, 16 (1757), P- 377-

40. Monthly Review, 45 (1771), p. 594. 41. Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), pp. 1-2. 42. Randolph Starn, 'Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline', History and Theory, 14 (1975), 1-31 (p. 28). 43. Mallet, Introduction a VHistoire de Dannemarc: quoted in Monthly Review, 16 (1757), pp. 377-8. 44. European Magazine, 23 (1793), p. 268. 45. Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 1, 272, 355-6. 46. 'English tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concentrates on how to create a native poetry which would express the special destiny of the nation. The poetical genius should reflect the genius loci, the spirit of England's religion, history, and countryside' (Hartman, 'Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci', p. 317). There might be an argument for citing Keats's 'To Autumn' as the climax to such a tradition: 'English ought to be kept up', declares the poet in the same letter where he not only tells J. H. Reynolds about the poem's composition but also voices the eccentric belief that Chatterton is 'the purest writer in the English Language... 'tis genuine English Idiom in English words' {Letters, 11, 167 (21 September 1819)). 47. Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 1, 348. 48. The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1774-81), new edition, 4 vols. (London, 1824), in, 286.

148

Notes to pp. 20-2

49. D. H. Urquhart, Commentaries on Classical Learning (London, 1803), pp. 388-9. 50. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. From the German . . . , 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1818), 1, 46. See Chapter 5, pp. 108-9. 51. Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Dublin, 1765), pp. 5, 63, 27. 52. Letters on Chivalry and Romance, pp. 43, 29, 32. 53. Monthly Review, 53 (1775), p. 102. 54. The notable exception was Dante. It was not until 1785 that Henry Boyd published A Translation of the Inferno... in English Verse, with Historical Notes, and the Life of Dante, in 2 volumes. His translation of the whole Divina Commedia (3 volsv 1805) was superseded by Henry Cary's more popular version, published in 1814, in 3 volumes (reprinted 1819). It was Cary's translation which Keats took with him on his tour to Scotland (see Letters, 1, 294). Editions of Spenser included: The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser... Publish'd by Mr. [John] Hughes, 6 vols. (1715, 1750); Spenser's Fairie Queene. A new edition... by J[ohn] Upton, 2 vols. (1758); The Fairie Queene . . . A new edition ...by Ralph Church, 4 vols. (1758); The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser... From the text of Mr. Upton, etc., 8 vols. (1778); The Works of Edmund Spenser... by Henry John Todd, 8 vols. (1805). Editions of The Poetical Works of John Milton appeared in 1720, 1731, 1761, 1776, 1790, 1794-7. Henry John Todd's edition, in 6 volumes, was published in 1801, and reprinted, in 7 volumes, in 1809. In 1783 John Hoole published his translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in 5 volumes; reprinted in 1785, 1799, 1807 (6 vols.), 1816. Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata was translated by P. Doyne in 1761 (2, vols.), and by Leigh Hunt in 1818. The version by John Hoole appeared in 1763 (2 vols.), and had reached its eighth edition by 1802. His translation of Rinaldo appeared in 179s. The Amyntas of Tasso was published by Percival Stockdale in 1770. Agostino Isola brought out editions, in the original Italian, of The Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso, 2 vols. (1786), and the Orlando Furioso of Lodovico Ariosto, 4 vols. (1789). 55. See two articles by Donald M. Foerster: 'The Critical Attack on the Epic in the English Romantic Movement', PMLA, 69 (1954), 432-47; 'Critical Approval of Epic Poetry in the Age of Wordsworth', PMLA, 70 (1955), 682-705. See also Brian Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison and Milwaukee, 1965). 56. Monthly Review, new series, 3 (1790), pp. 71-2.

Notes to pp. 23-30

149

57. Critical Review, 69 (1790), p. 679. 58. European Magazine, 23 (1793), p. 268. 59. 'History Writing as Answerable Style', in The Fate of Reading, pp. 101-13 (PP- 103-4)60. Complete Works, xvn, 139. 61. British Critic, new series, 2 (1814), p. 508. 6*. See E. S. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School :n Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge, 1975), p. 14, and passim. 63. Richard Hole, Remarks ,n the Arabian Nights' Entertainments (London, 1797), p. 18. 64. Walter Jackson Bate, Sarnvel Johnson (London, 1978), p. 339. See Martha Pike Conant r The Oriental Tale in England (New York, 1908). 65. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem, p. 20. 66. Richard Watson, A Discourse delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Ely (Cambridge, 1780), p. 4; Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem, p. 23. 67. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), P- 4768. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), a new edition, 12 vols. (London, 1819), 1, 349. 69. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, translated by Ralph Manheim, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1953-7), n> 10 570. Michael Kearney, Lectures concerning History, read during the year 1773, in Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, 1776), p. 8. 71. 'History', in A Philosophical Dictionary. From the French . . . , 6 vols. (London, 1824), 1V> 5572. Monthly Review, 59 (1763), p. 1. 73. The Poetical Works of William Collins, Bell's edition (London, 1783), pp. 23, 25. 74. Remarks on the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, p. 221. 75. Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754), new edition, 2 vols. (London, 1807), 1, 87. 76. History of English Poetry, 11, 233, 2%, 242. 77. Monthly Review, new series, 23 (1797), p- 409. 78. Monthly Review, new series, 2 (1790), p. 369. 79. See Edward B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York, 1941); Albert J. Kuhn, 'English Deism and the Development of Romantic Mythological Syncretism', PMLA, 71 (1956), 1094-116. 80. The Remains of Hesiod, Translated from the Greek into English Verse (London, 1812), p. 11. 81. A New System; or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774-6), third edition, 6 vols. (London, 1807), 1, L; VI, 383-4. 82. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem, p. 117. The

15°

Notes to pp. 30-4

Asiatic Researches were first published in 1788 and continued after Jones's death until 1839. 83. On the sacred 'symbolism of the Center', see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, translated by Willard R. Trask (London, 1955), pp. 15-17; Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem, pp. 117-50. 84. The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols. (London, 1799), 1, 259; Monthly Review, new series, 1 (1790), p. 435. 85. Works, 1, 34. 86. Monthly Review, 75 (1786), p. 114. 87. See Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem, pp. 183-6. 88. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ix, 3. 89. The History of the World, 2 vols. (London, 1807), 1, iv-v. 90. Gregory Sharpe, The Origin and Structure of the Greek Tongue (London, 1767), p. 5. Sharpe endorses the theory of the Oriental origin of Greek: 'The materials with which the Greek language is built are all brought from the East; many are still to be found in Arabia, in Persia, and Egypt' (p. f 91. Oriental Collections, Vol. 1 (London, 1797), p. 118. 95. The Itinerary of Greece (London, 1810). ,.-.'. ii-iii. 93. Complete Works, xvi, 38. 94. Observations on the Fairy Queen of Sptn^t r. 1, 19. 95. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem, p. 164. 96. Timothy Webb concludes his excellent survey of English Romantic Hellenism with the observation that 'throughout the eighteenth and in the early years of the nineteenth century the image of Greece was constantly refined, revised, refuted or reinterpreted. . . . Greece remained a rich imaginative matrix either as an ideal toward which one might aspire or as a false example which must be repudiated' (English Romantic Hellenism ijoo-1824 (Manchester, 1982), pp. 31-5). 97. The Subtler Language, p. 175. 98. 'Thomas Taylor, Plato and the English Romantic Movement', British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 99-153 (p. 150). 99. English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York, 1943), pp. 505-6. 100. Greek Influence on English Poetry, edited by Michael MacMillan (London, 1910), p. 59. 101. Frederick E. Pierce, 'The Hellenic Current in English Nineteenth Century Poetry', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 16 (1917), 103-35 (p. 115). 105. Bernard Herbert Stern, The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature ly32-1786 (1940), reprint (New York, 1969), p. 8. 103. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (1937), reprint (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 109.

Notes to pp. 34-42

151

104. English Bards and Grecian Marbles, pp. 206, 207. 105. See for example, John Buxton, The Grecian Taste: Literature in the Age of Neo-Classicism 1740-1820 (London, 1978), pp. 1 O

5 ~^ 153-4106. English Bards and Grecian Marbles, p. 232. 107. Letters, 1, 374 (27 April 1818); n, 212 (21 September 1819). Benjamin Bailey wrote to John Taylor that 'I have promised to assist [Keats] in his Greek', but over two years later he concludes that Keats 'has abundant power, but little knowledge' (The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-18J8, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins (1948), second edition, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 1, 26 (20 May 1818); 1, 126 (27 July 1820)). 108. Letters, 1, 274 (27 April 1818). 109. Keats Circle, 11, 147-8. 110. Complete Works, xix, 23. 111. Letters, 1, 325 (13 July 1818). 112. Philip Hobsbaum, Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry (London, 1979), p. 225. 113. M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England ijoo-1830 (Cambridge, 1945), p. 164. 114. Quoted in Clarke, Greek Studies in England, pp. 69-70. 115. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792-1827), 1, 421.

2

Towards Endymion

1. Begin?iings, pp. 50, 22. 2. Quoted in Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Reinsionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven and London, 1976), p. 7. 3. Letters, 1, 170 (8 October 1817); Poems of John Keats, p. 103. 4. Blackivood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (1817), p. 148. 5. See Chapter 5, p. 105. Keats might have read in Baldwin's Pantheon how Hesiod assigns Aurora, goddess of the morning, 'a very poetical kindred': she is 'sister to the sun [Apollo] and moon [Diana]' (Edward Baldwin [William Godwin], The Pantheon: or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (London, 1806), p. 145). 6. Baldwin, The Pantheon, p. 10. 7. Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca and London, 1978), p. 92. 8. Beginnings, p. 34. 9. Philosophical Essays (1810), third edition (Edinburgh, 1818),

P- 595-

152

Notes to pp. 43-7

10. Foliage; or Poems Original and Translated (London, 1818), p. 31. 11. Letters, 1, 224., 225 (3 February 1818). 12. As Walter Jackson Bate points out, Keats 'began to think of history as a process in which the changes that take place are fundamental. Men and their achievements must be seen in relation to the age in which they live' (John Keats (1963), third printing (London, 1979), p. 322). 13. Letters, 1, 266 (9 April 1818). 14. 'Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry', Daedalus, 99 (1970), 405-34 (p. 413). 15. John Hughes, 'On Allegorical Poetry' (1715), reprinted in The Works of Edmund Spenser, edited by Henry John Todd, 8 vols. (London, 1805), 11, xix. 16. Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer: with a Comparative vieiv of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade (London, 1775), pp. 231-2. 17. An Essay on Original Genius; and its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, particularly in Poetry (London, 176-7), p. 277. Walter Jackson Bate pursues the implications of the emphasis on 'originality' in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. 18. Letters, 1, 380 (21 October 1818); 11, 116 (9 June 1819). 19. Essay on Original Genius, pp. 265-6. 20. Essay on Genius (London, 1774), pp. 11, 17. 21. 'Homer', in A Classical Dictionary (1778), fifth edition (London, 1804), no pagination. 22- The Whole Works of Homer (London, no date), no pagination. 23. Hazlitt, Complete Works, xvm, 171. Pater will say that Hellenism is 'pre-eminently intellectual light' ('Winckelmann', in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 160). 24. Compare Shelley's remark on the 'fluted Ionic columns of white stucco' of a temple at Pompeii: 'so white that it dazzles you to look at it' (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), 11, 73 (23-4 January 1819)). 25. The ambiguous power of antiquity's brightness is a problem which returns in Lamia, and which I shall discuss in Chapter 6. 26. Complete Works, v, 59. 27. Letters, 1, 146 (16 May 1817). 28. Letters, 1, 141 (10 May 1817); 1, 166 (21 September 1817); 1, 169-70 (8 October 1817). T h e evidence of the letters suggests that Keats never really overcame this anxiety. Almost two years later he announced to J. H. Reynolds that 'I have finish'd the

