SOURCE: An introduction to Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style, Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 1-44.

[In the following excerpt, Levinson surveys aspects of Keats's life and writing within their original social context and studies the relationship between his life and works, noting that Keats was born into a lower social class than many other Romantics, including Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. After discussing the way social disadvantages affected Keats's writing, Levinson reviews some of the early criticism of Keats's work, particularly that of Byron.]

The true cause of Mr. Keats's failure is, not the want of talent, but the misdirection of it … [T]here is a sickliness about his productions, which shews there is a mischief at the core. He has with singular … correctness described his own case in the preface to Endymion [sic:] 'The imagination of a boy', he says, 'is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but 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'. The diagnosis of the complaint is well laid down; his is a diseased state of feeling arising from the want of a sufficient and worthy object of hope and enterprise, and of the regulating principle of religion.

Josiah Conder, Eclectic Review, September 1820

He outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that … looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch's muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram.

Blackwood's, January 1826

There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of the word vale. The English word is of the happiest chance … It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction—a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a mist.

Keats, marginal note on Paradise Lost I: 321

[Keats] says he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes for men …

Richard Woodhouse to John Taylor, letter, 20 September 1819

The Argument

There's no need, I think, to defend the statement that our commitment to a canonical Keats runs deep. Anyone who has thought critically about Keats in the past five years must appreciate the difference between the Keats commentary and the kinds of inquiries conducted on the poems of the other Romantics. This business of a canonical Keats is not a matter of explicitly idealizing or redemptive readings.¹ I'm talking about the assumptions that organize our practical understanding of the relations between Keats's life and writing and the social context in which they both materialized.

Keats, like Shakespeare, is a name for the figure of the capable poet. The best Keats criticism (Lionel Trilling, John Bayley, Christopher Ricks), and the smartest (the Harvard Keatsians), mark out the canonical extremes and define a range of problems, many of which are addressed in this study.² These greatly disparate critiques, sketched toward the end of this chapter, are both founded on a single premise, one which opposes tout court the governing thesis of the contemporary criticism of Keats's poetry. We all agree to know the man and his writing by their eminent authenticity: Bayley's 'Gemeine', Ricks's 'unmisgiving' imagination, Eliot's epistolary idiot savant, Vendler's true craftsman. In order to produce this knowledge, we put what the contemporary reviews called Keats's 'vulgarity' under the sign of psychic, social, and textual unselfconsciousness: roughly, the sign of sensuous sincerity. Further, by the providential tale of intellectual, moral, and artisanal, development we find coded in Keats's letters, we put the vulgarity which cannot be so sublimed in the early verse and show its gradual sea-change into the rich, inclusive seriousness that distinguishes the great poetry. Thus do we rescue Keats's deep meanings from his alluring surfaces, his poetic identity from his poetical identifications. By and large, we read the poetry as a sweet solution to a bitter life: a resolution of the actual contradictions. The writing is not, we say, an escape from the real but a constructive operation performed upon it so as to bring out its Truth, which is also a new and deeply human Beauty. We describe, in short, a transformation of experience by knowledge and by the aesthetic practice which that knowledge promotes. The word that best describes this critical plot is romance: a march from alienation to identity. The governing figure of this narrative is the Coleridgean or Romantic symbol and its rhetorical device the oxymoron: irreducibly syncretic ideas. The hero of our critical history is a profoundly associated sensibility and his gift to us is the exemplary humanism of his life and art.

Trilling, Bayley and Ricks have discriminated a stylistic 'badness' that occurs throughout Keats's poetry: a certain remove whereby Keats signifies his interest in his representations and, we might add, in his own expressiveness. In so doing, these critics approximate the response of Keats's contemporaries, analyzed below. However, by emphasizing the psychic investment rather than the social remove which prompts it (and, by focusing mimetic and rhetorical rather than subjective disorders), Bayley and Ricks bring Keats's discursive alienations into the dominant romance.³ Following these powerful writers, we read Keats's lapses from the good taste of innocent, object-related representation and transparent subjectivity as a determined consent to his own voluptuous inwardness and to the self-conscious recoil. By this willed abandon, Keats transcends both enthrallments, thereby releasing the reader into a more generous (in today's parlance, 'intersubjective') relational mode. In other words, those critics who acknowledge the stylistic vulgarity of Keats's writing put it in the redeemable field of creaturely instinct and defense, and not in the really unsettling category of externality, materiality, and ambitious reflexiveness. When Keats nods, we say, it is because he dares to nod ('swoon', 'sink', or 'cease'), not because he tries too hard.

The early reviews tell a different story. The most casual survey of this commentary (1817-35) reveals a response so violent and sustained, so promiscuous in its blending of social, sexual, and stylistic critique, and so sharply opposed to mainstream modern commentary as to imply a determinate insight on the part of Keats's contemporaries and a determined oversight on the part of his belated admirers. While we're all familiar with Blackwood's Cockney School attack (Lockhart's rebuke of Keats's literary presumption ['so back to the shop Mr. John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes, …'" ]), we have not attended very closely to the sexual invective, and not at all to the relation between those two discourses. Time and again, the poetry is labelled 'profligate', 'puerile', 'unclean', 'disgusting', 'recklessly luxuriant and wasteful', 'unhealthy', 'abstracted', and 'insane'.⁴ More specifically, it is graphed as a stylistically self-indulgent verse: prolix, repetitive, metrically and lexically licentious, overwrought. The diatribes culminate in the epithet 'nonsense'.

We have always related the savaging of the early poetry to the anomaly of Keats's social position and to the literary blunders which follow from that fact: generally, problems of diction, rhetoric, and subject matter, all of them reducible to the avoidable (and, finally, avoided) misfortune of Keats's coterie. Because we situate these blunders at a certain level and within a very contained biographical field, and because we isolate them from the beauties of the so-called great poetry, we have not understood the deeper insult of Keats's writing, that which explains the intensity and displacements of the early response and the equal but opposite distortions of the twentieth-century view.

From the distance of today, one can detect in those vituperative catalogues a governing discursive and even cognitive model. Keats's poetry was characterized as a species of masturbatory exhibitionism, an offensiveness further associated with the self-fashioning gestures of the petty bourgeoisie.⁵ The erotic approbrium pinpoints the self-consciousness of the verse: its autotelic reflection on its own fine phrases, phrases stylistically objectified as acquired, and therefore misacquired property. The sexual language of the reviews was, of course, an expedient way to isolate Keats, but it is also a telling index to the social and existential project outlined by Keats's style. In his overwrought inscriptions of canonical models, the early readers sensed the violence of Keats's raids upon that empowering system: a violence driven by the strongest desire for an authorial manner and means, and for the social legitimacy felt to go with it. In the alienated reflexiveness of Keats's poetry, the critics read the signature of a certain kind of life, itself the sign of a new social phenomenon. Byron's famous epithet for the style of the Cockney writers, 'shabby genteel', puts the matter plainly.

The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but 'shabby-genteel', as it is termed. A man may be coarse and yet not vulgar, and the reverse … It is in their finery that the new under school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow 'a Sunday blood' might be easily distinguished from a gentleman … In the present case, I speak of writing, not of persons. (Extract from letter to John Murray, 25 March 1821)

If we were not already convinced of Byron's ear for social nuance, we would only have to recall Keats's confession, 'I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover'.

Like our own criticism, the early reviews read in Keats's poetry 'a life of Allegory', but the meaning they develop by that allegory lies in the realm of social production, not aesthetics, metaphysics, or humanistic psychology. To those early readers, 'Keats' was the allegory of a man belonging to a certain class and aspiring, as that entire class was felt to do, to another: a man with particular but typical ambitions and with particular but typical ways of realizing them. A world of difference separates this hermeneutic from the 'poignantly allegorical life', an adventure in soul-making, which has become today's John Keats.⁶ By respecting the social-sexual compounding evidenced by those reviews, we recover the sense of danger underlying our formalist and rhetorical readings of Keats's middling states: his adolescence, his literariness, his stylistic suspensions, his pronounced reflexiveness. We focus Keats's position—sandwiched between the Truth of the working class and the Beauty of the leisure class—not as a healthy both / and but as the monstrous neither / nor constructed in the reviews. We see that the problem of Keats's early poetry is not its regressive escapism (its instincts, so to speak), but its stylistic project: a social-ego enterprise. The deep contemporary insult of Keats's poetry, and its deep appeal (and long opacity) for the modern reader, is its idealized enactment of the conflicts and solutions which defined the middle class at a certain point in its development and which still to some extent obtain. We remember that Keats's style can delineate that station so powerfully because of his marginal, longing relation to the legitimate bourgeoisie (and its literary exemplars) of his day. In emulating the condition of the accomplished middle class (the phrase is itself an oxymoron), Keats isolated the constitutive contradictions of that class. The final fetish in Keats's poetry is precisely that stationing tension.

