SOURCE: Ross, Marlon B. “Beyond the Fragmented Word: Keats at the Limits of Patrilineal Language.” In Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, edited by Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, pp. 110-31. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Ross examines the presence of patriarchal language in Endymion and Hyperion. Ross asserts Keats recognized his continued imitation of patrilineal discourse in Hyperion and, in an attempt to subvert this tendency, shifted to an obtuse private language.]

In her study The Romantic Fragment Poem (1986) Marjorie Levinson asserts the intentionality of fragmentation in the poetry of the romantics. Asking why Keats's Hyperion “break[s] off before its appointed end,” she appeals to what I call an evolutionary parable, a story of progression that asserts the capacity to gain, if not increasingly greater control over experience itself, at least greater control over a language that orders and expresses experience. Fragmentation becomes, for Levinson, a sign of Keats's successful maturation, his mastery over his past and his precursors as well as over himself.¹The Fall “surpasses” Hyperion even as it depends on the previous poem to mark the mastery of its progression, and, Levinson says, it “demonstrates on every level Keats's autonomy. We see at once by this work that Keats has escaped the influence of his great precursors and that he has surpassed himself—surpassed ‘Hyperion’!”² Paradoxically, Keats's “autonomy” is achieved through “dependent” forms, his own developmental narrative mastered through undeveloped fragments; his discourse supposedly succeeds by fracturing itself.

I wonder, however, whether this evolutionary parable—both the one that Keats writes and the one that Levinson rewrites and celebrates—is not fractured in a more fundamental sense. As Levinson herself recognizes, Hyperion serves to assert Keats's gaining of adulthood through language that is “causal, univocal, linear.” I would go further than this and suggest that the poem desires to assert not just Keats's coming into manhood but also his coming into discursive power—and that, in fact, the latter is considered a sign of the former. The poem aims to prove the poet's capacity to perform forcefully the discursive rituals of his culture, rituals which define poetic maturity in terms of patrilineal performance. That is, Keats recognizes that to make himself into, to be accepted as, a great poet he must seek to renew and re-form all previous poetic discourse by engendering a lasting line of descendants who will be bound to use language according to his re-formation of it. The “great” poet's capacity to re-form his linguistic tradition is, however, an illusory kind of reform, in that his renewal of language merely affects the forms in which discourse is uttered without effecting a change in the structure of discourse itself. Re-formed discourse does not inevitably give us new ways of structuring discourse, does not give us new rituals that can change the ways in which we interact verbally, in which we inhabit our culture through the use of language. Instead, reformed discourse gives us new ways of carrying out already established verbal interactions, new costumes for old customs. We can see, then, that re-form prevents real reform by deluding the poet into thinking that his grand performance in establishing a lasting line of followers who will mimic his discourse is a kind of progression, when actually it is nothing more than a validation of his culture's power over him and over language use. Ironically, then, if Keats manages to re-form the specific discursive rituals of his precursors, seeming to circumvent the discipline of his poetic fathers, his success will only bind him more tightly to the greater rituals of his unreformed culture. In fact, because it is patriarchal culture that has defined discursive power as the capacity to re-form the fathers' discourse, by seeking to avoid the discipline of the fathers Keats subjects himself to the discipline, subjects himself to the rituals of his fathers' culture. Culture's rule over discursive rituals assures its power over poetic discourse.

By the same logic, however, in order for patriarchal culture to be sustained, its rituals must be practiced, not necessarily in all modes of discourse but in those modes that predominate or in enough modes to maintain its predominance. Patriarchal culture cannot fully abrogate the intrinsic malleability of language, since it is this malleability that enables discourse to occur in the first place. Because discursive rituals are based on the malleability of language, a poet cannot re-form language without also dallying with genuine discursive reform. If a poet attempting to re-form tradition is automatically a potential reformer of cultural discourse, how does culture discourage reform while encouraging re-form? As we shall see, Keats, desiring a life beyond the prisonhouse of cultural discourse, most certainly experiments with the nonpatrilineal potential of language, as he hesitates to perform the rituals demanded within patriarchal culture. When he tries to explore nonpatrilineal uses of language, however, he is immediately perceived, and perceives himself, as impotent. To hesitate patrilineal performance is to refuse patriarchal power; to refuse patriarchal power means to give up power as it is practiced within culture; to have no power within culture makes it all the more difficult to have power over culture, to have power to change culture. How can one reject the signs of power and still be empowered? How can one reject the strictures of patrilineal discourse without also being disciplined by that discourse? How can one progress as a poetic soul without performing the rituals that determine progression? How can a poet take (progress) his culture beyond discourse as it is practiced toward revolutionary discourse if the only notion of progress is the one predetermined by the old culture, if the notion of “progress” is itself the premise on which the rituals of the old cultural discourse is based? This is the quadruple bind that Keats finds himself in, and that fractures each poem in which he aspires to reform discourse by giving words new forms of power, by giving them a wholeness beyond the limits of culture as it is learned, known, perpetrated, and perpetuated through language.