Notes to pp. 47-9

153

Act [of Otho the Great] and in the interval of beginning the 2nd have proceeded pretty well with Lamia, finishing the 1st part which consists of about 400 lines' (Letters, 11, 128 (11 July 1819)). And in August 1819 he told Benjamin Bailey that 'within these two Months I have written 1500 Lines. . . . I have written Two Tales [Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes] . . . and a third call'd Lamia (half finish'd - I have also been writing parts of my Hyperion and completed 4 Acts of a Tragedy' (Letters, 11, 139 (14 August 1819)). 29. Stuart A. Ende has made the similar point that 'the plots of Keats's early poems . . . trace restorations that deny the permanence of departure', and that 'renovation is itself part of the larger plot of emotional compensation' (Keats and the Sublime (New Haven and London, 1976), p. 34). 30. For useful discussions of the metaphor of the bower in Keats, see Mario L. D'Avanzo, Keats's Metaphors for the Poetic Imagination (Durham, N.C., 1967), pp. 164-72; Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development (Chicago and London, 1971), pp. 30 ff. See also Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1969); Herbert Lindenberger, 'The Idyllic Moment: On Pastoral and Romanticism', College English, 34 (1972), 335-5131. Hunt himelf spoke of Keats's poetry as 'a garden of enchantment', containing 'flowers of all hue' (Imagination and Fancy (1844), reprinted in Keats: The Critical Heritage, edited by G. M. Matthews (London, 1971), p. 281). 32. The Works of Edmund Spenser, 11, ii, xx. 33. Complete Works, v, 43. Earlier in the same lecture (the second of the Lectures on the English Poets), Hazlitt observed of Spenser that 'he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination' (Complete Works, v, 35). 34. Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807-1824 (London, 1973), pp. 455, 462. A famous axiom of Keats was, of course, that poetry 'should surprise by a fine excess' (Letters, 1, 238 (27 February 1818)). 35. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 619. 36. The effect of the two negative propositions - 'No wreathed incense . . . No crowd of nymphs' - might usefully be explained in Freudian terms. In his essay on 'Negation' (1925), Freud claims that 'the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed' (Standard Edition, xix, 235). On account of its paradoxical power - the modern poet must, and yet cannot whole-

154

Notes to pp. 50-7

heartedly, acknowledge its irrevocable loss - the image of the beautiful mythology of Greece needs to be repressed (hence the emphatic tone of the sonnet's opening line: 'Glory and loveliness have passed away). The image returns, however, but in a negated form, and it is, perhaps, the language of flowers which authorizes the negative statement. I think the repeated use of the negative has a comparable effect in the second stanza of the 'Ode to Psyche'. 37. Jack Stillinger, 'The Order of Poems in Keats's First Volume', in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana, Chicago and London, 1971), pp. 1-13 (p. 5). 38. Letters, 1, 121 (17 December 1816). See Bate, John Keats, pp. 39. Letters, 1, 170 (8 October 1817). 40. Complete Works, v, 35. 3 Flowers of speech 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

Poems of John Keats, p. 103. Letters, 1, 170 (8 October 1817). Poems of John Keats, p. 102. Letters, 1, 170 (8 October 1817). Hazlitt, Complete Works, xi, 30. Compare the description of the union of Porphyro and Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes: Into her dream he melted, as the rose/Blendeth its odour with the violet' (350-1), or the nymph's submission to Hermes in Lamia: 'like new flowers at morning song of bees,/Bloom'd, and gave up her honey to the lees' (1, 142-3). John Keats, p. 185. Letters, 1, 170 (8 October 1817). Writing on Endymion in the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey suggested that Keats be distinguished from his Elizabethan models, insofar as 'their ornaments and images are employed to embellish and recommend just sentiments, engaging incidents, and natural characters, while his are poured out without measure or restraint, and with no apparent design but to . . . give vent to the overflowing vein of his fancy' (Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, pp. 493-4). According to Bate, for example, the sight of Venus and Adonis 'gives Endymion further encouragement; for there are parallels between Adonis' situation and his own' (John Keats, p. 185). On the parergonal embellishments in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Hazlitt was severe: Shakespeare's images 'do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it,

Notes to pp. 58-60

155

like splendid patch-work, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished over' (Complete Works, iv, 359). With which might be compared his comment on Chaucer: 'He exhibits for the most part the naked object, with little drapery thrown over it. His metaphors, which are few, are not for ornament, but use, and as like as possible to the things themselves' (Complete Works, v, 22).

11. Hunt, The Feast of the Poets (London, 1814), p. 105; Hazlitt, Complete Works, iv, 32. 12. John Keats, 2 vols. (London, no date; USA printing, 1925), 1, 373. The disquiet of Amy Lowell and other critics at the excessive embellishments of Endymion might be compared to Hazlitt's remarks on two writers whom Keats certainly read, Beaumont and Fletcher: 'We find all the prodigality of youth . . . an enthusiasm bordering on extravagance, richness running riot, beauty dissolving in its own sweetness. . . . Every page of their writings is a florilegium . . . [but] their serious poetry . . . with all its richness, sweetness, loftiness, and grace, wants something - stimulates more than it gratifies, and leaves the mind in a certain sense exhausted and unsatisfied. . . . Every thing seems in a state of fermentation and effervescence, and not to have settled and found its centre in their minds. The ornaments, through neglect or abundance, do not always appear sufficiently appropriate: there is evidently a rich wardrobe of words and images, to set off any sentiments that occur, but not equal felicity in the choice of the sentiments to be expressed' (Complete Works, vi, 249). 13. Letters, 1, 169-70 (8 October 1817). 14. Of Gramrnatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 144, 145. 15. Of Grammatology, p. 142. 16. This phrase, 'originary lack', I borrow from Jonathan Culler's exposition of Derrida in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, New York, 1982), p. 103. 17. The statement as a whole, of which this phrase is a part, actually implies a double movement of supplementation: the 'one bare circumstance' must be filled with '4000 Lines', which in turn must be filled with 'Poetry'. 18. Letters, 1, 154 (10 September 1817). 19. 'The Parergon', October, 9 (1979), 3-41 (pp. 20, 33). The relevant passage in Kant is to be found in The Critique of Judgement, Part 1, translated by James Creed Meredith (1928), reprint (Oxford, 1973), p. 68: 'Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e. what is only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the

156

Notes to pp. 60-2

object, in augmenting the delight of taste does so only by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces. But if the ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of the beautiful form - if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win approval for the picture by means of its charm it is then called finery and takes away from the genuine beauty.' 20. I think that David Morse is reaching a similar conclusion when he says: iEndymio?i is not only a meditation on the theme of "Et in Arcadia Ego" - the presence of sorrow, greed and loss even in Arcady; it is further intensified by the distance that separates us from such an Arcady and further still by a lack in language which makes it impossible to communicate even a glimmering of what such an existence could be' {Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (London, 1982), p. *65). 21. Letters, 1, 238-9 (27 February 1818). For a general discussion of the subject, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), reprint (London, Oxford and New York, 1975), pp. 184-225. See also Chapter Five, pp. 116-18. 22. 'But now he names his most treasured possession,/Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he must find' (Friedrich Holderlin, Poems and Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger (London, 1966), p. 249). 23. Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image', in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom (New York, 1970), pp. 65-77 (PP- 67, 68, 69). Compare de Man's discussion of the 'allegorical sign' in 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, edited by Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 173-209 (p. 190). 24. 'Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image', p. 69. 25. Of Grammatology, p. 143. 26. 'Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image', p. 67. 27. See Eugene M. Green and Rosemary M. Green, 'Keats's Use of Names in Endymion and the Odes', Studies in Romanticism, *6 {l91l)> 15-3428. Quoted in Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, 1981), p. 34. 29. 'From Work to Text', in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, edited with an introduction by Josue V. Harari (1979), second printing (London, 1980), pp. 73-8i ( P . 76). 30. 'An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative',

Notes to pp. 62-3

157

New Literary History, 6 (1975), 237-72 (p. 271). 31. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, pp. 482, 486, 483. A gap between rhetoric and content was also noticed in the verse of Byron and Shelley. In his review of Beppo (1818), Jeffrey observed that the poem is 'absolutely a thing of nothing - without story, characters, sentiments, or intelligible object. . . . The great charm is in the simplicity and naturalness of the language' (Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, pp. 224-5). Hazlitt prefaced his review of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with a misquotation from Othello: 'I do perceive a fury in your words, but nothing wherefore.' Byron Volunteers his own Pilgrimage, - appoints his own penance, - makes his own confession, and all - for nothing. . . . There is no plot, no story, no interest excited, no catastrophe' (Complete Works, xix, 35, 36). A propos Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Hazlitt said that the poet 'gives us, for representations of things, rhapsodies of words' {Complete Works, xn, 246), while the Quarterly Review had this to say about the poem: 'In Mr. Shelley's poetry all is brilliance, vacuity, and confusion. We are dazzled by the multitude of words which sound as if they denoted something very grand or splendid: fragments of images pass in crowds before us; but when the procession has gone by, and the tumult of it is over, not a trace of it remains upon the memory. . . . The predominating characteristic of Mr; Shelley's poetry . . . is its frequent and total want of meaning.' The critic acknowledges Shelley's 'glittering constellations of words', but concludes by asking: 'Is it not strange that he should never have turned his attention from his verses to that which his verses are meant to express?' (Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, pp. 363, 368). 32. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, pp. 494, 507. 33. Keats: The Critical Heritage, p. 365. Smith's comment is cited by Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment (1974), reprint (London, Oxford and New York, 1976), p. 101, a book which stands alone in its fertile approach to the 'sensuousness' of Endymion. 34. Quoted in Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), reprint (London, 1969), p. 172. Davie himself refers to Keats as a 'flagrant case' of the impurity of Romantic poetic diction : 'In all but his best work, his language oscillates wildly between a colloquialism which is slang and a literary pomp which is exotic' (p. 26). 35. 'Critical Introduction' to Poems of John Keats, edited by G. Thorn Drury, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1896), 1, xciv,

158

Notes to pp. 63-5

36. Edward Semple Le Comte, Endymion in England: The Literary History of a Greek Myth (New York, 1944), p. 152; Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, 1973), p. 90. 37. E. C. Pettet, On the Poetry of Keats (1957), reprint (Cambridge, 1970), p. 153; Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London, 1959), p. 133; John Jones, John Keats''s Dream of Truth (London, 1969), pp. 128, 145. Embarrassment would seem to be a typical reaction to a work's formal incoherence, according to an essay from a contemporary journal: 'An elegant distribution and concurrence of parts are the only means by which that harmonious proportion is produced, which is ever so delightful to the senses. It is by this disposition alone that the mind of the reader or spectator can be freed from embarrassment' ('On the Affinity between Painting and Writing, in point of Composition', Annals of the Fine Arts, 1 (1817), 1-50 (P. 11)).