By the stylistic contradictions of his verse, Keats produces a writing which is aggressively literary and therefore not just 'not Literature' but, in effect, anti-Literature: a parody. We will see that Keats's most successful poems are those most elaborately estranged from their own materials and procedures and thus from both a writerly and readerly subjectivity. The poetic I describe, following the lead of Keats's contemporaries, is the opposite of 'unmisgiving'.⁷ The triumph of the great poetry is not its capacious, virile, humane authenticity but its subversion of those authoritarian values, effects which it could not in any case, and for the strongest social reasons, realize. This is the triumph of the double negative. The awfulness of the early work, by contrast, is explained as an expression of the single, or suffered negative: a nondynamic reflection of Keats's multiple estrangements and of the longing they inspired. The accomplished poetry may be considered the negative knowledge of Keats's actual life: the production of his freedom by the figured negation of his given being, natural and social. To say this is not to consecrate Keats a precocious post-modernist, only to take seriously the social facts and meanings embedded in his representations and in the contemporary reception. It is to see in 'the continuous manner in which the whole is elaborated' a parodic reproduction of the social restrictions that marked Keats as wanting: unequipped, ineffectual, and deeply fraudulent.⁸

Keats did not accomplish by this greatly overdetermined stratagem the goodness he craved: that plenitude of being he worshipped in the great canonical models and which he images in Autumn's breeding passiveness. What he did produce by what Shelley called 'the bad sort of style' was a truly negative capability. I call this power 'virtual' to bring out its parodic relation to authorized forms of power, 'virtuoso' to suggest its professional, technically preoccupied character, and 'virtuous' by reference to its imposed and contrived limitations… . To generate this verbal sequence is also, of course, to put as the ruling stylistic and social question the question of Keats's virility: to begin, that is, where the early commentary leaves off. We will take Keats's own phrase, the 'wreathed trellis of a working brain', as a figure for Keats's negative power: his inside-out, thoroughly textualized and autotelic accomplisment. In the celebrated poise of Keats's poetry, we read the effect of the impossible project set him by his interests and circumstances: to become by (mis)acquiring; to become by his writing at once authorized (properly derivative) and authorial (original); to turn his suffered objectivity into a sign of his self-estranged psyche, and to wield that sign as a shield and an ornament.

The project of this book is to read the meaning of a life in the style of a man's writing, and then to read that writing, that style, and that life back into their original social context. What I describe is a self-consciously distanced and totalizing study on the order of Sartre's Saint Genet.

The Life

The facts of Keats's life are too familiar to bear recounting here. I refer the reader to Aileen Ward's unsurpassed biography and to the important work of Walter Jackson Bate and Robert Gittings.⁹ Below, I elaborate those aspects of the story that bear directly on Keats's stylistic development.

To observe that Keats's circumstances put him at a severe remove from the canon is to remark not only his educational deficits but his lack of those skills prerequisite to a transparent mode of appropriation: guiltless on the one side, imperceptible on the other. He knew some French and Latin, little Italian, no Greek. His Homer was Chapman, his Dante was Cary, his Provençal ballads translations in an edition of Chaucer, his Boccacio Englished. Keats's art education was largely by engravings and, occasionally, reproductions. His absorption of the accessible English writers was greatly constrained by his ignorance of the originals upon which they drew and by his nonsystematic self-education. To say all this is to observe Keats's literally corrupt relation to the languages of poetry: his means of production.

We might also consider a more mundanely mechanical aspect of Keats's composition. Throughout his life, Keats felt compelled physically to escape his hard, London reality in order to write. A great deal of the poetry was conceived or composed at a number of modest, middleclass and, as it were, publicly designated resorts: Margate, Shanklin (the Isle of Wight), Burford Bridge (Surrey). Keats could afford only the leanest accommodations, ofcourse, and often he adjourned to these spots alone and off-season. When even these small excursions were not possible, Keats sought his escape on Hampstead Heath, in the British Institution, or in a friend's wellfurnished living room. In short, the graciously conformable bowers and dells enjoyed by Wordsworth and Coleridge were no more available to Keats than were the glory and grandeur of Greece and Rome, Byron's and Shelley's enabling resorts.

'Romantic retirement' gains a whole new dimension with Keats. Imagine the solitude of a young man in a seaside rooming house in April, a borrowed picture of Shakespeare his only companion: a man with nothing to do for a set period of time but write the pastoral epic which would, literally, make him. Compare this withdrawal to the seclusion of a writer musing in his garden, deserted by his wife and literary friends of an afternoon; or to the isolation of two English aristocrats, recognized poets both, galloping along the Lido and relishing their escape from the cant of high society and from its official voices. Better yet, imagine a conversation poem, a social verse, or a lyrical ballad by Keats; project from Keats's pen a sublimely inspired ode on the order of Shelley's 'Mont Blanc', or a Defence of Poetry, or a pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra. The experiment should point up the problematic nature for Keats of those elementary and, in the period, normative literary effects: authority, authenticity, and ease.

Apropos that last and deeply Romantic effect, ease, we recall that Keats hadn't the luxury for a 'wise passiveness'. His early detection of his disease, Tom's condition, the time constraints imposed by his medical training, his assumption of responsibility for his sister, his haste to make a name so he could marry Fanny: all these familiar facts precluded the meditative quiescence which enabled in the other Romantics a rhetoric of surpassing naturalness.¹⁰ Wordsworth's compositional program was simply not an option for a man who could not wait upon memory's slow digestive processes. Nor could Keats draw upon his everyday life, a monotonous struggle to get by and get ahead, for the interest, surprise, and suggestiveness which Byron and Shelley found in their large circumstances. Keats's necessary writing trips were hasty and purposive; the work of this simulated leisure was the production of pleasure, precondition for the rich, selfless, and suspended literary exercise which was Keats's dream of art. The result of these sad, self-vexing outings is a poetry evincing the paradoxes by which it is made. A poetry too happy by far, too full by half. When Shelley disdainfully rejected Keats's advice, 'load every rift with ore', he knew what he was about. He registered the class implications of Keats's plenitude, and knew that he, for one, did not have to plump his poems to the core.

Before we can begin re-reading Keats, we must really imagine what we know. We must see very clearly, as John Bayley saw, that Keats was a man whose almost complete lack of control over the social code kept him from living his life. He could not write his poetry in the manner he required, marry the woman he loved, claim his inheritance, hold his family together, or assist his friends. He could not, in short, seize any of the appurtenances of manhood. Keats was as helplessly and ignominiously a 'boy' poet as Chatterton, and Byron's 'Mankin' was a viciously knowing insult.

The range of paradoxes which Byron and his contemporaries observed in Keats's poetry is ultimately referrable to the fact that it was not given to Keats, a poet in Shelley's 'general sense', to be a poet in the most pedestrian, professional, 'restricted' sense. Keats had to make for himself a life (the training at Guy's; then, getting by on his allowance; finally, when the money ran out, the projected career of ship's surgeon), while writing a poetry that was, structurally, a denial of that life.¹¹ At no time did Keats make any money from his writing. (One wonders how, exactly, Keats applied the title of 'poet' to himself. How did he introduce himself in ordinary social interactions?) The oddly abstract materialism of the poetry—its overinvestment in its signs—takes on a new look when we remember both Keats's remove from his representational manner and means, and also his want of those real things that help people live their lives. Is it any wonder that the poetry produced by this man should be so autotelic, autoerotic, so fetishistic and so stuck? Should it surprise us to find that his dearest fantasy—a picture of somebody reading, a window on the one side, a goldfish bowl on the other—takes the form of a multiply framed, trompe-l'oeil still life? 'Find the subject', we might call it; or, what is the same thing, 'Find the frame'.

Keats's poetry was at once a tactical activity, or an escape route from an actual life, and a final construction: the concrete imaginary to that apparitional actual. What was, initially, a substitute for a grim life became for Keats a substitute life: a real life of substitute things—simulacra—which, though they do not nourish, neither do they waste. At the very end of his career, Keats began, I believe, to position this parodie solution as part of the problem. 'Lamia' is Keats's attempt to frame the problematic of his life and writing and thus to set it aside.