“The phenomenology of the fragment is the phenomenology of human awareness,” Thomas McFarland says in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin.³ Levinson and McFarland both see the romantic fragment as an intentional form of human achievement—the former as mastery over time itself by “chronicling” a progression in awareness, however futile, and the latter as mastery over the “forms of fragmentation,” over both the consciousness of fragmentation and the poetic expression of that consciousness. Edward Bostetter, on the other hand, takes romantic fragmentation as a thoroughly unintentional loss of control over the very poetic intentions that promise control. The “abandonment” of Hyperion, Bostetter suggests, “at the point of revelation was a sign of doubt and imaginative failure” on Keats's part.⁴ Wholeness of poetic form becomes the sacrificial victim of a vision that fragments itself unintentionally, a vision internally fragmented by its own inherent limits. In order to understand Keats's self-fragmenting vision, we need to consider how an evolutionary parable functions within the culture that Keats desires both to master and to revolutionize, for his writing of that parable is not so much a natural progression toward “adulthood” as it is a culturally determined will to power, which conflicts with the urge toward a revolutionary reordering of discourse. Once we resituate Keats's discourse within the culture that authorizes it, the question of intentionality must resurface. If the poems reveal a fundamental split within Keats's desire, a fracture marked by cultural politics, then how intentional can their fragmentation be? Also, could it be possible that these fragments expose a fissure within the culture itself, a fissure that culture seeks to hide because, while signaling the limits of an individual's power over his own discourse within culture, that fissure also unintentionally exposes the potential limits of culture's power over language, a faultline of potential weakness within the cultural economy?

My interrogation of Keats's tendency toward fragmented discourse is grounded in two major premises. The first is that we can make a valid distinction between the way language operates systemically and the way it operates in historicized discourse. I am not interested in describing the structural foundations of a system here; rather, I want to examine how one specific kind of language usage—romantic poetic discourse—operates as culturally bound exchanges between a poet and the demands of his readers, between a poet and the demands of his own desire, between a poet and the demands of cultural tradition. The second premise is that poetic discourse operates no differently in relation to intention than cultural discourse in general. I tend to question writers like Julia Kristeva who suggest that poetic discourse by its very nature tends to suspend or break the normative functions of language in patriarchal culture.⁵ The way a poem, even the most avant-garde poem, communicates (is written and read) depends on the cultural practices available to poet and reader alike. Poetic discourse, like all discourse, is bound by the history of its practices within a particular culture. This does not mean, of course, that poetic discourse cannot rebel against the historicized rituals that inform and re-form it. The question is whether, or to what degree, such discourse, whether poetic or not, can revolutionize culture itself. The question is whether, or to what extent, “revolutionary” language tends to subvert anything other than itself, anything other than its own attempt at cultural communication. This second premise means that poetic discourse has no special privilege in relation to the culture that authorizes it. In fact, the very idea that poetic language is privileged is one of the cultural premises that rules poetic performance in the English literary tradition that Keats finds himself enamored of and frustrated by. Merely because we can write and read as though poetic language transcends the culture that authorizes it does not mean that such poetic language actually does transcend the rituals that conventionally enable its communication and efficacy within culture. Perhaps Keats is writing, then, not only at the limits of his historical situation, as Levinson might claim, or at the limits of the “human situation,” as McFarland might claim, or at the limits of his own desire, as Bostetter might claim, but also and more importantly at the limits of his particular culture's discursive knowledge, at the outmost periphery of a culture's articulation of itself.

Twice Keats sets out to narrate the fall of Hyperion, and both times he stops writing before completing the narration. We know it is not because Keats could not complete a narrative poem. He completes several long ones with no evident difficulty or discomfort. On the other hand, there are other instances of Keats's stopping before finishing. If we do not take these fragments as either universally inevitable (assuming that every poem is a fragmented form) or purely accidental (assuming that all poetic motives and ends must be reduced to the happenstance of self-unmotivating language), then we can claim that there are significant reasons for the incompletion of these narratives and that their state of fragmentation may have at least a common denominator. If we consider the narrative poems that are completed (if not artistically “finished”), we find that they all come under the general rubric of romance: Endymion, Isabella, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Lamia. Except for “The Eve of St. Mark,” which is so much a fragment that it is impossible to define its genre, all of the completed narratives are concerned with the quest for innocent love, albeit a quest perverted or subverted in some way in almost all of the poems. On the other hand, the narrative fragments are all poems that are concerned with the quest for power: Calidore and the Hyperion poems. This distinction between love and power, though it may at first appear both simplistic and arbitrary, helps us to understand (1) the way in which Keats's own desire is fractured, (2) the way in which his desire conflicts with the demands of his culture, and (3) the way in which patriarchal culture always attempts to heal a fissure that it necessarily inflicts within itself.

In Endymion, Keats explores the bower of innocent love; it is a bower that enables him to escape, however temporarily, the doubts and uncertainties that later become definitive of poetic power for him.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.(6)

This notion of poetic language as an infinite bower of beauty forgets temporarily the schematized performance demanded in patrilineal discourse. Bower poetry is a kind of nonperformance or, as Keats terms it, “negative capability,” which is based on aestheticized identification rather than self-empowering mastery. Frances Ferguson has explained one such kind of “love language” as evidenced in Shelley's intercourse with Mont Blanc. “In Mont Blanc,” Ferguson writes, “Shelley falls in love with a ravine, a river, and a mountain not because of the nature of those objects but because of his own, his human, mind, which cannot imagine itself as a genuinely independent, isolated existence.” And as Ferguson points out, “Mont Blanc” is Shelley's attempt to align “epistemology with love.”⁷ I think, however, that the definition of love which Ferguson quotes from Shelley applies even more to Keats's bower poetry than to Shelley's own metaphysically oriented poetic discourse. He defines love as “that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within ourselves.”⁸ As Ferguson suggests, Shelley's “love language” results not so much from the “nature of those objects” that he seeks to commune with as from the nature of his own mind. Keats's bower language, on the other hand, seems more radical to me, exactly because it results from an intense desire to annihilate the identity of self, as he says, for the sake of other natures.⁹ The poet subjects himself willingly to other natures, which then become subjects in themselves rather than merely denatured objects. They become indiscriminately subjects of the poet's nature while remaining subjects within themselves.

