A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Of the Odes: A Speculative Context

91 Of the Odes: A Speculative Context Keats composed the six odes for which he is most famous in only six months, March to September. On either side of their composition stand the ruins of two abandoned epics: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Those epic efforts—the former Miltonic in feel, the latter invested with Dante’s lyric “I”—take as their concern the result of a great battle between the old gods, when the Titans fell to the strength and beauty of the Olympians. The drama of the two poems occurs a fathom deeper than the grand action of immortals at war; Keats finds himself concerned with a moment in which one order of power subsides to another power (concerned enough that he returns to the same material twice). Beauty here is not an aesthetic quality, but a phenomenological one. The defeat of the Titans by the Olympians marks the moment when a cosmogony fails, and the images by which a world could be understood are no longer invested by the divine power by which they, and the world they represented , subsisted. Beauty here unfolds from essence, an outward appearance of an inner, hidden, occult order; beauty hints at the structure of the world. Keats places himself in a position of extraordinary witness: a place where beauty is the very record of cosmogonic crisis. Life and death are included in this crisis. More astonishingly, the images by which poetry values life and death are included in this crisis. This crisis is imaginary. That is, this crisis occurs in the imagination’s most profound depths—there where the Titanic gods still linger, defeated in their strengthless strength, deathlessly dead, and the Olympians etch in daylight’s new order. Imagination, Keats knows, cannot be other than the fundamental battleground . 92 1819 Imagination in crisis becomes Keats’s most consistent theme in the letters of 1819. “I have been always till now almost as careless of this world as a fly; my troubles were all of the Imagination.”1 “Imaginary grievances have always been more my torment than real ones.”2 “I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginaryones.”3 His real grievances are largely financial. He has no money, and George’s prospects in America have taken a severely downward turn. Keats ponders giving up poetry. He thinks about becoming a hatmaker , of returning to medicine, of writing “professionally,” and of earning money and fame by composing a play with Charles Brown. He feels the real world of mundane concerns press into and against the “thousand worlds” in which he has come to dwell, and those worlds gained by imagination ’s work are planet-­ struck by the presence of the daily one. The world of high romance—faeries and shepherds— and the epic world of Titans and Olympians cannot wholly withstand the encroachment of this everyday reality whose impact scatters imaginary worlds back into the chaos from which they emerged. The Odes occur within this difficulty. Keats’s feel for his own imagination is undergoing a crisis marked by the Hyperion poems, but unable to be solved by them. The Odes chart out, as much as such terrain can be charted out, the agonizing process of Keats’s imagination confronting—and being confronted by—“this world” he can no longer treat as carelessly as a fly. They present the awful middle ground in which a world made real by imagination’s ardent pursuit collides with a world that denies ardor as its required source—a world that says back to the poet, “I am, with or without you, real.” Keats can no longer afford to take for granted the holiness of imagination’s worlding work. There is an effort made in the Odes to initiate him into a new realization of imagination’s powers, one that requires him to question completely his previous thoughts—Imagination 93 1819 as “Adam’s dream,” to wake is to find it true—and ask after other possibilities, including one in which poetry exists to . . . save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment.4 In these lines we can read those dangers inherent in imaginative work: an enchantment that secretly teaches us to revel in pleasures that forsake the actual world, that charm us from the fact of our own lives. Keats feels pressing upon him the ethical threat inside imagination’s creative promise. Keats sees that the poem might...