It is crucial to see, as Bayley saw, that the deep desire in Keats's poetry is not for aesthetic things or languages per se (that is, Byron's 'finery'), but for the social code inscribed in them, a code which was, to Keats, a human transformational grammar. Indeed, all Keats's meditations on art and identity (typically, plasticity), should be related to his abiding desire, to live. The real perversion of Keats's poetry is not its display of its cultural fetishes but its preoccupation with the system felt to organize those talismanic properties. Keats could have had all the urns, Psyches, nightingales, Spenserianisms, Miltonisms, Claudes, and Poussins he wanted; he was not, however, permitted possession of the social grammar inscribed in that aesthetic array, and this was just what Keats was after.

We illuminate Keats's legitimacy problem by way of the originality anxiety that seems to have beset most of the Romantic and what used to be called pre-Romantic poets. The past only lies like a weight on the brain of those who inherit it. Or rather, the past imposes a special kind of burden on those individual talents who feel themselves disinherited by the Tradition, and, thus, excluded from the dialectic of old and new, identity and difference. Wordsworth's celebrated defense of his poetical innovations—'every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed'—must be understood as the statement of a man so assured of his entitlement that he can trust his originality to be received as intelligible and valuable. (That Wordsworth's confidence was not always confirmed is not the issue here.) Keats, by contrast, could not begin to invent an original voice without first and throughout establishing his legitimacy: roughly, his derivativeness.

Chatterton, the poet with whom Keats felt the strongest affinities, developed a most economical solution to this problem. By his perfect reproduction of 'the medieval', Chatterton not only established that epochal concept as a normative style, thereby sanctioning his persona, Rowley, and that figure's verse, he produced as well and dialectically, for the knowing reader, the originality of the entire oeuvre (viz. poems, charts, maps, coins). Theoretically, Rowley's canon at once created the taste, which it represented as already venerable and prestigious, and offered itself as the only artifact capable of satisfying it.

Practically speaking, however, Chatterton couldn't begin to fashion the readership he needed. Indeed, the logic of his enterprise compelled him to do all he might to malform—misinform—his audience. The literariness of his poetry was strictly a function of its documentary, antiquarian presentation. The aesthetic dimension of the writing only materialized under the pressure of a fundamentally historical interest, and in that case, of course, the literary credit was Rowley's. Chatterton's successful negotiation of the technical imperatives set him by his social facts required his entire self-effacement, as a man and a writer. A rare intuition of this paradox surfaces in the controversy prompted by the hoax poems. We find considerable puzzlement among Chatterton's detractors, and ingenuity on the part of his defenders, regarding the anomaly of a writer who would seem to have preferred the inferior reputation of translator-editor to the glory of proper poetic genius: that is, originality.¹² To us, of course, Chatterton's perversity indicates how completely over-determined a choice he faced. His election of the lesser fame, scholarly authority, was in fact an embrace of the bad originality of the counterfeiter. In that vexed ideal, we read the situation of the writer whose mastery consists exclusively in his self-violation.

Keats sidestepped Chatterton's final solution. By the self-signifying imperfection of his canonical reproductions (a parodic return upon his own derivativeness), Keats drew upon the licensing primacy of the code even as his representation of that total form changed the nature of its authority. The pronounced badness of Keats's writing figures the mythic goodness of the canon, and, by figuring, at once exalts and delimits it. Thus did Keats plot for himself a scene of writing. By the double unnaturalness of his style, Keats projects the authority of an, anti-nature, stable by virtue of its continuous self-revolutionizing and secured by its contradictions. The proof of these claims is the rest of this book, but let me offer as a critical instance a reading of 'Chapman's Homer'.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I trevelled [travell'd] in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed [brow'd] Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.[:]
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared [star'd] at the Pacific, [—] and all his men
Looked [Look'd] at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I have accented several words in the first three lines by way of amplifying the tone of Keats's address. Even if we were ignorant of Keats's social disadvantages, this fulsome claim to literary ease would give us pause. The very act of assertion, as well as its histrionically commanding and archly literary style, undermine the premise of natural authority and erudition. The contemporary reader might have observed as well some internal contradictions; not only is Homer the Golden Age, but not to 'have' Greek and not to have encountered Homer by the age of twenty-three is to make one's claim to any portion of the literary empire suspect. (Keats's acquaintance with Pope's translation is suppressed by the sonnet.) Keats effectively assumes the role of the literary adventurer (with the commercial nuance of that word) as opposed to the mythic explorer: Odysseus, Cortes, Balboa. More concretely, he advertises his corrupt access to the literary system and to those social institutions which inscribe that system systematically in the hearts and minds of young men. To read Homer in translation and after having read Spenser, Coleridge, Cary, and whoever else is included in Keats's travelogue, is to read Homer badly (in a heterodox and alienated way), and to subvert the system which installs Homer in a particular and originary place. Moreover, to 'look into' Chapman's Homer is to confess—in this case, profess—one's fetishistic relation to the great Original. Keats does not read even the translation. To 'look into' a book is to absorb it idiosyncratically at best, which is to say, with casual or conscious opportunism. Similarly, the substitution of 'breathe' for the expected 'read' in line 7 marks the rejection of a sanctioned mode of literary acquisition. To 'breathe' a text is to take it in, take from it and let it out, somewhat the worse for wear. It is, more critically, to miscategorize the object and in such a way as to proclaim one's intimacy with it. Both the claim and the title of Keats's sonnet are, in a word, vulgar.

One is reminded of Valéry's appraisal of museum pleasure: 'For anyone who is close to works of art, they are no more objects of delight than his own breathing'.¹³ Keats, we observe, rejoices in his respiration and goes so far as to fetishize the very air he admits. I single out the phrase 'pure serene' not only because it is structurally foregrounded but because it reproduces in miniature the method—the working contradiction—of the sonnet. What Keats 'breathes' is, ofcourse, anything but pure and Homeric (since he reads in translation and perversely with respect to canon protocol), and the phrase formally exposes that fact. We cannot help but see that 'pure serene', a primary reification, further calls attention to itself as a fine phrase, that Keats clearly looks upon as a lover. Not only is the phrase a Miltonic construction, but more recent usage would have characterized it as a sort of translator-ese. One thinks of Pope's 'vast profound' and indeed, of Cary's own 'pure serene', a description of Dante's ether (1814). Coleridge uses the phrase in his 'Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni', 1802. Keats's reproduction of the phrase designates both his access to the literary system and his mode of access—that of translator to Original. In effect, he intentionalizes the alienation he suffers by his social deficits. By signifying the restriction, he converts it into restraint: 'might half-slumbering on its own right arm'. Let me note here that the translation of an adjective into a noun, while etymologically justifiable, transforms Homer's pure and therefore insensible atmosphere—his aura—into a palpable particular: a detached literary style and a self-reflexive one at that. What figures in Homer as a natural and epochal expressiveness is in Keats, and first, a represented object. Only by performing that office does the Homeric value assume for Keats an expressive function.

The thing to remark is the way Keats produces the virtues of his alienated access to the canon. The consummate image of the poem—that which accounts for its overall effect of 'energetic … calmness'—is, obviously, that of Cortes / Balboa 'star[ing] at the Pacific' while 'all his men / Looked [Look'd] at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien'. Cortes, we notice, is a 'stout' and staring fellow: a solid citizen. 'Stout' means, of course, 'stouthearted', but in the context, where Cortes's direct stare at the object of his desire is juxtaposed against the 'surmise' of his men (and the alliteration reinforces these visual connections), one feels the energy of the men and the stuck or frozen state of their leader. By their surmise—a liminal, semi-detached state—the men are 'wild', a word which in the Romantic idiom means 'free'. We clearly see that the relation of the men to that (etymologically) literal 'pure serene', the Pacific, is indirect and perverse. Who in that situation would avert his gaze?

Claude Finney has reminded us that according to Keats's sources, Balboa's men were forbidden the prospect until their leader had had his full gaze.¹⁴ We can see that the social discrepancy vividly sketched by Keats's original gets translated in the sonnet into an existential and selfimposed difference, and one that inverts the given power ratio by rendering the men, not the master, free and vital. One does not, I think, go too far in associating Keats with those capably disenfranchised men.