Within the bower, poets and readers can revel in the ecstatic experience of otherness redefining the limits of self. The other's inclusion within the self becomes a form of participation itself, rather than invasion and impregnation for the end of establishing a lasting line. It is like “An endless fountain of immortal drink, / Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink” (1.23-24). Generating endless discriminations in an attempt to experience all of experience, encouraging a democracy of identifications in an attempt to include all inclusions, this dream of love is also an articulation of ceaseless excitement without disturbance, peace without banality, mortality without the finality of death:

          Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,
They always must be with us, or we die.

[1.25-33]

The bower grows within our souls and binds us—not the normative kind of binding, as we shall see, practiced within Keats's culture, but binding for the sake of fertile differentiation. What Keats attempts to write in and into Endymion is a kind of objectless desire that fulfills itself by yearning for itself, a desire that has no objects because every object is itself a desiring subject, a desire that has no objectives except to increase the pleasure of desire. This bower discourse embraces the infinite “essences” within each thing, binding and referring each to each, endlessly reproducing a love for such endless referential binding. Such a poem does not describe or reflect or moralize on the world; it escapes the world by re-creating its own world in itself, ironically while insistently referring innocently to the world it seeks to evade. The bower is a place so easeful that it can include the diseased world (in fact, according to its rule of infinite inclusions, it must) without its own ease being disrupted, for the bower composes (makes and eases) a discourse whose communicative rituals are defined by a participatory love for aestheticized experience. Since infinite wonder is a type of wholeness, the bower brings wholeness by making beautiful (worthy of wonder) that which appears to be ugly in the world, transforming the pall of death into “some shape of beauty.” The limitless capacity of words (their malleability) helps to create a fountain of delight ever renewing itself. And as these words seem to refer to external things (the world with its attendant gloom), they magically remain true to the logic of their own internal beauty, making sense (communicating) by remaking the external world into the internalized image of ever-changing words.

How would this participatory discourse work as poetry? It would work something like Endymion, though, as Keats was aware, this romance falls far short of his ideal. The most important rhetorical attributes of such discourse for our purposes include: (1) the wandering series, (2) profuse but lucid imagery, and (3) tropes of imitative identification. We can see all of these at work in the third verse paragraph of Endymion. The design of the paragraph is characteristically simple, for how can every reader be invited in if some are turned away by obscurity? The paragraph is simply an additive series that moves from the “full happiness” of Keats's prospective tracing in the first two lines to the uncertain path, dressed in green, a color that encourages us to “speed / Easily Onward, thorough flowers and weed.” The uncertainty of the path is not an impediment except insofar as it is a pleasing deferral of our “onward” motion, causing us to linger and idle, to wander aimlessly from flower to flower. And our aimless wandering claims for itself the naturalness of erring exactly because it makes erring impossible, because it makes erring a wonderfully pure pleasure rather than a sin. Wandering that precludes all possibility of erring is very dissimilar from Wordsworth's teleological wandering at the beginning of the Prelude. Whereas Wordsworth cannot lose his way because his journey is predestined by nature, Keats and his readers must lose both the way and themselves in the way. They must forget themselves as they take pleasure in endless wandering, rather than through wandering to some predetermined end. Endymion reads as though Keats is unsure of his way because he is, like Spenser, unsure of his way. Each new turn of the story, whether predictable or not, is a pleasure, for it is the constant turning that is the aim of the story's aimless movement. The plot is progression without progress, where incident and accident are always pleasurable openings for a new path, where each new path promises a bowery maze.

This prospective paragraph itself, for instance, is a series of the most natural kind. It ambles through the seasons, each season itself being transformed into an infinite maze, each transferring its beauty and joy to the next. We begin in spring: “Now while the early budders are just new, / And run in mazes of the youngest hue” (1.41-42). We move through and within summer and autumn:

                                                                                                              And, as the year
Grows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steer
My little boat, for many quiet hours,
With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finished: but let autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.

[1.45-58]

It would be a mistake to think that Keats desires a mere year to write this story; he desires a lifetime, and one without terminus, in which each season becomes an age within itself, an infinite bower to be explored. The wandering series would, of course, be familiar to Keats's readers due to poets like Spenser and Thomson. This device, however, can easily be used performatively to reaffirm patrilineal discourse rather than for the ends of bowery love. In other words, it could be used as a way of proving a poet's mastery over so many mazes, as a way of asserting a poet's capacity to amaze others, who become lost in his ways never to enjoy their own, who become imitators of his discourse never to discover their own. If Keats had used the wandering series in Endymion, for instance, to demonstrate how easy it is to err from the proper path, rather than how pleasurable it is to forsake the notion of the proper path, he would have been using it to sustain patrilineal discourse. Instead, the tale enjoins us to participate not in order to disown ourselves but rather in order to chart our own wanderings among the poet's serial mazes, not in order to perform correctly a predetermined ritual but rather in order to share mutually in the spontaneous ritualization of remaking discourse as a shared activity. In effect, it becomes the ritual of constantly remaking the rituals of discourse. Keats invites his readers to fall, like Endymion, in love with objects, taking them as subjects, while being led by desire to some arbitrarily happy conclusion, instead of, as in patrilineal narrative, forever claiming the need to lead and shape every object into a predetermined objective.

