SOURCE: Trott, Nicola. “Keats and the Prison House of History.” In Keats and History, edited by Nicholas Roe, pp. 262-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Trott proposes a tension between history and poetry in Keats's writings, in part reflected in his use of prison metaphors, in which history is imagined as a constraining force on the imagination.]

‘IN THE … PRISON-HOUSE’

The poetry is for the most part ironed and manacled with a chain of facts, and cannot get free; it cannot escape from the prison house of history … Poetry must be free!

These remarks, from an unfavourable notice of Richard Duke of York, a compilation of the three parts of Henry VI, appeared in the Champion for 28 December 1817. Scholarly fact has now chained the authorship to John Hamilton Reynolds, dramatic editor of the Champion, but it was for many years thought to be by Keats, who had produced the previous week's review, of Kean's performance in Richard III.¹ And, indeed, the sentiments expressed tally with Keats's posthumous reputation as an aesthete who had nothing to do with ‘passing events’:² Shakespeare is properly an Ariel, his poetry ‘generally free as the wind—a perfect thing of the elements, winged and sweetly coloured’.

Keats was entranced by Ariel as a figure of imaginative liberty, and markings in his copy of The Tempest reveal a special interest in Prospero's words of parting to his spirit: ‘then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!’³ But this is spoken as a master honouring his pledge to release his servant; however free by nature, Ariel is not, in fact, a free agent until the end of the play. He is, paradoxically, a spirit-slave. And this tension between the idea of imagination as ecstatic escape-artist, and the constraining conditions under which it operates, is fundamental in Keats. The imagination is ambiguously both enthraller and enthralled.⁴

Keats is neither able nor willing to keep to so conventional a separation of discourses—fact and history, imagination and poetry—as is maintained by the review I quoted at the start of this essay. Yet this separation has bedevilled Keats criticism. Aesthetes, formalists, and historicists have, in their turn, sought to claim him for their own, the last of these on materialist grounds.⁵ Whatever his own will to apartheid, Keats understands it to be as fallacious as the wish ‘To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain’ (Lamia, I. 192). This seemingly paradisal knowledge is offered to the inexperienced Lycius by Keats's Lamia, ‘a lady bright’ who, moments earlier, had herself been ‘touch'd with miseries’, ‘convuls'd with scarlet pain’ (I. 171, 54, 154). What is more, her suffering was caused by longing for a human shape while being locked in a ‘serpent prison-house’ (I. 203). This serpentine form is one of Keats's governing devices for describing the limits of desire as he sees them—limits which, I suggest, are instituted partly by the ‘prison house of history’ within which the imaginary is necessarily, if reluctantly, enclosed.

One of Keats's marginalia to Paradise Lost, made probably in 1818, seizes on the occasion in Book IX when Satan is ‘constrained’ to ‘imbrute’ his ‘essence’ in the body of the serpent. Keats notes that

Satan having entered the Serpent, and inform'd his brutal sense—might seem sufficient—but Milton goes on ‘but his sleep disturb'd not.’ Whose spirit does not ache at the smothering and confinement—the unwilling stillness—the ‘waiting close’? Whose head is not dizzy at the prosaible speculations of satan in the serpent prison—no passage of poetry ever can give a greater pain of suffocation.⁶

In paraphrasing Satan's transference of intelligence to the brute sense of the snake, Keats has substituted his own verb (‘inform'd’) for Milton's (‘inspired’). Satan has performed the chameleonic act of ‘in for[ming] … and filling some other Body’ (Letters, i. 387). But, as Keats's further ‘speculations’ disclose, the merging of identities is monstrously incomplete: the informing mind remains Satan's own, condemned to endure the suffocating closeness of the host organism.

What may be deduced from Keats's impassioned commentary on Milton's lines? There is the identification: we find Satan immersed in his familiar role of surrogate Romantic ego. More troublingly, his invasion of the serpent diabolically parodies the Keatsian poet who ‘has no self’ (Letters, i. 387). His predicament marks an ethical indecision between the chameleon, who renounces his identity for those of others, and the egotist, who is tormented by its suppression. Yet if Satan-in-the-serpent suggests an egotistical poet in chameleon's clothing, the hybrid also implies Keats's awareness that the two are not strict antitheses, but that a poetic persona is at work in each. By extension, this persona is the animating force behind all forms, whether identifiably separate from, or inextricably identified with, the creatures of its imagining.⁷ Satan thus insinuates a lurking egotism in Keats's poetics and, consequently, their partial compliance with the idealist philosophies of Romanticism.⁸ To be more precise, the strength of Satan's identity, and the fascinated horror evoked by his smothering, are recognisably a gloss upon the ‘egotistical sublime’, the coinage supplied by Keats, in October 1818, for effects that similarly attract and repel him in Wordsworth (Letters, i. 386-7).