38. 'On the Interpretation of Endymion : The Comedian as the Letter E', in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and other Essays on Keats's Poems, pp. 14-30 (pp. 26,30). Referring to Endymion and both versions of Hyperion, Paul de Man has noted that 'whenever Keats criticism has gone astray, it has been in trying to force a thematic unity on the entire work'. But de Man himself succumbs to precisely this temptation. Endymion, he argues, is about the hero's 'quest for unity', and this theme/ would confer unity on the work itself, were it not for the 'incoherence of structural design' and the 'over-worked texture, which hides the real profundity of the idea under a superficial gloss of decorative diffuseness' ('Keats and Holderlin', Comparative Literature, 8 (1956), 28-45 (pp. 29, 35, 38)). 39. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941), revised edition (New York, 1957), P- *6. 40. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 125. 41. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 484. 42. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 494. 43. 'From Work to Text', p. 76. 44. Henry John Todd's edition of Johnson's Dictionary gives this definition of arabesque: 'Related to the architecture of the Arabs and other Mahometans; to the ornaments of foliage, plants, and the like, on their buildings; and sometimes used as distinguishing the lighter kind of Gothick architecture in general' (4 vols. (London, 1818), 1, no pagination). On the importance of arabesque to Islamic art, see Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven and London, 1973), and David Wade, Pattern in Islamic Art (New York, 1976). Towards the end of the eighteenth century the term had been

Notes to pp. 65-6

159

applied by one writer to 'the most delicate Gothic' (Louis Avril, Temples anciennes et modernes (London, 1774): quoted in Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (i960), third printing (Princeton, 1965), p. 413). Hegel was to describe the ornaments on Gothic architecture as 'intertwined like arabesques' and 'fantastically juxtaposed' (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835), translated by T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 11, 696). The 'roof terraces' of John Ruskin's Gothic Venice are 'wreathed with Arabian imagery of golden globes suspended on the leaves of lilies' (The Stones of Venice (1851-3), fourth edition, 3 vols. (Orpington, 1886), 1, 10). As an adjective, arabesque means 'strangely mixed, fantastic' (OED), while the relevant article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica points out that the term is 'technically used for a certain form of decorative design in flowing lines intertwined; hence comes the more metaphorical use of this word . . . indicating a fantastic or complicated interweaving of lines against a background' (eleventh edition, 29 vols. (Cambridge, 1910-11), 11, 253). 45. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 483. Compare Le Comte: 'Great stretches of the poem have the phantasmagoric quality of a dream, brilliant, shifting, unconsecutive'; the narrative is full of 'abrupt transitions' and 'kaleidoscopic shifts' (Endymion in England, pp. 156, 173). According to David Morse, the 'enchanting visions' presented in Endymion 'have the character of a recurrent nightmare. . . . Endymion can have no genuine progression or development, since an obsessional alternation between dream and reality is its actual theme' (Romanticism: A Structural Analysis, p. 564). To unravel Endymion as a Freudian dream-text would be a difficult though intriguing task; for the moment we may be content to supplement accounts of the poem's dream-like form with a relevant sentence or two from Hazlitt's essay, 'On Dreams': 'The bundles of thought are, as it were, untied, loosened from a common centre, and drift along the stream of fancy as it happens. . . . [We are not] prepared to trace the same connected subject of thought to a number of varying and successive ramifications, or to form the idea of a whole' (Complete Works, xn, 20). 46. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 486. 47. Keats touches on the relation between parerga and the 'whole' in a letter written at the end of 1818. He tells how, during a visit to Benjamin Robert Haydon, he perused 'a Book of Prints' containing 'Specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy'. Keats discovered in the engravings 'magnificence of draperies beyond any I ever saw not excepting

160

Notes to pp. 66-7

Raphael's - But Grotesque to a curious pitch - yet still making up a fine whole - even finer to me than more accomplish'd works - as there was left so much room for Imagination' (Letters, 11, 19 (51 December 1818)). Compare Keats's wish 'to diffuse the colouring of St. Agnes eve throughout a Poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery' (Letters, 11, 234 (17 November 1819)). 48. Shelley, Letters, 11, 117 (6 September 1819). In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley suggested that 'the parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem' (The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Harry Buxton Forman, 4 vols. (London, 1880), m, 108). 49. The radical nature of such a displacement can be gauged if we cite, by contrast, the orthodox theory of narrative form proposed by Lord Kames, who believed it was a common human tendency 'to view the principal subject before we descend to its accessories or ornaments, and the superior before the inferior or dependent: we are equally averse to enter into a minute consideration of constituent parts, till the thing be surveyed as a whole'. Thus 'an episode in a narrative poem . . . will not be graceful if it be loosely connected with the principal subject'. Kames praises Milton for his 'peculiar talent in embellishing the principal subject by associating it with others that are agreeable'. Such embellishments 'diversify the narration by new images that are not strictly necessary to the comparison: they are short episodes, which, without drawing us from the principal subject, afford great delight by their beauty and variety' (Elements of Criticism (1762), third edition, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1765), 1, 21, 57-8; 11, 195-6). Compare Joshua Reynolds, Discourse XI (1785): 'The detail of particulars, which does not assist the expression of the main characteristick, is worse than useless, it is mischievous, as it dissipates the attention, and draws it from the principal point' (The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1797), second edition, 3 vols. (London, 1798), 11, 44). 50. Shelley, Letters, 11, 117 (6 September 1819). 51. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1956-71), iv, 545 (7 March 1815). 52. Elements of Criticism, 1, 379. 53. Complete Works, xvm, 163. 54. Approaching the end of the first draft of En dy mi on, Keats wrote to J. H. Reynolds: 'Whenever I am separated from you, and not engaged in a continued Poem - every Letter shall bring you a lyric - but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole, to send you a particle' (Letters, 1, 188 (22

Notes to pp. 67-8

161

November 1817)). 55. Poems of John Keats, p. 105; I borrow the architectural metaphor from Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1977), p. 19. 56. On arbitrariness in Islamic arabesque, see Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art, p. 300. 57. Keats: The Critical Heritage, p. 350. The profound distrust of ornamental styles, which forms an important chapter within the history of Romanticism, is not, of course, confined to writing. Joseph Forsyth, who thought that a 'rage for embellishing' was implanted in every artist', criticized the modern architecture of Rome for its 'excess of ornament': 'Every where you see ornament making great edifices look little, by subdividing their general surfaces into such a multitude of members as prevents the eye from re-combining them. . . . Ornaments for ever interrupt or conceal ornaments: accessories are multiplied till they absorb the principal: the universal fault is the too many and the too much' (Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in the years 1802 and 1803 (London, 1813), pp. 133, 180-1). 58. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness, p. 107. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, Keats remarks that he is 'continually running away from the subject', a confession he repeats to James Rice: 'I am obliged to run wild, being attracted by the Loadstone Concatenation' (Letters, 1, 185-6 (22 November 1817); 1, 255 (24 March 1818)). Keats is notably alert to his own writing habits, particularly the tendency to 'criss-cross' his letters with fragments on different themes (Letters, 1, 246 (14 March 1818)). Relevant here is the 'Rat-trap' passage in a famous letter to J. H. Reynolds (Letters, 1, 279 (3 May 1818)), which has been discussed by David Luke in 'Keats's Letters: Fragments of an Aesthetic of Fragments', Genre, 11 (1978), 209-26 (pp. 212-17). 59. Letters, 1, 170 (8 October 1817). 60. An Abridgement of the Light of Nature Pursued, edited by William Hazlitt (London, 1807), p. 62. 61. Complete Works, v, 35, 42; vin, 255. 62. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 3 vols. (London, 1850), 11, 270.

63. Relevant here would be Keats's interest (nurtured by Hunt) in Italian. Italian is a 'soft' language, as Keats intimated to his sister: 'I wish the Italian would supersede french in every School throughout the Country for that is full of real Poetry and Romance of a kind more fitted for the Pleasure of Ladies than perhaps our own' (Letters, 1, 155 (10 September 1817)). Joseph Forsyth thought that the 'common discourse' of the Italians was 'too melodious, too soft; all vowel-sounds, all

162

Notes to pp. 68-70 pulp and flesh, without nerve, articulation, or bone' (Remarks O7i . . . Italy, p. 259). It is not surprising, then, that Italian art should appear to come close to arabesque: 'The architecture of Italy is tinged with the same romantic hues as its poetry; if not uniformly correct, yet luxuriant and sportive, wild and fantastic' ('On the Analogy between Language and Architecture', Annals of the Fine Arts, 5 (1850), 542-83 (p. 260)).

64. Complete Works, v, 35; xn, 227. Compare Hazlitt's comment on Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess: 'In reading the Faithful Shepherdess, we find ourselves breathing the moonlight air under the cope of heaven, and wander by forest side or fountain, among fresh dews and flowers, following our vagrant fancies, or smit with the love of nature's works' (Complete Works, vi, 256). 65. 'From Work to Text', pp. 76, 77. Compare Grabar, on the experience of 'reading' Islamic arabesque: the subject 'can lose himself in the contemplation of details. . . . He can pick a single motif and follow it up . . . or examine its variations. . . . He can search for compositional patterns or for effects of light and shade' (The Formation of Islamic Art, P- !99)66. Complete Works, vm, 248, 249. 67. Complete Works, v, 20. Hazlitt extends these terms to his discussions of painting. In the essay, 'On Gusto1, for example, he says that the limbs in Michelangelo's paintings 'convey an idea of muscular strength. . . . They are firm, commanding, broad, and massy. . . . This is what is meant by saying that his style is hard and masculine. It is the reverse of Correggio's, which is effeminate. . . . In Correggio's faces as well as figures we see neither bones nor muscles' (Complete Works, iv, 78). (The comparison of Spenser's 'effeminacy' to Chaucer's 'masculinity' was later adopted by Swinburne; see Swinburne as Critic, edited by Clyde K. Hyder (London and Boston, 1972), pp. 165-7.) 68. Complete Works, v, 20, 34, 35. 69. Complete Works, vm, 254-5. A less explicit link between Hazlitt's essay and Keats might be traced in a possible continuity between Hazlitt's remarks on effeminacy's devotion to 'a studied succession of agreeable sensations' (Complete Works, vm, 248) and Keats's 'O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts' (Letters, 1, 185 (22 November 1817)). We might also compare Hazlitt's account of Endymion with his description of the 'flow of voluptuous thoughts and shining allusions' in the verse of Thomas Moore: 'His subject is set off by a dazzling veil of poetic diction, like a wreath of flowers gem-