In addition to the wandering series, Keats uses a more novel trope, imitative identification, a kind of metonymy in which each essence participates in the other by dissolving itself into the other while retaining its own essence. There are many instances of it in this single paragraph. Keats says about Endymion's name: “The very music of the name has gone / Into my being, and each pleasant scene / Is growing fresh before me as the green / Of our own vallies” (1.36-39). The name is turned (in)to music, which composes (again in both senses) Keats's “being.” The name is not simply metaphorically musical; it is music. To speak it or hear it remakes the self in the idiom of music. Keats's existence is now constituted by that naming music (EndymionEndymionEndymion), the repetition of redolent sound that transforms itself magically into purely aestheticized melody. The magical music of the name represents, of course, the magical bower of poesy. The name is to music what “the green / Of our own vallies” is to “each pleasant scene” that grows within the poet's mind; the name is the word that grows magically within the poetic imagination. Just as music usurps the name (giving it feature, form, and function), so the fanciful scenes of the poem usurp the actual green valleys. The pleasant scenes “growing fresh” (growing always anew) before him both are and are not the green valleys of the real world before him. As Keats sends his “herald thought into a wilderness,” his mind becomes a wilderness of wonder, where everything is itself and yet everything else at once, where we can always move forward and never move toward an end. This process of indiscriminate naming transfers the attributes of one “essence” to those of another, introjects subjectivity into every object, making it a space to be inhabited and enjoyed rather than an objective to be gained, and labels everything as though it must partake of everything else even as it retains its own uniqueness. Such a process, as we shall see, is opposed to the act of naming in the discourse authorized by culture. It is also different from the metonymy of Freudian displacement, for it is not a mechanism that enables the unconscious to operate as an engine of repression. Keats's metonymic transferrals are fully conscious, without becoming self-conscious, for the pleasure of indiscriminate naming lies in recognizing how boundaries become bridges, how subjectivity can become contagious without also becoming the fatal illness of self-propagation.

“They alway must be with us, or we die,” Keats says. The profuse lucidity of the diction, the endless meandering around, in, and through serial mazes, the universalization of metonymic relations—all of these hope to forestall the “wintry season, bare and hoary.” The only apparent threat to this dream of participatory love within the bower is the barrenness of death. The paradox of this kind of democratic discourse is that it must, if it is true to itself, discriminate among forms of barrenness, that it must indiscriminately include its most apparent threat, death itself. And like life itself, the poem must come to an end, must annihilate itself—a reality that everywhere haunts its feverish profuseness, its infinite multiplication of “many and many a verse.” As Richard Macksey points out, Endymion ends so awkwardly because “Mortal man is not Apollo; the earth is not heaven.”

The situation of the poet, like that of his language, is one of continual “usury” in the erosive and fragmenting as well as the additive sense. The radical—and ineradicable—fact in Keats's mind is the mutual incompatibility of the human and the ideal climates, of “life” and the “legend,” of experience and the language that would comprehend it.¹⁰

In addition to this ultimate incompatibility between heaven (the bower) and earth (patriarchal culture), there is a conflict between endlessly discriminating inclusiveness and the reality of exclusions, the reality that excluding is what enables the pursuit of inclusivity. Keats wants the happiest synthesis: both the infinite inclusiveness of never ending and the aesthetic wholeness of formal closure. Obviously, he cannot have both, but he can have an ending, however awkwardly forced, which makes the poem appear to be a whole that contains infinity in itself, that contains infinity in its endless amazing naming of itself.

However awkwardly Endymion ends, it does end. Ironically, the ease of the bower diminishes the threat of ending. We can always have the pleasure of beginning again; enter a new bower, write a new poem, or because each bower is loaded with ore, reenter the same bower and retrace its infinite series of mazes yet again. Bower poetry invites the luxury of idle rereading. The alternative is to do what Keats does in his other romances: pervert the dream of love, subvert the bower by bitterly bringing attention either to the potential evil that must always be entertained when innocence reigns inclusively (as in Lamia) or to the deadly finality of even the most innocent act of aesthetic concluding (as in the closure of “The Eve of St. Agnes”). Perhaps we could say that the world's disease contaminates the quest for participatory, innocent love in these romances. The dream of love must always be infected by the disease of reality and harbored under the shadow of death.

The biggest problem with the bower is not so much its apparent unreality, however, as its implicit powerlessness to affect reality. The bower is merely a lapse, an escape. “[S]o I will begin / Now while I cannot hear the city's din” (1.39-40), Keats says, entering the bower. The din of the city is the noise of civilization, of culture and its “despondence.” Discourse in the city, as opposed to language in the bower, is a tower of Babel, where self-individuating selves clamor and vie for attention and power, where playful discrimination and participation fall into division and strife, where the luxury of idleness is reprimanded as undisciplined laziness and loitering, and where progress (the movement of culture toward some realizable end) is real even though it is perverted toward selfish ends. Although bower poetry uses language in a way that allows us temporarily to forget patrilineal rituals, it does so unfortunately by giving ultimate value and power to the dominant reality that it seeks to escape. As we have seen, in the bower progress is temporarily annihilated in favor of a kind of progressless progression. It is the timelessness of the dreamspace, the untimely idleness of escape. Can the “work” of revolution be sustained by dreamplay that refuses to progress even beyond itself? Can discourse be revolutionary if it forsakes the right of timely intervention and timed progression toward a shared goal? Could it be that bower discourse ignores that language must work for revolution before it plays within the ideal? Because bower language is the nostalgic discourse of a remembered or imagined Eden, rather than the working discourse that charts a path toward a new Eden, it cannot be revolutionary. It defines poetic language always as a dreamy and harmless cousin of a powerful tyrant. The bower derives its pleasure from its status as an illusive, protective, self-containing, self-restraining space of pure beauty within a larger world of real woe. Such poetic discourse—no matter how seductive—effects (and affects) only itself. Because bower poetry merely holds at bay the patrilineal uses of discourse, it cannot alter the cultural rituals that perpetuate the patrilinearity of discourse. Ironically, by refusing the notion of progress offered by patriarchal culture, bower poetry refuses a notion of progress beyond culture as it is known. In effect, in worshiping the bower, Keats gives up his chance to rename his culture, to revise how his culture names itself.