It is the stillness and strangeness of the men—their peculiar durée—which stations Keats's sonnet, all the gregarious exploration metaphors notwithstanding. Homer enters the poem as the Pacific enters the sensibilities of Cortes's men: through Chapman's / Cortes's more direct possession of / by the object of desire. Odysseus's extrovert energy animates Keats's sonnet but, again, perversely. In the Keatsian space, that energy turns self-reflexive, reminding us perhaps of Tennyson's 'Ulysses'. The poem looks at itself as the men look at each other. The virtue of both looks is their impropriety; what they refuse by that gesture is the Gorgon stare, the direct embrace of and by the authorizing Original. Keats's poem 'speak[s] out loud and bold' by not speaking 'out' at all. We finish the sonnet, which seems to be predicated on such a simple donnée, and we wonder where we have travelled. What happened to Homer, and to Keats for that matter? Why does Keats interpose between himself and his ostensible subject Chapman, Cary, Coleridge, Gilbert, Robertson, Herschel, Balboa, Cortes, and Cortes's men? Why does Keats leave us with this off-center cameo, an image of turbulent stasis among the extras of the cast when what we expect is a 'yonder lie the Azores' flourish by the principal? What is this poem? By the conventions it sets, it should strike us as a graceful display of literary inspiration and gratitude. But it seems other, and otherwise. How do we explain the real power of its slant rhyme?

Let me recall Hunt's comment on the sonnet: 'prematurely masculine'. By emphasizing the adverb for a change, we begin to see that Keats's unnatural (illicit) assumption of power, signified by the 'poetical' octet, does not qualify the 'masculinity' of the sestet, it constitutes it. The direct and natural compression of the sestet is the stylistic effect of the displayed disentitlement that is the functional representation of the opening eight lines. The pivot which constructs this before-and-after dynamic (the coordinates for a range of ratios: imitation-genuine, protest-power, struggle-ease) is, of course, the experience of reading Chapman. The experience takes place, significantly, in the breach between the two movements of the sonnet. Rather than imitate Chapman, Keats reproduces Chapman's necessarily parodie (that is, Elizabethan) inscription of Homer. The queerness of Chapman's 'mighty line, loud-and-bold' version is rewritten in Keats's own parodic Elizabethanism, and, through the queerness of the Cortes / Balboa image. It is the self-reflexive, fetishistic inscription of the canon—the display of bad access and misappropriation—that emancipates Keats's words. Keats's sonnet breaks free of Homer and Chapman by mis-giving both. By the English he puts on Homer's serenity (he reifies it) and on Chapman's 'masculine' extrovert energy, Keats produces the perpetual imminence which is the hero of his sonnet. In the Keatsian idiom, we could call that imminence or suspension a 'stationing', with an ear for the full social resonance of Keats's aesthetic word.¹⁵

The instance of this poem would suggest that Keats's relation to the Tradition is better conceived as dialogic (Bakhtin) than dialectic (Bloom).¹⁶ The poetry does not clear a space for itself by a phallic agon; it opens itself to the Tradition, defining itself as a theater wherein such contests may be eternally and inconclusively staged.¹⁷ The authority of this poetry consists in its detachment from the styles or voices it entertains. By this detachment, these styles become signatures: not audible voices but visible, material signs of canonical voices. These signs—like all such marks, inauthentic and incomplete—are not, ultimately, mastered by the master-of-ceremonies. And because they remain external to authorial consciousness, theirs is the empowering virtue of the supplement. In these magic supplements, 'Things semi-real', lies the terrific charm of Keats's poetry.

The contained badness of 'Chapman's Homer' constitutes its goodness, which is to say, its rhetorical force. The paradox hinges, naturally, on the word 'contained'. When Keats is great, it is because he signifies his alienation from his materia poetica, a fact that modern criticism and textual studies have suppressed.¹⁸ This alienation—inevitable, given Keats's education, class, and opportunities—was highly expedient. By it, Keats could possess the 'stuff of creativity' without becoming possessed by it. By 'stuff', I do not mean Bloom's primary, inspirational matter but the means and techne for exercises in literary production. Keats's poetry, inspired by translations, engravings, reproductions, schoolroom mythologies, and Tassie's gems, delivers itself through these double and triple reproductions as the 'true, the blushful Hippocrene'. That phrase describes ironically, precisely a substitute truth. Again, Byron understood these things; 'You know my opinion of that second-hand school of poetry.'

Discussion

The early commentary has more to teach us. Byron's vivid epithets—'a Bedlam vision', a 'sad abortive attempt at all things, "signifying nothing" '—suggest that the masturbation trope was a most economical way of designating the poetry nonsense: not bad Literature but nonLiterature. In practical terms, it would seem that the association of Keats's poetry with masturbation was a way to isolate Keats without agonizing him.

We make sense of this tactic in two ways. First, the commonplace alignment of masturbation with madness suggests that whereas homosexuality was part of the normative heterosexual configuration—either a standard deviation or binary Other—masturbation was outside the curve: the age's 1/0, 'signifying nothing'.¹⁹ This speculation is consistent with the class affronts (revelations of practical and ideological projects) leveled by Keats's poetry and explored below. Second, while 'nonsense' attacks always suppress unwanted sense, this particular noncognition additionally implies a response to the subjective irreality of Keats's self-reflexive poetry. 'Frigging [one's] Imagination' is one thing; frigging an imagination tenanted by other minds is another and a double-perversity. ('Frig' means 'to chafe or rub', 'to agitate the limbs' [OED], and most commonly, of course, to copulate. The 'Imagination ' to which Byron refers is, thus, a male and female property; or, Keats was accused of masturbating / fucking a Nothing.) Byron's contempt for Keats's fetishistic relation to his acquired literary languages—borrowed 'finery'—masks a fearful insight into the subjective vacancy of Keats's writing. The 'Bedlam' association registers Keats's want of a proprietary subject-form: a voice distinct from the entertained canonical echoes and offering itself as a point, however 'bad', of readerly identification and authorial control. In Keats's poetry, the diverse cultural languages which we call the Tradition are both the means and the manner of representation, both object and subject. The 'self' upon which the verse reflects is, precisely, 'notself': a fetishized, random collection of canonical signatures. One can see that this bad imitation of that earnest Romantic exercise, self-reflection, was, in effect, a burlesque. Keats's operations objectified the naturalness (originality, autonomy, and candor) of all writerly origins, putting those transparencies at risk. Even Byron, that determinedly mad bad man, was threatened; Byronic irony, no matter how inclusive, is always recuperated by the biographical subject-form coded in all the poems. Keats's poetry is differently, but no more masturbatory than Wordsworth's or Byron's, the largest, most virile poets of the age. We could say that Keats offended his generation so deeply by practicing one of its dominant modes of literary production while showing his hand. The sexual slander developed in the reviews registers Keats's relation to the Tradition, understood as a limited-access code with powerful social functions, and the class contradictions which that relation stylistically defined. At the same time, the critique displaces those contradictions to the sphere of private life and pathology: a safety zone. Thus was a serious, or materially designing sensuousness converted into a grave sensual disease.

A juxtaposition of two professional responses to Keats's poetry gives us a practical purchase on the meaning of Keats's style. Wordsworth and Byron agreed on very little; their consensus on Keats argues their glimpse of that in his poetry which challenged a common interest or which exposed a contradiction at the center of both their very different practices.

Wordsworth's brisk dismissal of Keats's 'Hymn to Pan'—'a Very pretty piece of Paganism'—concisely maps the manifold of impressions I've been describing. By 'pretty', with its resonance to 'fancy' (Imagination's weak sister), and its evocation of the ingenious, the trivial, the overcultivated and infantile, Wordsworth suggests both the mechanical elegance of Keats's writing and its servility to an imperfectly discriminating appetite. The adjective describes a taste at once immature and effete, under- and overrefined, and in both cases unhealthy: an appetite for 'dainties' or for 'luxuries', baby-food or caviar.²⁰ Wordsworth's disgust is the revulsion of a plain-eating, water-drinking man for a connoisseur of pulpy strawberries and claret. It is the contempt of a man who transcends class—an essential man addressing his peers in a language as limpid and restorative as mountain streams—for a man to whom class is a fetish, and whose language, impure and overcharged, must spoil the taste and the constitution of his readers. Putting the critique on the side of production, and with an ear to that 'Paganism', we might describe Wordsworth's Keats as a purveyor of substitute pleasures: real signs that provide lacks and differences.