Keats's satanised serpent is analogous to the Romantic consciousness, his own or Wordsworth's, brilliantly ‘speculating’ upon the supine corpus of Milton's text. But it also places the free-thinking mind in a ‘prison-house’. What might be termed the Satanic consciousness emerges from a ‘serpent prison’ of brutal and stubborn materiality. Keats is invariably troubled by the growth of consciousness, and as invariably associates it with the recognition of harsh realities and frustrating limitations. The poet to whom he looks for exactly this interinvolvement of mind with recalcitrant matter is Wordsworth. It is ‘the “burden of the Mystery”’, a weight drawn equally from what is to be borne and from consciousness itself, which Keats's elects to carry, from ‘Tintern Abbey’, to his own ‘dark Passages’ of poetry on the suffering mind (Letters, i. 281). And it is these necessary facts that Keats sets himself to explore and accommodate, in the idealised history of his development he calls the ‘life of Allegory’.

ALLEGORICAL LIVES

‘[T]hey are very shallow people who take every thing literal’, Keats tells his brother and sister-in-law in early 1819, turning as he does so from some gossip about Benjamin Bailey's amorous deceptions, to a spectacular lift out of the literal:

A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative … Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it—

(Letters, ii. 67)

The procedure is by turns antithetical and synthetic. As usual, Keats is setting one author against another (Byron and Shakespeare in this instance). Less explicitly, he favours the poet who elides opposing categories—here, of the life and the work. Life, if it is ‘of any worth’, is always already allegorical, scriptural, figurative. Like writing, it is inherently purposive, and therefore interpretable to those whose ‘eyes can see’ to read.

Marjorie Levinson shrewdly points to allegory as the site of idealisation in Keats and, in an ingenious critique, interprets Keats's life as ‘the allegory of a man belonging to a certain class and aspiring … to another’.⁹ It is this—often conflictual—relation between the ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ that I wish to take up. But I shall do so by understanding it as part of an internal debate about the liberty or duress with which the poetic personality and its cognates, the chameleon and the serpent, are felt to act.

Levinson's counter-allegory tends to evacuate the life to which it alludes: ‘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.’¹⁰ Under these conditions, Keats's poetry has a purely negative capability. To speak positively, one might observe that, in its inquisition of its own escapism, his ‘accomplished poetry’ is emphatically engaged with ‘actual life’, and its ‘freedom’ produced by exact acknowledgements of constraint.

In prefacing his Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Hazlitt quotes from Schlegel the dictum that Shakespeare ‘gives us the history of minds’, in that his drama ‘lays open to us, in a single word, a whole series of preceding conditions’.¹¹ Keats's Shakespeare, on the other hand, offers a biographical model, in that he applies the form of art to the flux of experience. To lead a ‘life of Allegory’ is to exemplify a coherent existence, as opposed to a contingent one. Yet the strictness of form reflects a need to impute an order to the random forces of the ‘literal’. The peculiarly intrusive sympathy of Keats's art—its power of entering alternative lives—also renders him permeable by life, sometimes painfully so. In his letter describing the chameleon poet, for instance, the capacity of losing himself in the imagining of other identities is disturbingly inverted among real people: ‘the identity of every one in the room begins [so] to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated’ (Letters, i. 387). A year earlier, in autumn 1817, Keats writes to commiserate with Bailey over a delay in his ordination: ‘Such is this World—and we live … in a continual struggle against the suffocation of accidents’.¹²

Already, notably, there is the ‘pain of suffocation’ under constraint. Yet the strong paradox of Keats's ‘life of Allegory’ is that it undertakes the struggle against accidents. The good life is allegorical as much because of its proximity to experience as its resemblance to art. On the day after he chooses to ‘burn through’ King Lear once again, Keats is reminding Bailey that ‘The best of Men have but a portion of good in them—a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames which creates the ferment of existence—by which a Man is propell'd to act and strive and buffet with Circumstance’ (Letters, i. 210; see also i. 270).

That circumstance may be a source of resistance as well as suffocation makes it somewhat less perplexing that Keats should think of it as defining a personal identity. Moreover, this is where the countervailing form of allegory is most categorically imposed. In May 1818, Keats associates a world ‘full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’, with an allegorical rite of passage: ‘human life’ is ‘a large Mansion of Many Apartments’ leading from thoughtlessness to the burdensome consciousness of such realities (Letters, i. 280-1). In April 1819, he repudiates the Christian allegory of the world as ‘a vale of tears’ redeemable only by divine intervention, and substitutes his own term, ‘The vale of Soul-making’, to designate a ‘system of salvation’ within ‘a World of Pains and troubles’ (Letters, ii. 101-2).¹³ Keats adopts a progressive ‘medium’, in which the contingent and literal may acquire the idealised form of allegory.

The ‘life of Allegory’ seeks to place the accidental within an aesthetic order. In addition to a local history of malign or awkward circumstances, there is a grand narrative of the meliorative and meaningful developments that take place in individuals and cultures alike. Each is continuously and ambiguously present in the hybrid form of Keatsian allegory. Levinson describes Keats's social position ‘not as a healthy both / and but as the monstrous neither / nor constructed in the reviews’.¹⁴ Such hybridisation is endemic in Keats himself, not least because he recognises his own aesthetic ambivalence, and the connection it has with the conflicting perspectives of the compassionate and progressive imaginations: the one demanding a subjective and sympathetic, the other a general and gregarious, evaluation of experience.