At first, this may appear to be simply a conflict between the proverbial “man of action” and “man of contemplation.” It is not. The choice is not between writing poetry and leaving poetry behind in order to do something else. Rather, the choice is between writing poetry of one kind or another. Furthermore, it is not merely a conflict between Keats's desire and the world he inhabits, between heaven and earth; it is also a conflict within Keats which splits his desire and turns it against itself. One way of thinking about this is to say that Keats has internalized (as he must) the cultural rituals that enable language to have meanings, that enable poets to write and be read. I would rather, however, conceptualize this conflict within Keats's desire as a battle between dissonant urges, each belonging to his culture as well as to him, but one dominant, the other recessant. It is this conflict between the demand for patrilineal performance of language and the desire for a liberated use of language that frustrates Keats in his Hyperion poems and ultimately causes their fragmentation.

To love infinite deferral of identity, rather than to plunge headlong into a self-empowering progression, is to err in the eyes of Keats's culture. The poet's guilt for erring, for loitering, reveals itself in the preface to Endymion both as a kind of self-castigation or inward lashing, a desire to claim the loitering as a mere phase that the poet will ultimately purge from his discourse, and as a kind of lashing out, a desire to punish the patriarchs who he knows will judge his loitering as poetic impotence. In this self-castigation and lashing out, Keats not only preempts the loitering of the poem to do penance for his erring; he also succumbs to the guilt that culture infuses within him to assure the victory of patrilineal (self)discipline. “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy,” Keats says in the preface to Endymion, as he appeals to the making of his own evolutionary parable. “[B]ut there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages” (103). In this parable, it is Keats who resides in the unhealthy state of undecidedness and who will proceed, presumably through confusion, to a healthy state of maturity. Endymion's “love language” is temporalized by the poet's desire to father and further his discourse as a powerful language within the cultural hierarchy. This need to create a stage for bower desire signals how patrilineal discourse everywhere haunts Endymion. In effect, Keats creates an evolutionary parable in order to stem the tide of his insecurity, in order to drown out the smug security of his critics. The stages of his parable necessarily become status positions within an implicit hierarchy. By placing himself in the second stage, he hopes to preempt the discipline of his critics by disciplining himself, and at the same time he hopes to promote a sense that he is not really idly wandering or being led somewhere he cannot know but that he is shaping his own destiny, as he passes from the innocence of youth through temporary weakness and confusion to the wholesomeness of manly maturity.

The preface to Endymion, then, discriminates in a way altogether different from the discriminations within the poem, for the preface names in order to objectify and discipline (both Keats and his potential critics). The difference between the critics and himself becomes a threat to him, a threat and yet a promise. It tells him that he may never claim their conviction in his powers as a poet, and therefore he must either castigate himself or convince himself of their real impotence, or both. The will to power, the desire to overcome his foes and win their allegiance, the desire to become his foes by being accepted by them, overwhelms the dream of love espoused within and by the poem.

This may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a punishment: but no feeling man will be forward to inflict it: he will leave me alone, with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object. This is not written with the least atom of purpose to forestall criticisms of course, but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are competent to look, and who do look with a zealous eye, to the honour of English literature.

[102]

If the rhetoric of the poem invites all who can read to dwell within the bower of poesy, the preface prefigures the dilemma that Keats feels in making so generous a gesture to all. This passage contains all of the attributes that characterize patrilineal discourse: schematizing compromise; performance, purposiveness, and spectatorship; and, perhaps most important, the establishment of territorial claims for the sake of engendering a lasting line of powerful discourse within culture. Keats feels compelled to point out his “inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt” while saying that even “a year's castigation” would not improve the poem he has written (102). By attempting to “conciliate” these men, however, Keats also necessarily conciliates his own desire. He invests the “zealous eye” within himself, an eye that is always beforehand vested within the self, for it is this eye that teaches us how to look, how to keep a zealous eye on the honor of tradition and its properties, how to grow up properly in a culture that rules through the rituals of its self-disciplining discourse.

