Pedagogy

Keep on Keatsin’ on; or, Punny Keats

Editor’s Note: As part of the KLP’s ongoing pedagogy initiatives, one of the KLP co-founders, Brian Rejack, has been working with some of the students in his undergraduate romanticism course this semester to have students produce posts for the site. Today’s post is the last in that series. You can read previous ones here and here and here and here.

Spencer Hopkins (Illinois State University)

I’m Spencer (or SPUNcer, as some call me) Hopkins and I am a senior in ISU’s English program. Dr. Rejack’s romanticism class provided a way for me to combine my love of punning and my love of Keats. Throughout the semester I wrote Keats-centered puns on the board in class (and eventually graduated to other kinds of puns). When Dr. Rejack mentioned that I could compile a list of Keats’s puns for the KLP, it was a big boost to my Psyche. No need to write an ode on melancholy, because you’ll find a wealth of Keats’s puns listed below!

  • “The little Gentleman that sometimes lurks in a gossips bowl ought to have come in very likeness of a coasted crab and choaked me outright for not having answered your Letter ere this”—10 May 1817 to Leigh Hunt. Punning on a reference to Midsummer Night’s Dream (“roasted crab”) because Keats was then staying at Margate (on the coast).
  • “I will get over the first part of this (unsaid) Letter as soon as possible”—22 November 1817 to Benjamin Bailey. Playing on “said” meaning something referred to previously.
  • “remember me to each of our Card playing Club–when you die you will all be turned into Dice, and be put in pawn with the Devil–for Cards they crumple up like any King”—22 November 1817 to John Hamilton Reynolds. Playing with terms from cards and chess.
  • “I will not deceive myself that Man should be equal with jove–but think himself very well off as a sort of scullion-Mercury or even a humble Bee”—19 February 1818 to John Hamilton Reynolds. Playing on humility and the bumble-bee (whose name derives from the earlier term, “humble-bee,” which comes from the association with the bee’s humming).
  • “I am your debtor—I must ever remain so—nor do I wish to be clear of my rational debt”—25 May 1818 to Benjamin Bailey. Playing on “national debt” (and indicated with the underlined “r”).
  • “my head is sometimes in such a whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our moments—that I can get into no settle strain in my Letters—My Wig! Burns and sentimentality coming across you and frank Floodgate in the office—O scenery that thou shouldst be crush’d between two Puns–I hope Brown does not put them punctually in his journal –If he does I must sit on the cutty-stool all next winter”—13 July 1818 to John Hamilton Reynolds. Lots going on here!
  • “there are many like Sir F. Burdett who like to sit at the head of political dinners—but there are none prepared to suffer in obscurity for their Country … A man now entitlerd Chancellor has the same honour paid to him whether he be a Hog or a Lord Bacon”—14 October 1818 to George and Georgiana Keats.
  • Basically all of the co-written letter (with Charles Brown) to Charles Dilke from 24 January 1819, including:

“not call Mat Snook a relation to Matt-rass”
“This is grown to a conclusion—I had excellent puns in my head but one bad one from Brown has quite upset me”
“N.B. I beg leaf to withdraw all my Puns—they are all a wash, an base uns—”
“*erratum—a large B   *a Bumble B” (referring to Brown)

  • “She is bon a side a thin young—’Oman”—Feb-May 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats. Describing a “Miss H.” who would eventually marry Georgiana’s brother, Henry Wylie.
  • And several from the long journal letter to George and Georgiana Keats in September 1819:

“attitude is every thing as Fusili said when he took up his leg like a Musket to shoot a Swallow just darting behind his shoulder”— Playing on Fusili’s name and a term for a musket (a fusil).
“As for Pun-making I wish it was as good a trade as pin-making—there is very little business of that sort going on now.”
“No more will notes you will say—but notes are different things—though they make together a Pun mote—as the term goes.”
“for I have discovered that a little girl in the house was the Rappee–I assure you she has nearly make me sneeze.” Playing on a variety of snuff (Rappee) and a girl who had been knocking on the wall in the house where Keats was staying.

