like this place very much.

John Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 22nd November 1817

That which is creative must create itself.

John Keats to J. A. Hessey, 8th October 1818

Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

John Keats to J. H. Reynolds 19th February 1818

At the centre of John Keats’s tragically curtailed life – which burgeoned for no more than two highly creative years before it was eclipsed and then destroyed by inherited tuberculosis – was the concept of personal growth, of gradual self-realization, of what the German Romantics in their pursuit of a greater consciousness named Bildung.

Like Goethe, Keats possessed an unquenchable curiosity concerning all facets of life, from the mundane to the metaphysical. He constantly routed settled assumptions with fierce gusts of critical thinking, with his ‘speculation’ and ‘abstraction’. A prolific poet, he was also a trained apothecarist and an assistant surgeon, working for a time at Guy’s Hospital in London. His mind ranged effortlessly across science, medicine and the classical arts, across history and myth, conjecture and knowledge. Like Goethe, he drew constantly on the resources of his inherited culture. He sought his foundations as a poet in a literary tradition going back through Shakespeare and Spencer to Dante, Sappho and Homer. And at the heart of his work, as with Goethe, lay the animating idea of the self creating itself through the valencies and vicissitudes of changing circumstances.

In a long letter, written in early 1819, Keats recorded his commitment to individuation with characteristic eloquence: The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven – What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please ‘The vale of Soul-making’. Then you will find out the use of the world … The sentences display the very essence of the historical move from orthodox Christianity to a poetic and religious form of humanism. The language of the Psalms is recast to suggest other meanings and further existential possibilities. Keats went on to elaborate: Do you not see how necessary a world of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? Tellingly, Keats characterised his insight as a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity. The Christian vale of tears becomes the Romantic vale of self-creation. In the story of the self it is a paradigmatic moment of linguistic and philosophical sublation.

The tragedy of Keats was that, unlike Goethe, he only had the briefest span of time in which to chart the dramatically changing psychic landscape.

The emerging life-wisdom, scattered throughout his many brilliant letters with their penetrating formulations, especially concerning ‘negative capability’ and ‘soul-making’, finally found its highest poetic expression in To Autumn, the last of the odes, written at Winchester in September, 1818. But it is a poem which has suffered from its very success. Too constant an exposure to certain works of art can engender psychic numbing. Familiarity anaesthetises. We look, but do not see; we hear, but do not comprehend. The collective recognition of art, paradoxically, becomes its death sentence. From the very moment of its public inception the incandescent work begins to fade. Keats’s ode To Autumn is a conspicuous example of the law of aesthetic entropy. The mellifluous phrases have become the unfelt, unheard, clichés of the educated mind. Like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with which the poem has a certain emotional and philosophical affinity, the work has been rendered a platitude. Postcard Romanticism. Yet if we are to understand the place of Keats in the story of the self it is essential to smash the thick crust and place our fingers again in the lava streaming beneath.

It is illuminating to interpret the poem through the letters. On 21st September, two days after its composition, Keats wrote to his friend Reynolds alluding to the poem:How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now – Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it … I have been at different times so happy as not to know what the weather was. ‘How beautiful’ … ‘How fine’ … ‘So happy as not to know’ – the emotion is that of Apollonian joy, of supreme flourishing, of eudaimonia. The letter continues by mentioning Chatterton and linking him to the season and the power of the authentic word: I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn. He is the purest writer in the English language … ’Tis genuine English idiom in English words. The reflection then provokes Keats to recall his own struggle to write in the artificial style of Milton: I have given up Hyperion – there were too many Miltonic versions. Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. His discarding Hyperion had opened the way To Autumn and to finding his own distinctive idiom, what he goes on to call the true voice of feeling. At last, Keats in his poetry seemed ready to speak his being, to write authentically.

Two further remarks throw a light on the last ode. In a much earlier letter Keats had written: Very few men have ever arrived at a complete disinterestedness of Mind … yet this feeling ought to be carried to the highest pitch. He sees Socrates and Jesus as being exemplars of this perceptive and loving objectivity, but views it as the ideal to which all humanity should aspire. It is the ultimate achievement. Then in a letter written to Benjamin Bailey on 14th August, just a few weeks before writing To Autumn, Keats wrote: I am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend Philosopher) a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World.Brought together, these quotations provide the most fitting terms for understanding the poem: a genuine English, the true voice of feeling, Disinterestedness of mind, Being in the World. They suggest that the poem is not about Autumn; but of Autumn, through the power of language. It is not a descriptive poem, as many critics blindly assume, but rather, as in Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, a celebration of grounded Being. While the ‘I’ of the poem is nowhere explicit – there is not a single use of the first-person pronoun – it is implicit in every sensitive observation, and vibrant as electricity. As the poem builds architectonically, the season, with all its various manifestations and qualities, becomes a complex metaphor for existence, or rather what Keats, anticipating Martin Heidegger, calls Being in the World, both subject and object given equal status: two poles of one universe. And this is made possible through the transformative power of speech; through the living power of the mother tongue as it catches the various shifts of mood and feeling. The creative Word opens and enhances the containing World.

