Letter #68: To John Hamilton Reynolds, 27 April 1818

Keats’s spring stay in Teignmouth is fast coming to an end. Today’s letter is the penultimate one sent during the visit, the last one coming on 3 May, a day or two before he and Tom head back to London. His vacay has been a bit of a mixed bag. Keats put the finishing touches on Endymion during his stay. As we’ve seen again and again, Keats certainly didn’t enjoy being confined indoors thanks to the constant rainy weather since arrival at the beginning of March. But at least that meant he had time to get some writing done! In today’s letter we hear for the first time about one of the three narrative poems that will lend their names to Keats’s final volume of poetry: Isabella, or, as Keats refers to it here, “my ‘Pot of Basil.'” Reynolds and Keats had originally planned to each write poems based on stories from Boccaccio and publish them together. Reynolds, though, urged Keats to forge ahead without him. Reynolds did publish two poems based on Boccaccio in his book The Garden of Florence (1821).

Keats is a bit reluctant to hurry Reynolds along since his friend had been in ill health for much of the spring. He writes today that “you must not think of it [i.e. Reynolds’s Boccaccio poetry] till many months after you are quite well:–then put your passion to it,–and I shall be bound up with you in the shadows of mind, as we are in our matters of human life.” And indeed today they are still bound up in the minds of posterity (though their poems were not bound together in a book as they had intended), with Reynolds’s fame typically being associated with his friendship with Keats.

Also on Keats’s mind is Tom’s health, which has been up and down throughout the spring. In this letter Keats notes that Tom has “taken a fancy to a Physician here, Dr Turton, and I think is getting better.” Alas, the Keats brothers’ days of being nearly almost always all together are coming to an end. John will soon venture out for his Northern tour, George will get married and leave for America, and Tom will be beyond the reach of any physician’s help. Poor Tom.

It’s perhaps with some sense of the impending sufferings he will face that Keats continues his quest in what he called in his letter to Taylor on 24 April, “a love for philosophy.” Today he notes his intention to learn Greek and Italian, and to seek, with the help of William Hazlitt’s advice, “the best metaphysical road I can take.” He would start to learn some Italian with his reading of Dante over the next two years, and one can’t help but think that such study would have offered some insightful “metaphysical roads” to travel. If nothing else it led to the wonderfully strange dream vision that is The Fall of Hyperion. So cheers, Dante!

And one final bit of humor regarding this afterlife with which to conclude (although Keats does so at the letter’s opening). He apologizes to Reynolds for his delinquency in writing, and notes:

I hope I may not be punished, when I see you well, and so anxious as you always are for me, with the remembrance of my so seldom writing when you were so horribly confined–the most unhappy hours in our lives are those in which we recollect times past to our own blushing–If we are immortal that must be the Hell.

The KLP wholeheartedly agrees–embarrassment lingers in the memory pretty darn effectively, and an eternity of reflecting upon one’s failures seems like a pretty good approach to eternal torture! Dante must have come up with that in some circle, no?

Text of today’s letter comes from a transcript by Richard Woodhouse. It can be read in Forman’s 1895 here. Images below come courtesy of Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Page 1 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 27 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 27 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

We Who Are Skittish

Sarah Sarai

Re: Keats’s 24 April 1818 letter to Taylor

You know how a person sometimes fails at squirming away discomfort? And so they drink a few beers, or binge on Netflix, or both? Or perform a multitude of other diversionary tasks – scrubbing odd corners of their abode and reorganizing their books, maybe by presenting-gender, geography, and first-name alpha? And all that is performed in order to numb-out. To not feel an anticipated sting of suspected failure or panic at the thought of confronting imperfection, regardless of the odds? The odds being, imperfection unlikely when making a book as John Keats, but whatever.

Because if a person feels pain and discomfort, even a simple sting, she or he or they are most likely not happy in that moment. And what does a person want, especially a person young as John Keats in 1818, but to be happy?

And so, in his letter of 24 April 1818, twenty-three-year-old John Keats thanks “dear Taylor” for the assist. Keats, as he writes, is among those “young men” who, “for some time have had an idea that such a thing as happiness is to be had, and therefore are extremely impatient under any unpleasant restraining.” An idea had anew by youth of all genders and preferences in every generation, of course. In the letter he describes second-guessing his decisions about Endymion. He reveals or at least plays with “revealing” an uneasiness with himself as a writer. “But I could not help it then…” What artist could “help” wanting another eye on the work?

