Keats (Poetics & Letters)

Question 1

Wordsworth: “All good poetry is…”

Answer 1

…“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads)

Question 2

Keats: “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree…”

Answer 2

“…it had better not come at all.” (Keats, Letter to Taylor, 27 February 1818)

Question 3

Keats: “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until…”

Answer 3

“…they are proved upon our pulses.” (Keats, Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818)

Question 4

Keats: “The excellence of every Art is…”

Answer 4

“…its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth.” (Keats, Letter to Tom and Georges Keats, 21 and 27 December 1817)

Question 5

Keats: “As to the poetical Character itself…”

Answer 5

it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or eleveated [sic].

It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet.

It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body[.]” 

(Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818)

Question 6

Keats on “The vale of Soul-making”:

“…how then are Souls to be made? […]”

Answer 6

How, but by the medium of a world like this? [. . .] a grander system of salvation than the chrystain [. . . .] Do you not see how necessary a World of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! [. . .] a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.”

(Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 21 April 1819)

Question 7

Keats:

“I am certain of nothing but…”

Answer 7

“…of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not. . . . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” (Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817)

Question 8

““I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not…”

Answer 8

“… in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment [O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!,]—The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” (Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817)

Question 9

Negative Capability

Answer 9

“that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 and 27 December 1817)

Question 10

“We shall enjoy ourselves here after by…”

Answer 10

“…having what we call happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone.” (Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817)

Question 11

“I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavour of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is…”

Answer 11

“…harvested from these materials, by the finest spirits, and put into etherial existence for the relish of one’s fellows.” (Letter to Tom Keats, June 1818)

Question 12

‘The innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives…”

Answer 12

“…at that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty’ (Letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon, 8 April 1818)

Question 13

Locke: Sensation is

Answer 13

‘such an impression or motion made in some part of the body, as makes it be taken notice of in the understanding’ (John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding)

Question 14

Keats: Sensation is

Answer 14

‘an impression made on the Extremities of the Nerves conveyed to the Brain’ (Keats’s Anatomy and Physiology Notebook, from his days at Guy’s Hospital)

Question 15

According to Robert Mitchell, while Coleridge embodies a tradition that “approached [sensation] solely from within an epistemological framework’, for Keats, “the more fundamental question was…”

Answer 15

“…how, through sensation, a living body linked itself with other forms and states of matter and motion’ (Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life)

Question 16

“There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop
Of light, and that is love: its influence,”

Answer 16

“…Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense,
At which we start and fret”
John Keats, Endymion, I, 806-09.

Question 17

Robert Mitchell:
“…the lyric voice functions as a…”

Answer 17

“…sensitive line, like that of a thermometer, that allows auditors or readers to register the impersonal tensions, both semantic and rhythmic, that traverse the poem’. (R. Mitchell, op. cit.)

Question 18

Milton:

“The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs thro’ the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine…”

Answer 18

Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
John Milton, ‘On the morning of Christ’s Nativity’

Question 19

“You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apulieus the Platonist […] and consequently the Goddess was…”

Answer 19

“…never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour – and perhaps never thought of in the old religion […]”
February 1819 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats

Question 20

“I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate does not…”

Answer 20

“… suit the language over-well from the pouncing rhymes—the other kind appears too elegiac—and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect—I do not pretend to have succeeded.” (Letter-Journal to George and Georgina Keats)

Question 21

Alan Richardson:

‘The “wild-ridged mountains” suggest the cerebrum with its convolutions […] and its fissures; the “dark-cluster’d trees” with “branched thoughts” suggest the brain’s branching nerves (axons) […]. “Convolutions,” “ventricles” and “other Cavities,” and the nerves that “arise by numerous branches” from the brain’s “Substance” all appear in Keats’s lecture notes, […]. The “streams” the poet projects for his mind-region evoke…”

Answer 21

“…the brain’s network of blood vessels, as does Psyche’s “rosy sanctuary.” This sanctuary will be dressed […] with the “wreath’d trellis of a working brain,” an especially rich image evoking both what Keats called the “serpentine” branchings of the nerves and their fibrous structure […].’
(Alan Richardson, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats’s Poetry)

Question 22

‘thus by every germ of Spirit sucking the Sap from mould ethereal every human might…’

Answer 22

‘…become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees’
Letter to John Reynolds, February 1819

Question 23

“almost any Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own…”

Answer 23

“…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 circuiting: man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Webb of his Soul and weave a tapestry empyrean—full of Symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering of distinctness for his Luxury.” (John Keats, Letter to Reynolds, February 1819)

Question 24

L’indolence keatsienne est la

Answer 24

«confusion du travail et du repos, de l’activité finalisée et de la rêverie sans objet». K Imagine la littérature comme une toile tissée par des araignées rêveuses dont «le travail est délesté de sa fonction utilitaire c’est-à-dire de sa fonction prédatrice» (Jacques Rancière, Le Fil Perdu, p. 79).

Question 25

«Refuser la démarche qui…»

Answer 25

«….veut s’emparer de l’esprit des autres, comme l’insecte de sa proie» (p. 80)

Question 26

«Ne pas conclure, ne pas affirmer, mais «murmurer», […] c’est là, affirme le poète, le mode

Answer 26

de communication propre à la formation d’une démocratie sensible effective.»

Question 27

“The very word is like a bell…”

Answer 27

“To toll” - Ode to a Nightingale

Question 28

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given

Answer 28

In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Question 29

Était-ce vision, ou bien rêve éveillé,

Answer 29

Ce chant s’éteint : suis-je éveillé ? Suis-je endormi ?