Wordsworth's 'piece', while it describes, of course, the formal self-containment of the Hymn within Endymion, also marks out the thingness, partiality, and externality of Keats's attempt at an archetypal discourse of presence.²¹ The word suggests the essentially extraneous character of Keats's writing, if we can allow that solecism for a moment. Wordsworth is out to imply the sheer factitiousness of the verse, an interested representation of what is already for Keats a received idea or, following Wordsworth, a 'poeticism': 'the Pagan'. Wordsworth's 'ism' is his way of naming this double fetish. The singsong alliteration of the phrase, an imitative tactic, contrastively conjures the austere, holistic, deeply qualitative hedonism which is Wordsworth's Pagan: 'the pleasure which there is in life itself. The conceptual resonance amplifies the ontological logical corruptness of Keats's partial, purposive, and mechanical self-pleasuring. In a phrase (Wordsworth's), Keats's is a poetry of 'Outrageous stimulation'; we might say, the pleasure of the ornament.

By the memorable epithets Byron coined for Keats and his poetry ('a sort of mental masturbation—frigging his Imagination', 'Johnny Keats's piss a bed poetry', 'the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin', 'dirty little blackguard Keates', 'Self-polluter of the human mind'), Byron crystallized the sexual associations diffused throughout the more modulated responses. A more interesting phrase, however, is Byron's 'shabby genteel', quoted above, an expression which seems to emerge from a different perceptual field. In context, the phrase identifies Keats's vulgarity less with his motives (cheap thrills; supplemental delights), than with his methods. Specifically, Byron censures Keats's display of his literary entitlement. 'It is in their finery that the new under school are most vulgar … I speak of writing, not of persons'. Byron's 'finery', like Wordsworth's 'Paganism', designates those elements in the poetry which are perceptible as styles ('ery', 'ism'), because imperfectly appropriated, heaped heterogeneously together, and reflected on by an 'author' who is but the alter ego to those styles. 'I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision … ' By his three-way equation, linking self-reflection, masturbation, and middle class acquisition and display, Byron clarifies the broad social offensiveness of Keats's poetry. As Byron well knew, a good deal of his own poetry and that of his contemporaries solicits its own ideas into a state. Byron had, of course, his quarrel with those serious self-reflectors, the Lakers, and his attack on Keats is no doubt part of that quarrel. But, Keats was a figure from the 'Mediterranean' side of the great North-South, serious-sensuous divide: Byron's side, that is. It would seem that Keats owes his rare achievement—at once Byron's and Wordsworth's whipping boy—to the manifest subject disorders of his discourse.²²

Byron is repelled by Keats's psychic fane first, because it is filled with false things: not human qualities or even authorial properties, but props, or material signs of literary reality. Worse, everything acquired by the Keatsian consciousness, no matter how 'good' originally, gets falsified within that precinct. Fine becomes 'finery', cultivation becomes Culture, whole and living speech is rendered a quotation, and everything is as an artifact in an overwrought cabinet: framed, spotlighted, exhibited as possessions that are also signs of possession.²³ Keats's 'solicitation' of his ideas was manifest because practiced on false-consciousness, and 'vicious' because tending to falsify (that is, reify) some privileged forms of consciousness. Keats's canonical 'abstractions' (the word recurs obsessively in the reviews) effectively exposed the canon as a construct, as authoritarian, and as subject to violation. This is to say, Keats's scavenging replaced the authority of Authority, a natural and internal quality, with that of a more literal, original author-ity: with the figure of the literary entrepreneur. No poetic style could have been more abhorrent to the respectively private and public transparencies of Wordsworth and Byron, or rather, to the class subject-forms projected by those good manners. Returning to Byron's 'nonsense' verdict: when self-reflection is projected as reflection on other poets' selves, when 'frigging [one's] Imagination' describes a dalliance with other men's surmises, when a signally autotelic poetry exposes the real interests served by its display of disinterest, and an autoerotic verse betrays the busyness—and business—of a working brain, then accusations of 'nonsense' make perfect sense.

Keats's strangely alienated reflexiveness carried, I believe, an even stronger social charge than the one I've just identified. We get at this meaning by setting Keats's methods against the Wordsworthian model, which we read as an exemplary Romantic form, and by glossing that comparison with another of Byron's colorful commentaries. The governing antinomy here is not legitimacy / originality but pleasure / work.

Wordsworth's poetry, like so much of Keats's, typically represents its coming into being as its reason for being, and also its chief delight. What distinguishes the Wordsworthian from the Keatsian method are its defenses against a mechanically divisive—analytic, one might say—reception. The devices of Wordsworth's poetry fend off a reading which would dissociate the verbal means from authorial and rhetorical ends, and, thus, set 'poet' against both 'human being' and reader, writing against speaking and reading. Wordsworth discourages this kind of attention first, by figuring the poem's formal materialization as a generically idealized human process: a development independent of authorial design and direction. Wordsworth's narrators loudly proclaim their passivity; and, their unself-consciousness invites us to identify narrator with poet. By these techniques, the work's semiotic center of gravity gets displaced to the reader, a postulated activity center. The narrator's encounter with an object, memory, or event is the condition of a narration which claims to be nothing but a self-accounting, offered to the reader as a humanizing opportunity. 'It is no tale; but, should you think, / Perhaps a tale you'll make it' ('Simon Lee'). One is meant to translate this disclaimer as follows: this is a tale, a tale of telling, but like all discourse, it is also a contract, a 'Thing semi-real'. To actualize the form, the reader must take it 'kindly', or according to the usage of essential humankind. Any suggestion of distinct and divisive purposiveness—'particular', interested, or class-specific self-consciousness—is neutralized by the textual gesture toward, if not a communicative, then a shared existential and social circuit. Wordsworth's pleasure becomes our delight when we cast off our minute particulars and make ourselves him; thus, of course, do we also discover the essential being within our historical being.

The framing devices of Keats's poetry do not, like Wordsworth's preemptive techniques, usher us into the poem, they frame us out. Think of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. The final, bracketed epigram—formally, a parody of Wordsworth's closing, intersubjective immediacies—puts the entire poem and all its apparently human and authorial anguish in aesthetic space: museum space, to be precise. The triumph of this ode is its transformation of poetry into scripture, sound into silence, relief (the Truth of fantasy) into Relief (an art of surfaces: Beauty). 'End-stopped feel' is as good a phrase as any to describe the alienating closure of Keats's poetry.²⁴

Moreover, Keats's poems tend rather to distinguish than to identify narrator (or lyric 'I') and writer. Rarely do we hear his verse as the utterance of an unmediated human voice. Even in so magical, so historically sincere a poem as 'La Belle Dame', one must remember than an anonymous working brain is continuously engendering and overhearing the reciprocally exclusive languages of the balladeer and 'knight-at-arms', low and high languages that can only engage within the artificial space of a sentimental ballad.²⁵ Keats, like Wordsworth, teases us out of thought by making his method of representation his representational object in the sense of 'purpose'. The difference is that by fetishizing this purpose, Keats makes of it an 'object' in the material sense and a 'subject' in the philosophic sense. With these transformations, self-reflexiveness crystallizes as a mode of production with determinate social meanings and purposes, some of them having no immediacy for the reader, others possessed of the most threatening and, thus, rejected immediacy. Keats's double alienation, from the textual interior and from his audience, outlines the contradictions which make the work, contradictions invisibilized by subject-related writing and object-related sex. Keats's pleasure stands revealed as his work.

Again, consider the phenomenology of the Wordsworthian narration. The poet effortlessly reaps his memory of its rich and naturally integrated meanings. Indeed, by emphasizing both the strain of those lives which are often the originals of his mnemonic experience and the wise unconsciousness which fashions the inner verse, and, by arousing his readers to the challenge of their high and arduous calling, Wordsworth underscores the pure pleasure which is the poet's special gift: his character, even. The poet

is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul … a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goingson of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802)

By contrast, Keats's careful inventories of his overdecorated psychic interiors are at once pointless and busy, giving us something very like an inversion or parody of Wordsworth's wise passiveness. Keats's authorial exercise seems unrelated to the reader's imagined enjoyment, and to any of the more familiar forms of expressive gratification. The early readers, who recognized in Keats's ease a display of ease, experienced the verse as entirely dis-eased. Again, it is Byron who clarifies the social offensiveness of the Keatsian difference.