To Autumn advances like a short symphony in three movements. Each movement, made up of only eleven lines, depicts a different facet of the season which, in turn, embodies a particular aspect of mind. The first stanza evokes the sensuous abundance of Autumn. Its theme is that of an incomparable surplus. The many one-syllabled (mostly plosive) verbs – load, bless, fill, swell, plump, bud – and concrete nouns –core, gourd, kernel, cell – work cumulatively to create the music of superabundance. Here there is no desire to escape, no desire to leave the world unseen, no anxiety about being left forlorn. Here the self belongs intimately to its world, is part of its plenitude.

The second stanza shifts dramatically, and unexpectedly, into personification. It is less cosmic; more psychological. It presents a figure representing the qualities of the season, a complex personality. At first she is seen as passive, careless on a granary floor or sound asleep drugged by the perfume of poppies, but then as active, either alert as a gleaner (a word Keats often used to convey the urgent quest of the poet for the right word), or a patient observer watching the cider-press as it transforms apples into cider. The spiritual and alchemical implications of Autumn for the symbolic life are impossible to miss, but what is most important is the confirmation of the whole psyche. In the personification ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ come together. They are united in one harmonious state. I have named the personification ‘she’ for grammatical convenience but, in fact, it falsifies – in the poem the figure is withoutgender. ‘He’ or ‘she’ is not used once, nor is ‘god’ or ‘goddess’. The stanza is a celebration of the poised androgynous mind: an existential wholeness.

The final stanza is more philosophical. It recognizes the co-existence of light and shade, of life and death, of Being and Non-Being. Once again, opposites are brought almost imperceptibly together: the barred clouds bloom … the stubble plains have a rosy hue … almost simultaneously the light lives and dies. By joining past and present even the oxymoron ‘full-grown lambs’ points to a fusion of differences. And unquestionably there is an embracing of the tragic dimension in this closing movement, the feeling of ‘whatever, so be it’: of Edgar’s lines towards the end of King Lear – Ripeness is all. The beautiful, dialectical phrase barred clouds bloom can be taken back to an earlier letter by Keats where he wrote: Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting – While we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events – while we are laughing it sprouts it grows and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck. But in this new context the clouds are to be accepted as part of reality, not a poison to be plucked but a necessary element of the soft-dying day. The dominant mood is that of Amor fati, and finds its climactic expression in the last image: And gathering swallows twitter in the sky. The line graphically suggests inevitable change, departure, endings.

But there is no despair, only a sublime acceptance; the self delighting in the world in which it finds itself, a creative, reflective and essential witness through the power of language.

After the composition of To Autumn in 1818, Keats’s life began to fall into the darkest shadows. There was the intense, but always frustrating relationship with Fanny Brawne; there were pressing financial difficulties; but, above all, there was the growing certainty of imminent death. Keats knew his life would end soon, and with all the pain he had witnessed in nursing his mother and then his younger brother, Tom. Too much was impinging too rapidly, and with too much anxiety. The next year, even his evolving poetry plummeted into rhetorical bathos or strained satire. His last unfinished poem, Cap and Bells, remains unreadable. In his letters Keats confessed that he was often in despair, far removed from any state of flourishing. He saw himself already living a posthumous life, a ghost drifting through a world becoming increasingly insubstantial. There is no point in recounting the heart-wrenching details of his last months of exile or in documenting his suffering or the fatuous remedies proffered by the doctors of his day. Whatis important is to mark his special significance in the story of the self.

In truth, Keats’s life had not been writ on water. Through his letters and his odes it became part of the very historic advance of consciousness which he himself had always espoused with such gusto. His letters exemplify the romantic art of individuation through friendship, through the practice of introspection, though the method of poetry and the philosophical habit of negative capability; while his greatest poem, To Autumn, gave incomparable expression to the spirit of eudaimonia, that sense of flourishing in the world whatever: of perceiving death and contingency as part of the fabric of life, and still uttering a joyous and unconditional ‘yes’. His brief life remains one of the purest examples of Bildung in the whole of English literature.

 

In his next essay Peter Abbs will examine Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in terms of the archetypal journey of individuation. For further details of the story of the self see www.peterabbs.org

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