Notes to p. 71

163

med with innumerous dew-drops, that weep, tremble, and glitter in liquid softness and pearly light, while the song of birds ravishes the ear, and languid odours breathe around' (Complete Works, xi, 169). 70. Letters, 1, 207 (23 January 1818). 71. Complete Works, iv, 38; v, 57. 72. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken i'tber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755), herausgegeben von Ludwig Uhlig (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 20; Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, translated by Henry Fuseli (London, 1765), p. 30. 73. We are frequently reminded of the 'chastity' of ancient Greek art, a chastity which always curbs any tendency towards excess: 'In their vases, candelabra and utensils of every kind, with their decorative embellishments, are beheld the excursions of an elevated fancy, subjected at the same time to the regulations of propriety' (George Stanley, 'An Essay on the Superiority of the Ancient Greeks in the Fine Arts', Annals of the Fine Arts, 5 (1820), 37-51 (p. 41)). Or else it is said that Grecian architecture unites 'the most exquisite beauty' to 'the most perfect chastity of decoration', whereas Renaissance Italian architecture is 'less severe in its forms' and less chaste in its decorations' ('On the Analogy between Language and Architecture,' Annals of the Fine Arts, 5 (1820), 245-83 (pp. 253, 259)). Introducing his volume of vase engravings, Thomas Kirk stated that one of the book's objects was 'to present to artists, and those who are attached to painting, a series of chaste compositions, that may tend to the formation of a pure and correct taste' (Outlines from the Figures and Compositions upon the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases of the late Sir William Hamilton (1804), second edition (London, 1814), p. v). 74. We might compare Hazlitt's critique of Endymion with the remarks of Hartley Coleridge, in an essay of 1822: 'The Gods and Goddesses of classic fame, with all the. . . Fauns and Satyrs, Dryads and Hamadryads, are beginning to re-occupy, with limited sway, their ancient places in poetry. Keats, Cornwall, and Shelley have breathed a new life into the dry bones of old mythology.' But there is a notable difference between the original images of antiquity and their modern representation: 'We cannot help thinking, however, that the immortal emigrants have acquired new manners, and almost new faces, in their exile. They seem to rely less on their antiquity, and more on their beauty and accomplishments. They are far less obtrusive and assuming; but, at the same time, they have lost somewhat of that strength and manliness which

164

Notes to pp. 71-5

distinguished them in the best periods of Greece and Rome, and are become refined and delicate, almost finical. They are invested with an exquisite tenderness; a soft and melting radiance; a close and affectionate affinity to the gentler parts of nature; but they have no longer that stern and venerable simplicity with which they appeared in nations where they were the objects of adoration' ('On the Poetical Use of the Heathen Mythology', in Essays and Marginalia, edited by Derwent Coleridge, 2 vols. (London, 1851), 1, 18-19). 75. Sidney Colvin, John Keats (1917), third edition (London, 1920), pp. 171, 173. 'The style of Keats', said Walter Savage Landor in 1850, 'is extremely far removed from the very boundaries of Greece. I wish someone had been near him when he printed his Endymion, to strike o u t . . . all that amidst its opulence is capricious and disorderly' (Keats: The Critical Heritage, p. 560). The assumed superiority of a simple 'masculine' over a flowery or 'feminine' style reappears in John Buxton's misguided discussion (following Walter Bagehot) of the 'Grecian simplicity in Shelley's poetic expression', a quality absent from Keats's poetry; thus, 'Keats addressing a Grecian urn is not the least Grecian in his use of language' (The Grecian Taste: Literature in the Age of Neo-Classicism 1740i82o,p. 153). 76. Complete Works, vm, 25. 4

The fall of Hyperion

1. John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London, 1976), p. 136. 2. Letters, 11, 80 (19 March 1819). 3. Letters, 1, 374 (8 October 1818); 1, 269 (10 April 1818). 4. Letters, 11, 322 (16 August 1820). 5. Letters, 1, 207 (23 January 1818). 6. Complete Works, v, 17. See Bate, John Keats, p. 259. 7. Hazlitt, Complete Works, iv, 38. 8. Complete Works, v, 52, 47, 58. 9. Philosophical Essays, p. 595. 10. Hazlitt, Complete Works, v, 57. 11. The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form, p. 260. 12. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971), new edition (London, 1975), p. 360. 13. Quoted in Thomas Munro, Evolution in the Arts and Other Theories of Culture History (New York, 1963), pp. 47, 48. 14. See Letters, 1, 237 (21 February 1818), 369 (21 September 1818); 11, 100 (21 April 1819).

Notes to pp. 75-9

165

15. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 197s), pp. 138-9. Hayden V. White observes that 'when - as we do with Gibbon — we move a great historical work out of the sphere of science in order to enshrine it in the sphere of literature as a classic, what we are paying tribute to, ultimately, is the historian's command of a power that is plastic and figurative, and finally linguistic' ('Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination', in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 101-50 (p. 118)). 16. Roland Barthes, 'Historical Discourse', in Structuralism: A Reader, edited by Michael Lane (London, 1970), pp. 145-55 (p. 151). 17. See Bate, John Keats, pp. 388-9. 18. Elements of Criticism, 1, 33. 19. The Works of Lucian, translated by Thomas Francklin, 4 vols. (London, 1781), 11, 306, 309-10. 20. A New System, 1, 185. 21. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London, 1965), p. 12. 22. Quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, translated by J. E. Anderson (London, 1975), p. 445. 23. 'On the Historian's Task' (1821), History and Theory, 6 (1967), 57—71 (pp. 57-8). We are reminded, perhaps, of Keats's admiration for the engravings which he saw during a visit to Haydon: they seemed 'even finer... than more accomplish'd works' since 'there was left so much room for Imagination' (Letters, 11, 19 (31 December 1818)). 24. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London, 1964), p. 75. 55. The History of Ancient Greece . .. Including the History of Literature, Philosophy, and the Fine Arts, 2 vols. (London, 1786), 1, v-vi. 26. Two Dialogues, Concerning the Manner of Writing History. From the French (London, 1783), pp. 86, 172-3. 27. Two Dialogues, pp. 224., 22$. 28. John Hill, 'An Essay upon the Principles of Historical Composition, with an Application of those Principles to the Writings of Tacitus', Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1788), Part 11, section 2 (p. 84). 59. Two Dialogues, p. 236. 30. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 111, 1-2. 31. Monthly Review, 64 (1781), p. 22%. 35. Monthly Review, 79 (1788), pp. 121-2. 33. Complete Works, x, 44.

166

Notes to pp. 79-85

34. John Hill, 'An Essay upon the Principles of Historical Composition', p. 77. 35. Monthly Review, 79 (1788), p. 235. 36. Monthly Review, 69 (1783), p. 107. 37. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973), p. 54. 38. John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (Dublin, 1763), p. 31. 39. European Magazine, 5 (1784), p. 337. 40. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1, 421-2. 41. Vico's Scienza Nuova was first published in 1725; a second and altered version appeared in 1730, reprinted with additions in 1744. 42. J. Adams, A View of Universal History, from the Creation to the Present Time, 3 vols. (London, 1795), 1, 9. 43. Brown, Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power. . . of Poetry and Music: quoted in William Hayley, An Essay on History: in Three Epistles to Edward Gibbon (London, 1780), p. 90. 44. Monthly Review, 61 (1779), p. 523. 45. Quoted in Monthly Review, 75 (1786), p. 8. William Beloe's translation of Herodotus appeared, in four volumes, in 1791. 46. Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, !773-9*), iv, 415-4547. Lectures concerning History (Dublin, 1776), p. 7. 48. Two Dialogues, p. 295. 49. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, p. 383. 50. Vorlesungen fiber die Methode des academischen Studiums (1803): my translation of the original German, quoted in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography, p. 89. 51. Txuo Dialogues, p. 160. 52. Two Dialogues, pp. 72-3. 53. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ix, 5. 54. Monthly Review, new series, 12 (1793), p- 195-• 55. Urquhart, Commentaries on Classical Learning, p. 34. 56. Quoted in Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967), second printing (Oxford, 1968), p. 161. 57. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 441; Thomas De Quincey, Collected Writings, edited by David Masson, 14 vols. (Edinburgh, 1889-90), xi, 389. 58. Paul Sherwin, 'Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion, PMLA, 93 (1978), 383-95 (p. 384). 59. Romayiticism and the Forms of Ruin, p. 4 and passim. 60. Complete Works, x, 221. 61. From the Plan General et Raisonne of Antoine de Gebelin,

Notes to pp. 85-91

167

Le Monde primitij analyse et compare avec le Monde moderne (1773-8): quoted in Monthly Review, 49 (1773), p. 573. 62. The Works of Lucian, 11, 307, 308. 63. Essay on History, in, 359-60 (p. 78). 64. Monthly Review, 74 (1786), p. 125. 65. Quoted in Bate, John Keats, p. 405. 66. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 499. 67. Keats Circle, 11, 534. 68. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 441; London Magazine, 2 (1820), p. 560. 69. Keats: The Critical Heritage, pp. 303-4. 70. British Critic, new series, 14 (1820), p. 561. 71. Letters, 1, 51; Keats Circle, 11, 63. 72. Hartman, 'Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion , in The Fate of Reading, p. 61. 73. Jones, John Keats s Dream of Truth, p. 161. 74. Brisman, Romantic Origins, p. 92. 75. Celtic Researches, on the Origin, Traditions & Language, of the Ancient Britons (London, 1804), p. 131. 76. Baldwin, The Pantheon, p. 202. 77. Landscape into Art (1949), second edition (London, 1976), 78. Complete Works, x, 24; vm, 169. 79. The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, edited by Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr (Cleveland and London, 1970), p. 553. 80. Baldwin, The Pantheon, p. 41. 81. Complete Works, x, 109; vm, 169; x, 57. 82. A New System, in, 87, 88. 83. Complete Works, xviu, 271. 84. Complete Works, v, 60, 65. 85. Letters, 11, 73 (12 March 1819); n, 205 (20 September 1819). 86. We might find that Keats's lines harbour other suppressed references to books and writing: 'dead leaf; 'A stream went voiceless by' (suggesting a metaphor for failed creativity); 'the Naiad 'mid her reeds', where 'reeds', besides the homonymic allusion to reading, invites us to think of the pipes of Pan : in a more genial setting, it would be her reeds, rather than her 'cold finger', which the Naiad would press close to her lips (at the beginning of Book in, this potential for sound will indeed be realized, in the 'soft warble from the Dorian flute' (»*))•

87. 88. 89. 90.

