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Keats's Conscious and Unconscious Reactions to Criticism of Endymion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Writers on Keats, when discussing the central problem of the effects upon the poet of the contemptuous criticism directed against Endymion and against Keats personally, have presented various and often contradictory opinions. The two extreme views, namely, that Keats was killed by this criticism, or, on the other hand, that he was scarcely touched by it, are no longer regarded as tenable. The current opinion was first stated, I believe, by Sir Sidney Colvin when he wrote:
the reviews of those days, especially the Edinburgh and Quarterly, had a real power of barring the acceptance and checking the sale of an author's work. What actually happened was that when a year or so later [after Endymion was condemned] Keats began to realise the harm which the reviews had done and were doing to his material prospects, these consequences in his darker hours preyed on him severely and conspired with the forces of disease and passion to his undoing.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945
References
1 John Keats (New York, 1917), p. 316.
2 I am indebted to Dr. Burtrum C. Schiele, Associate Professor of Neuropsychiatry in the University of Minnesota Medical School, for reading this paper with me and making suggestions concerning the psychological matters involved.
3 M. B. Forman, ed., The Letters of John Keats (New York, 1936), p. 30.
4 Ibid., p. 54.
5 Ibid., p. 191.
6 Ibid., p. 318.
7 Quoted by Colvin, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
8 Quoted by Harry Buxton Forman, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats (London, 1889), iv, 402-403.
9 I have already commented on this fact; see my “Two Notes on Hazlitt and Keats,” PMLA, lix (June, 1944), 598.
10 Quoted by Tom Taylor, Life of Haydon (London, 1853), i, 333.
11 Dorothy Hyde Bodurtha and Willard Bissell Pope, edd., Life of John Keats by Charles Armitage Brown (London, 1937), p. 63.
12 Quoted by Colvin, op. cit., pp. 31-32.
13 While I realize that the validity of Haydon's testimony has been questioned, I can find no reason for rejecting it on this particular point, and several reasons, as will appear, for accepting it.
14 Quoted by C. L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), i, 195.
15 Adonais, a Life of John Keats (London, [1937?]), p. 198.
16 See George L. Marsh and Newman I. White, “Keats and the Periodicals of His Time,” Modern Philology, xxxii (August, 1934), 37-53.
17 See Bodurtha and Pope, ed. cit., p. 26.
18 Quoted by Harry Buxton Forman, ed. cit., iii, 364.
19 Ibid., i, 350.
20 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., pp. 212 ff.
21 Quoted by Finney, op. cit., ii, 694.
22 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 227.
23 Tom Taylor, op. cit., ii, 9. The order in which Haydon gave the statements in his reminiscence seems certainly to indicate that he was speaking of a period which preceded the death of Tom Keats, on December 1, 1818, to which Haydon refers on the same page.
24 Loc. cit. Considering this testimony objectively, one is inclined to believe that Haydon had no motive for misrepresenting the truth in a private journal; that his testimony agrees generally with other testimony, that Haydon would not write falsely at this time when he had just heard of Keats's death; and that he would not have repeated his statement a month later, in his letter to Miss Mitford of April 21, 1821, if he had not regarded it as true.
25 Quoted by Harry Buxton Forman, ed. cit., iii, 386.
26 Both Clarke and Severn are quoted by Bodurtha and Pope, ed. cit., pp. 33-34.
27 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 222.
28 Ibid., p. 234.
29 This couplet was not changed in the second edition of Rimini, 1817.
30 For a study of the influence of Rimini on Keats, see Finney, op. cit., i, 103 ff. and p. 194.
31 The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), p. 39.
32 Ibid., pp. 60-61.
33 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., pp. 87-88. To avoid overuse of sic I refrain from indicating all of Keats's peculiarities of spelling and punctuation.
34 Ibid., p. 252.
35 Ibid., pp. 52-53.
36 Ibid., pp. 231-232.
37 Ibid., pp. 220-229 and the footnotes.
38 Ibid., p. 234.
39 Ibid., pp. 232-234. Earlier Keats had said in a letter to Reynolds that “the voice and the shape of a Woman has haunted me these two days,” p. 217; and it is highly probable that he was speaking of “Charmian” here also.
40 Charmian's conversation with the Soothsayer (i, 2) will serve as an illustration:
Char. Good now, some excellent fortune! Let me be married to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all; let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage; find me to marry me with Octavius Caesar, and companion me with my mistress… .
Sooth. You have seen and prov'd a fairer former fortune
Than that which is to approach.
Char. Then, belike, my children shall have no names; prithee, how many boys and wenches must I have?
Sooth. If every of your wishes had a womb,
And fertile every wish, a million.
41 See Freud, op. cit., pp. 46-61.
42 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 233.
43 The first connection chronologically is that Hunt had dedicated Rimini to Byron. But this remote association seems to be of no significance here.
44 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 215.
45 Ibid., p. 142. Forman notes that Byron, in Manfred, i, 1, 10, wrote “Sorrow is knowledge.”
46 Ibid., p.240.
47 Loc. cit.
48 Ibid., p. 241.
49 Keats's engagement to Fanny Brawne, scholars have agreed, probably took place on December 25, 1818. Later Fanny Brawne referred to this Christmas day as “the happiest day I had ever then spent,” and Amy Lowell seems to have good reason for interpreting the remark as proof that the two became engaged then. See her John Keats (Boston, 1925), ii, 148.
50 See M. B. Forman, ed. cit., pp. 217-218, n. 4.
51 See, e.g., idem, p. 302.
52 He wrote to his brother on January 2, 1819, “I never forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman—but that is a fever—” Ibid., p. 261.
53 Ibid., p. 263, from 'Ever let the Fancy roam.“
54 Ibid., pp. 382-383.
55 Ibid., p. 272.
56 Ibid., p. 303.
57 Ibid., pp. 312-313.
58 Ibid., p. 285.
59 Finney, op. cit., i, xv.
60 Op. cit., ii, 564.
61 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 318.
62 The desire for death is a well recognized and common neurotic wish that has been explained as a distorted form of over-intense desires for fame and success of all kinds, including sexual gratification.
63 See my paper, “Keats, Robertson, and ‘That Most Hateful Land,‘” PMLA, lix (March, 1944), 184-199.
64 M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 338.
65 It must be remembered that Keats was not yet suffering from tuberculosis, or not known to be; his first hemorrhage occurred on February 3, 1820. “Feverish,” as Keats uses the term, is emotional rather than physical in reference, or, better, it is a psychosomatic term with both psychological and physical significance.
66 I refer to this point because of Keats's self-consciousness in regard to his being only five feet tall. The first fact that he mentions when he gives George a detailed description of Fanny Brawne is that “She is about my height.” See M. B. Forman, ed. cit., p. 254.
67 Op. cit., ii, 171.
68 Quoted by Finney, op. cit., ii, 691.
69 Ibid., ii, 690.
70 Ibid., ii, 694.
71 The Poetical Works of John Keats (Oxford, 1939), pp. 236-256.