Here is the strange little fable Byron produced for the purpose of characterizing Keats's poetry.

The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are: why, his is the Onanism of Poetry—something like the pleasure an Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street Walker in Drury Lane. This went on for some weeks: at last the Girl went to get a pint of Gin—met another, chatted too long, and Cornelli was hanged outright before she returned. Such like is the trash they praise, and such will be the end of the outstretched poesy of this miserable Self-polluter of the human mind. (Extract from letter to John Murray, 4 November 1820)

We recall that during the Regency, as before, 'Jack Ketch' was an appellation for the common hangman, and, that the name and character were strongly associated with the puppet-play of Punchinello (OED). With this double-dangling as his starting point, Byron goes on to explore, as it were, the social and sexual nuances of the resonance attaching to Keats's name. The fiction he unfolds describes a particularly laborious form of masturbation, le coup de corde, a trick that requires the technical assistance, here, of a prostitute. The 'Italian fiddler's' busy contrivance is emphasized by his partner's fecklessness, and the comedy of the story (literally, a 'hoist by one's own petard' narrative) involves the exposure of a work-pleasure ratio where we least expect to find it, at the center of an autoerotic activity. (The joke is perhaps more pointed yet; Byron involves a distinctly lower-class character in a perversion associated with aristocratic refinement, ennui, and unself-consciousness—dare we say, hauteur. Presumably, one's valet would not leave one hanging. Byron's aspiring fiddler is punished for his violation of social, not sexual proprieties.) Byron's 'outstretched', a comment on the ambitiousness, elaboration and sexual tension of Keats's poetry, says it all. So does this extract from an 1820 review appearing in the London Magazine and Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review: 'he says nothing like other men, and appears always on the stretch for words to shew his thoughts are of a different texture from all other writers.' The reviewer recommends to the clever but overwrought lad, suffering from a sort of literary priapism, some country air, a change of diet, and an introduction to 'the retreat at York', a private madhouse.

What Byron is driving at is the contradiction which organizes both masturbation and the reproductive habits of the middle class. Below, I propose that the dream or the concept of masturbation is one of conscious unconsciousness: 'the feel of not to feel it', or, as in the Nightingale Ode, sensible numbness. (Here again, we detect a debased because reified version of that Wordsworthian paradigm, 'wise passiveness'.) Inasmuch as one is both worker and pleasurer, giver and receiver, subject and object in masturbation, the act should produce a rare psychic consolidation. However, both the technical groundplot (a part of the body is fetishized and overworked), and the absence of a distracting other to absorb the purposiveness of the activity and naturalize the techne, install with unusual force the divided psyche, which must know itself busy for luxury.

No one cared, of course, about Keats's exposure of the contradiction which informs masturbation. What did concern Wordsworth and Byron was the poetry's exposure of the relation between 'working brain' and the 'spontaneous overflow' or 'rattling on exactly as I talk' of Romantic poetry: that is, Keats's demystification of a prestigious idea of literary production. In the case of Wordsworth, we might call this method 'natural selection': a darkling deliberation effected by memory and emerging as a spontaneous, strictly processual value. Byron's worldliness, the counterpart to Wordsworth's naturalism, establishes authorial purpose within a psyche so profoundly socialized (so inherited, one might say), and accomplishes those purposes through audience reciprocities so exact, that calculation has no place to surface. Both protocols are commonplaces of Romantic criticism. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that while these myths of production negate what the poets conceived as the age's dominant material productive mode, the mechanical, they also rehearse a mode of social and ideological production.

In order to constitute its structural betweenness (a neither-nor, 'Nothing' state), an 'existence', the middle class had to expose the historicity of value, clearing the ground as it were for its own violation of inherited and naturalized values. At the same time, and so as to sanction this originality and safeguard its middling position, threatened on the lower front by imitation, and the upper by assimilation, the class in the middle had to represent its own, invented values as either ahistorical or as history's telos. The trick was to look valuably and essentially ambitious—history's coming class—and also eternal: a class dreamed by Adam, who awoke and found it real. One logical solution to this stylistic problem (we will see it in Keats) was the phenomenology of the nunc stans, or the look of an eternally coming class, in motion/in place forever. The display of ease, a contradiction in terms, was another device for converting nothingness into prolific tension. By its self-identification as a profitably consuming class, the bourgeoisie imitated the ontologically productive condition of the aristocracy. At the same time, the rhetorical orientation of this mimesis, as well as its fetishism (the effect of its semiotic interests), marked it as an ambitious gesture: literally, as wanting. The power of this mark, a negative originality, was, of course, its determined negativity. A class that is self-violating makes itself inviolable. That which has no center cannot be seized; what has no character cannot be defamed, and what is always and by definition moving is not easily removed.

I am describing a 'bad' solution to an ideological bind: on the one hand, the middle-class commitment to a program of social mobility (Keats's 'camelion poet': an ethic of becoming, or, less Romantically, a work ethic), and on the other, its longing for the authority connected with the generative passivity, stable identity, and 'quiet being' which was an influential fantasy of the leisure class. Keats, we shall see, motivates the contradiction in the style of the middle class but, because this was not 'naturally' his solution, and because it was, for him, greatly polyvalent, that style gets reified. Keats works at his pleasure and stations himself by that oxymoron. Wordworth, as we saw, tends to suppress that conflictual figure which is no less the agency of his art than of Keats's. Wordsworth's genius is to operate a kind of double-standard. Even as he identifies poet (for him, speaker) with reader-listener as both essential men, he splits apart production and consumption into respectively passive and active moments. The poet easily overflows with his own pre(consciously) meditated verse. The reader, however, is forbidden the spontaneous, inward delight which is the poet's prerequisite and prerogative. Indeed, the reader cannot emulate that noble ease without degrading it and himself, becoming but a seeker after 'the pleasure of Frontiniac or sherry'. Wordsworth's readers are instructed to work at their meanings, to 'find' tales in the things which the poet effortlessly makes available to them. By contrast, Keats's ambitiously masturbatory poetry correctly positions the work-pleasure contradiction in the act of production. Is it any wonder that Byron, a poet who reaped such profits by producing himself as an aristocrat for the delectation of the middle class, and Wordsworth, who did well enough by his 'habits of meditation', should have been so shaken by Keats?

To explore the virtues of Keats's bad stylistic solution, we move to a more abstract register. Oddly enough, this is the way we proceed to the most concrete textual place. Christopher Ricks's interest in the Keatsian pathology makes an excellent guide.

Ricks's Keats is a poet who abolishes his own and his readers' self-consciousness by a poetics of conscious discomfiture. Through its aurally and visually embarrassing representations, Keats's poetry induces in its readers a painful, but, since this is art, a contained self-consciousness. By entertaining what is, in its natural form, a consuming state of mind, the reader learns to surpass rather than suppress his embarrassment. This is what Ricks means by his accolade, taken from Keats: 'unmisgiving'. Keats constructs a canon so psychically capacious that it accommodates even self-consciousness, which it thereby deconstructs. To use the idiom of the theory from which Ricks's argument implicitly derives, the acting-out is also a working-through for both the poet and his reader.

By setting Ricks's psychological construct in social space, we find within his own argument the shadow of an answer to the question we have raised. Why did Keats's early readers find the poetry so precisely misgiving: solipsistic, fraudulent, falsifying, and perverse? Ricks studies Keats as a 'blushing' poet: a poet of adolescence and its special self-consciousness. We are reminded that blushing and genital engorgement, as by masturbation, are only nominally distinct processes. By reference to the social meanings we've teased from the early response to Keats's style, we associate one sort of self-consciousness (adolescent, sexual) with another: middle-class, social. Or, just as self-consciousness is the salient symptom of adolescence (signified by the blush and at once a cause and effect of masturbation), so does it signify the complex identity problems of a middle class in a middling stage, securing itself and its anxiety by its fetishistic possessive style. I'm suggesting that we draw an analogy between the marginal, insecure, or immature bourgeoisie of Keats's day and the modern state of adolescence. Both those middle classes are defined by memory (the longing for a child-hood, working-class, 'gemein', or 'primitive' unselfconsciousness: for example, Wordsworthian authenticity), and desire (a state beyond self-consciousness: Byron's adult, aristocratic coolness). Both, moreover, are constituted by that contradiction. In the accomplished bourgeois poet, this self-division translates into a 'high', philosophic self-consciousness, which is, we have seen, a good solution to two such identity problems (legitimacy / originality, pleasure / work). In Byron, the self-consciousness is also 'high', not in an intellectual sense but in a social register, where it signifies the political mastery that comes of self-possession. By the analogy, the 'low' self-consciousness of Keats's poetry—something like the awkwardness we feel in social situations—cannot be read as only the luckless effect of his ambitiousness, or as a reflection of ideal psychic processes. We must also construe this effect, the rhetorical form of a contradiction, as part of a project in its own right. Thus did Keats go about the business of making himself into that nonsense thing, the middle class.