Letters, 11, 212 (21 September 1819). Complete Works, x, 164. Redpath, Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, p. 151. Letters, 1, 207 (23 January 1818). Keats would have noted in

168

Notes to pp. 91-4

William Robertson that the march of passion and endeavour is as much the business of the historian as it is of the epic poet: 'It is one of the noblest functions of history to observe and to delineate men at a juncture when their minds are most violently agitated, and all their powers and passions are called forth. Hence the operations of war, and the struggles between contending states, have been deemed by historians, ancient as well as modern, a capital and important article in the annals of human actions' (History of America, 2, vols. (London, 1777), i> 179)91. Complete Works, x, 56. 92. Poetry and Repression, p. 119. 93. Hazlitt, Complete Works, iv, 37. Hazlitt uses this phrase to suggest the effect of Milton's ability in Paradise Lost to make words 'tell as pictures'. 94. The phrase, 'blighted moonscape', I borrow from Jones, John Keats's Dream of Truth, p. 164. 95. Hazlitt, Complete Works, xvm, 27. 96. Complete Works, v, 45. Dugald Stewart quotes an interestingly relevant sentence from Kames's Elements of Criticism: 'The veneration we have for our ancestors, and for the ancients in general, being similar to the emotion produced by an elevated object of sight, justifies the figurative expression, of the ancients being raised above us, or possessing a superior place' (Philosophical Essays, p. 380). In a late essay, 'English Students at Rome' (1827), Hazlitt will come to regard the ancients' monumental superiority less genially: 'If it were nothing else, the having the works of the great masters of former times always before us is enough to discourage and defeat all ordinary attempts. How many elegant designs and meritorious conceptions must lie buried under the high arched porticoes of the Vatican! The walls of the Sistine Chapel must fall upon the head of inferior pretensions and crush them' (Complete Works, xvn, 138). 97. Hartman, 'Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion, p. 57. 98. Hazlitt, Complete Works, x, 28. 99. John Logan, Elements of the Philosophy of History (1781): quoted in Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing 1760-1830 (New York, 1933), p. 53. 100. Review of Kean in Richard Duke of York, in The Champion (28 December 1817), quoted in Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study, p. 6. According to Marilyn Butler, 'the great literature of the years immediately after 1817... discovers a great nineteenth-century preoccupation: the necessity of historical change, but also and more particularly the

Notes to pp. 94-7

169

damage done to individuals by that process.... The sensibility, the bewilderment of loss, the essential innocence of Keats's fallen gods, capture a modern pity for the helpless individual victims of the historical process' (Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, pp. 148, 151). 101. Hartman, 'Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion , p. 66. 102. Hazlitt, Complete Works, v, 66. 103. Complete Works, v, 151. 104. Keats Circle, 1, 129. 105. A satisfying footnote to Keats's drama with Milton in Hyperion is provided by a contemporary writer, who imagines a situation where 'our language had so entirely disappeared that no vestige of it remained except Milton; now, although it could not but be allowed, that it had attained a high degree of cultivation; that it was not less poetical or sublime than the classic idioms... or that its prosody... had its peculiar laws and native beauties; it would, nevertheless, not be very easy to conjecture in what manner this language, so nervous and so lofty, would assume a style less ornate, consonant to the tone of familiar and unpremeditated conversation, adapted to simple narrative, in unison with colloquial gaiety and freedom'. All this evidently accords with Keats's belief that 'English ought to be kept up', and that Miltonic verse, though 'a beautiful and grand Curiosity', is 'a corruption of our Language' and 'cannot be written but in the vein of art' (Letters, 11, 167 (21 September 1819); 11, 212 (21 September 1819)). Our anonymous writer proceeds thus: 'The difficulty of employing a dead language upon some subjects, without many periphrases and barbarisms; the utter impossibility of using it at all upon others, without degenerating into downright jargon, will hardly be disputed: often where most skilfully managed, it conveys an air of stiffness and labour to the composition, that seems to impede the fluency of the writer' ('On the Analogy between Language and Architecture', Annals of the Fine Arts, 5 (1850), 242-83 (pp. 256, ^57))106. Complete Works, v, 63. 107. See Poems of John Keats, p. 102. 108. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, 1,43. 109. Complete Works, iv, 34. 110. I borrow 'invaginate' from Jacques Derrida, 'Living On: Border Lines', translated by James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism (London and Henley, 1979), p. 97. 111. Keats's hope for a broadening of experience from Hyperion is

170

112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

Notes to pp. 97-101 registered in some comments made during his tour: 1 should not have consented to myself these four Months tramping in the highlands but that I thought it would give me more experience, rub off more Prejudice, use [me] to more hardship, identify finer scenes load me with grander Mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among Books even though I should reach Homer' (Letters, 1, 342 (22 July 1818)). Letters, 1, 309 (1 July 1818). Letters, 1, 348-9 (26 July 1818). It is not the only occasion when we find Keats needing to colour the bleak sublimity of the Scottish landscape with his imagination: 'The Banks of the Clyde are extremely beautiful - the north End of Loch Lomond grand in excess - the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part from a little distance is precious good - the Evening was beautiful nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather — yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with Trumpets and Banners just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains' (Letters, i'334 (i7 July, 1818)). Letters, 1, 353 (3 August 1818). Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, p. viii. Poems of John Keats, p. 739. Letters, 1, 353 (3 August 1818). Letters, 1, 300 (27 June 1818). Wittreich, The Romantics on Milton, pp. 241-2. Eugenio Donato, 'Divine Agonies: Of Representation and Narrative in Romantic Poetics', Glyph Textual Studies, 6 (Baltimore and London, 1979), 90-122 (p. 116).

5

Silent forms

1. Quoting the lines which begin 'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!' in a letter to J. H. Reynolds, Keats says that he wrote them 'on May-day' and that he 'intend[s] to finish the ode all in good time' (Letters, 1, 278 (3 May 1818)). 2. See Poems of John Keats, pp. 638, 647. In the case of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', however, Stillinger rightly points out that 'the dating is difficult to consider objectively, because virtually all scholars in the twentieth century have assigned the poem specifically to May, usually without question or qualification' (P. 653)3. Bate, John Keats, p. 490. 4. Complete Works, VIII, 174.

Notes to pp. 102-11

171

5. 'Psyche', in A Classical Dictionary, no pagination. 6. Keats, Letters, 11, 106 (30 April 1819). 7. Homer Brown, 'Creations and Destroyings: Keats's Protestant Hymn, the "Ode to Psyche" ', Diacritics, 6 (Winter 1976), 49-56 (P- 5°)8. Letters, 1, 243 (13 March 1818). 9. Complete Works, xvn, 149. 10. Leo Spitzer, 'The "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or Content vs. Metagrammar', in Essays on English and American Literature, edited by Anna Hatcher (Princeton, 1962), p. 72. 11. 'Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's "To Autumn"', in The Fate of Reading, p. 130. 12. Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism in English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), p. 161; Hartman, 'Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's "To Autumn" ', p. 130. 13. The Fable of Cupid and Psyche, Translated from the Latin of Apuleius (London, 1795), p. vii. 14. 'Mercury', in A Classical Dictionary, no pagination. 15. Bate, John Keats, p. 405. 16. Jack Stillinger, Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keats', in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes, edited by Jack Stillinger (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), p. 5. 17. Lawrence Kramer,'The Return of the Gods: Keats to Rilke', Studies in Romanticism, 17 (1978), 483-500 (p. 494). 18. Complete Works, v, 9. 19. Letters, 1, 282, 281 (3 May 1818). 20. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, 1, 46. 21. Complete Works, v, 168. 22. Complete Works, v, 156. 23. Complete Works, iv, 112, 113. 24. Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London, 1828), p. 263. 25. 'Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's "To Autumn" ', p. 131. 26. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London, 1979), pp. 2J. John Keats's Dream of Truth, pp. 219-20. 28. Greek vases 'are not unfrequently, more particularly the vases of marble, adorned with single heads, masks, wreaths, borders of flowers, arabesque patterns, and various fanciful designs' (Henry Moses, A Collection of Vases, Altars, Paterae, Tripods, Candelabra, Sarcophagi, &c. From various Museums and Collections . . . xvith Historical Essays (London, 1814), p. 8). 29. Kirk, Outlines from the Figures and Compositions upon the

172

Notes to pp. 111-20

Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases of the late Sir William Hamilton, pp. ii-iii. 30. Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), fifth edition, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1817), 1, 353-4. 31. Complete Works, x, 135. 32. 'History Writing as Answerable Style', in The Fate of Reading, p. 102. 33. Frank Kermode, 'Secrets and Narrative Sequence', Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn 1980), 83-101 (p. 84). 34. A Collection of Vases, p. 3. 35. 'The Parergon', p. 15. 36. A Collection of Vases, p. 12. 37. Letters, 11, 79 (19 March 1819). 38. Complete Works, vm, 258. 39. Keats, Letters, 1, 238-9 (27 February 1818). 40. According to Richard Payne Knight, the 'wreaths of foliage, generally of laurel, olive, myrtle, ivy, or oak', which appear on ancient Greek coins, are generally 'dionysiac plants: that is, symbols of the generative power, signifying perpetuity of youth and vigour' (An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (London, 1818), p. 37). 41. The Stones of Venice, 1, 226. 42. Outli?ies of a Philosophy of the History of Man, p. 394. 43. The Stones of Venice, 1, 225. 44. Complete Works, iv, 77. 45. Complete Works, xvn, 139. 46. Complete Works, v, 11. The relevance of this passage has been noted by several critics, the most recent of whom is David Bromwich, in Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, p. 391. In the original version of the essay, 'On Gusto', published in The Examiner in 1816, Hazlitt suggested that 'the Greek statues want gusto' (Complete Works, iv, 377), but in the version of the essay included in The Round Table (1817) this statement was amended to: 'The gusto in the Greek statues is of a very singular kind' (Complete Works, iv, 79). The Examiner version of the essay was reprinted in the same volume of the Annals of the Fine Arts which first published the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (4 (1820), 543-9; 638-9). 47. Compare the more benign effect of the single use of 'For ever' in Wordsworth's sonnet, 'Upon the Sight of a beautiful Picture' ('the bark upon the glassy flood/For ever anchored in her sheltering bay'), originally printed in Annals of the Fine Arts, 2 (1818), 561. 48. 'Secrets and Narrative Sequence', p. 85. 49. Robert Gittings, John Keats: The 6

1954). P- *3 -

Living

Year (London,

Notes to pp. 120-32

173

50. Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), eleventh edition, 2 vols. (London, 1813), 11, 170, 171. 51. Philosophical Essays, p. 331. 52. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), tenth edition, 3 vols. (London, 1806), in, 130. 53. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, p. 54. 54. Letters, 1, 265 (8 April 1818). 55. Complete Works, xvi, 338. 56. Luke, 'Keats's Letters: Fragments of an Aesthetic of Fragments', p. 224. 57. Outlines, p. 16. According to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, bcetilus, or baetulus, is 'a species of meteoric stone'. The word derives from the Greek, flmTvXos, a 'meteoric stone, held sacred, because it fell from heaven' (Liddell and Scott). 58. Outlines, p. 12. 59. Complete Works, iv, 74. 60. Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry, p. 8. 61. 'Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's "To Autumn"', P- *3362. Sperry, Keats the Poet, p. 278. 63. Spitzer, 'The "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or Content vs. Metagrammar', p. 82. 64. 'Essay upon Epitaphs' (1810), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974), n, 57. 65. Wordsworth, 'Essay upon Epitaphs,' Prose Works, 11, 49. 66. Kirk, Outlines, p. xi. 67. Complete Works, x, 57. 68. 'Antiquity', in Essays and Marginalia, 1, 68. 6 Lamia; or, Antiquity Decomposed 1. Complete Works, vin, 254. 2. Hazlitt, Complete Works, vm, 254, 255. See above, Chapter 3, pp. 71-2. 3. Bate, John Keats, p. 429. See Poems of John Keats, p. 664. 4. Bate, John Keats, p. 544. 5. Letters, 11, 304 (5 July [?] 1820). 6. Letters, 11, 123 (1 July 1819). 7. 'The History of the Basket', in Henry Weber, Tales of the East, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1812), 11, 666-74. 8. Letters, 11, 130 (15 [?] July 1819). 9. Weber, Tales of the East, 11, 666. 10. Tales of the East, n, 669.