PROGRESS AND STASIS

The progress of the self naturally lends itself to a progressive theory of history.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, it is in his letter on the chambers of thought that Keats first develops the notion of a ‘general and gregarious advice of intellect’. More startling, perhaps, is the extent to which he is prepared to think of this advance as historically determined. He vividly excuses Milton his jejune philosophy on the grounds that the ‘ideas on virtue, vice, and Chastity in Comus’ occur ‘just at the time of the dismissal of Cod-pie ces and a hundred other disgraces’; while the ‘hintings at good and evil in the Paradise Lost’ are made ‘when just free from the inquisition and burrning in Smithfield’. History gives evidence of the advancement of learning beyond certain types of oppression and, equally, of the limits imposed by the context in which it occurs. That ‘Wordsworth is deeper than Milton’ is doubly corroborative: it ‘proves there is really a grand march of intellect’; conversely, it ‘proves that a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being’ (Letters, i. 281-2). The intellect's effectiveness depends upon its incarceration in the historical prison house.

On an enlarged scale, Keats's life of allegory becomes an allegory of life. Both these forms, the poetic and the historical, are compelled by an ideology of progress. Keats's interest in his own forwardness is transparent. The pattern of his work is, as de Man remarks, ‘prospective’: hopes for the future govern the way he conceives of his development and, from Sleep and Poetry onwards, his poetic ambitions are gathered under the topos of a ‘progress of poetry’.¹⁶ If this is Keats's way of encouraging himself, it does not stop here, but widens to embrace all humanity in the massed ranks of a ‘march of intellect’. Such idealisations—what he calls ‘ethereal finger-pointings’ (Letters, i. 231)—are deliberately flying in the face of the available evidence, from the restoration of monarchical Legitimacy in 1815 to the Peterloo massacre four years later.¹⁷ It is indicative that, a month after Peterloo, as Shelley is finishing The Mask of Anarchy in a ‘torrent of indignation’, Keats is sanguine enough to tell his brother and sister-in-law: ‘All civiled countries become gradually more enlighten'd and there should be a continual change for the better.’¹⁸

This is a history told by the Enlightenment and endowed with predictive force. But its projection into the future is prompted by the special intimacy in Keats between his personal aspirations and a more general wish for improvement. His conflation of poetic and historical progress begins to have a defining effect in early 1818. Contemplating the writing of Hyperion, in January, Keats buoyantly assures Haydon that ‘the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating’, since Apollo ‘being a fore-seeing God will shape his actions like one’ (Letters, i. 207). The god of poetry will lead an allegorical life as a matter of course, his own empowerment conferring on the myth of the Olympian succession the form of a progress poem.¹⁹

Yet although Hyperion is conceived as an allegory of historical progress, the fragment as it stands is caught up by states of fixity and paralysis. Superseded by a more ‘beautiful mythology’ (The Poems of John Keats, 103), the Titans fall from the sky to find themselves ‘pent in regions of laborious breath’ (Hyperion, II. 22). Their defeat, whose analogy with that of the ancien régime hovers within the poem's interpretative horizons, should on the face of it have appealed to Keats, wholeheartedly on ‘the Liberal side of the question’ as he was.²⁰ Far from being triumphalist, however, the work generates sympathy for the predicament of the Titans, who feature as benign, traditionary gods, cast out from bliss into anthropomorphic torments.²¹ To Keats's imagining, their mountain-prison is emotive precisely because it is conceived as an imprisonment. The Titans are literally ‘Lock'd up’ (II. 25) in sign of their figurative incarceration by historical events. These events take the ‘sky-children’ (I. 133), once untouched by passion and pain, into the ‘world of Circumstances’ (Letters, ii. 104). Hyperion, the doomed precursor of Apollo, is initiated into this world through the central Keatsian image of psychic and physical suffering:

                    … through all his bulk an agony
Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown,
Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular
Making slow way, with head and neck convuls'd
From over-strained might.

(I. 259-63)

In a powerful reversal of Paradise Lost, the Satanic act of invading the serpent becomes the subjective experience of being invaded by it.²² The knowledge of pain and weakness enters Hyperion with a perverse intimacy and alien strength. The poet Apollo, by contrast, readily imbibes a ‘Knowledge enormous’, and the corresponding enlargement of mental space ‘makes a God of [him]’. In this further reversal of Milton, knowledge confers the godhead that was denied to Adam and Eve. But it does so by relating to the power struggles of human history:

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 …

(III. 114-18)

Keats's myth requires a history of crisis, of the birth and death of cultures. Yet the Titans and Olympians represent stages in development as well as warring dynasties. As the poem stands, Apollo barely emerges into godhead, but his change marks a point of regeneration. The Apollonian poet is able to generalise what would otherwise remain an inarticulate horror. Through him, the poetry moves from circumstantial to providential awareness, from the victim to the interpreter of historical change.