Letter #62: To James Rice, 24 March 1818

Editor’s Note: As part of the KLP’s ongoing pedagogy initiatives, one of the KLP co-founders, Brian Rejack, has been working with some of the students in his undergraduate romanticism course this semester to have students research individual letters and write introductory posts for the letters. Today, the first of five such posts scheduled to appear over the next few weeks comes from ISU students Amanda Peters and Ricky King. Enjoy!

Amanda Peters & Ricky King (Illinois State University)

Regular readers of the KLP will know we love firsts. The recipient of today’s letter is not one of the more frequent correspondents, such as John Hamilton Reynolds, or George and Tom Keats. Nope, today we have instead the first letter to James Rice. It is not surprising that Keats would write a letter to Rice, given that they were quite good friends. What is surprising is that more letters weren’t written to Rice, given the nature of their friendship. Only four total letters to Rice exist. One more will come up later this year, in late November just one week before Tom’s death. The two others to Rice appear in December of 1819 and February 1820.

It was well before this point when Keats was first introduced to James Rice. He was a lawyer, like Reynolds, the mutual friend who brought Rice and Keats together. Rice was also a member of the literary society known as the Zetosophian Society, in which Reynolds and Benjamin Bailey were also involved. Although it comes long after the writing of today’s letter, we can gather an idea of the high esteem in which Keats held Rice from the long journal letter to George and Georgiana from 17-27 September 1819, written after Keats had spent a month with Rice on the Isle of Wight in July. Keats tells of visiting Rice in London soon after their stay in Shanklin:

I was out and every body was out. I walk’d about the Streets as in a strange land–Rice was the only one at home–I pass’d some time with him. I know him better since we have liv’d a month together in the isle of Wight. He is the most sensible, and even wise Man I know–he has a few John Bull prejudices; but they improve him. His illness is at times alarming. We are great friends, and there is no one I like to pass a day with better.

Although they may not have exchanged many letters, it seems as though Keats nonetheless relished the company and companionship of his sensible friend. Indeed, it seems that just a few weeks after today’s letter, Rice joined Keats in Teignmouth, because he gave Keats a copy of Mateo Aleman’s picaresque tale, Guzman de Alfarache. Rice inscribed the book with this message: “John Keats / From his Friend / Js Rxxx / 20th April 1818.” Like so many Keats materials, this gift from Rice now resides at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

An image Guzman de Alfarache from EEBO. The EEBO book scanned was Lowell’s copy of the book. She purchased it so that she could copy all the annotations that were present in the copy owned by Keats. Notice Lowell’s note in the top left indicating the inscription was Rice’s: “[In Rice’s handwriting]”

With regards to the provenance of this letter, it’s one we’ve covered before. The estate of Keats’s publisher, John Taylor, was sold at Sotheby’s in 1903. Many of the Keats-related items were purchased by Bernard Quaritch on behalf of Amy Lowell. Bernard Alexander Christian Quaritch was a German-born bookseller and collector. He relocated to London in 1840s to pursue bookselling and ultimately began a business in the same decade. Following his death towards the end of the nineteenth century, his son, Bernard Alfred Quaritch, continued the bookselling legacy, eventually collecting some of Keats’s letters. Quaritch, it seems, acted as a purchaser on behalf of Amy Lowell at the sale of the Taylor estate in 1903. (The Quaritch business still exists today– you can read about the company and its history here: https://www.quaritch.com/about/our-history/.)

While we’ve mentioned Amy Lowell before, let’s devote a bit more space to her today, given that she was and forever will be a true Friend of Keats. She was a poet herself, who, like many poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century, looked to the English Romantics for inspiration and guidance. She happened to gain an affinity towards Keats, and over the course of many years she managed to acquire a pretty sizable collection of manuscripts of Keats’s letters and poems (including today’s letter to Rice). Her writing career was bookended in a way by Keats: her first volume of poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, took its title from Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonais; and one of Lowell’s last works was her biography of Keats, published in 1925.

