Aaron Hagstrom

Aaron Hagstrom

12-7-2011

Long Essay

Keats and Intensity

What poetic and thematic techniques does John Keats use to convey intense emotion through ‘Endymion?’ I define literary intensity as a work’s ability to makethe reader a participant and and co-creator. We must first examine Keats’ philosophical beliefs and worldview as conveyed through his extensive correspondence, in order to get a sense of his scope for ‘Endymion.’ Then, by a close reading of ‘Endymion,’ we can attempt to see what literary techniques create the intensity. We can see this in the context of his own relevant works like the ‘Odes,’‘Sleep and Poetry,’ and the ‘Eve of St. Agnes.’

In a letter to Bailey on March 12, 1818, Keats wrote of the necessity of intensity in his poetry: ‘probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardency of the pursuer—being in itself nothing’ (qtd. In Ende 59). If any poem were created out of nothing, Endymion would qualify: 4,000 lines created out of a few lines of story. Intensity was therefore vital to the poem; it creates what Jones calls ‘stuntedness’—a heart-certainty about nothing. As Ende puts it, ‘All truth is contained in, and attention bent upon, the feel he has of them’ (10), which is why Endymion’s meaning is so dependent on its sensory and ethereal language.

The language of ‘Endymion’ can be seen in light of the style of the Greek philosopher Longinus whose theory of words ‘underlies the typical romantic theory of poetry in general’ according to M.H. Abrams (Abrams 132). Sublimity, for Longinus, is the result of an ‘inspired moment of passion’ which is evoked through short passages that come upon the reader with ‘speed, power, and intensity’ (Longinus qtd. In Abrams 133). God’s proclamation in the Book of Genesis—‘Let there be light’—would fall under this category. This classical principle is in accord with Keats’ belief that ‘poetry should surprise by fine excess rather than by singularity,’ serving to make the reader ‘breathless rather than content’ (qtd. In Abrams 136). One of the keys to Keats’ lightning-likedepiction is ekphrasis—intense depictions of other art forms like paintings. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is a mature example of Keats’ usage. Grant Scott in The Sculpted Word believes that this poem can be seen as a painting because of its ‘static pictures, opulent enumerations of colours and foods and music’ (Scott 89) in the midst of silence—no sound except for a ‘great deal of quiet breathing, waiting and listening’ (Scott 89). ‘Endymion’ similarly has many quiet, set-piece bower scenes as when Endymion first sees Adonis. And throughout, there is a curious quiet, only broken now and then by gentle sounds of nature. In the passage I.89-106, the forest is full of whispers and sighs, intermixed with the sounds of birds and other animals. There are the breathing sounds of ‘whispering blade of grass,’ a ‘wailful gnat’ and ‘bees bustling’ and a wren lightly rustling’ (III. 345).Keats’ quiet, painterly-like display of images conveys peace, lulling the mind of the reader, and the quiet bower becomes a place to escape the world in dreams and thus a meeting place between real and divine.

Touching, seeing, hearing, and religious-like experiences trump everything intellectual. The Romantics privileged ‘feel’ as a means of depicting personal crisis. This is certainly the case with ‘Endymion.’ Endymion is perpetually in the midst of an emotional crisis as he struggles between the extremes of pleasure and pain, melancholy and joy, chaos and harmony. He is kept from regaining his comfortable former status as a hunter and ruler by potent dreams and visions of Cynthia that make him ‘mad’ with emotion (I. 175-80; 475-80, 530). His desire for pleasure is perpetually upset by its ephemerality. He is ‘as though by beauty slain’ (IV. 98). He ‘hurls his lance from place to place’ and counts time by ‘the strokes of the lone woodcutter’ (I.930; II.50-1).