John Gibson Lockhart, the most infamous of Keats's reviewers, represents the extreme of patrilineal discourse. He names only in order to discipline: to separate the powerless from the powerful, to advance his own claim to cultural power by asserting his authority to name, to punish those who would presume a claim to cultural power without having followed the prescribed rituals of empowerment. Lockhart establishes a bastard line of descent, naming it the “Cockney School,” in order to claim zealously his own power within the legitimate line of descent. Lockhart's aim is not to get Keats to write better poetry but rather to stop him from writing all poetry: “if Mr Keats should happen, at some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps he convinced of the existence of his malady.”¹¹ Discrimination is conceptualized always as exclusiveness, error as the failure of having taken the proper route to an appropriate end. “Destined” for the “career of medicine,” Keats errs so far as to determine his own “career” as a poet. Thus Keats, desiring to paint himself as the healthy young poet, is disciplined by Lockhart, who classes him among “uneducated and flimsy striplings” incapable of understanding the “merits” of “men of power.”¹² Keats's preface fails, as it must, to serve its purpose. His self-castigation encourages the patrilineal discourse of others, encourages others who desire power over him to castigate him, to see his poem as a failed performance rather than as an experiment in participatory discourse, to see it as a potential line of descent naming its objects as territorialized objectives rather than as a bower of indiscriminate naming. Just in the way that culture perpetuates its own rituals of hierarchized power through the patrilinearity of its discourse, so Keats unwittingly sets in motion a spiral of contestation in which each writer attempts to outperform his adversaries.

When Keats moves from the Endymion to the Hyperion myth, he attempts to progress from a dream of love to the will to power. It is not by coincidence that the Hyperion fragments attempt to narrate how the ruling gods must fall in order to make way for new ones, how the fathers must give way to the sons. Anxious to assert his own claim to manhood, Keats, against the current of his own desire, attempts to teach himself how to perform the rituals of patrilineal poetry. As Keats writes to Haydon:

[T]he nature of Hyperion will lead me to treat it in a more marked and grecian Manner—and the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating—and one great contrast between them will be—that the Hero of the written tale being mortal is led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstance; whereas the Apollo in Hyperion being a foreseeing God will shape his actions like one.¹³

Bringing his bower poem into the world of realpolitik, he makes an analogy between his earlier hero and Napoleon, an ironic analogy considering Napoleon's real power in the world but appropriate considering Napoleon's inevitable “fall” and Keats's impending realization of Apollo's own limits. Unlike Endymion, Apollo “will shape his actions,” will lay claim to his legitimate reign by fathering his discourse in his own image.

This apparent acceptance of patrilineal rituals translates into the following stylistic practices in the poem: (1) high, hard, disciplined diction; (2) an unrelenting pace toward momentous climax and closure, almost to the extent that the poem becomes pure “action”; (3) constant images of measure, whether of increase or diminishment, rising or falling, violent invasion or projection. Stripping his language to a “manly” terseness, Keats steps willingly into the barrenness that he has attempted to keep at bay in Endymion. His lean and hardened language serves to gauge his renewed engagement with the world of power and its demands. His description of the doomed god Hyperion serves well to represent the newly acquired discipline and momentum of his language:

He enter'd, but enter'd full of wrath;
His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scar'd away the meek ethereal Hours
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared,
From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,
Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,
And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades,
Until he reach'd the great main cupola;
There standing fierce beneath, he stampt his foot,
And from the basements deep to the high towers
Jarr'd his own golden region; and before
The quavering thunder thereupon had ceas'd,
His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb,
To this result:

[1.213-27]

Narrating the determined progress of “aching time” and “moments big as years” (1.64), the language is as driven as the gods, desperate to act, irritated by delay, threatened by the possibility of erring. Because what is at stake is the rule of the world itself—a “ripe progress” (1.125) “[t]oo huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe” (1.160)—we can afford neither to linger nor to make uncalculated moves in the wrong direction. The grandness and hardness of the style, as opposed to the delicate and intricate detail of Endymion's bower, are supposed to signify not only a matured manly vision but also a toughened stance in relation to the reality he once sought merely to escape. Like Hyperion himself, Keats is now willing to stand his ground and claim his rightful place in the world.

Unlike the serial wandering of Endymion, this poem moves in phrases catapulted by the sheer force of active, almost manic verbs. It is Hyperion who shapes and drives the action, but he too is driven by it. Activity is being forced upon him (the flaming robes that give a roar and scare away the hours, the voice that leaps out) as the crisis is being forced to its moment. Hyperion, Keats's alter ego, embodies the poet's own split desire, driving toward a disciplined manhood in order to be allied with power but also driven by the very rituals of the discourse he would control. The irony of this passage is that Hyperion inhabits and represents the bower that must be left behind once the crisis is forced, once he must fight to gain or retain power. In such passages, it is as if Keats is literally disciplining his “former” self, purging the bower that he cannot totally surrender. Hyperion's movement “From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault” is a fierce parody of Endymion's objectless wandering, turning that wandering into the frenzied determination of a god shaping his own future, even though that future be his doom. The “bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light” that we explore idly in the previous poem now become the direct object of Hyperion's wrath. The “golden region” that is “jarr'd” represents the false security of the bower, which must be transformed into a space of active contestation. “Am I to leave this haven of my rest, / This cradle of my glory, this soft clime, / This calm luxuriance of blissful light,” Hyperion asks.

This is the question that each god must ask, even though the answer is clear and unavoidable. The kind of imitative identification celebrated in Endymion is replaced here with “transitive” predication. Activity is always bound by discrete motives and objects, enacted by discrete subjects toward determinate objects and established ends. In fact, imitative identification becomes the very threat that the father god Saturn names as the condition of his fall:

                                                                                —I am gone
Away from my own bosom: I have left
My strong identity, my real self,
Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit
Here on this spot of earth.

[1.112-16]

Saturn's loss of his “strong identity, [his] real self,” represents his fall from power because it figures the incapacity to name, at will, the objects of his power. Feverishly, with the hyperactivity of one who knows that he is soon to be merely an object in someone else's discourse, Saturn commands Thea to search out and identify his only remaining hope, Hyperion. But his capacity to name objects and objectives at will is lost.

