he hath heard The Lion's roaring, and can tell The fanatic and the savage can dream; the power of the poet is to tell his dream. For poetry, With the fine spell of words alone can save And dumb enchantment.2 As the artist in him developed, Keats knew frequently the experience when forms and characters seemed to press upon him, intense with expression; not as ways to express feelings he recognized in himself, but as a fullness of passion in external things crowding upon the void of his own personality. It was his nature, being an artist, not only to dwell upon and analyse vivid emotional experience of his own, but to dramatize and objectify in others feelings of which, apart from them, he was scarcely aware. "I beg now," he writes to Bailey, "that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction-for I assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole Week-and so long this sometimes continues, I begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times -thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears." 3 So Endymion, puzzled by his own disloyalty to Cynthia : Came it? It does not seem my own, and I Have no self-passion or identity. 1 Where's the Poet? 3 Letter, Nov. 22, 1817. 2 Fall of Hyperion, 1. 9. 4 IV, 475. "When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated-not only among men ; it would be the same in a nursery of Children." The sorrows of his own identity seem fickle as this magic of sympathy transports him into another. "The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." "The roaring of the wind is my wife, and the Stars through the window pane are my Children. . . . I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me . . according to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost Soul upon the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone." 3 ... We may recall Croce's distinction between the imaginative and the willed personality. So clearly is the artistic activity a desire to form, that the poet will express not only experiences which he has already judged to be sublime, interesting, or otherwise important, but others of which form for the first time makes him conscious. Keats knows that the poet has, as such, no moral or practical personality. "Men of genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect-but they have not any individuality, any determined Character-I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power."4 The same thought is developed nearly a year later: 1 Letter, Oct. 27, 1818. 3 Letter, Oct. 1818. 2 Letter, Nov. 22, 1817. 4 Letter, Nov. 22, 1817. "As to the poetical character itself. . . it is not itself— it has no self. It is everything and nothing-it has no character-it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity-he is continually in for and filling some other body." 1 That this account of poetry was based on observation of his own experience appears from what he says about the composition of the sonnet Why did I laugh to-night? "It was written with no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point, though the first steps to it were through my human passions-they went away and I wrote with my Mind." Keats's exceptional capacity for what may perhaps be described by the German term Einfühlung explains his intense delight in myth. Its beauty is rich and vivid for him because, fresh through all the generations, it comes to him charged with an emotion old beyond memory and yet his own. In his first published poem, after describing a mood of his own, he goes on: So felt he, who first told, how Psyche went Thus mirrored in a myth, his feeling becomes clearer to him than direct introspection could make it. But Keats recognized the mirror for what it was. The moon is used in Endymion as Sydney used her, to make her appearances express human emotion: 1 Letter, Oct. 27, 1818. 'Tis She, but lo! How chang'd, how full of ache, how gone in woe! This, like Sydney's With how slow steps, O Moon, brings her before us as truly as could a professed descriptive poet; but Keats consciously uses her as an image to express his own feeling. Similarly in all the delicate loveliness of Keats's reflections of Nature she is a form "obedient to the strong creative power of human passion." In the fourth book of The Excursion Wordsworth offers an explanation of the way Greek myth arose from the contemplation of Nature; and Keats, in I stood tip-toe, clearly echoes the theory. Wordsworth presents it as a stage in the progress towards the true vision of Nature, but Keats does not seek to go beyond myth. He catches the impressions of Nature and personifies them to make them the more expressive of human passion; his purpose is imaginative expression, not universal truth. Indeed, he evidently resented the tendency of some of his contemporaries to rank the spiritual power of Nature above that of Man; he insists from time to time, in his Scottish tour, upon his preference for human character.. Sir Sidney Colvin notices his curious description of his aim in this exploration of Nature-" to identify finer scenes "-"seeming to imply that the fruit of his travel was not discovery but only the recognition of scenes already preconceived in his imagination." Nature is the "lodge for solitary thinkings "; its value for the poet is to fix in form such moods as "dodge conception to the very bourne of heaven, then leave the naked brain." Without thus "identifying" the forms of the mountains, he perhaps could not have created his massive calm gods. He once definitely imagines them 1 Endymion, III, 79. 2 Ll. 141-204. in the likeness of the Druid circle which he saw "about a mile and a half on the Penrith road." Scarce images of life; one here, one there, In his gradual rejection of the mystical view, in the scattered fragments in which he describes the type of thought which belongs to poetry, and still more in his accounts of the poet's need to objectify feeling, Keats points the way to a new theory of Art. It would seem that examination of his own æsthetic experience was leading him at the time of his death towards a view resembling Croce's, though he never systematically formulated it. The central Crocean doctrine, that poetry is self-expression, not the discovery or imitation of a reality outside self, emerges very clearly in a letter to Reynolds: the poet must "like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel -the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury." 2 1 Hyperion, II, 33. 2 Letter, Feb. 19, 1818. |