The Columbia History of British Poetry (97 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 385
While maintaining his disagreement with Keats's "principles of poetry" and "abuse of Pope," Byron in a letter of 1821 also apologizes to the memory of John Keats. The evolution of poetic power Keats describes in "Sleep and Poetry" and
Endymion
connects itself to the tradition of genius tragically cut shortas exemplified by Thomas Chatterton, who lived from 1752 to 1770 and to whom
Endymion
is dedicated. Keats differentiates the couplets he writes in ''Sleep and Poetry" from those of Pope and eighteenth-century neoclassicists who "sway'd about upon a rocking horse, / And thought it Pegasus."
In "Sleep and Poetry" an Apollo-like charioteer, having evolved from an erotic, pastoral setting, "with wond'rous gesture" animates the natural world. This imaginative perception cannot be maintained butin a typical Keatsian processdeliquesces, and "a sense of real things comes doubly strong." Reality seeks to overcome this vision, rising "like a muddy stream." The poetic imagination, which defines itself in the rest of the poem, enables "the great end / Of poesy, that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.
Poetry brings pleasure and joy. The narrator, who with "full happiness" will "trace the story of Endymion," begins by insisting, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Keats revises the myth of Endymiona prince made immortal and put into an endless sleep, during which the moon goddess visits himinto a story of a young man's quest. A passionate encounter with an inconstant female presencethe moon, Dianadrives Keats's Endymion to the depths of the earth and sea. He comes to "a jasmine bower, all bestrown / With golden moss. His every sense had grown / Ethereal for pleasure."
A vision of sexual consummation allows poetic description, the presence of a poet, who "sang the story up into the air, / Giving it universal freedom." Endymion, however, awakes alone and "most forlorn upon that widow'd bed. . . ." While the light of the moon always finds him, under the ocean Glaucus, who has been entranced by the nymph Sylla, warns him about involvement with such an "arbitrary queen of sense." Able to reunite Glaucus, Sylla, and a procession of other lovers, Endymion's own vision of love for Diana is set against the reality of a physical relationship with an Indian maid. Ready to renounce "cloudy phantasms," "the air of visions," the "daintiest Dream," Endymion contemplates telling his children, "There never liv'd a mortal man, who
 
Page 386
bent / His appetite beyond his natural sphere, / But starv'd and died." Then the Indian maid becomes Diana, and the lovers "vanish'd far away."
The last line of the poem describes Endymion's sister, Peona, who, having witnessed the transformation, returns "home through the gloomy wood in wonderment." Gloom and wonder typically characterize the Keatsian experience of moving from passion to its aftermath, from dream to reality. To infuse the gloomy wood with wonderment is the poet's power.
Keats offers the poem with trepidation more as a statement of his own poetic potential than as a finished work. The anxieties expressed in his preface to
Endymion
were well founded, for "Scotch Reviewers" and other literary critics savaged the poem and its author. In a letter of 1820, which he may never have actually sent, an outraged Shelley berated William Gifford, the editor of the
Quarterly Review
: "Why it should have been reviewed at all, excepting for the purpose of bringing its excellences into notice I cannot conceive, for it was very little read, and there was no danger that it should become a model to the age of that false taste, with which I confess that it is replenished." In another letter of 1820 Shelley touches on "false taste" when, in discussing Keats, he refers to "the bad sort of style which is becoming fashionable among those who fancy that they are imitating Hunt and Wordsworth.''
Despite his own purposeful echoes of Wordsworth in such poems as
Alastor
and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," Shelley makes the problematic nature of influence or imitation central to his discussion of Keats and poetic taste in a letter of 1821 to Byron: "I certainly do not think Pope, or any writer, a fit model for any succeeding writer." In his early work Keats favors the characteristics of Leigh Hunt's poetry that break with eighteenth-century modes. His sonnet "Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison" portrays Huntthe poet-essayist who had been imprisoned for attacking the Prince Regent in the pages of the
Examiner
as stepping back to before the eighteenth century in order to take flight with Spenser and Milton "to regions of his own his genius true." This poetic sphere encompasses an exaggerated idiom, an erotic figuration that employs participial adverbs"pantingly," "droopingly," "beamingly,"and adjectives ending in
y
"lawny mantle," "downy rest."
Shelley comments on a certain overabundance in the verse in a letter to Keats of 1820. "I have lately read your 'Endymion' again and ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures
 
