A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

A Note on the Book

xvii A Note on the Book The biographer’s art takes a facewe thought we clearly knew and, in adjusting the reader’s focal distance, reveals to us the blurriness we mistook for fact. Book after book adds to this sum of knowledge, an indelible gift that etches the poet’s portrait into ever-­ firmer lines. But with John Keats, a poet reticent to tell his own friends the facts of his history, accuracy itself falls under scrutiny. The face another gives us, that construction of another’s utmost care or spontaneous whim—ranging from the great biographies to Charles Brown’s quick sketch of Keats, hand pressed to cheek, gazing off and upward—cannot help but become a mask the next effort tries to revise by removing. I should admit I have little interest in offering a portrait of Keats more accurate than those already available; nor am I capable of doing so. I am more concerned with returning Keats, as best I can manage, back into that half-­light that obscures accurate rendering so as to make more brilliant those sudden flashes in his poems and letters that, lightning-­ like, reveal the storm-­ tossed grasses in the ceaseless field even as darkness closes the vision again—sudden clarities, and the afterimage that lingers long past the lightning’s strike. This book’s effort is to mine Keats’s poetic concerns even as it mimics the same. It proceeds by two commingling methods: a set of portraits that privilege allegorical accuracy within a biographical frame, and a chronological reading of Keats’s poems and letters, from 1816 to 1820, attending to the ways in which singular concerns grow adhesive, alter, and confound themselves as the man matures into the poet. Keats writes, “Now it appears to me that almost any Man may 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 xviii A Note on the Book circuiting.”1 Perhaps the primary crisis of the poet involves taking that which is inward and finding for that structure outward expression. That web-­ like construction connects together separate points, makes of intervening absence a place of consideration—the cost of thinking is entering; the danger of entering, being trapped. Each thread pulled on exerts a pressure on the whole, as nerve does to body, as nerve does to mind. To exert too much force in one’s inquiry risks tearing the web apart. This book is not a work of criticism, but a “tribute and a study.”2 The challenge is, as Robert Duncan puts it as he pays tribute to H.D. in his study of her, a semi-­ magical one, in which “a spell [may] be felt to be necessary to the works here, for weaving is necessary as I go, to keep many threads and many figures so that every thread is central and every figure central to threads and figures, with none coming to conclusion but leading further into the process.”3 Further into the process takes us into the silken threads of Keats’s letters and poems, and every point of concern tugs on one such thread so that the whole web thrills in response. The image may be justly accused of being “romantic” in the worst sense, but I cannot help but see, when I imagine Keats’s “airycitadel,” that what breath blows through it alters its shape, bends it to an inspiration it cannot control, and in that constant re-­shaping, Keats’s face in its continuous mutability gains its truest form, uncertainly visible from moment to moment, never growing still, changeless only in its change. Such a portrait is the only one Keats has left of himself. It is a drawing done with words and in mystery, brilliant and occult, and it is only by schooling ourselves in such a text, one requiring of us both the difficulty of devotion and devotion to difficulty, that we can learn to read that name “writ in water.” How does one do so? One traces the letters as they’re written in the element of their own erasure. ...