But to the letter itself. It takes some interesting turns as Keats discusses Milton. Apparently Milton “came into these parts” around the time he wrote “his Answer to Salmasius” (also know as Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, published in 1651). Keats hears about a meadow in which Milton “rolled himself, for three whole hours.” As a result, “in all the seven acres for seven years,” according to Keats’s informant, “not a nettle sprang up.” However, Milton’s rolling was said to have created “a new sort of plant,” a “white thorn” that is “of a thornless nature”. These white thorns are used by “the Bucks of the present to rap their Boots withall.” The Oxford English Dictionary helps us by explaining that at the time Keats wrote this letter a “Buck” would refer to “A gay, dashing fellow; a dandy, fop, ‘fast’ man.” Keats is himself being a bit of a gay and dashing fellow with his playful speculations on Milton’s long-lasting effects on a meadow in Devon.

Keats turns a bit more serious as he goes into a discussion of the scholarly debate between Milton and Salmasius, which then leads him into a broader contemplation about the difficulty of intellectual labor. The struggle he identifies is that the our thoughts are always restless. He writes, “What a happy thing it would be if we could settle our thoughts, make up our minds on any matter in five minutes and remain content.” Keats continues to compare the disharmony caused by a restless mind and whether or not it is better than having a rested (but limited) mind, using a wonderful extended metaphor of the mind as a “mental Cottage.” Eventually he arrives at the necessity of unsettled thoughts, as Keats discusses how he cannot rest his mind because of his attraction to the “Loadstone Concatenation.” This magnetic force does not allow Keats to cannot rest his mind because he can’t ignore his thoughts, which are endlessly led on in an unbroken and unending chain of associations.

Keats’s concatenation of thoughts continues as he ponders the question, “‘Did Milton do more good or ha[r]m to the World?”. His joke revolves around the idea that just as the vastness of our universe is composed of “the same quantity of matter,” there must have been “a certain portion of intellect” assigned to the universe at creation. But Milton, with all his impressive intellectual “gormandizing,” might not have left anything for the rest of us to eat! Oh well. We daresay Keats’s own intellectual playfulness, here and elsewhere, proves that a few scraps were leftover after Milton had his feast.

The KLP Pedagogy Series Presents: Keats, Travel, and Aesthetics

[Today’s post is the first installment of the KLP Pedagogy Series, in which we feature student work, work about pedagogy, and other Keats-related things that intersect with some of the vibrant teaching happening in and around romanticism today. Our first author in the series, Victoria Rego, is an undergraduate student studying English and Creative Writing at the College of Charleston, where she also works as a writing lab consultant and has completed grant funded research on the intersection of Victorian Literature and Popular Tourism. Her short fiction has been featured in Bully, from KY Story, with more of her fiction forthcoming.

Read more about this series on our Pedagogy page, and contact us with pedagogy related ideas as you have them!]