Hyperion reflects the suffocated, accidental side of Keats, Apollo his (trans)figurative alter ego. They are, to adapt Hazlitt on the egotistical Wordsworth, two persons in one poet.²³ If Hyperion reads allegorically, it does so by inserting a continuous experience of self within the overtly catastrophic history supplied by the myth. During its composition, Keats was living through the death of his brother Tom; in the months before its writing, he enunciated a progress of poetry, whose tendency was to ‘think into the human heart’ (Letters, i. 282).²⁴Hyperion daringly mythologises the passage, initiated in Keats's letters, from preconscious bliss, to mortal experience, and thence to a saving knowledge. That the structure is as much developmental as revolutionary is confirmed by the verbal repetitions of the poem: the Titans, Hyperion, and Apollo alike undergo an agonising metamorphosis, culminating in the ‘fierce convulse’ with which the poet is said to ‘Die into life’ (Hyperion, I. 262; II. 27; III. 129-30).

Keats is notoriously a young poet, and is never more so than when trying to be an old one. The urgency of his growing up is measured by his growth pains—from the poet who anticipates passing the joys of ‘sleep and poetry’ in quest of the ‘agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’ (Sleep and Poetry, 124-5), to the dreamer who yearns to comprehend suffering as one ‘to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery’ (The Fall of Hyperion, I. 148-9).²⁵ In the antithetical terms preferred by Keats, pleasure is overtaken by philosophy, sensation yields to thought. However negatively capable his ‘hovering … between’ such categories, the life of allegory insists on a progress from one to the other (see Letters, i. 271). The Hyperion poems are so inescapably Miltonic, it seems, because this hard task of relinquishment is especially associated with Milton. Keats's marginale on Paradise Lost argues that

he had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical Luxury; and with that it appears to me he would fain have been content … but there was working in him as it were that same sort of thing as operates in the great world to the end of a Prophecy's being accomplished: therefore he devoted himself rather to the Ardours than the pleasures of Song …

Milton's life of allegory is plainly an allegory of Keats's. As a result, both censor and libido are at work: an arduous poetry is conscientiously in touch with the ‘great world’; the self-pleasuring is wistful for a refuge of its own. Thus, while Paradise Lost exists because Milton ‘committed himself to the Extreme’, the ‘finest parts of the Poem’ are produced by his occasional bouts of self-indulgence—his ‘solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine’.²⁶

Keats requires a transition from original pleasure to painful knowledge, yet intuits the incompatibility of the Miltonic ‘Extreme’ with the aesthetic effects he cherishes. It is partly that the epic makes him acutely conscious of the canon he is seeking to enter. These formal conditions are both paralysing to and parodied by the Hyperion poems. Keats's epic allows for a visceral enjoyment of imitation, in Miltonisms that verge on pastiche; and a moral sympathy with pain, in divinities that are not symbiotic with, but excruciatingly trapped within, the forms they inhabit. As Keats is uncannily aware, on giving up The Fall in September 1819, the epic threatens his death-by-Milton: ‘Life to him would be death to me’ (Letters, ii. 212).²⁷

The Titans are ‘Dungeoned’ by historical events; the mobile Keats is threatened with the prison house of literary history—in Harold Bloom's terms, by the corpus of the precursor: ‘yet the past doth prison me’ (Endymion, IV. 691). But Keats is perpetually at risk of confinement for reasons other than those of influence. He is haunted by the threat of his own poetic stunting, and so defines a poetry of alternate paralysis and movement. His narrative of entrapment and escape goes back to Endymion, where a power of redemption vies with death or dormancy, to the point of inducing a torture of ‘renewed life’ (I. 919, and see also II. 457-533). Book III of the poem recounts the legend of Glaucus and Circe, the enchantress to whom the sea-god is sensually enslaved and from whom he escapes only to be cursed with a lingering death, until Endymion appears as his ‘deliverer’:

                                                                      … thou openest
The prison gates that have so long opprest
My weary watching. Though thou know'st it not,
Thou art commission'd to this fated spot
For great enfranchisement.

(III. 295-9)

The story of Glaucus and Circe has an explicitly political frame, since Book III begins with an attack on the Legitimacy in the manner of the Examiner. If Hyperion is written for an era of revolutionary shifts in power, Endymion speaks to its ideological enslavements and liberations.²⁸ But the romance also indicates how seamlessly (and, until recent criticism, invisibly) Keats's poetry joins the stuff of history to what it is always doing of itself—that is, acting out its own compulsive movements of feeling and empathy, fixation and flight.

‘History’ here is an enlargement of an existing scale. One way of measuring the enlargement is to be found in Hazlitt. As a republican, Hazlitt is notoriously the enemy of Legitimacy; as a realist, he is hard-headed about the prospects for reform. Reviewing The Excursion in August 1814, he answers Wordsworth's ‘fond conclusion’ as to the eventual ‘triumph of virtue and liberty’ with the brutal contradiction: ‘All things move not in progress, but in a ceaseless round.’²⁹ In the final collapse of revolutionary ideals before the downfall of Napoleon (the French monarchy had been restored in May), Hazlitt disabusingly insists that history is circular, and ‘progress’ a purely ideological illusion.