174 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 53. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes to pp. 132-42 Tales of the East, 11, 669, 671. Bate, John Keats, p. 555. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, pp. 66-7. Tales of the East, 11, 669, 670, 671. Letters, 11, 222 (11 October 1819). Tales of the East, 11, 67s, 673, 674. Hartman, 'Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion', p. 66. 'Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion , p. 68. 'The Critic as Host', in Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 225. Tales of the East, 11, 674. Letters, 1, 265 (8 April 1818). Keats, Letters, 11, 164 (19 September 1819). The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London, 1835), pp. xxxvixxxvii. Keats, Letters, n, 163 (19 September 1819). Bate, John Keats, p. 440. Letters, 11, 189 (18 September 1819). See Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum fragment 37 (1797), in Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, translated, introduced, and annotated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park and London, 1968), pp. 154-5. $ e e a ^ s o Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1980), pp. 12-16. Letters, 11, 116 (9 June 1819). Poems of John Keats, p. 475. See above, Chapter 4, p. 96. Poems of John Keats, p. 475. Keats, Letters, 1, 244 (14 March 1818).

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Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (London, 1828). The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London, 1832). The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 3 vols. (London, 1850). Hurd, Richard, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Dublin, 1762). Irwin, David, English Neo-classical Art (London, 1966). Jack, Ian, Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967), reprint (Oxford, 1968). Jackson, John, Chronological Antiquities, 2 vols. (London, 1752). Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), Princeton paperback edition (Princeton, 1974). Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980).

Johnson, Samuel, Johnson's Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. by J. P. Hardy (Oxford, 1971). Jones, John, John Keats's Dream of Truth (London, 1969). Jones, William, The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols. (London, Kames, Henry Home, Lord, Elements of Criticism (1762), third edition, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1765). Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, tr. by James Creed Meredith (1928), reprint (Oxford, 1973). Kearney, Michael, Lectures concerning History, read during the year 17J5, in Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, 1776). Keats, John, The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins (1958), third printing, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). The Poems of John Keats, ed. by Jack Stillinger (London, 1978). Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967). Kirk, Thomas, Outlines from the Figures and Compositions upon the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases of the late Sir William Hamilton (1804), second edition (London, 1814). Knight, Richard Payne, An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (London, 1818). Kramer, Lawrence, 'The Return of the Gods: Keats to Rilke', Studies in Romanticism, 17 (1978), 483-500. Kubler, George, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London, 1962). Kuhn, Albert J., 'English Deism and the Development of Romantic Mythological Syncretism', PMLA, 71 (1956), 1094-1116. Larrabee, Stephen A., English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York, 1943).

Le Comte, Edward Semple, Endymion in England: The Literary History of a Greek Myth (New York, 1944).

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Lempriere, John, A Classical Dictionary (1788), fifth edition (London, 1804). Levey, Michael, Rococo to Revolution (London, 1966). Levin, Harry, The Broken Column (Cambridge, Mass., 1931). Lindenberger, Herbert, 'The Idyllic Moment: On Pastoral and Romanticism', College English, 34 (1975), 335-51. Little, Judy, Keats as a Narrative Poet: A Test of Invention (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1975). Lowell, Amy, John Keats, 5 vols. (London, no date; USA printing, Lucian, 'Instructions for Writing History', in The Works of Lucian, tr. by Thomas Francklin, 4 vols. (London, 1781), 11, 566-313. Luke, David, 'Keats's Letters: Fragments of an Aesthetic of Fragments', Genre, 11 (1978), 509-56. McFarland, Thomas, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, 1981).

Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, Two Dialogues, Concerning the Manner of Writing History. From the French (London, 1783). Manuel, Frank E., The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Matthews, G. M., ed., Keats: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971). Mayo, R. S., Herder and the Beginnings of Comparative Literature (Chapel Hill, 1969). Meinecke, Friedrich, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, tr. by J. E. Anderson (London, 1975). Mellor, Anne K., English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1980). Milton, John, The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. by Henry John Todd (1801), second edition, 7 vols. (London, 1809). Mitford, William, The History of Greece, 8 vols. (London, 1814). Momigliano, Arnaldo, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966). Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1773-95). Moore, Thomas, Epistles, Odes and Other Poems (London, 1806). Morse, David, Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (London, 1985). Moses, Henry, A Collection of Vases, Altars, Paterae, Tripods, Candelabra, Sarcophagi, &c. From various Museums and Collections . . . with Historical Notes (London, 1814). Ong, Walter J., S.J., The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London, 1967). Ouseley, William, Oriental Collections, Vol. 1 (London, 1797). Ovid, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished by G[eorge] S[andys] (London, 1656).

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Palgrave, Francis T., Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson (London, 1897). Pater, Walter, 'Winckelmann' (1867), in Studies in the History o] the Renaissance (London, 1873), pp. 146-206. Greek Studies (London, 1895). Paz, Octavio, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, tr. by Rachel Phillips (1974), second printing (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1975). Peacock, Thomas Love, Rhododaphne (London, 1818). The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), ed. by H. F. B. Brett-Smith (Oxford, 1951). Peardon, Thomas Preston, The Transition in English Historical Writing (New York, 1933). Perkins, David, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)Pettet, E. C, On the Poetry of Keats (1957), reprint (Cambridge, Pierce, Frederick E., 'The Hellenic Current in English Nineteenth Century Poetry', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 16 (1917), 103-35. Priestley, Joseph, Lectures on History, and General Policy (Birmingham, 1788). Ragussis, Michael, The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore and London, 1978). Raine, Kathleen, 'Thomas Taylor, Plato and the English Romantic Movement', British Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968), 99-123. Redpath, Theodore, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 180J-1824 (London, 1973). Reynolds, Joshua, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1797), second edition, 3 vols. (London, 1798). Ricks, Christopher, Keats and Embarrassment (1974), reprint (London, Oxford and New York, 1976). Ridley, M. R., Keats' Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development (1933), reprint (New York, 1962). Robertson, William, The History of America, 2 vols. (London, Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed., The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816-18y8 (1948), second edition, 2, vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Roscoe, William, On the Origin and Vicissitudes of Literature, Science, and Art, and their Influence on the Present State of Society (London, 1818). Rosenblum, Robert, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (1967), second printing (Princeton, 1969). Rosenmeyer, Thomas G., The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (1969), reprint (Berkeley, Los Angeles

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Sandys, John Edwin, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1908). Scheffer, John D., 'The Idea of Decline in Literature and the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century England', Modern Philology, 34 (1936-7), 155-78. Schiller, Friedrich, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795), herausgegeben von Johannes Beer (Stuttgart, 1975). Schlegel, August Wilhelm, Lectures on Dramatic Literature, tr. by John Black, 2 vols. (London, 1815). Schlegel, Friedrich, Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. From the German, % vols. (Edinburgh, 1818). Ober das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1795), herausgegeben von Paul Hankamer (Godesberg, 1947). Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, tr. by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park, Penn., and London, 1968). Shaffer, E. S., 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge, 1975). Sharp, William, Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London, 1892). Sharpe, Gregory, The Origin and Structure of the Greek Tongue (London, 1767). Shawcross, John T., ed., Milton 1732-1801: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston, 1972). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (1905), new edition, corrected by G. N. Matthews (1970), reprint (London, 1975). The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964). Sherwin, Paul, 'Dying into Life: Keats's Struggle with Milton in Hyperion, PMLA, 93 (1978), 383-95. Simpson, David, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London, Snell, Bruno, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, tr. by T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford, 1953). Spence, Joseph, Polymetis: or, An Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Ancient Artists (1747), third edition (London, 1774). Spenser, Edmund, The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Henry John Todd, 8 vols. (London, 1805). Sperry, Stuart M., Keats the Poet (Princeton, 1973).

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185

Spitzer, Leo, Essays on English and American Literature, ed. by Anna Hatcher (Princeton, 1962). Spurgeon, Caroline F. E., Keats's Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study (London, 1928). Starn, Randolph, 'Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline', History and Theory, 14 (1975), 1~31« Stern, Bernard Herbert, The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature 1732-1786 (1940), reprint (New York, 1969). Stewart, Dugald, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792-1827). Philosophical Essays (1810), third edition (Edinburgh, 1818). Stillinger, Jack, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968). The Hoodwinking of Madeline and other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana, Chicago and London, 1971). Stuart, James, and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, 4 vols. (London, 1762-1816). Taylor, Thomas, The Fable of Cupid and Psyche, Translated from the Latin of Apuleius (London, 1795). Thomson, George, The Spirit of General History (London, 1792). Thomson, J. W., and B. J. Holm, A History of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (New York, 1942). Tooke, Andrew, Pantheon (1698), thirty-first edition (London, 1803). Tucker, Abraham, An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Pursued, by Abraham Tucker, Esq., ed. by William Hazlitt (London, 1807).

Urquhart, D. H., Commentaries on Classical Learning (London, 1803).

Ward, Aileen, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London, 1963). Warton, Joseph, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756), fifth edition, 2 vols. (London, 1806). Warton, Thomas, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754), new edition, 2 vols. (London, 1807). The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1774-81), new edition, 4 vols. (London, 1824). Wasserman, Earl R., The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, 1949)The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems (1953), fifth printing (Baltimore, 1967). Watson, J. R., Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (London, 1970). Webb, Daniel, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (London, 1769). Webb, Timothy, English Romantic Hellenism 1700-1824 (Manchester, 1982).

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Weber, Henry, Tales of the East, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1812). White, Hayden V., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973)Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1978). Wilkie, Brian, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison and Milwaukee, 1965). Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background (1934), third impression (London, 1946). Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, tr. by Henry Fuseli (London, 1765). Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr., ed., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland and London, 197°)Wood, Robert, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer: with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade (London, 1775). Woodbridge, Kenneth, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead: 1J18 to 1838 (Oxford, 1970). Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (1904), new edition, revised by Ernest De Selincourt (1936), reprint (London, 1974). The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974). Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), ed by E. Morley (Manchester, 1918). Young, William, The History of Athens (1777), third edition (London, 1804).

Index Blair, Hugh, 121 Blake, William, 15, 49 Bloom, Harold: on anxiety of influence, 2, 143 n. 4; on Hyperion, 93 Boccaccio, G., 93 Brawne, Fanny : and Lamia, 130-1, 133 Bridges, Robert: on Endymion, 63 Bromwich, David, 6, 172 n. 46 Brown, Charles Armitage, 86, 97 Brown, John, Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music, 27 Browne, William, 68, 70 Bryant, Jacob, 25, 29, 76, 89 Burke, Kenneth, 64 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 120, 141—2 Bush, Douglas, 33 Butler, Marilyn, 2-3, 64, 168-9 n.