Keats's poetry blushes more radically and purposively than Ricks suggests. It blushes at the level of style. This is a discourse which 'feeds upon' but does not assimilate its sources. It engorges—a transitive operation—in such a way as to make itself permanently, gesturally, intransitively engorged: 'stationed', in Keats's phrase. Keats's discursive procedures rehearse that protocol whereby the middle class of his day produced itself as a kind of collective, throbbing oxymoron: achieved by its ambitiousness, hardworking in its hedonism, a 'being' that defined itself strictly by its properties, or ways of having. In the style of Keats's poetry, we read the dream of masturbation: the fantasy of 'the perpetual cockstand', that solution to castration anxiety.²⁶ In both the dream and the anxiety, we, like Byron, discern the genetic code of the middle class.

Derrida has taught us that the supplemental or additive character of masturbation is also its substitutive character.²⁷ Derrida's word, 'le supplément', describes that which adds its own difference and subtractiveness: masturbation, writing. Derrida's fabulously suggestive concept is more deeply antinomial than I've made it sound. I naturalize the idea slightly with an eye toward summarizing the practical charm of the supplement for Keats. In the readings to come, we shall recover the more irrational, more precisely functional dimension of Keats's substitutions.

Masturbation may be conceived as a fantasy of pleasure without the death of perfect gratification: or, meaning / value without the loss of reflexive consciousness or the object. The fantasized masturbatory experience is one of energy and luxury; giving and receiving; high (cerebral) and low (genital); infinite metamorphosis contemplated by a center of consciousness keen to enjoy that lability. Ideally, or in imagination, masturbation establishes a psychic wholeness which knows itself to be dialectically contingent. Thus is it also vitally, capably incomplete.²⁸ The defensive virtue of masturbation, understood as a fantasy of (in place of / in addition to) proper sex, is its protection against the drive which, correctly enacted, must obliterate the consciousness which would own that pure pleasure, that death. 'Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain … Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/ To thy high requiem become a sod.' Masturbation—the part for / in addition to the whole, the fantasy for / plus the actual, the oblique for / with the direct, the sign for / alongside the thing—is a holding action: a way of holding on to a holding off. The formula could be recast in temporal terms. Masturbation, that unnaturally hasty act, dreams of a 'slow time': a duration which neither wastes nor realizes, at once history's negation and its fulfillment. 'Deathwards progressing / To no death was that visage'. (Or, for a categorical association, 'purposiveness without purpose', Kant's definition of aesthetic experience.) Many of our fondest moments in Keats's poetry describe this condition: 'Their lips touched [touch'd] not, but had not bade adieu.' (The very time signature of 'To Autumn' is a code for this kind of durée; it is also the subject and object of this undying poem.) Many describe a fantasy wherein the sign (let us say, the Tradition: an empowering reproductive apparatus), and the thing (John Keats, an author-original) are simultaneous but distinct: a métonymie dream, or a fantasy of being, put under erasure by having and, thus, violated, idealized, effectuated, and possessed. Another way to frame this fantasy is as an instant(iation) wherein Beauty (the sign of legitimacy: the signifying possession) and Truth (the natural, unspeaking attribute) do not antithesize or succeed one another, neither do they coalesce. They exist, rather, side by side: parallel, mutually delimiting total systems, value and 'existences', Symbolic and Imaginary zones. In class terms, a logical category, all these couplings describe a conjunction of having, a function of distance, difference, and loss, and being, the form of presence, identity, and plenitude. In class terms, a social category, this conjunction describes a proprietary style and function. Nowhere is this coincidence so clearly and economically expressed as in Keats's typically ambiguous 'of locutions, where the preposition is used both partitively (or genitively), and descriptively (for example, 'bride of quietness': belonging to quietness [having], and characterized by quietness [being]).

I have been describing a masturbation fantasy: the concept shadowed forth by Keats's strong practice. The special offensiveness of Keats's very early writing arises from its incomplete perverseness: its failure, thus, to realize that concept. (Byron's qualification, I don't mean he is indecent …', should be taken as part of the criticism; regarding the sexuality of Keats's writing, more would have been less.) The early poetry is bad in the commonplace colloquial sense: accidentally or passively imperfect. What vitiates it is the innocence of its self-consciousness, the intimacy of wish and word.

The poetry we call great is that which signifies—indeed, fetishizes—its alienation from its representational objects and subjects, and, thus, from its audience. This poetry is a discourse whose self-possession is a function of its profound structural dispossession; its pleasure is its knowledge of a 'wished away' / unavailable workaday world. 'Pleasant pain', 'a drowsy numbness pains / My sense', 'ditties of no tone', 'unheard' melodies. Each of these phrases, fetishized negations, captures the (il)logic of Keats's masturbatory exercise and of its social objective: a state of being at once 'first, and last, and midst, and without end'—a fair definition, that, of a state of nullity.

Finally, 'Lamia' evinces a badness that indicates a new scene of writing. Keats's bold plot in this last romance is to analyze materially and conceptually his own mode of literary production. The romance undoes itself even as it unfolds, and there is no interest in recuperating this deconstruction at another level. Neither are the contradictions motivated in the manner of the canonically central romances. 'Lamia' is the closest thing we have in the Romantic repertoire to a scientific poem.

To grasp these bad varieties, we must appreciate both the binding nature of Keats's social circumstances and the special opportunities he found in those binds. Even as we say this, we should remember what life, as opposed to proverbs, likes to teach us: that 'opportunities' are always part of the factual web, not breaks in that binding fabric. The virtues we make of necessity were there all the time, waiting to be released. Our virtuous inventions are necessity's best friend.

Notes

¹ Alan Bewell's essay 'The Political Implication of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics' (Studies in Romanticism, 25, Summer 1986, pp. 220-9) represents the beginning of a departure from the critical norm for Keats studies. Bewell's sensitivity to the special political discourse of the writer situated by the polis on its underside or between its categorical positions, intimates a criticism beyond the margins of formalist, thematic, biographical, and metaphysical inquiry as these have developed in Romanticist scholarship over the past thirty years, and also, beyond the 'new historicism'. This last observation is part of an argument about the new historicism in Romantic studies (see Levinson, 'The New Historicism: What's in a Name', in Critical Readings of Romantic History: Four Literary Essays, ed. Levinson, forthcoming Blackwell's, 1988).

² Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963); John Bayley, 'Keats and Reality', Proceedings of the British Academy, 1962, pp. 91-125; Douglas Bush, John Keats (New York: 1966); David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959); Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Lionel Trilling, 'The Fate of Pleasure' in Beyond Culture (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1955); Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983); Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1953).

³ John Bayley shrewdly divines that Keats's badness is his goodness. Had Bayley pushed his aperçu a little further, he would have come up against the meanings shadowed forth by the contemporary criticism. He would, perhaps, have associated the vulgarity of Keats's poetry with the situation, activities, and interests of the burgeoning middle class. As it is, Bayley's interpretative construct neatly registers this association by negation. 'Das Gemeine'—a postulate of healthy, earthy, Elizabethan (that is, sociologically and psychically nonstratified) consciousness—is the mirror image of the nineteenth-century Keats, or of a poetry experienced as sick, pretentious, horribly contemporary, and thoroughly mannered. To the early readers, Keats's poetry was the expression of a 'folk' degraded by a bad eminence: the petty bourgeoisie.

⁴ All excerpts from contemporary notices are drawn from Donald Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), C, I, 91-3; C, I, 95; C, I, 330-3; C, I, 339; C, I, 344-5; C, I, 385; C, I, 423-4; C, II, 470; C, II, 479; C, II, 531; C, II, 587-90; C, II, 614; C, II, 768-9; C, II, 807-8; C, II, 824-5; C, II, 829-30; and from G. M. Matthews, éd., Keats, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 35, 129-31, 150, 208-10, 248, 251. Censored Byron material checked against Leslie Marchand, Byron's Letters and Journals, vol. 7, 1820 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977), p. 217 (from letter to John Murray, 4 November 1820; Matthews lists it as 4 September).

