A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Failure–Genius–Self

59 Failure–Genius–Self Keats reacts to the violent criticism of Endymion not as any wilting flower too delicate to bear the world’s buffeting, but with a resolvewhose strength borders on pride. He tells one of his publishers, Hessey, that “praise or blame” can have “but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his ownWorks.”1 Keats knows the failure of Endymion more keenly and more truly, to a deeper plummet of depth, than any critic could inflict upon him; Keats also knows that the long poem’s failures are intimately entwined with its heights. He writes: It is as good as I had power to make it—by myself—Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece and with that view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. . . . I have written independently without Judgment . I may write independently and with judgment hereafter . The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself.That which is creative must create itself. In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.2 The poet is one who from perfection learns quickly to flee. Perfection—the advice that guides one toward it, and worse, the questions that garner such advice—privileges a world-­ like system over a system-­ breaking world. In a per- 60 1818 fect world there is only the depthless sea, the airless air. A perfect world denies the very experience by which it could be discovered. Keats forges an intuitive link between an approach to poetry so tremulous with intent that the poet’s hand shakes with the force of will by which he’d write, and the resulting poem, whose beauty depends upon a Law it did not, because it could not, discover within itself. Within Keats’s poetic axiom that a poem must “come . . . as naturally as the Leaves to a tree”3 lurks a deeper ethic than “organic form” implies. He sees that a poem “must work out its own salvation in a man.” The material with which the poem does this salvific work is no less than the sensations of the man in which the poem occurs. The poem seems to abstract from the nerves of the man himself that Beauty which he can only, literally, sense. The world of the poem is showered in watchfulness. The actual body becomes an un-­minded thing.Then the hand doesn’t write the word because it obeys the thought that commands it; no, it’s the mind that fails. Seeking a way to dismantle those laws the mind would impose on what it creates, Keats realizes that the mind is no source, hardly a resource, save when it fills with that judgment that intuitively guides the eyes to where they should look, and asks secretly, unobtrusively, for the hand to open and grasp what must be grasped. There abstraction begins, and the poet is as an alembic in which a distillation occurs that he cannot wholly control, a mystic vessel, not creative in itself, but in whose crucible that which is creative “must create itself.” Twoweeks later, Keats writes oneof his most famous ­letters: As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se and stands alone), it is not itself— 61 1818 it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character. . . . What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. . . . A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity; he is continually in for and filling some other Body.4 This sense of the poetic self as no self at all, this belief that a certain kind of poet retreats from the ego’s formative fact as quickly as dew departs from...