A sense of futility enters Keats's poetry as the fearful contrary of his progressive ‘endeavour’. In the Ode to a Nightingale, the poet's envious cry, ‘No hungry generations tread thee down’ (62), tacitly echoes The Excursion, this time in its sceptical questioning of Enlightenment historiography: ‘Do generations press / On generations, without progress made?’ (V. 466-7). Similarly, Apollo is envisaged as ‘a fore-seeing God’, but his power of divination arises from his not being ‘led on, like Buonaparte, by circumstance’ (Letters, i. 207).³⁰ Keats is seemingly unable to think of a providential and poetic history without invoking the antithetical world of circumstantial and circumscribed action: in de Man's words, ‘History can only move by becoming aware of its own contingency.’³¹

‘Even here, into my centre of repose’, says Hyperion, ‘The shady visions come to domineer’ (I. 243-4). The poetry of refuge is overtaken by the allegory of life, and its complex assimilation of realities. Keats is deeply indebted to Hazlitt for his development and the turn to ‘philosophy’ with which it is associated. But the turn is problematic in that it fosters the distrust Keats feels for his own aesthetic, as the sign of an immaturity that must be overcome. What is more, Hazlitt makes knowledge inimical to poetry. His essay on ‘Why the Arts are not progressive’ defines the ‘stationary’ history of art by its antithesis to the mobile history of science and thought.³² A theory of social progress is brought into ironic alignment with a theory of artistic decline. Having been perfected in a primitive state of society, the argument goes, art is an anachronism in the present. Indeed, Hazlitt's ancients barely allow the moderns to enter the lists: ‘in grace and beauty they have never been surpassed.’³³

Hyperion, of course, attempts to found a modern poetry of knowledge. It envisages a progression that is led by the poet, and which dictates that beauty supersede strength. Yet the threat of stasis remains. In taking Hazlitt's mischievousness to heart, Keats also sets its ironies to work. The Titans are immobilised by the very poetics of progression which the superior beauty and changeable form of Apollo represent, and their sculptural forms rigidly correspond to the notion of a ‘stationary’ art. The pressure of Hazlitt's thinking is more directly felt in the poems of summer 1819, The Fall of Hyperion and, especially, Lamia, which subscribes to the antagonism that Hazlitt perceived between the discoveries of science and the terra incognita of art: ‘the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry … There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens have gone farther off, and grown astronomical …’³⁴ Pegasus is brought down to earth, and the heavens estranged. It is to this sort of nostalgia that Keats gives way in his lament for the ‘awful rainbow once in heaven’ (Lamia, II. 231). As in Hazlitt, though, the idealist aesthetic is subject to critique. Lamia conducts an ironic progress of knowledge. And its heroine is certainly no Ariel.

The poem has an explicitly evolutionary setting: in the opening lines, the narrator casts back to the era before the ‘faery broods’ drove out the deities of Greek mythology. Keats returns to the scenes of his earliest poetic infatuation, but to very different ends: the destruction of the imaginary by science, and the slaying of Lamia by her philosopher-antagonist. Lamia is peculiarly sensitive to Keats's ambivalent understanding that ‘truth’ is at once the enemy of imagination, and the standard to which art should conform. In its use of the lamia legend, the poem is comparable to other applications of literary history in Keats. The archaisms, medievalisms, and faery of The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and Ode to a Nightingale, seek to uphold the imaginary by their distance from the ‘real’. But they also risk its being unmasked as a ‘cheat’, an anachronism, or evasion. Hence the opposite tendency in Keats, of bringing his mythologies to the test of modernity or ‘reality’, and to the production (first glimpsed at the end of The Eve of St. Agnes) of an ‘unsmokeable’ art.

Lamia escapes from her serpent prison, only to enter the prison house of history. Under Apollonius's coldly philosophical gaze, she is exposed as a ‘deceiving elf’ (Ode to a Nightingale, 74). Keats is apparently writing against the evolutionary structure of Hyperion, where the progressive force is personified as the god of poetry, in whom beauty and knowledge are made one. In Lamia, the imaginary is not only incompatible with knowledge, but is itself deceptive. To Hazlitt's prescription of imaginative limits, Keats adds the Platonic stigma of the lie: the ‘virtuous philosopher’, to whom the lamia is an acknowledged fake from the start, makes the imaginings of the chameleon poet look like a serpent-prison.³⁵

STILL LIVES AND CHAMELEON FORMS

The serpent denotes Keats's fear of fixity; the chameleon his compulsion to change. They are two beasts in one poet. While the Satanic consciousness is invaded by, or insufficiently subdued to, a bodily existence, the chameleon is ‘continually in for[ming] and filling some other Body’. It is perhaps not surprising that Keats has been the object of formalist scrutiny. In his own recognition, the chameleon is a formative principle, at once imparting itself to, and taking on the identity of, its creations. The poetry craves existences that it may enter, in satisfaction of its own avid hunger for form. Its characteristic movement is from one entity to another (rather than ‘hovering between images’, as in a Coleridgean poetry of indeterminacy): in Endymion, the pleasure-thermometer measures palpable objects of desire; the relentless succession of its pageant-forms, the endearing literalness of its mythologies, seek to embody forces of love and nature. Keats's ‘fellowship with essence’ must have substance (Endymion, I. 779); his way of feeling is transitive—it takes an object.