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poured forth with indistinct profusion." Such work, he tells Keats, will simply not sell. He goes on to emphasize his own attempts "to avoid system and mannerism."
Although wary of emulating others, Shelley insists in the preface to
Prometheus Unbound
that every poet is to some extent the creation of his age, the reflection of contemporary artists. He, too, writes in couplets of Endymion and the moon.
Epipsychidion
narrates a quest for passion and love and for the language to describe it. The poem may be read as a positioning of Shelley's own sexual relationships. In this cosmology he is the earth and Mary Shelley the moon. Claire Claremont, Mary's stepsister and one of Byron's lovers, is the comet. Nineteen-year-old Emilia Viviani, to whom the poem is addressed (the "noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia V, now imprisoned in the convent of"), is the sun.
The poem begins by suggesting possible descriptions of Emily, but none are adequate. Images in language simply cannot fix her reality. Shelley then sets the restraints of marriage against the speaker's passion for Emily and the impossibility of maintaining human passionthe confining morality of being "chained" to one person against the exuberance of uninhibited love. In allegorizing these multiple loves, the poem celebrates its ability to create what the psyche does not have and then to move towards it.
This particular power and freedom of imagination, vitally important to Shelley, Keats, and Byron, define a significant interconnection among them. Despite their obvious differences, Shelley writes of the common ground of their work in a letter of 1819a "certain similarity all the best writers of any particular age inevitably are marked with, from the spirit of that age acting on all." Shelley notes a "similar tone of sentiment, imagery, and expression"; and in the preface to
Prometheus Unbound
he writes that a "peculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery . . . distinguishes the modern literature of England."
From the late eighteenth century on, writers sensed their activity in a common literary field and were aware of the interconnections among themselves. From the late eighteenth century, literary historians have characterized these similarities as
Romanticism
. Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel used the term in Germany to discuss the poetry of Goethe and Schiller. Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge have usually been grouped together as first generation Romantics, Byron, Shelley, and Keats as the second. Numerous definitions of their similarities exist,
 
Page 388
from Walter Pater's "the addition of strangeness to beauty," to Watts-Dunton's "the renaissance of wonder" to Stendhal's proclamation: "All good art is romantic." By the early twentieth century, Arthur O. Lovejoy announced that the term
romantic
meant so many different things "that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign." In his essay "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms'' Lovejoy proclaims this multiplicity of meanings to be a "scandal of literary history and criticism." Twenty-five years later, however, René Wellek argued in "The Concept of 'Romanticism' in Literary History" that reading in the context of certain categoriesImagination, Nature, and Symbolallows us to characterize writers as "Romantic."
In the late twentieth century the whole possibility of discussing Romanticism as a viable literary, historical category (along with the possibility of writing literary history) has been called into question. Drawing on Nietzsche and Foucault, it is possible to see history as a fiction produced by certain powerful, self-promoting Western ideologies. The traditional periodization of history in Western culture is then made suspect.
For early-nineteenth-century poets, however, literary associations with contemporaries as well as the concept of literary history become vital issues. When Keats discusses Wordsworth and Milton, he is also debating his own poetic path. Grousing about a review of
The Revolt of Islam
, Shelley in a letter of 1819 writes that the only remark worth commenting on is that he imitates Wordsworth"It may as well be said that Lord Byron imitates Wordsworth, or that Wordsworth imitates Lord Byron. . . ." For Shelley, great writers are necessarily connected to their contemporaries because their works commonly derive "from the new springs of thought and feeling, which the great events of our age have exposed to view."
I recommend the Revolution of France as a theme involving pictures of all that is best qualified to interest and to instruct mankind.
Shelley in a letter of 1816 to Byron discussing Byron's poetic future.
As sources of poetic inspiration, "the great events of our age" begin for Shelley, Byron, and Keats with the French Revolution. Frequently associated with revolution, Romantic verse often focuses on the French Revolution and its aftermath, on the reorganization of Europe under Napoleon, and on his defeat by Wellington in 1815, which eventuated in the political restructurings that the victorious Allied powers

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