Adam, Robert, 13, 14 Aeschylus, 86, 91, 97 Aikin, John, 10, 11 Alcamenus, 85 Alison, Archibald, 112 ancient Greece, 150 n. 96; archaeological discovery of, 13—15; its art, 4-5, 71, 163 n. 73; Keats's ignorance of ancient Greek, 345; and Orientalism, 31—2; see also classical antiquity; classical mythology antiquarianism, 17—19 anxiety of influence, 2, 4, 45-6, 129, 143 n. 4, 143-4 n. 12 Apuleius, 102, io3 arabesque, 6, 73-4, 82, 162 n. 63; defined, 158—9 n. 44; in Endymion, 65, 66-7, 68, 71; see also language of flowers; narrative Ariosto, Lodovico, 22, 32, 80, 93; Orlando Furioso, 32, 148 n. 54 Arnold, Matthew, 4, 33

100

Bagehot, Walter, 164 n. 75 Bailey, Benjamin, 151 n. 107, 153 n. 28, 161 n. 58 Baldwin, Edward [William Godwin], 87, 151 n. 5 Barthes, Roland, 62, 65, 69 Bate, Walter Jackson, 152 nn. 12, 17; on Endymion, 56, 154 n. 10 Beaumont, Francis, 90, 155 n. 12 belatedness: and Hyperion, 93—4; of Keats, 1-2, 3, 10, 43-4, 11618; of Milton, 74; and 'Ode to Psyche,' 102 Beloe, William, 166 n. 45 Ben Nevis: Keats on, 98-9 Blackstone, Bernard, 74 Blackwell, Thomas, 11; Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 81

Buxton, John, 164 n. 75 Byron, George Gordon, Lord: on Hyperion, 84, 86; Beppo and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 157 n. 31 Caesar, Julius, History of the Gallic Wars, 77 Cary, Henry, 148 n. 54 Cassirer, Ernst, 26 Cervantes, Miguel de, 93 Champion, Joseph, 28 Chandler, Richard, 13 Chapman, George, 4, 34, 35, 42, 43) 45; see also 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' Chatterton, Thomas, 147 n. 46 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 28, 90, 93, 108, 155 n. 10; contrasted to Spenser, 70, 162 n. 67; The Floure and

187

188

Index

the Leafe, 51; The Squire's Tale, Davie, Donald, 157 n. 34 Davies, Edward, 87 28 Clark, Kenneth: on Poussin and decline of poetry, 8—9, 20, 108—9 de Man, Paul, 60—1; on Endymion, Hyperion, 87 158 n. 38 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 34 classical antiquity, 1-2, 33, 37; as De Quincey, Thomas : on Hyperion, 84, 96, 142 absent referent, 4, 49-50, 61-3, 69, 142; its alterity, 1, 119; its Derrida, Jacques, 58—9, 59—60, 61, 113, 142 brightness, 45-6, 52, 129, 132-3, 152 nn. 23, 25; its mistiness, 99, de Selincourt, Ernest, 33 100, 142; its monumentality, 71, D'Hancarville, P. F. Hugues, 29, 30 74, 93~4, 168 n. 96; and Drayton, Michael, 70 Dryden, John, 128 Shakespeare, 3—4; its silence, 124, 134; as site of origins, 38-9, 61, Duff, William, 43, 44 124, 142; as supreme fiction, 1, Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 25 4, 35, 61—2, 101—3; its tyranny, 2; see also ancient Greece; clas- Elgin Marbles, 15—16, 84; see also 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' sical mythology classical mythology, 1, 3, 163-4 n. Eliot, T. S., 3 Elton, Charles Abraham, 29; Speci74; its disappearance, 39—40, 49, mens of the Classic Poets, 24 52, 59; and Gothic romance, 20, 21, 22-3, 24; Keats's ambiva- embellishment, 6, 154-5 n - I 0 j e m " lence towards, 38, 46-7, 153-4 bellished style, 49; in Endymion, n. 36; Keats's familiarity with, 57—8, 67; Keats's odes as, 101; in 34; Keats's fear of tarnishing its Lamia, 138-9, 142; and narrabrightness, 38, 46, 53, 129, 132-3, tive, 76, 79, 80-1, 160 n. 49; in 136; as language of fiction, 9-10, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 111-1 2, 16, 32, 33, 39-40; and Northern 116—17; see also language of mythology, 19; its obsolescence, flowers; ornamented style; parer9-13, 24; as 'one bare circumgonal style stance', 56, 58-60; and Orient- Ende, Stuart A., 153 n. 29 alism, 27—31; and origins, 29—31; Endymion, 1, 5, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39its representation, 61—3, 70—1, 40, 45-6, 48, 50, 51, 53-72, 85, n see a so 163-4 - 74; l ancient 86, 95, 96, 98, 102, n o , 129, Greece; classical antiquity 154 n. 9, 158 n. 38, 160 n. 54; Coleridge, Hartley, 127, 163 n. 74 as arabesque, 65—9, 82; as BarColeridge, Samuel Taylor, 12-13, thesian text, 62, 65, 69; as dream, 55, 65, 66, 67, 130; on Paradise 65, 159 n. 45; its 'effeminacy', Lost, 99; 'On Poesy or Art', 13 63, 69-72, 128, 162-3 n - 69, 164 Collins, John Churton, 23 n. 75; and error, 5-6, 67, 73-4; Collins, William, 15, 27; Verses and failure, 73-4; and language Humbly Address'd to Sir Thomas of flowers, 54-63, 66, 67, 69-72, Hanmer, 23 84, 128, 155 n. 12; and modern Cornwall, Barry [B. W. Procter], criticism, 63, 72; Preface to, 38, 163 n. 74 53; and representation, 59-60, Correggio, 93, 162 n. 67 61—3. 71—2, 101, 156 n. 20 Cottle, Joseph, 22 epic poetry, 21-3, 74-5, 148 n. 54; Culler, Jonathan, 155 n. 16 and historical narrative, 75-6, Cumberland, George, 15 79-83 Euripides, 35, 80 Dante, 9, 93, 108, 148 n. 54; Hazlitt Ferguson, Adam, History of the on, 74; Keats's reading of, 76

Index Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic, 80 Fingal's Gave : Keats on, 97-8 Fletcher, Angus, 38 Fletcher, John, 90, 155 n. 12; The Faithful Shepherdess, 162 n. 64 Forsyth, Joseph, 161 n. 57, 161-2 n. 63 Foucault, Michel, 75 fragment, 6, 16, 77 fragmentation: in Endymion, 64, 65-7; in Hyperion, 84-6, 89, 92-4, 96-100; in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 121 Freud, Sigmund, 2; 'Negation', 153 n. 36 Fuseli, Henry, 'The artist in despair over the magnitude of antique fragments', 37 and Figure 1 Gell, William, 31 Gerard, Alexander, 44 Gibbon, Edward, 25, 29, 31, 75, 76, 78-81, 83, 85, 86, 99, 165 n. 15; Keats's reading of, 75, 76, 84; History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 75, 79 Gillies, John, 31, 81; History of Ancient Greece, 77, 85 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 77 Gothic romance, 20—1, 32; and classical mythology, 20, 21, 22-3, 24 Gough, Richard, Comparative View of the Ancient Monuments of India, 30 Grabar, Oleg, 162 n. 65 Gray, Thomas, 15 Hamilton, William, 121 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 1,3, 15, 24; on Keats, 110; on Keats's odes, 103 ; on 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 112, 126; on The Fall of Hyperion, 136 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 15—16, 159 n. 47, 165 n. 23 Hayley, William, 85 Hazlitt, William, 32, 34, 55, 67, 69-723 79, 89, 93, 95, 102, 115,

189

123, 127, 130, 154-5 n. 10, 155 n. 12, 157 n. 31, 162 n. 64, 162-3 n. 69; on 'classical' and 'romantic', 5; on decline of poetry, 8—9, 108-9; o n Endymion, 68, 70, 162—3 n - 69; and Keats, 6—7; on Milton, 46, 58, 71, 74, 96, 101, 168 n. 93; on sculpture and statues, 85, 91, 112, 119, 146 n. 34, 172 n. 46; on Spenser, 49, 52, 68-9, 70, 153 n. 33; on Wordsworth, 109; 'On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin', 87, 88; 'English Students at Rome', 24, 168 n. 96; Lectures on the English Poets, 70, 74, 93, 109, 119, 153 n. 33; 'On Dreams', 159 n. 45; 'On Effeminacy of Character', 69-70; 'On Gusto', 162 n. 67, 172 n. 46; The Round Table, 97, 109, 172 n. 46 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 159 n. 44 Herculaneum, 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 17, 25, 26, 81-2; on Homer, 117; Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 17 Herodotus, 76, 78, 166 n. 45; and Homer, 81, 82 Hillis Miller, J., 43, 137 historicism, 17, 23-4 history, 1-3, 19, 72, 99-100; and epic, 75, 79-83; and form, 76-8, 82-5; literary history, 1-3, 28, 93—4; as narrative, 75—85; and origins, 25-7, 30-1, 42-3, 88-9; as prison house, 94; see also Hyperion Holderlin, Friedrich, 60 Hole, Richard, 22, 28; Arthur, 22 Homer. 12, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 35, 38, 79-80, 81, 82, 93, 104, 108, 1 A. 1: compared with Shakespeare, 3-A: decline in popularity of, 11, 14: Hazlitt on, 146 n. 34; Herder on, 117; and Herodotus, 81, 82; Keats on, 3, 4, 35, 144 n. 14, 170 n. 111; his 'mistiness', 4; his 'priority', 43-5, 117; as site of origins, 42-3; see also 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' Hoole, John, 148 n. 54

190

Index

Hopkins, Gerard Manley: on Keats, 63 Hughes, John, 49 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 77 Hume, David, 'Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences', 8 Hunt, Leigh, 48, 58, 68, 70, 161 n. 63; on Hyperion, 86, 93; Keats on, 43; on Lamia, 141; and language of flowers, 48-9, X 53 n- 3 11 o n 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 110 Hurd, Richard, 21 Hyperion, 5, 33, 71, 84-100, 101, 106, 108, 125, 128, 142, 167 n. 86, 169 n. 111; as alternative to Endymion, 73-4; as fragment, 84-6, 94, 96, 98, 99-100; and historical narrative, 75; and history, 93-4, 99-100, 168-9 n 100; and Paradise Lost, 74-5, 89-9^ 95. l 6 9 n- I 0 5 ; a s parergon, 99; and Scottish landscape, 97-9; as 'undeviating' narrative, 73-4, 82, 87, 96 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill', 39, 48, 50-2, 53, 56, 104; and narrative, 50-2 influence, 1-2; see also anxiety of influence Isabella, 153 n. 28 Jeffrey, Francis, 157 n. 31; on Endymion, 63, 64-5, 154 n. 9 Johnson, Samuel, 21; on Lycidas, 9; Dictionary, 158 n. 44; Rasselas, 25 Jones, John: on 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 110 Jones, William, 25, 29, 30; Asiatic Researches, 30, 149-5° n- 8 2 J 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India', 30; 'Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus', Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 66-7, 76, 160 n. 49; Elements of Criticism, 168 n. 96 Kant, Immanuel, 65, 155-6 n. 19

Kearney, Michael, 81 Keats, Fanny, 59, 85, 161 n. 63 Kedington, Roger, Critical Dissertations on the Iliad of Homer, 11