The dramatic persona of Hazlitt's Shakespeare, from which the idea of the chameleon poet derives, becomes a formal premise in Keats. The imagination's dual capacity, to be submerged in parallel lives, and be drawn by fresh objects, means that it has both a freedom to change and a formal fetish—as in the ravenous lines from the Ode on Melancholy: ‘Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes’ (18-20). Since Keats's imagination requires form, it is to that extent a prey to fixation and fixity. The chameleon moves between points of stasis, adopting other identities in recognition of their formal constraints. It has, then, a kinship to its reptilian other, the serpent, and to the gamut of imprisoned figures which fall under the heading of Keats's commentary on Satan: Circe, with her ‘serpenting’ captives and piteous elephant-man, and Glaucus, cursed with age and the ‘serpent-skin of woe’ (Endymion, III. 501, 240); the impotent Titans—Saturn, his arm ‘nerveless, listless, dead’, Hyperion, overcome by the ‘lithe serpent’ of his own frailty, and Iäpetus gripping a ‘serpent's plashy neck’ (Hyperion, I. 18, 261; II. 45); finally, Lamia, trapped in her weird serpentine beauty, and desiring human form.

All these figures render states of circumstantial entrapment, and their ‘pain of suffocation’ testifies to Keats's fascinated horror of stasis. His mind is continually driven to imagine its own death, or, less catastrophically, the cessation of its development: ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain …’ (When I have fears that I may cease to be, 1-2). The poet of progress conceives an art-form whose age and stillness are a final apotheosis, transcending the erotic instability of his own ‘rhyme’: ‘Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian …’ (Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1-2). Such inviolability is the condition of an art that is purely historical. It is the living poet whose desire endows the urn with a future in the image of ‘breathing human passion’, ‘For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd’ (28, 26). For ever ‘Cold’ and static, the urn excludes all contingency, so that its closure may ‘tease’ the interpretative impulse (44-5), and provoke the ‘struggle to escape’ of the poem.

By over-identifying with his own method, the chameleon poet ends up in a serpent-prison.³⁶ Nevertheless, a distinction is drawn between them, which may also be tied to the larger question of Keats's relation to history. The chameleon is associated with Shakespeare, with freedom, and with the life of allegory—the self effortlessly elided by a life lived at the level of art. The serpent-prison is associated with Milton, confinement, and the allegorising of life—the drama of self-overcoming necessitated by circumstance. In either case, it is the accidental which enforces the larger shapes of an ideal history in Keats. But the relation between the two is by no means axiomatic. One way of thinking about this is to say that the effects of his poetry escape and exceed the totalising structures within which they are placed. His poems resist the allegorical interpretations for which they are intended, owing in part to what Barbara Everett has called the role of the ‘haphazard’ in his work.³⁷ The official design of Endymion is to achieve a ‘fellowship with essence’, but it is also consumed by a wayward and excitable observation. In what is surely a metaphor for his own art—a catalogue-epic of extreme fluidity and inclusiveness—Keats describes the ‘ambitious magic’ of Glaucus's embroidered cloak:

The gulphing whale was like a dot in the spell,
Yet look upon it, and 'twould size and swell
To its huge self, and the minutest fish
Would pass the very hardest gazer's wish,
And shew his little eye's anatomy.

(III. 205-9)

The chameleon opposes a determining fixity with freedom within formal bounds—as in the roomy manoeuvre of ‘Obstinate silence’, in Book II, ‘Feeling about for its old couch of space / And airy cradle’ (II. 335-7). And a similar combination of definiteness and changeability informs Keats's allegorical interpretations of history, in a fortuitous and unrigorous mix of necessity and contingency. The same chancy assurance that allows him to ‘do half at Random’ things that ‘are afterwards confirmed by [his] judgment in a dozen features of Propriety’, governs the meta-narratives of soul-making and the march of intellect (Letters, i. 142).

Keats's ideal is both determined and open-ended, a progress of poetry that is free at the point of writing. As Bloom remarks of the Ode to Psyche, which addresses the ‘latest born’ of the Olympians, he hopes for ‘a map with blanks’ in it. Literary history would petrify were not the poet an explorer of its formal possibilities.³⁸ The odes are the fullest example of how Keats's promiscuous identity (the erotic impulse uncoercively at play) is also generically innovative and enabling. Similarly, they reveal how poetry may, as Hartman suggests, ‘tell the time of history—without accepting a historical determinism’.³⁹