Keats showed the manuscript of Endymion to worthy friend John Taylor who suggested this and that edit. And during that blessed moment when the manuscript was in a sort of conscionable limbo, Keats could catch his breath, which, after creating a classic epic poem of poetic romance and philosophy, he needed, said breath, to catch thereof. His gratitude for Taylor’s help is genuine and dear. His expression of same is playful; his description of one macrocosm of an emotion vivid.

In Endymion, as Ronald A. Sharp points out in his book, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty,

What Keats suggests . . . is that to fully actualize the soul, or potential identity with which each person is born one must not passively tolerate suffering but actively confront it as the Indian Maid does in Endymion:

Come then, Sorrow!
Sweetest Sorrow!
Like an own babe, I nurse thee on my breast! [4. 270-81]

Sharp further elucidates that suffering has value but requires no glorification:

This does not mean that one must seek suffering or that, like Rimbaud, one must search out the most intense and various experiences in order to savor even the gruesome and perverse for their full cargo of ‘life.’

Certainly, there are impulses within most religions to gruelingly treat the flesh in order to prove one’s worth as a devotee of whatever, whoever one has in mind. I think most any deity would be more than satisfied were we to feed and educate our children. At any rate, it’s not that Keats shies away from pain so much as he knows the universal instinct to do so. He has observed the emotional cycles in the laboratory of his being as “habitual sensation.” As one of my favorite American poets wrote, “Sorrow everywhere” (Jack Gilbert).

Another perspective–other than aha-ing Keats’ pain–another or perhaps the most obvious is that John Keats entrusted his work with a friend before chasing it into the world at large. Therefore, the very existence of Keats’s letters is verification that friendship and connection were more than part of Keats’s life. Friendships and navigating the spaces between us are basic to everyone’s life. Friendship was part of Keats’s poetry, part of his life and his poetry.

One summer many years ago I spent six weeks at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio with a dozen other high school teachers, courtesy of an NEH Fellowship. By night, we searched out most moist and leafy green grottos, elven-designed, for firefly watching. The only firefly I had seen since my family moved from New York to L.A. when I was eight was in The Golden Book of Elves and Fairies, illustrated by Garth Williams. In the seminar, we discussed writings on the theme “Literature and Friendship.” Professor Ronald A. Sharp (see above) led the seminar, the reading list of which included Books VIII and IX of The Ethics by Aristotle, whose insights into friendships and categorization of types of friends are astoundingly accurate and provoked, in me, many gotcha moments. The ancient philosopher was out of his league in some of his other volumes when it came to describing women’s anatomy, but friendship, which has no country, he got right. We read Shakespeare and other literature the titles which I can no longer remember–this was thirty years ago, and we read selections from Keats’s letters. Prior to that summer my thoughts of Keats’ interests were of beauty and imagination. Friendship added a new room for my little inner castle of thinking about Keats.

In the April 24, 1818 letter, Keats offers his friend a gentlemanly apology (“I think I did wrong to leave to you all the Endymion…”). It’s a statement signifying high politesse as there is no injured party, but the statement is not a meaningless gesture. John Taylor is a friend to whom Keats can admit his path to self-actualization (definitely my phrase, not his). “The road lies through application, study and thought.” And magical fireflies, quixotic to the imagination.

Sarah Sarai is the author of Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books) and The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX). Her poems are in many journals and anthologies, including Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Say It Loud: Poems About James Brown, and Like a Fat Gold Watch: Meditations on Sylvia Plath and Living. She also writes short stories and has an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

 

Works Cited

Ronald A. Sharp. Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty. Athens: Georgia. The University of Georgia Press. 1979.

Jane Werner, author. Garth Williams, illustrator. The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies. NY: NY. Golden Books. 1951.

Letter #67: To John Taylor, 24 April 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’s post is the third of such posts scheduled to appear over the next few weeks. You can read previous ones here and here and here.