A little time, and then again he snatch'd
Utterance thus.—“But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to nought?
Where is another Chaos? Where?”

[1.140-45]

Accustomed to a world where his own patrilineal discourse is unthreatened, Saturn finds himself snatching utterance, fashioning words that refuse to father forth a world of objects to his calling. Instead of the raw material of chaos, he has only the form of his own outmoded discourse to mold, and soon that too will be snatched by mightier gods projecting their own claims to father their own world from the power of their words.

Like Hyperion, his double/foil Apollo must be forced from the bower and into the world of manly strife. As opposed to the participatory discourse of the bower, the patrilineal discourse of power demands that even the most similarly identified “essences” be divided and compete against each other. Thus Hyperion and Apollo, each the spitting image of the other, must refuse metonymic transference. Ironically, as the narrative moves relentlessly from old to new, from Hyperion to Apollo, in an attempt to reach its climax and claim its god-making objective, the progress falters dramatically. What Keats realizes is that the discourse of the new gods mimics that of the old, that power mimics itself and forces would-be gods to name objects with the same tireless rituals practiced by the dethroned patriarchs. How can Apollo empower a new order without falling in one of three directions: (1) merely mimicking the old order by replicating its rituals with different words; (2) becoming an unintentional parody of the old order by mimicking its powerful discourse but without its actual power in the world; (3) rejecting the old order and its discourse entirely but in doing so falling into an ineffectual private realm of fanatically obscure language?

The conflict between the bower and the will to power resurfaces as a conflict between the new gods and the old, between the culture that is already fathered and the one that the new god desires to father. Though this conflict expresses itself as inadequacy on Keats's part to express the “dire” moment of climax, the climactic shift from one kind of power to another kind, it is as much a failure of discourse itself:

Thus in alternate uproar and sad peace,
Amazed were those Titans utterly.
O leave them, Muse! O leave them to their woes;
For thou art weak to sing such tumults dire:
A solitary sorrow bests befits
Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief.
Leave them, O Muse! for thou anon wilt find
Many a fallen old Divinity
Wandering in vain about bewildered shores.

[3.1-9]

This conventional appeal to the Muse is more than merely conventional here. It represents the “impotence” of one individual's speech to father forth a new language/knowledge freed from the established rituals of patrilineal discourse. How can he create a new world when his discourse itself is fashioned by the old, when even his attempt to “father” is a ritual determined by the discourse he seeks to disclaim? Keats singly as an “individual” poet can only will a discourse bewildering to his readers, whose discourse is already determined by the knowledge Keats would transform, unless he becomes more than merely an “individual” poet, unless he becomes “great.” But literary greatness itself is a concept constructed and determined by patrilineal rituals.

In the fragmented final book of Hyperion, Keats intuitively realizes that his poem has become a parody (unself-consciously?) of patrilineal discourse. Anxious to make his new words powerful, he imitates the old discourse all too well, subverting his own attempt to move beyond that discourse. Therefore, the final book, brought to grief and despair by this realization, falls into a private language that obscures itself and thus weakens its power to establish a new public discourse for culture's use. Rather than moving relentlessly to a newly ordered discourse, the poem instead transits toward a private realm of grief, a realm in which even the Muse herself is too “weak to sing such” tumultuous desire. And thus Keats, the would-be great poet, his Muse, who represents his potential for greatness, and his readers all are stranded within an elegiac dreamspace, in which “A solitary sorrow best befits [our] lips, and antheming a lonely grief,” a dreamspace as ineffectual as Endymion's bower but lacking Endymion's innocently optimistic playfulness.

Paradoxically, this fragmented book must elegize the birth of a new god, who is doomed to be a deadly replica of the old. The Muse will find, Keats says, numberless fallen divinities “Wandering in vain about bewildered shores,” and yet the “tumults dire” of a world enmeshed in “alternate uproar and sad peace” continue unabated. This fragmented book, then, is both an elegy for the innocent bower that is “stampt” on fiercely by Hyperion, the ruling patriarch, and an elegy for the dream of a new order that forever dies into an unarticulated, ineffectual private language. Thus Keats's other alter ego, Apollo, is also split. He does not desire to leave the bower for a world of strife, and yet he desires to “father” a new language beyond patrilineal discourse. His doom is foreshadowed, however, in his likeness to the old gods of power, a likeness that he desires to repress as a sign of his potential for renewal. Apollo must “die into life” (3.130) because his very birth is an aborted death. Just as Saturn cries out for “another universe” (a “covert,” Thea calls it [1.152]), just as Hyperion mourns “to leave this haven of [his] rest,” so Apollo mourns with the foresight of a god:

                                        Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.
He listen'd, and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held.

[3.38-43]

The “golden bow,” the promise of his new rule, becomes the bearer of his tears. “Where is power?” Apollo asks, but before the answer can be articulated in words that we can understand, the poem breaks off. We as readers become like Apollo himself, waiting the revelation of Mnemosyne: “While I here idle listen on the shores / In fearless yet in aching ignorance” (3.106-7). The wish-fulfilling dream of a new order cannot realize itself without a language to name its being:

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me.

