John Keats and Poetry

Keats, in his Sleep and Poetry, enumerates the aspects of a rather intriguing fancy of his. If, for ten years, he could overwhelm himself in poesy, he would make a certain set of ventures into a set of symbolic worlds; the first of these locales ‘seen in long perspective’ being the realms of Flora (the Roman goddess of the vegetative) and Old Pan (a player of piping music). Here we see exhibited a bona fide paradise, complete with near enough to all the archetypal pleasures conjured within man as paradisiac. Upon first inclination, the paradisiac ensorcels young John, but before long this fruitful setting comes to its own fruition as he makes his pass at them and continues on to what he feels to be a ‘nobler life’. This land is a craggy land contained ever beneath the sternum and existing ever within the ventricles and aortas of Man. This is revelatory in a number of ways; however, perhaps the most endearing, if not the most pertinent, conclusion to be drawn from these mere 29 lines is that within them is the entire outline of Keats’s poetical formulae. Within the golden lands of Keats’s poetical ingenuity a reader will first come, and perhaps be ensorcelled, to the paradisiac lilt of all his verse. Keats never fully abandoned his once encompassing deities, and was ever to be a votive of the sensual and lively. The darkest of tales could pass through the tendons of Keats and out the quill in his hand to still be nothing short of a sensual revelry – but while it could never seem to fall short of such marks, and he indeed held all the extrinsic worlds in his notes, the intrinsic is yet still to be passed through. It is quite possible to dwell within Keats’s verse for 10 years and note, and enjoy, his marked devotion to Old Pan and Flora. To do so, however, is to jilt the second realm so latent within the first – the craggy hearts of man are shrouded in the sensuality that Keats held always dear to him, even though it is quite clear that what engages his gaze is no longer quite so sensual, nor so endearing. The truly remarkable facet of Keats is that within him the pernicious and aching elements of the latter world are communicated, realized, through the former, and this would be exactly how Keats came to achieve his particular breed of immortality and universality: a concinnity of the disdainable and the lovable which has yet to again be achieved within the literary canon in quite so stable a manner, and all readers of Keats must first pass through the sensual worlds to arrive at the crux of Keats and his poetry and his poetry’s intent.

In The Eve of St. Agnes, as well, we see a bouquet of roses with one withered at the center. The entire poem being a sensual feast which expounds the mutability of life and the ephemeral nature of the Present, we see still that that is not the world of Pan, who lives in the instant. Through its various elements the message is perhaps accentuated; namely, the symbolic usage of prayer throughout. These people embroiled in strife of heart and world are continually praying, and it is not a leap of great proportions to purport that the concept itself at least meant something to Keats. I would venture to say that, whatever it may have meant to the Poet, it certainly portrays with aptitude the character of the poem’s message. The message itself is reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon view of the world; especially the stance that at the end of it all things are decidedly undecided and may often turn to the favor of the unfavorable. The prayer, then, would reflect this in that these men and women are hopeful through travail. Whether it be in God or Love, these people have faith and perseverance in the face of ‘the storm’. They have the realism to recognize the world as an unruly and objective environment, and, what’s more, the strength of character to assert themselves within its Sturm and Drang. Prayer, then, is a buffer and a bolster to the purpose of both enduring and crafting the worlds about them: the sensual and the irrepressibly So.

But what of how Keats himself dealt with these facts he revealed to himself and then us? How could a mind palpate its own innerworkings? An insight we mayhap attain is found in a particular Confucian line of the Analects: “Personal cultivation begins with poetry, is established by rites, and perfected by music.” With this in tow we may purvey at Keats’s mind, the minds of Poets, and posit that Poets are merely roses who can ran-dance in a ritual worship of the World’s song. They cultivate themselves, and those of us within the same garden may also gain sustenance through this ritual they have, and continually do, execute with the music of the Self and the World. Were we to distend, with what bit of propriety we may uphold while doing so, this statement of Confucius’s, we might arrive at the conclusion that Poets are a people representative of the ultimate form of self-cultivation. When Keats then proceeds to ‘build a fane in some untrodden region’ of his mind, he is delving his Psyche, adulating it, recording it, devoting his essence to it in piety. He is cultivating his Self and the integral nature of his Self within the World.

The term Self, however, it should be noted, in no way entails anything necessarily positive. The Self, the craggy realms of Man’s heart’s innards, is what Keats concerned himself with, upon cloaking it with the worldly. This, so far as Keats may be concerned, is the nature of Art itself. A reflection of the World, with all its triumphs and travails; an expression of  a thought, an instance, an era, a person: That is Art. Just as well, however, it is important to note that, while art may be said to be nothing less than this, it is certainly never more. With his infamous Ode On A Grecian Urn, for instance, Keats is engaged in a meditative look at a pictorial encapsulation of an epoch, through a remnant of the epoch itself. The Urn contains many things to take hold of and ponder, many things to consider to their fullest, but nothing truly expressive of all the World. Works of Art are ways of divvying the world into various perspective allotments, but can never be considered a comparable replacement for the world itself. As Art is necessarily an imprint of the Self and the World, there is no such thing as ‘Art for Art’s sake’, and neither is there anything vital, no matter how vivified, within Art. Art is an adjunct ramification of Life, and Life an adjunct ramification of the World, so far as humans may be concerned; or, at the very least, Keats.

In Keats’s To Autumn we see a literary slice of Life and World. Within its three stanzas we find a phasing of Autumn, a view of the planet’s transitional modulations and man’s place within them. The entire poem is a great and continuous enactment through a series of instances, often reflecting great and indolent inaction. Through the thresher who does not thresh, through the reaper who does not reap, through the gleaner who does not glean, through the mere observing of a cider spigot being bled of its last juices, we are moving through Autumn. The World is thrice represented, and with each of the World’s manifestations in stanzas an instance or two is caught, and the poem moved forward, alongside time. Action through inaction is the mode of the poem, a continual observance of the varied actions and inactions of Autumn. Something is always done, but it is not always Man who does it, and nor is it always anything but the continual wearing of time on the World. The world goes on, in spite of man. Arguably, this poem is one of the more sensual to ever grace our anthologies, and yet its latent portrayal of inward and outward truths is irrevocably, if latently, present. Keats was never to compose a poem which was to carry itself onward without an expostulated or implied inquiry into the truth of the World, and Keats was yet again never to compose a poem in which the material world was excluded. The press of Winter in To Autumn is the press of the storm in The Eve of St. Agnes, and all of them amounted to Keats’s divvying of the world into various perspectives. And always the verses were to cultivate the perspectives of John Keats himself.