Daniel De La Cruz and Denzel Mitchem (Illinois State University)

Keats, in classic fashion, writes out another contemplative letter as he reflects on his newest book finally appearing in print. After having received an advanced copy of Endymion, Keats corresponds with his publisher John Taylor about some minor errata he’s identified in reading over the book. He also expresses his struggle to feel ready for his summer journey to the north, not because he lacks desire, but because he has an insatiable appetite for knowledge and he worries he may not yet be ready to truly benefit from the experience.

The letter begins with Keats apologizing to Taylor for leaving him “all the trouble of Endymion.” One can understand why a publisher might want his author around while putting the final touches on the book. Keats excuses his behavior (i.e. leaving London for Teignmouth) by suggesting that at a young age people are so eager to get happiness that they feel entitled to it,  and treat any “unpleasant restraining” as something to avoid at all costs. Keats now seems to think it is better to greet this difficulties and troubles “as an habitual sensation, a pannier which is to weigh upon them through life.” It would appear that Keats had been “impatient” about the task of correcting his poem for publication, but now he decides to add some edits even though the task has been completed!

Following his thoughts gives a glimpse into how Keats could apply a perfectionist’s care to the publication of his work when he didn’t feel too impatient to do so. Note the precise way he explains what he calls “identical” and “related” speeches in the poem: “If we divide the speeches into identical and related: and to the former put merely one inverted comma at the beginning and another at the end; and to the latter inverted commas before every line, the book will be better understood at the first glance”. While it is slightly confusing to follow, it shows that Keats does take his time and purposely looks through his work to improve upon it, and these seemingly minor edits can nonetheless serve a large purpose in Keats’s delivery. As he mentions, he does carry the reader’s interpretation of his work in mind: “the book will be better understood at the first glance.”

In the following paragraph, Keats explains in vivid detail the fact that he wishes to travel over the summer, but that he worries about his lack of experience before undertaking the trip. He wants to gain knowledge not only for his own sake, but also to help him serve the world better. In the letter Keats writes, “I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world […] there is but one way for me–the road lies though application study and thought.” As much as Keats appreciates “delicious diligent indolence,” we also see his ability to approach a task with determination and an aim to help more than just himself. We thus see a Keats optimistic about the immediate future, and in overall good spirits thanks to his book’s appearance, his brother’s improving health, and his intentions to pursue “a love for Philosophy.”

The MS for today’s letter is at the Morgan Library (no images for us to provide at the moment). You can read text of the letter from Forman’s 1895 edition here. Images below come from Richard Woodhouse’s transcript (courtesy of Harvard). Coming up soon, a response to the letter from Sarah Sarai!

Page 1 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 24 April 1818 letter to John Taylor. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 24 April 1818 letter to John Taylor. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #66: To John Hamilton Reynolds, 17 April 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’s post is the third of such posts scheduled to appear over the next few weeks. You can read previous ones here and here.

Taylor Edwards and Hannah Henley (Illinois State University)

A rather short letter for today, and once again it is to one of Keats’s regular correspondents, John Hamilton Reynolds. As you may recall, in the last letter to Reynolds (9 April), Keats responded to Reynolds’s objections about the preface to Endymion. His submission of the original preface was on 21 March, and now, almost a month later, the debate finally concludes. In today’s letter to Reynolds it is apparent that Keats still feels ambivalent about the preface, even going as far to say that he “had an idea of giving no preface.” But then he reluctantly relents, declaring finally that “one should not be too timid—of committing faults.”

After discussing the topic of the preface, Keats goes on to mention the climate and surroundings of his current locale. At this time Keats is still in Teignmouth as he awaits the publishing of Endymion. The constant wet weather continues to disappoint, leading to Tom being “quite low spirited.” Keats nonetheless offers some humor by unfavorably comparing his native England and its climate to that of Italy: “It is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches. Who would live in a region of Mists, Game Laws, indemnity Bills, etc., when there is such a place as Italy?” These sentiments arrive as Keats continues to plan for his Northern Tour, which will not quite match the climate of Italy!

Keats then apologizes to Reynolds by mentioning that he intended to send him “songs written in your favorite Devon.” This demonstrates that he had intended to write more, but thanks to the weather he lacked the impetus to do so. By this point in 1818 it seems Keats is almost required to dwell on the weather, most particularly the “Rain! Rain! Rain!” Ever since his arrival in Teignmouth in early March, his displeasure with the constant rain has been a common topic in his letters to Reynolds. He appears to have enjoyed at least once nice day on 16 April, as he writes: “What a spite it is one cannot get out the like way I went yesterday I found a lane bank’d on each side with store of Primroses.” His pleasure at the rare good weather emphasizes his clear annoyance with the more consistent bad weather, which certainly has a great effect on him.