Keats makes the reader a participant in Endymion’s experience, by making the reader supremely dependent on emotions. While composing ‘Endymion,’ Keats was developing his idea of ‘negative capability’—the idea that the best poet is the one with no identity or self-consciousness, but perfectly content in a state of sensation and spiritual experience. In a letter dated September 1818, Keats speaks of the poet as possessing the unique capability to live in doubt without an ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ because of his faith in the ‘holiness of the heart’s affections’ (KL I:184-5 qtd. In Ou 2; KL I:193-94 qtd. In Ou 1). Keats was advocating that the best reader and writer was a kind of actor—ever changing based on his emotions. It spurred Keats to say in a letter to his brother George Keats, ‘according to my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily’ (Waldoff 32). To be these characters involved being ‘passive and receptive to the influence of others’ (KL. I:232 qtd. In Ou 3). And because of this passive state, the poet doesn’t have an identity except as what Keats would call a ‘camelion poet,’ one perpetually changing. However, there is a tragic vision of humanity allied with negative capability. Suffering is an essential piece of identity because it lets the hearts ‘feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways (KL II: 102 qtd. In OU 7). To become the nightingale in the Ode, separated from suffering, Keats must either lose himself in ‘easeful death’ or on the ‘viewless wings of poesy.’ Keats saw the world as a ‘vale of soul-making’—a redemptive scheme in which suffering was necessary for identity and feeling. Keats says in an 1819 letter to Reynolds, ‘Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’ (qtd. In Allott 515). The soul journeys between two rooms in a dark mansion, from the ‘the infant or thoughtless chamber’ to the ‘the chamber of maiden thought’ where good and evil are indistinguishable (NS 124). In this room, suffering is a necessary good. This chamber comes under the name of ‘cave of quietude’ in ‘Endymion’; here the soul is lulled because ‘anguish does not sting, nor pleasure pall’ (IV.526; IV. 557). Outside of this cavern, there is a clear line between pain and pleasure.For instance, he finds beauty has two faces. It is what beckons him to kneel, bow, and pray in adoration, but at the same time, it is a thing of fear.In his first direct contact with Cynthia, he cannot help admiring her beauty, but he is ever fearful of losing his sight—a self-consciousness, which Keats labels a ‘second self’ (I.653-61 qtd. in Ende 63). Beauty is essential for Endymion—as clearly laid out in the opening lines of Book I—‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ For this beauty is ‘bound to us so fast’ with existence that without it ‘we die’ (I. 27 qtd. in Ende 67). Yet,he must suffer to attain it. By loving the Indian princess, he must sacrifice his ability to love others: ‘Say beautifullest, shall I never think? Oh thou…could make my watchful care close up its bloodshot eyes, nor see despair!’ (IV, 305-08 qtd. In Ende 69).

It is as though Keats is so eager, even frenetic, for the reader to feel images or scenes that he can’t write fast enough. We see this urgency in Book I, where Keats, the narrator, expresses his desire to finish his story before the ‘wintry season, bare and hoary.’ Or in the dizzying page-and-a-half long praise of Pan, Keats the magician, directly addresses the thing he is trying to conjure up, exclaiming: ‘Be still a symbol of immensity, a firmament reflected in the sea, an element filling the space between’ (I. 261-306).’ The power of words to bring things to life is witnessed strikingly in the Adonis scene; voices break the spell and bring Adonis to life ‘Come! Come! Arise! Awake!’ (II.501-2). Endymion’s words even have the power to break the spell, which has oppressed Glaucus for one thousand years. Keats creates urgency through his questions: ‘Brainsick shepherd prince, what promise hast thou faithful guarded since the day of sacrifice?’ These are reminiscent of the ecstatic questions of ‘Sleep and Poetry’: ‘what is higher beyond thought than thee…more strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal? Waldoff claims that Keats uses these unanswered questions as a ‘bridge between fantasy and reality’ (109), to blur dream and reality—the question because it is unanswered frees the reader to wonder, to step beyond the bounds of reality. This is very obviously evidenced in the ‘Ode to Psyche’ line, ‘surely I dreamt today,’ upon which doubt is immediately cast with ‘or did I see the winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?’ (qtd. In Waldoff 109). In ‘Endymion,’ there is no clear line between dream and reality, and similar questions are asked such as ‘What misery most drowningly doth sing in lone Endymion’s ear, now he has raught the goal of consciousness?’ (II.281-3); but it is only intensity of dream and imagination that brings certitude. It is only when Endymion feels the power to ‘dream deliciously’ in the cavern, for instance, that he finds his unknown goddess close by to ‘entwine hoveringly’ (II.817). Only then can she repeatedly overpower him with pleasure, leading to fits of fainting and exclamations like, ‘twas too much! Methought’ (I. 635-7). In particular, he seems to believe that this intensity can be so great that it may lead to death or what he calls in ‘Psyche,’ ‘happiness carried to an extreme’ (qtd. In Waldoff 104). Dreams are a means of ridding oneself of the knowing reality, which is why he can say of Cynthia, ‘Oh let me by some sweet dreaming flee to her entrancements,’ (II.703). This dream theme is common in his odes as well—here it is a means of escaping the ‘mutability of human existence’ (Waldoff 63).