To Autumn is a progress-poem, in the sense that it does not seek a return. Though it ends with antiphonal thoughts of spring, its seasonal form is not cyclical but linear (the ‘full-grown lambs’ (30) refer to a completed temporal sequence rather than to a possible recurrence). Much of the ode's greatness derives from this oblique morbidity: time is not stopped but stayed, as though death had become implicit, and so made room for a triumph of life or fruitfulness. The suspension of the inevitable allows for both the extraordinary glutting of the first stanza (where the season conspires, by an illusion of permanence, ‘to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers’), and the satiated ease of the second (where Autumn gathers to herself the products of human labour). At the centre of the poem, the activity of harvesting is replaced by still lives of the season, in which work is an achievement of rest, and productivity a reward of contemplation. The drive to progress has been overtaken by organic processes and their ‘patient’ evolution. These ‘last oozings’ are as slow as you can go while still sustaining motion (21, 22). By taking out the evolutionary dilemmas that had so beset Hyperion and Lamia, To Autumn evades the accusation of fixity—both formal (the figure of Autumn fluently metamorphoses everywhere you look), and temporal (the problem of anachronism does not occur in ‘nature’).⁴⁰ The forms of the harvest—winnowing, reaping, gleaning, apple pressing—succeed one another in the finer tone of Autumn's unwilled fertility, as if in final reconciliation of the conflicting impulses of indolence and urgency, stasis and momentum.

As a model of history, Keats's ‘gregarious advance of intellect’ is evidently problematic. Yet in his astonishing development we find the ocular proof, as it were, of his faith that time itself is progressive, or the ‘maturing’ element in which we inevitably move and grow. Standing ‘tip-toe’, eager for the unfolding of futurity, Keats projects his own life of allegory, and equates it with a ‘general’ progress. Yet although the literal is put on terms with the allegorical, the convergence is not achieved in any final sense. There remains a sharp and contradictory awareness, both of the absolute nature of individual suffering, and the ineradicable subjectivity of experience. The conditions of the literal life are not to be denied—hence the destabilising weight of the satire Keats brings to the romance, and the burdensome knowledge that the ‘march of intellect’ occurs only through a progressive entanglement in circumstances. There are many confines, in life and art, as well as history; Keats's rich and risky amplitude is to move between them, threatened with imprisonment by each.

Notes

1. See Caroline Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare. A Descriptive Study Based on New Material (London, 1928), 6. Leonidas M. Jones, ‘Keats's Theatrical Reviews in The Champion’, Keats-Shelley Journal 3 (1954), 55-65, traces the erroneous attribution to Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, and makes a convincing attribution to Reynolds.

2. W. J. Courthope, ‘The Latest Development of Literary Poetry’, Quarterly Review (Jan. 1872); Keats. The Critical Heritage, 33.

3. See Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare, 86. Cf. Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespear's Plays: ‘Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought personified’; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, iv. 241.

4. See Lucy Newlyn, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), 250-5.

5. See ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism,’ Modern Language Notes, 61, for the definition of ‘Romanticism’ as both ‘a reactionary and “escapist” art movement’, and ‘an intense expression of critique’.

6. John Barnard (ed.), John Keats. The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1973), 526; for the very free ‘speculations’ given to Lamia in her ‘serpent prison’, see Lamia, I. 202-19.

7. Keats's understanding of the egotistical and dramatic impulses is comparable to Coleridge's of Milton and Shakespeare, the latter being able ‘to become by power of Imagination another Thing … yet still the God felt to be there’, R. A. Foakes (ed.), Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature (2 vols., London and Princeton, 1987) i. 69. See John Bayley, The Characters of Love (London, 1960), 19.

8. On idealism, see Paul Hamilton, ‘Kant and Critique’, in Marjorie Levinson et al., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford, 1989), 108-42.

9. Keats's Life of Allegory. The Origins of a Style, 5.

10. Ibid., 6.

11. HW, iv. 172; cf. Measure for Measure, 1.1.26 ff., a passage underlined by Keats: ‘There is a kind of character in thy life, / That, to the observer, doth thy history / Fully unfold’.

12. Letters, i. 179 where Keats simultaneously wishes to reform the world and remain untouched by it.

13. Keats refuses the pessimism of a Christian theology, which postpones salvation until the next world, and the optimism of a rationalist teleology which assumes perfectibility in this (for his anti-Godwinism, see Letters, i. 397; ii. 101).

14. That is, ‘sandwiched between the Truth of the working class and the Beauty of the leisure class’, KL, 5.

15. For various permutations of this theory, see Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969).

16. See Paul de Man (ed.), Selected Poetry of John Keats (New York, 1966), xi. For Keats's use of the ‘progress’ topos, see the opening of Endymion IV.

17. Keats's hopefulness was far from the post-Napoleonic triumphalism of Leigh Hunt's Descent of Liberty, and the sequence of thunderous odes Wordsworth wrote between 1814 and 1816. For Keats's awareness of the prosecutions of liberal publishers, see Letters, i. 191; ii. 62, 194.

18. Letters, ii. 193 ff.; see also the political allegory of i. 232 and, for a contrasting sense of the degeneracy of modern political life, i. 396.

19. On the progress poem, see Alan J. Bewell, ‘The Political Implication of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics’, in ‘Keats and Politics: A Forum,’ SIR. According to The Poems of John Keats 395, ‘the affirmation of the law of progress’ in Hyperion is Keats's own invention.

20. See Kenneth Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, in K. Muir (ed.), John Keats. A Reassessment (Liverpool, 1969), 102-3, and Letters, ii. 180. See also David Bromwich, ‘Keats's Politics’, A Choice of Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989), 92-105.

