A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Indolence–Ambition–Imagination

63 Indolence–Ambition–Imagination The erotic mind is apprentice to contrary educations: pursuit and passivity. In some under-­ grove of ardor’s epistemology , Apollo forever chases Daphne; in some under-­ arbor, a poet falls asleep to wake and find a laurel crown circling his head, a remnant vision in his eye. But in Keats’s poetry, it is the remnant that is excessive: In Poetry I have a few Axioms, and you will see how far I am from their Centre. First, I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity; it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.5 Keats knows those axioms that might be the dense points of his poetic discovery cannot become the axis of his poetic practicewithout deadening thevagrancy his art depends on. Keats is astray. Keats is astray, but his wandering occurs in a spectrum, a pendulum motion swinging toward an ambition in which he thinks he “shall be among the English Poets after my death,”6 to an indolence “abominably idle.”7 Both extremes contain their dangers, and Keats is keenly aware of them. That drive to write a great poem, that designed ambition, sacrifices the ambiguities of discovery for the grandeur of intent. It is a poetry Keats abhors, even as his ambitions propel him toward uncomfortable sympathy with thedesire to be great. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.8 64 1818 Keats sees that a poem is not an argument to convince, but an evidence of conviction. The poem that in its singularity forces the reader to admit of its greatness betrays those uncertain gifts genuine poetry offers—the half-­ lit realm in which thought arrives as experience, and an idea is a sensational value. Concepts grow nervous as “a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of thought.”9 That leaf is a flower’s petal and an ash’s leaf; it is also the page of a poem. Recognition comes with a shock. Keats has one such shock at Hunt’s, when he is told the lock of hair he is holding comes from the head of Milton. For many years my offerings must be hush’d. When I do speak, I’ll think upon this hour, Because I feel my forehead hot and flush’d— Even at the simplest vassal of thy power; A lock of thy bright hair— Sudden it came, And I was startled, when I caught thy name Coupled so unaware; Yet at the moment, temperate was my blood— Methought I had beheld it from the Flood.10 That lockof Milton’s hairacts as a strange catalyst to Keats’s poetic mind. It tempers the feverof his intent; it deepens his imagination’s erotic flush. Keats experiences a radical, because bodily, form of synecdoche. The lock of hair not only stands in for Milton himself (this lesser substitution would only feed the ego of the poet who would dearly wish to be Milton’s equal), but represents all that Milton thought, as if in growing out of the head it also grew out of the mind, and bore in its strands some residue of that lost paradise Milton in his blindness saw with such glaring, dark brilliance . Keats holds in his hand a relict, one that makes palpable the moment in which the pre-­ Edenic world became the post-­ Edenic, a moment in which desire and knowledge so intertwined that the consequence was no less than the 65 1818 loss of paradise, the fall into a language that must want in order to know. That fall links desire to knowledge in ways that deeply complicate both, a knot intrinsicate, where facts grow amorous as their definitions fail. This same fall also alters our sense of Beauty, that ever-­ tightening, ever-­ loosening concatenation of wanting and knowing. Keats feels it keenly. So keenly he comes to a sense of art in which he grows aware of those “innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-­horn perception of Beauty...