Victoria Rego
College of Charleston

Re: Keats’s 17/18 April 1817 letter to J. H. Reynolds

Keats was twenty-one when he wrote a letter to J.H. Reynolds in the spring of 1817. It was the seventeenth of April and he was settling into his lodgings, newly arrived from London to the Isle of Wight, in hopes of making progress on his first grand-scale poem: Endymion. This poetic pilgrimage was, in part, an escape from the bleakness of London, that “jumbled heap of murky buildings,” as Keats refers to it in “O Solitude,” written only a few months earlier (line 1). True poetic inspiration, Keats believed, would require a different sort of setting. Rosemary Hill writes that William Gilpin’s idea of the picturesque was one catalyst that sent Keats to the Isle of Wight: “no matter how he might grumble about the Picturesque … Keats was following the routes prescribed” in Gilpin’s works (122). Gilpin’s essays on the Picturesque, published mostly in the latter half of the 18th century, distinguished between an everyday notion of beauty, and beauty that “please[s] from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting” (3). Picturesque beauty stands, in many significant ways, in opposition to the philosopher Edmund Burke’s Beautiful, which was smooth, neat, and clearly composed. The Picturesque, in Gilpin’s view, was defined by roughness, crooked edges, and a look of untidiness. While Palladian architecture is undoubtedly beautiful, Gilpin argues, “should we give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet instead of the chisel: we must beat one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps” (7). The Picturesque, originally affiliated with landscape paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and JMW Turner, soon spread to many facets of English culture, such as landscape gardening. David Lowenthal and Hugh C. Prince, in “English Landscape Tastes” wrote that “landscapes are formed by landscape tastes. People in any country see their terrain through preferred and accustomed spectacles, and tend to make it over as they see it” (186). While landscapes can seem like something objective—it’s easy to assume that geography and the physical things that make up the natural landscape just are what they are, irrespective of human intention—what the Romantics knew best was that the human imagination is capable of reshaping any and everything. For this reason, popular writers of the time began to infuse picturesque sentiments into their poems and narratives. These writers soon found that this movement, inspired by the imagination, was readily transferable to linguistic mediums: “the picturesque tends always towards narrative, while the Beautiful and the Sublime depend on stasis” (Hill 124). The conflict between motion and stasis, imagination and reality, sublimity and narrative, is a central one to Keats’ poetry, one that relies on the aesthetic impulse, always, for its realization.

I was twenty-one when I made my first trip abroad to study at the University of Nottingham in the English midlands. For me, travel was a thing of novels: a place of escape in the imagination, not an actualization. Up to that point, much like Keats, I had never left my home country—had never even traveled to the West Coast—and had spent the vast majority of my days in the same tristate area. After my arrival in the Manchester airport, I took a public bus to Nottingham. It took over three sleep-deprived hours to arrive at the place that would become my home for the next five months. Amid bouts of exhausted delirium, I was in awe.

A view of the Midlands scenery. Photo by the author.

The midlands seemed to me a post card: the grass so green it seemed impossible, the effortless hills divided by low-lying stone walls that had compartmentalized the land for centuries and were here and there falling into a crumpled heap, weather-beaten sheep huddled in loose clusters, the sky a smoky blue that seeped into everything. It was both something I felt I knew intimately, but had never seen before—“Was it a vision, or a waking Dream? Do I wake or sleep?”

It seems that Keats felt a similar sentiment while on his journeys across the Isle of Wight. In his letter to Reynolds, Keats writes of a walk he took the previous day to Shanklin:

Shanklin is a most beautiful place—sloping wood and meadow ground reaches around the Chine, which is a cleft between the Cliffs of the depth of nearly 300 feet at least. This cleft is filled with trees & bushes in the narrow part; and as it widens becomes bare, if it were not for primroses on one side, which spread to the very verge of the Sea, and some fishermen’s huts on the other, perched midway in the Ballustrades of beautiful green hedges along their steps down the sands. (130)

Keats’s depiction of the Picturesque starts with nature: the “Chine” filled with trees and bushes” lined with primroses. His depiction ends with the modest human footprint: the fishermen’s huts and “beautiful green hedges.” Rosemary Hill writes that while nature in its pure state may be Sublime, “it could not be Picturesque: the Picturesque [is] a contingent state, secondary to the Sublime and the Beautiful” (124). While the Sublime is revealed in natural scenes which are unable to be fully conceptualized, thereby shoving mankind’s mortality back in the viewer’s face, the Picturesque opens up as something warm, inviting, and rich, exactly because of human presence. The Picturesque delights in human history and the stamp of human activity, although limited. Picturesque scenes, while primarily arising in the bucolic setting, no matter how “their creators strive to conceal their handiwork,” are always “inherently artificial” (Lowenthal 195). The Picturesque setting was just as contrived—whether through actual handiwork, or through the imagination of the spectator—as any landscape painting or pastoral poem.