⁵ The association of masturbation with the individualism and materialism of the early middle class is something of an established literary theme. Swift's Master Bates, the physician to whom Gulliver is apprenticed, teaches his student more than a middle-class trade, he teaches him the principles of acquisition and display (in Gulliver's case, anthropological), which constitute the middle class an ideological phenomenon over and above its economic being.

⁶ The much-quoted phrase 'poignantly allegorical life' is Bate's allusion to Keats's own observation that Shakespeare led 'a life of Allegory' (Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970; 1979, p. 218).

⁷ 'Unmisgiving' is Ricks's class term, taken from Keats, for the social, psychic, and rhetorical generosity of the poetry.

⁸ Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961; 1984), p. vii. In the course of my current research, I've discovered two books, both marvels of textual and theoretical exposition, that coincide closely with my reading of Keats's strategic defenses against, as well as his longing for, social and canonical majority. I refer to Louis Renza's 'A White Heron' and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison, Wise.: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 11-19; and David Lloyd's Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 19-26. I thank Renza for refreshing my memory of Leslie Brisman's Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978): specifically, Brisman's derivation of George Darley's originality from his 'posture of weakness'.

⁹ Aileen Ward, John Keats, the Making of a Poet (New York: Viking, 1963); W. J. Bate, John Keats, R. Gittings, John Keats (London: Heinemann, 1968). All source information from Claude Finney, The Evolution of Keats' Poetry, 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963); George Ridley, Keats's Craftsmanship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Miriam Allott, The Poems of John Keats (London and New York: Longman and Norton, 1970; 1972).

¹⁰ See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 164-72. See also Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), on the worker's negative privilege: the lack of that leisure needed to 'intuit [the outside world] in the middle-class sense'. By the adjective 'middle-class' Jameson means the static and contemplative immediacy required by industrial capitalism's productive structures and relations.

¹¹ Apropos Keats's medical training, see n. 22, ch. 6.

¹² Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 41-3, 239-40.

¹³ Quoted in Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Weber and Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967; 1983). The essay from which that quotation derives, 'Valery Proust Museum', deeply informs my discussion.

¹⁴ Finney, The Evolution of Keats' Poetry, vol. 1, p. 126: 'When, with infinite toil, they had climbed up the greater part of that steep ascent, Balboa commanded his men to halt, and advanced alone to the summit, that he might be the first who should enjoy a spectacle which he had so long desired'. From Robertson's History of America.

¹⁵ In his notes on Milton, Keats comments on 'what may be called his stationing or statuary. He is not content with simple description, he must station … ', quoted in Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art, p. 142.

¹⁶ To the extent that the inner voices in Keats's poetry tend to be maintained as signs, and also as signs of otherness, the 'we' experience central to Vološinov's dialogic analysis is missing. Keats's dialogism conforms more to the Bakhtinian model.

¹⁷ Allusions to the indeterminacy of Keats's gender (for example, 'Mankin', 'effeminate', 'boyish') should be taken as responses to Keats's mode of literary production or to the androgyny thereby implied. Keats's discourse 'mans' itself by a self-consciously autotelic receptivity, at once 'unmanning' the Tradition and, paradoxically, feminizing itself as well. Indeed, we might illuminate some of the more mysterious female figures in Keats's poetry by identifying them with the code or languages at once feared and desired by Keats: a phallic order. Aileen Ward's compelling defense of Fanny Brawne—her insistence that Keats loved Fanny precisely for the unpoetical distinctness of her character—is not contradicted by Keats's fascination with women like Isabella Jones: protean women who seemed, in addition, capable of transforming others, and, by liberating them from themselves, freeing them from their self-consciousness as well. Keats could love Fanny; he could use the Isabella Joneses of his life. What I'm suggesting is a loose association in Keats's poetry binding the phallic fetish-woman and the social code which Keats sought indirectly and defensively to embrace.

¹⁸ Jerome McGann, 'Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism', MLN, 94 (1979), pp. 988-1032. McGann's discussion of the textual history of 'La Belle Dame' and of the Paolo and Francesca sonnet is an invaluable lesson in the ideological uses of textual scholarship.

¹⁹ See Tristram Engelhardt, Jr, 'The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease', in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 48 (1974), pp. 234-48; Engelhardt, 'Ideology and Etiology', Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, I (1976), pp. 256-68; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978).

Louis Crompton's fine study, Byron and Greek Love (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), has opened our eyes to the homophobia of the early nineteenth century. The special ignominy I confer upon 'the masturbator' is not meant to contest or in any way qualify Crompton's representation. I am only elaborating the lesson we first learned from the Romantics. Namely, that Satan is always God's product, structural complement, and support system; that which threatens divinity because it reveals the machina in the deus is either not named, or it is named as a nonphenomenon. Not evil, but monstrous.

²⁰ 'Pretty' implies an imitation of 'nice', in the sense of 'exact' or 'appropriate'. 'Pretty' misses the mark, however, erring on the side of deficiency or excess, precisely because it imitates a fetishized Idea of the middle. Hence, perhaps, the adverbial usage: for example, 'pretty good', 'pretty warm'.

Apropos what Shelley called Keats's 'false taste'—its resonance for Wordsworth—here is Hunt's synopsis of Wordsworth's famous Preface (from Notes on The Feast of the Poets, 1814): 'the taste of society has become so vitiated and so accustomed to gross stimulants … as to require the counteraction of some simpler and more primitive food, which should restore to readers their true tone of enjoyment, and enable them to relish once more the beauties of simplicity and nature' (pp. 90, 91).

²¹ Wordsworth's critique of Macpherson runs along the same lines (see Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, 1815). Wordsworth does not attack Macpherson's hoax per se; in the Essay, he is careful to indicate his awareness of the doubtful authenticity of Percy's Reliques, and also his great admiration for that anthology. What he condemns in the Fingal collection is its fraudulent expressiveness. Macpherson's failure to feel his subject, and thus to communicate in a quick and quickening manner, is for Wordsworth the intolerable flaw.

²² The poetry's lack of intrinsic reference, its deep insincerity, was its great and largely unmet generic challenge.

But when the … arts have reached the period of more refined cultivation, they cease to be considered as means through which to convey to other minds the energies of thought and feeling: the productions of art become themselves the ultimate objects of imitation, and the mind is acted upon by them instead of acting through them from itself … [W]hen imitative skill has brought an art the nearest to perfection, it is then that its cultivation is the least allied to mind: its original purpose, as a mode of expression, becomes wholly lost in the artificial object,—the display of a skill. (Josiah Conder, Eclectic Review, September 1817)

On one level, this criticism marks out the difference between a classically mimetic and a Romantic-expressive mode. But this difference was, by 1817, a familiar one, and it seems not to trouble the writer unduly. The damaging fact of Keats's poetry was its expressive falseness. Where Wordsworth, for instance, offers himself in propria persona, Keats was felt to provide a tissue of received, heterogeneous, and often conflicting manners. That this was the source of the generic confusion is something Keats seems to have guessed. One feels in his penetrating characterization of Wordsworth's mode, 'the egotistical sublime', an implicit reading of his own style, the egotistical bathetic. Or, where ego should be, there is alienated, interested reproduction.

²³ This discussion is informed throughout by Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St Louis: Press, 1981); The Mirror of Production, trans. M. Poster (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975); and Simulations, trans. Foss, Patton, and Beitchman (New York: Semiotext (e), 1983).

²⁴ John Jones, John Keats's Dream of Truth (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 111. For the context of my phrase 'museum space' see Philip Fisher, 'A Museum with One Work Inside: Keats and the Finality of Art', Keats-Shelley Journal, 33 (1984), pp. 85-102.

²⁵ Aileen Ward writes of 'La Belle Dame', 'One hesitates to press this poem for any meaning beyond itself, for it is poetry of a kind that, as Keats said of his favourite passage in Shakespeare, "One's very breath while leaning over these pages is held for fear of blowing these lines away'". (The Making of a Poet, p. 273).

²⁶ Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1964; 1974). My understanding of the early response to Keats's poetry, and my argument for the complex purposes of that poetry, began with a reading of Marcus's extraordinary book.

²⁷ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974; 1976), p. 155 and passim, and pp. 141-64; Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 75-171.

²⁸ To recast the model in a familiar philosophic idiom, one may conceive the dream or the concept of masturbation along the lines of self-enriching alienation.