Notable history of this letter includes that this it was for a long time wrongly dated. The manuscript was a late acquisition of Arthur Houghton, and as such, editions including Rollins’s had relied on a transcript by Richard Woodhouse, which incorrectly dated it to 10 April. So good thing we have the manuscript now!

The text of the letter (based on the Woodhouse transcript) can be found in Forman’s 1895 edition. Images of the manuscript and the transcript are below. A few small discrepancies exist–see if you can spot them all…

Page 1 of Keats’s 17 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.27). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Keats’s 17 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.27). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 17 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #65: To John Hamilton Reynolds, 9 April 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’s post is the second of such posts scheduled to appear over the next few weeks. You can read the first of them here.

Rachel Adams, Alisa Christensen, & Rachel Mackey (Illinois State University)

For today’s letter, we see Keats writing again to one of his typical correspondents in spring 1818, John Hamilton Reynolds. After delivering his preface to Endymion back on 21 March, we now gain insight into Keats’s thought process about it in response to his friends’ rejection of it. Keats opens the letter by remarking, “Since you all agree that the thing is bad, it must be so.” His publishers and Reynolds concurred that the tone of Keats’s first preface was far too apologetic and self-negating. Keats provides a lengthy explanation as to why it may have come across this way, and he confesses to Reynolds that he views the public as “a thing I cannot help looking upon as an Enemy.” He loathes the idea of being subordinate to the public, and that if he were to “write a Preface in a supple or subdued style, it [would] not be in character with [him] as a public speaker”. In this hostility towards the public, however, Keats’s appreciation for his friends is further highlighted in a rather touching moment. He emphasizes to Reynolds that such hostility and fear of vulnerability does not extend to his closest companions, as he “could not live without the love of [his] friends.” Thus, while Keats feels animosity toward the idea of the public, it’s clear just how much he valued the friendly relationships in his life.

After this moment of vulnerability, Keats further contemplates his attitudes toward the public and how he feels about his own public image. Keats states “I would jump down Ætna for any great Public Good,” a somewhat paradoxical statement when the context behind the phrase is examined. The reference is to the pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles, who believed he was a divine being of sorts, and thus (allegedly) leapt into the volcanic crater of Etna hoping to be apotheosized after death. So although Keats claims he is willing to sacrifice himself to do some good in the world, his reference also suggests that he considers himself a divine being above the public, while they are merely his followers. It’s Keats being a bit pretentious even as he’s claiming to not care about an audience.

That tension continues throughout this section. He wants to “daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers about Pictures and Books” (i.e. the Public), but he “cannot be subdued before them.” His next image suggests that he’s thinking here specifically about reviewers, describing these “jabberers” as “swarms of Porcupines” who await Endymion with “their Quills erect.” Keats wants to “fright ‘em away with a torch” and (presumably) discourage them from even reading Endymion. The torch in this metaphor is his preface, but he acknowledges to Reynolds that perhaps it “is not much of a torch.” He eventually concedes that his original preface may have been too disrespectful towards his audience, but for now he remains indecisive about whether to rewrite it, and even suggests to Reynolds that if he has not reached a decision in four to five days to “tell Taylor to publish it without a preface.” Seemingly ready to leave the topic behind, Keats abruptly changes topics away from the issues with the preface, and towards Reynold’s health (a frequent subject with the two friends). Another regular topic we’ve encountered this spring surfaces next: the near constant rainy weather in Devon. Keats is clearly fed up with it, as he claims the sound of raindrops against his window “give [him] the same sensation as a quart of cold water offered to revive a half drowned devil.”