On one of my weekend journeys in Spring, I visited Dartmoor, a place with a rich literary history. Among the desolate, mist-covered moors, it is simple to see why those from Devon might see themselves as a particularly superstitious people; their landscape has more than enough spaces which seem well fit for ghostly inhabitants. My guide took me to Buckfastleigh Church, a catalyst for Devonshire superstitions for decades.

Buckfastleigh Church. Photo by the author.

The church has been rebuilt and burnt down multiple times over the centuries, with the latest disaster completely destroying the church’s roof. On my visit, I wasn’t the only one there to admire the ruin: I saw locals wandering amidst the grave stones, gazing up at the church tower which seemed to me solid and formidable against the skeleton of the nave. I watched a magpie balance himself on an empty window tucked into a disembodied wall standing at the end of the grounds and separating the church from the thick forest around it. The walls were engulfed in a miasma of vines and lichens. The irregular heads of moss marbled tombstones poked out of weed infested grass. The place was eerie, but it had a beauty. Could this be called Picturesque? My guide told me that the place was popular for photoshoots, for weddings, special occasions, and films.

In his letter to Reynolds, Keats praises the beauty of Carisbrooke Castle. He writes: “I have not seen many specimens of Ruins—I don’t think however I shall ever see one to surpass Carisbrooke Castle” (131). Lowenthal and Prince note that “the ruin was a landscape feature especially favored by lovers of the picturesque” (196). The ruin unites the Picturesque with the Antiquarian, another sentiment favored by the English Romantics. When Gilpin wrote of ruins, he argued that they were, although not necessarily more beautiful than complete specimens of architectural master work, favored subjects by painters. The rough surfaces of ruins diffused light in a way that was easier to replicate in paint. While this could be part of the Picturesque fascination with ruins, even Gilpin knew it was far from the whole story. The Picturesque love of ruins can be understood in light of the movement’s philosophy as a whole. The Picturesque “proposed a reciprocal relationship between material reality and subjective experience;” between the physical world and the imagination of the perceiver. (Hill 121) The ruin is a physical manifestation of this reciprocal relationship—an object built by a past peoples, no longer serving its original purpose (whether secular, religious, or political) and having been at least partially taken over by the natural landscape. In his letter, Keats praises the beauty of the ruinous castle:

The trench is o’ergrown with the smoothest turf, and the walls with ivy—the keep within side is one Bower of ivy—a colony of Jackdaws have been there many years—I dare say I have seen many a descendant of some old cawer who peeped through the Bars at Charles the first, when he was there in Confinement. (131)

Keats admires the melding of the natural world with the world of human activity; he delights in seeing the Jackdaws overtaking the castle, and the ivy claiming its walls. Hill argues that the Picturesque relies on a “greeting of the spirit’ in which self and spectacle meet” (Hill 125). It is in the ruin that the human self and the natural spectacle meet and find aesthetic harmony.

For all of Keats’s ruminations on the landscape, one aspect seems to unabashedly steal his attention. When he gets to the waterfront, the poet seems to lose his words: “but the sea, Jack, the sea” (131). Although sometimes depicted in picturesque landscape paintings, the sea rests largely within the Burkeian Sublime. The attempt to capture the Sublime in language is a defining feature of Keats’ works, such as the Elgin Marbles Sonnets, his Hyperion poems, and Endymion. Throughout his short writing career, Keats struggled to find a balance between the impulse to capture the Sublime and a recognition of the impossibility of the task. However, rather than give up his mission to capture that which defies language, Keats struggles on, as in the sonnet, “On the Sea” that concludes his letter to Reynolds:

It keeps eternal Whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns; till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
often ’tis in such gentle temper found
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell,
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh ye who have your eye-balls vex’d and tir’d,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea
Oh ye whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody—
Sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quir’d— (132)