[3.113-18]

The poem breaks off because the knowledge that would enable us to deify ourselves lies always on the other side of the only discourse we know how to use. If Mnemosyne were to speak, could we understand her tongue? If Keats were to write the words, would our old-fashioned rituals of communication serve to hold the newly fashioned knowledge, or would we have to become, like Apollo, widely hollowed out? The narrative aborts itself because it has nowhere else to go. It has reached the limits of discourse as we have “fathered” it, and as it reaches for that new knowledge just beyond the old, it trails off into muteness. “Mute thou remainest—mute! yet I can read / A wondrous lesson in thy silent face,” Apollo says wistfully to Mnemosyne as he “raves” in his “aching ignorance” (3.111-12).

There is noticeable “regression” (or nostalgia) in Keats's language in the unfinished third book of the first Hyperion. His discourse returns to the dream of the bower, a space in which the manly strife for power is disrupted by the private desire for peace:

Let the rose glow intense and warm the air,
And let the clouds of even and of morn
Float in voluptuous fleeces o'er the hills;
Let the red wine within the goblet boil,
Cold as a bubbling well; let faint-lipp'd shells,
On sands, or in great deeps, vermilion turn
Through all their labyrinths; and let the maid
Blush keenly, as with some warm kiss surpris'd.

[3.15-22]

We could easily be in Endymion's easeful world of love again, but we are not. Sensing his own regression to the bower and no doubt feeling distress at its return, not desiring to linger between the momentous climax that has refused to come and the bower that invites his lingering, Keats “abandons” the poem. Before, to wander was a joy forever. Now, he fears “Wandering in vain about bewildered shores.”

Leaving the first Hyperion to mute itself, Keats proceeds to the second Hyperion. Rather than resting in muteness, he attempts again to rescue poetry, believing that it can create a discourse that is powerful without merely rehearsing the patrilineal rituals of power. But instead of retreating into the sharable (communicable) peacefulness of the innocent bower or the sharable experience of elegiac disappointment as at the end of the previous fragment, in The Fall, appropriately named, Keats falls, from the very first word, into the obtuseness of private language. The Fall of Hyperion is subtitled “A Dream” as much because it is a retreat into the private self as because it promises a visionary view of the new discourse. “Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave / A paradise for a sect,” he says in the first line. The poet, like the religious fanatic, is blessed with unarticulated knowledge, but whereas the fanatic only has to share his “dream” with a sect of faithful believers, only has to communicate his paradise to those for whom the vision is already communicated, the poet is cursed with attempting to communicate his vision of paradise to culture as a whole, to the worldly masses who must be “hollowed out.” Whereas the fanatic can afford to forgo the use of language, since his divine dream cannot be embodied in language in any case and since those who will believe do not need language to convince them, the poet must use language, however unsuitable, because his goal is to embody the dream and because it is only language that can acculturate the dream, making it powerful within culture. Desiring to trace the “shadows of melodious utterance” (1.6), Keats wants to hold firmly to his belief in poetry's power to fashion communicable words for a new world:

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment.

[1.8-11]

“Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse / Be poet's or fanatic's” (1.16) is yet unknown, for the dream remains unarticulated. Perhaps Keats finds himself, like the fanatic, weaving a “paradise for a sect,” writing an obscure, private code for the already saved. Perhaps he finds that he is unable to do what Moneta claims she will:

“Mortal, that thou may'st understand aright,
I humanize my sayings to thine ear,
Making comparisons of earthly things;
Or thou might'st better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.”

[2.1-6]

Once again the word is fragmented, for in whatever way Keats attempts to humanize his sayings, his visionary language becomes a “barren noise,” laden with the “earthly things” he seeks to transform, trapped at the limits of a discourse he desires to transcend.

By its very nature, genuine discourse cannot be private, although language as a system can be. Once it becomes a private language, it is no longer discourse, which is always communicable beyond the world of self. By the same token, language that is obscured by the dreamy privacy of its desire cannot be revolutionary, for it “falls” always into disuse and abuse, rebelling against itself, leaving intact the ordinary uses of language. Although The Fall is not an escape into the bower, it is virtually as powerless to effect discursive change. And so we find Keats fragmented by a double bind. In order to revolutionize discourse, he must make it communicate beyond the obscurity of a private dream, but in order to communicate it, he must either resort to the very rituals of discourse that he seeks to countermand or retreat into a bower discourse of happy escape, where language, although it is shared, is powerless to progress beyond its own discursive idleness and marginality and thus is incapable of effecting discursive reform. As the second Hyperion earnestly seeks to avoid the fall into private grief and then the regression to the bower that fragment the first Hyperion, and as it seeks to substitute a visionary or liberating use of language for mimicry of patrilineal discourse, it turns against discourse as it is known and thus unwillingly obscures, disempowers, fragments, and mutes itself. Realizing the dream requires us to avoid both fantasy and fanaticism, requires us to leap across the fractured word into a world that we have yet to articulate, though we, with Keats, have imagined it—waiting—just beyond the limits of our words.

Notes

1. Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); see esp. 181.

2. Ibid., 181.

3. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3.

4. Edward E. Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 8.

5. See, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Walker (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 50-57, 61, 79.

6. John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.1-13. Subsequent references are from this edition and are cited in the text.

7. Frances Ferguson, “Shelley's Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said,” in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 207.

8. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), 170.

9. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:387.

10. Richard Macksey, “‘To Autumn’ and the Music of Mortality: ‘Pure Rhetoric of a Language without Words,’” in Reed, Romanticism and Language, 278.

11. John Gibson Lockhart, “Cockney School of Poetry,” rpt. in The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, prt. C, ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1972), 90.

12. Ibid., 91.

13. Letters, 1:297.