This state of being overwhelmed is often expressed through metaphors that express synaesthesia—an overflow of all the senses in quick succession. For instance, as he is soaring with Cynthia, a touch of her hand leads to another sensation of plunging through water and sky and watching stars shoot around him; kissing her lips and seeing the whiteness of her arm leads to a sensation of warm air and scents of flowers. And then soon after, he is over-powered by a sensation of falling, and his feet glancing through flowers. This kind of blending of the senses is seen notably in the metaphor: ‘A shout from the whole multitude arose, that lingered in the air like dying rolls of abrupt thunder, when Ionian shoals of dolphins bob their noses through the brine.’ It is a curious metaphor because it is both auditory and visual—the shout is like thunder, but conditioned on sight and touch—of being with dolphins ‘bobbing’ through the brine (I.310). It is as though the reader is hearing the thunder from the viewpoint of a dolphin.Keats also creates a kind of synaesthesia in combining powerful natural effects with emotion. When melancholy, for instance,nature assumesa mood in which ‘deepest shades were deepest dungeons, heaths,’ and ‘sunny glades were full of pestilent light’ (I.692-95). The season autumn in which ‘Endymion’ is set mirrors the themes of change in that it holds both wonder and death. This is telling considering that Endymion is so much a poem about change. Endymion is perpetually conflicted in his desire for Cynthia—though he appears strong and kingly, he suffers from desire till he is ‘faint smiling like a star through autumn mists’ (I.989).

We find in Keats’ ‘Endymion’ an emotional intensity of language that makes the reader a participant in the poem. This is conveyed throughekphrasis, electrifying invocations to the reader, potent metaphors, and the emphasis on emotions over intellect.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp. OUP: Oxford. 1971. Print.

Gittings, Robert. John Keats. Heinemann: London. 1968. Print.

Jones, John. John Keats’ Dream of Vision. London: Chatto. 1969. Print.

Ou, Li. Keats and Negative Capability. London: Continuum. 2009. Print.

Waldoff, Leon. Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination. UI: Urbana. 1985. Print.

Walsh, William. Introduction to Keats. London: Methuen. 1981. Print.

White, R.S. Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare. London: Athlone. 1987. Print.

Keats, John. Keats’ poetry and prose: authoritative texts, criticism. London: W.W. Norton. 2009. Print.

---. ‘Endymion’

---. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

---. Ode to Psyche’

---. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’

Bibliography

Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in romantic literature. London: Norton. 1973. Print. (UBHU) 2796 e.1610

---. The Correspondent Breeze: essays on English romanticism. New York: Norton. 1984. (UBHU) 2796 d.808

---. The Mirror and the Lamp. OUP: Oxford. 1971. Print.

Bate, W.J. The Stylistic Development of Keats. London: Routledge & K. Paul. 1958. Print.

Bennett, Andrew. Keats, Narrative, and Audience: the posthumous life of writing. Cambridge: CUP, 1994. Print.

Bromwich, David. “Keats and the Aesthetic Ideal.” The Yale Review. 85.4 (2008): 140-5. Print.

Ende, Stuart. Keats and the Sublime. Yale: New Haven. 1976. Print.

Gittings, Robert. John Keats. Heinemann: London. 1968. Print.

Keats, John. Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends. Gutenberg.com. Web. 23 Oct. 2011.

Jones, John. John Keats’ Dream of Vision. London: Chatto. 1969. Print.

Ou, Li. Keats and Negative Capability. London: Continuum. 2009. Print.

Keats, John. Keats’ poetry and prose: authoritative texts, criticism. London: W.W. Norton. 2009. Print.

---. ‘Endymion’

---. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

---. ‘Ode to Melancholy’

---. Ode to Psyche’

---. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’

---. ‘To Autumn’

---. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

---, ‘Ode on Indolence’

Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Faber and Faber. 1998. Print..

Ricks, Christopher. “Keats’ Sources, Keats’ Allusions.” The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Cambridge: CUP. 2001. Print.

Slote, Bernice. Keats and the Dramatic Principle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1958. Print.

Waldoff, Leon. Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination. UI: Urbana. 1985. Print.

Walsh, William. Introduction to Keats. London: Methuen. 1981. Print.

White, R.S. Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare. London: Athlone. 1987. Print.

The Cambridge Companion to Keats. ed. By Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge: CUP. 2001. Print.

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