From this point on, Keats continues to write conversationally to Reynolds and does not return to Endymion again. Instead he tells Reynolds that he hopes “soon to be writing to you about the things of the north, purposing to wayfare all over those parts,” referring to his “Northern Tour” that he will undertake with friend and fellow poet Charles Brown beginning in late June (as Keats mentioned to Haydon in yesterday’s letter). Keats states “I have settled my accoutrements in my own mind,” but goes on to say that he still wants to have some time with Reynolds before he leaves. Keats then lists his many reasons for “going wonder-ways.” The reasons he lists to Reynolds are what you might expect: he wants to “enlarge [his] vision” and “escape disquisitions on Poetry.” These sound like excellent reasons to go on a months-long walking tour! Keats ends the letter with a few optimistic phrases that are actually pretty sad for the modern reader. While still writing about his summer plans, he writes “thus will I take all Europe in turn, and see the Kingdoms of the Earth and the glory of them.” Although Keats seems very excited about travel in this letter, we know that he dies before he is able to visit any more “Kingdoms of the Earth.” In fact, the next (and only) time that Keats travels out of the country is when he travels to Italy in 1820 in the vain hope of recuperating from his illness. Next, Keats writes that “Tom is getting better he hopes you may meet him at the top o’ the hill.” Unfortunately, even if Tom was showing improvement at the time Keats wrote this letter, it would have been short-lived as he died in December 1818. At least on 9 April 1818, though, Keats was feeling hopeful about the future.

As with most letters to Reynolds, the manuscript is lost, so the Woodhouse transcript is our only source for the text. Images of the transcript are included below courtesy of Harvard. Text of the letter from the 1895 Forman edition can be accessed here.

Page 1 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 9 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 9 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 3 of Woodhouse’s transcript of Keats’s 9 April 1818 letter to John Hamilton Reynolds. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #64: To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 8 April 1818

Today’s letter marks a first that we here at the KLP are very excited about: the first mention of Keats’s summer plans! That’s right, we’re getting close to the Northern Tour of 1818. It was a big deal for Keats in many ways, and, lucky for all of us, it produced some amazing letters. We’ve got these gems to anticipate: the account of Keats’s visit to Stock Ghyll Force in Ambleside, Keats’s thoughts on Wordsworth campaigning for the Tory MP William Lowther (later Earl of Lonsdale), drinking “whuskey” at the birthplace of Robert Burns, going up Ben Nevis (and “N.B. [coming] down again”), other sights like Ailsa Rock and Fingal’s Cave, and LOTS of opinions on “the cursed Oatcake.” So get your walking shoes ready!

Keats gives some idea of his intentions on undertaking the trip as he informs Haydon of the plan. Here’s that passage:

I purpose within a Month to put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour through the North of England, and part of Scotland–to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue–that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence. I will clamber through the Clouds and exist. I will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollolections that as I walk through the suburbs of London I may not see them–I will stand upon Mont Blanc and remember this coming Summer when I intend to straddle ben Lomond–with my Soul!–galligaskins are out of the Question.

No word on the fate of the galligaskins, but we get a pretty good sense of Keats’s other planning priorities. After the (disappointing) completion of Endymion, Keats felt the need to gain a new set of experiences which could serve as poetic “full-ripened grains” to be stored for later use. Given that the poems most associated with Keats’s legacy are written after summer 1818, it seems like the tour must have done something good!

In the rest of the letter Keats does a fair bit of quoting and referencing Shakespeare, as he so often does when writing Haydon (and because Haydon had mentioned a favorite passage from All’s Well That Ends Well in the previous letter to which Keats was responding–the 10/11 May 1817 letter to Haydon is another Shakespeare-filled bit of their correspondence). We also see a continuation of Keats’s displeasure with Wordsworth, which had been growing since meeting him back in December 1817. Here is what he has to say to Haydon in today’s letter: “I am affraid Wordsworth went rather huff’d out of Town–I am sorry for it. he cannot expect his fireside Divan to be infallible he cannot expect but that every Man of worth is as proud as himself.” This frustration is part of Keats’s broader wariness of literary London at this point, which is another reason he cites for wanting to venture North in the summer. We’ll see more thoughts on Wordsworth once Keats ends up in the elder poet’s backyard!

Text of the letter comes from the MS housed at Harvard (images below). As is our wont, we recommend Forman’s 1895 edition of the letters for a good public domain version of the text.

Page 1 of Keats’s 8 April 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.26). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Keats’s 8 April 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.26). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 3 of Keats’s 8 April 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.26). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 4 of Keats’s 8 April 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.26). Houghton Library, Harvard University.