Kermode, Frank: on 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 119 Kirk, Thomas, 121, 163 n. 73 Klopstock, Friedrich, 23 Knight, Richard Payne, 172 n. 40 Kubler, George, 77 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', 129 Lamia, 33, 127, 128—42, 152 n. 25, 153 n. 28, 154 n. 6; and Anatomy of Melancholy, 141—2; and blindness, 129; its deceptive 'furniture', 138-40, 141; and Fanny Brawne, 130-1, 133; and 'History of the Basket', 131-4, 137; its irony, 128, 137, 141; Lamia's brightness, 129, 132-3; Lamia's overrepresentation, 1323; and poet's release from ancient fictions, 137, 141; and The Fall of Hyperion,

135—6

Landor, Walter Savage, 164 n. 75 language of flowers, 117—18; and effeminacy, 70-2; as embellishment, 59-62; in Endymion, 54— 63, 69-72, 84, 128; in 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill', 50-2; in Keats's early verse, 48—50; as language of consolation and compensation, 49-50, 53-5; in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 116-18, 125; and Spenser, 48—9 Larrabee, Stephen A.: on Keats's Hellenism, 33, 34 La Sauvagere, F. F. Le Royer d'Artezet de, Recueil d'Antiquites dans les Gaules, 18 Le Comte, Edward Semple: on Endymion, 159 n. 45 Lempriere, John, 34, 45, 102, 105 Levin, Harry: on 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', 146 n. 35 Livy, 83 Lorrain, Claude, 89 Lowell, Amy: on Endymion, 58, 155 n. 12

Index Lowth, Robert, 25 Lucian, 85; 'Instructions for Writing History', 76 Luke, David, 161 n. 58 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 85; on historical narrative, 77-8, 81, 82-3 Mallet, Paul Henri, Introduction a VHistoire de Dannemarc, 18 McFarland, Thomas, 85, 121 Meinecke, Friedrich, 147 n. 37 Michaelis, Johann David, 25 Michelangelo, 93, 162 n. 67 Milton, John, 4, 9, 21, 22, 23, 38, 46, 71, 76, 86, 89-91, 93, 95, 96, 108, 117, 148 n. 54, 160 n. 49, 169 n. 105; Hazlitt on, 46, 58, 71, 74, 89, 96, 101, 168 n. 93; Keats on, 88, 91, 108, 169 n. 105; / / Penseroso, 46; Lycidas, 9, 21, 58; Paradise Lost, 71, 74-5, 86, 88, 89, 90, 96, 99, 101, 168 n. 93; see also Hyperion Momigliano, Arnaldo, 18 Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord, 81 Moore, Thomas, 13, 90, 162 n. 69 Morse, David: on Endymion, 156 n. 20, 159 n. 45 Moses, Henry, 113, 121 'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!', 39, 101, 140, 170 n. 1; and 'Ode to Psyche', 104-6 Murphy, Arthur, 83 Murry, John Middleton: on Keats and Shakespeare, 143-4 n. 12 narrative, 101, 160 n. 49; as edifice, 78, 84—5, 96, 138; in Endymion, 53-5, 62-9; as error, 5-6, 61-3, 67, 71-2, 73-4; and failure, 5-6; 73-4, 101; and history, 75-85; in Hyperion, 73-4, 82, 84-6; in 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill', 50-2; in Lamia, 138, 141-2; as landscape, 51-2, 54-5, 64-5, 689; withheld in 'Ode on a Grecian U r n ' , 11 2—13, 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 2 -

3; see also arabesque; embellishment; language of flowers; representation

'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 1, 33, 101-3, 104, 107, 110-27, i35> 170 n. 2, 172 n. 46; and Ana

tomy of Melancholy, 120; and death, 127; and language of flowers, 116-18, 125; and 'Ode on Indolence', 113-15; its parergonality, 111 —12, 125; and representation, 101, 103, 110-13, 118, 121—3; urn's silence, 112, 115, 124, 126, 134, 135; its withheld narrative, 112—13, 115—16, 121, 122-3 'Ode on Indolence', 101; and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 113—15 'Ode to a Nightingale', 105-6, 125, 127 'Ode to Psyche', 33, 101—9, 131, 154 n. 36; authority of poet's voice in, 105, 106, 107; and belatedness, 102; and 'Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!', 104-6; representation of Psyche, 101-3, 105, 106, 108; and Wordsworth, 108—9 O'Keefe, John, 12 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', 16, 40-3, 46, 51, 101, 146-7 n. 35; and belatedness, 43-5; and originary experience, 4i-3 'On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour', 48 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles', 16, 45, 101 Orientalism, 25-32; and ancient Greece, 31-2; and biblical scholarship, 25; and classical mythology, 27-31; and origins, 25-31 originality, 1, 9, 35, 38, 41-3, 152 n. 17 origins, 88-9; classical antiquity as site of, 38—9, 61, 124, 142; and classical mythology, 29-31;

Homer as site of, 42—3; in Hyperion, 87-8; and Orientalism, 2 5-3 l'•> °fpoetry and of flowers, 60-1

ornamentation: Kant on, 155-6 n. 19

ornamental style: in Beaumont and

192

Index

Fletcher, 155 n. 12; compared with monumental style, 71, 74; in Endymion, 63, 67, 69, 154 n. 9; Forsyth on, 161 n. 57; see also embellishment; language of flowers; parergon; parergonal style Otho the Great, 153 n. 28 Ouseley, William 31 Palgrave, Francis T., 33 parerga, 6, 99, 159 n. 47; Kant on, 155-6 n. 19 parergon, 59-60, 66, 142; Hyperion as, 99 parergonal style, 6; in Endymion, 63-5, 66, 73; in Hyperion, 95; see also arabesque; language of flowers Pater, Walter, 4-5, 152 n. 23 Patmore, P. G.: on Endymion, 62-3, 64, 65 Peacock, Thomas Love, 3 Phidias, 85 Pindar, 15 Polybius, 78 Pompeii, 13, 152 n. 24 Pope, Alexander, 9, 14 Porson, Richard, 35 Portland Vase, 113 and Figure 2, 121

Poussin, Nicolas, 87, 88, 93 Praxiteles, 85 Pye, Henry, 22 Raine, Kathleen, 33 Ramsay, Allan, 10—11 Raphael, 79, 93, 102, 160 n. 47 representation: of antiquity as supreme fiction, 1, 4, 5—6, 61—3, 73-4, 101-3; in Endymion, 5960, 71; and historical narrative, 75-82; in Lamia, 132-3, 134-5, 138—40; in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 101, 103, 110-13, 118, 121-3; in 'Ode to Psyche', 1013, 105, 106, 108; see also language of flowers; narrative Revett, Nicholas, 13 Reynolds, J. H., 4, 34, 147 n. 46, 152 n. 28, 160 n. 54, 58; 170 n. 1; on Hyperion, 86

Reynolds, Joshua, 160 n. 49 Rice, James, 161 n. 58 Ricks, Christopher, 157 n. 33 Robertson, William: Keats's reading of, 75, 167-8 n. 90; History of America, 78 Romantic Hellenism, 1, 2—3, 4—5, 33, 45, 7i-2, 150 n. 96, 152 n. 23 Romanticism, 2, 8, 33, 161 n. 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 25, 58, 59, 61 Ruskin, John, 117, 159 n. 44 Said, Edward, 25, 38, 42 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 61 Sayers, Frank, 22; Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology, 22; Poems, 23 Schelling, F. W. J., 82 Schiller, Friedrich, 4, 5 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, Lectures on Dramatic Literature, 5 Schlegel, Friedrich, 20, 62, 97, 109; Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie, 146 n. 31 Scotland: and Hyperion, 97—9; Keats's tour through, 170 nn. 111,

113

Scott, John, 9 Shakespeare, William, 58, 90, 93, 108, 143-4 n. 12, 144 n. 14; Keats on, 3-4; Venus and Adonis, 154 n. 10 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 3, 10, 73, 152 n. 24, 163 n. 74, 164 n. 75; on Endymion, 66; Defence of Poetry, 160 n. 48; Hellas, 35; Prometheus Unbound, 157 n. 31 Simpson, David, 110 'Sleep and Poetry', 39, 41, 48 Smith, Alexander: on Endymion, 63

Society of Antiquaries, 17 Society of Dilettanti, 13 Sophocles, 15 Southey, Robert, 22 'Specimen of an Induction to a Poem', 39, 48 Spenser, Edmund, 4, 16, 21, 22, 28, 34, 37, 38, 70, 93, 108, 148 n. 54; his 'effeminacy', 70, 162

Index n. 67; his embellished style, 49, 58; Hazlitt on, 49, 52, 68-9, 70, J 53 n. 33; and language of flowers, 48-9, 70; The Faerie Queene, 68, 69, 70 Spurgeon, Caroline F. E.: on Keats and Shakespeare, 3-4 Stevens, Wallace, 99, 117 Stewart, Dugald, 42, 74, 120, 168 n. 96 Stillinger, Jack : on Endymion, 634; on 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 170 n. 2 Stonehenge : Hazlitt on, 92 Stuart, James, 13 supplement, 58—60, 63 Swinburne, A. C , 162 n. 67 Tacitus, 83 Tasso, Torquato, 21, 22, 148 n. 54 Taylor, John, 138, 151 n. 107 Taylor, Thomas, 104 Terence, 12 The Eve of St. Agnes,

9 1 , 139, 141,

The Fall of Hyperion,

4 1 , 7 5 , 117—

153 n. 28, 154 n. 6, 160 n. 47

18, 153 n. 28; and Lamia, 135-6 Theocritus, 104 'This pleasant tale is like a little copse', 51 Thomson, James, 15 Thucydides, 76 Titian, 93 'To Autumn', 147 n. 46 T o Charles Cowden Clarke', 68 'To G.A.W.', 68 'To George Felton Mathew', 41 'To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles', 16

193

T o Leigh Hunt, Esq.', 39, 47-8, 49-50, 53 T o My Brother George', 39, 68 Tooke, Andrew, 34 Tucker, Abraham, 68 Tytler, Alexander, 10-11 Vico, Giambattista, 17, 26, 81; Scienza Nuova, 166 n. 41 Virgil, 12, 21, 82, 104 Voltaire, 26—7; Keats's reading of, 75 Warton, Joseph, 8, 13, 19, 20 Warton, Thomas, 20, 28, 32 Wasserman, Earl R., 33 Webb, Timothy, 150 n. 96 Weber, Henry, 'History of the Basket', 131; and Endymion, 131— 2; and Lamia, 131—4, 137 White, Hayden V., 80, 165 n. 15 Willey, Basil, 9-10 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 4, 6, 71-2, 130, 146 n. 26 Wood, Robert, 11, 13, 43 Woodhouse, Richard, 1, 96; on Hyperion; 84, 85; on Lamia, 138; on The Eve of St. Agnes, 141

Wordsworth, William, 10, 13, 127; Hazlitt on, 108-9; Keats on, 43, 108; 'Intimations of Immortality', 109; The Excursion, 109; 'Upon the Sight of a beautiful Picture', 172 n. 47 'Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison', 48 Xenophon, 76