21. See Hyperion, I. 328-35, II. 92-5. Marilyn Butler points out that the poem is a narrative of liberal ‘progress’ and of ‘the individual victims of the historical process’, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries. English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford and New York, 1981), 151-4. See also Laurence S. Lockridge, ‘Keats: The Ethics of Imagination’, in J. R. Barth and J. L. Mahoney (eds.), Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination (Columbia, Mo., and London, 1990), 143-73.

22. Keats inserts into the text his own moral empathy with suffering, finding a Milton who is ‘godlike in the sublime pathetic’ (Barnard, Complete Poems, 522). See also Susan Wolfson, The Questioning Presence (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 262.

23. ‘The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar, are three persons in one poet’—Hazlitt's verdict on The Excursion, HW, xix. 11.

24. On the day Hyperion was abandoned, 21 April 1819, Keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law about making the soul by the ‘medium of the heart’; Letters, ii. 104.

25. The notion of a graduation in genre, from pastoral to epic, is established from classical times; see Geoffrey Hartman, Minor Prophecies (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1991), 57.

26. Barnard, Complete Poems, 517. It seems likely that this commentary is contemporaneous with the letter written 24 April 1818.

27. See Jonathan Bate, ‘Keats's two Hyperions and the problem of Milton’, in K. Hanley and R. Brinkley (eds.), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge, 1992, 321-38.

28. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, 1973). In Book I, the serpent image is politicized in a fantasy of ‘wip[ing] away all slime / Left by men-slugs and human serpentry’ (I. 820-1).

29. See ‘What is the People?’, HW, vii. 259-81, and HW, xix. 17-18 (referring to the Wanderer, Excursion, IV). For Hazlitt's similar awareness that ‘friends of liberty’ are doomed by their inability to combat tyranny, see ‘Julius Caesar’, HW, iv. 198.

30. Cf. Letters, i. 144, on Haydon's review of a manuscript said to be sent by Napoleon from St Helena, and Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination, 93.

31. John Keats, xxi.

32. ‘What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive … what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde’; HW, iv. 161. Hazlitt's thesis is taken up in Peacock's ‘Four Ages of Poetry’ (1820), ‘The march of [the poet's] intellect is like that of a crab, backward’; see H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (eds.), The Halliford Edition of the Works of Thomas Love Peacock (10 vols., London and New York, 1924-34) viii. 20-1. Contrast Coleridge's view of man ‘as a progressive being’, Foakes, Lectures 1808-1819, ii. 193.

33. ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’, HW, iv. 162. For the battle of Ancients and Moderns, and its relation to ideas of progress, see Murray Krieger, ‘The Arts and the Idea of Progress’, in G. A. Almond et al. (eds.), Progress and its Discontents (Berkeley and London, 1982), 449-69; and David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London, 1990), chap. 2.

34. HW, v. 9.

35. For Lamia as ‘a perverted form of negative capability’, for Lycius and Apollonius as forms of the serpentine, and the role of snakes in pharmacy and mythology, see H. de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York and Oxford, 1991), 182-96.

36. For Geoffrey Hartman, ‘In-feeling, in Keats, is always on the point of overidentifying’; ‘Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's “To Autumn”’, in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago and London, 1975), 131.

37. ‘Keats: Somebody Reading’, London Review of Books (1984), quoted in KL, 31.

38. See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford and New York, 1975), 152, and Keats's sonnet If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd.

39. The Fate of Reading, 126, and see p. 143.

40. Even so, an aesthetic primitivism is being invoked; Ian Jack points to the influence of Hazlitt, who remarks of Poussin, one of Keats's pictorial models in To Autumn: ‘his implements of husbandry are such as would belong to the first rude stages of civilization; his harvests are such … as would yield to no modern sickle’; Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford, 1967), 69.

Abbreviations and a Note on Texts

AP: Miriam Allott, The Poems of John Keats. Longman's Annotated English Poets Series (London and New York, 1970)

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

EinC: Essays in Criticism

ELH: Journal of English Literary History

HW: P. P. Howe (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (21 vols., London, 1930-4)

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

KC: Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), The Keats Circle. Letters and Papers 1816-1878 and More Letters and Poems 1814-1879 (2nd edn, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1965)

KCH: Geoffrey Matthews (ed.), Keats. The Critical Heritage (London, 1971)

KHM: Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979); rpt. The Beauty of Inflections. Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford, 1985), 17-65

KL: Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory. The Origins of a Style (Oxford and New York, 1988)

KP: Susan Wolfson (ed.), ‘Keats and Politics: A Forum’, SIR 25 (Summer 1986)

KPP: Daniel P. Watkins, Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London and Toronto, 1989)

K-SJ: Keats-Shelley Journal

L & L: Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (2 vols., London, 1848)

Letters: Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821 (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1958)

MHRA: Modern Humanities Research Association

PJK: Jack Stillinger (ed.), The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1978)

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

PQ: Philological Quarterly

SEL: Studies in English Literature

SIR: Studies in Romanticism

A Note on Texts

Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from Keats's poems are from PJK, and quotations from Keats's correspondence are from Letters. Angle brackets denote cancellations; square brackets supply letters or words missing in the original manuscript source.