In the sonnet, Keats prescribes the ocean as a soothe for those who are “vex’d and tir’d,” writing that a look at the sea will help one’s soul to “start,” will possibly reawaken the spectator. In his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth argues for a new category of aesthetic achievement, the “Tranquil Sublime.” Wordsworth believed that the Tranquil Sublime could be seen in the English Lake District. He argued that the Sublime had become synonymous with “enormity,” and so sought to recategorize aesthetic distinctions in a way more suiting to aesthetic merit. For Wordsworth, neither the Sublime nor the Picturesque were satisfying aesthetic tendencies; the Tranquil Sublime was his way of mediating between these two, collapsing the soothing elements of the Picturesque with the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Sublime. Keats was as skeptical as Wordsworth towards the Picturesque movement, and as Rosemary Hill notes, was vocal about his dislike of Picturesque tourism (122). However, regardless of Keats’ disdain for the Popular Picturesque movement, it is this same inclination to seek out picturesque locations that goes on to fuel some of his poetry. But his treatment of the Sublime element, the ocean, complicates the Picturesque. While the Picturesque is an aesthetic that revels in the traces of human agency in a beautiful scene, Keats’ treatment of the ocean in his sonnet is something contrary to this. In the sonnet, Keats writes that a person feeling the pressures of the world should “sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth, and brood / Until ye start” (line 13 132). Keats isn’t suggesting that one can either tame the ocean, or leave one’s mark on it; rather, he suggests that aesthetic pleasure comes from the contemplation of the object in its natural state. As in his Elgin Marbles sonnets, there is an underlying anxiety that something so beautiful can only reduce one to passivity. This possibility seems, at times, to haunt Keats. However, this letter and its sonnet reveal a reconciliation between the fear and awe inspired by the sublime and his tranquil appreciation of the Picturesque. Here, at least temporarily, Keats seems to find a kind of aesthetic equilibrium.

Endymion, the epic poem he starts on the Isle of Wight, begins: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” In his private correspondence, one can see clearly the joy he takes in beauty, whether it be Sublime, Picturesque, or somewhere in between. Perhaps this is something that made Keats, so scorned by the critics of his time, charming to many readers; his affection for the Beautiful seems at first so simple and genuine. However, it would be wrong to say his aesthetic impulse is simple. Keats is able to straddle these different aesthetic tendencies, recognizing their merit and pointing to their inadequacies, but eternally believing in the transformative powers of beauty in all its forms.

 

***This response was written for a class taught by Kathleen Beres Rogers at the College of Charleston. Below, she reflects on how the essay emerged from that context.***

One of the joys of my teaching career has been reading John Keats’s letters with my undergraduate students at the College of Charleston; often, our students work two jobs, struggle with young adult angst, and want their writing to “mean something”: in other words, Keats is a natural fit.

In the fall, I taught my usual Keats course with an emphasis on sympathy and the sublime; although I did give them some ideas for paper topics, I read their responses to our readings and suggested research based on their own areas of interest. In order to promote interest in Keats’s letters, I showed them some essays on the KLP page and suggested they attempt something similar. Tori, a philosophy minor with interests in creative writing, aesthetics and literary tourism, gravitated toward this particular letter and submitted this essay as her final paper for the course. It is undergraduate work, but that’s what (to me) makes it a compelling response to a young man attempting to find his own place in the world.

 

Works Cited

Cox, Jeffrey N., editor. Keats’s Poetry and Prose. W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Gilpin. William. Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808.

Hill, Rosemary. “Keats, Antiquarianism, and the Picturesque.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 64, no. 2, 2014, pp. 119-137.

Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821. Edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 130-132.

Lowenthal, David and Hugh C. Prince. “English Landscape Tastes.” Geographical Review , vol. 55, no. 2, 1965, pp. 186-222.

Ottum, Lisa. “Discriminating Vision: Rereading Place in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes.” Prose Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2012, pp. 167-184.