Correspondence

Letter #113: To George and Georgiana Keats, 16 December 1818–4 January 1819

Today we encounter the second of Keats’s great “journal letters” to George and Georgiana in America. Readers will recall the first of these from back in October 1818. Between that letter and this one, Keats had not heard any further news from George and Georgiana, nor would he until several months into 1819. This was also the first letter Keats sent to America after Tom’s death, although it seems that, according to Keats’s opening, William Haslam had sent notice to George and Georgiana sometime between Tom’s death on 1 December and when Keats began the letter on the 16th.

As is typically the case with these journal letters, written over weeks and even months, this one ranges widely in terms of its topics. There is the discussion of Tom’s final illness and the ensuing grief, but also more hopeful and light topics such as Keats’s first impressions of Fanny Brawne and the receipt of a laudatory sonnet enclosed with a £25 note. There is also the inclusion of two poems which will end up in Keats’s 1820 volume: “Fancy” and “Bards of Passion and of Mirth.” So go ahead and read the whole letter. It’s well worth your time! Forman’s 1901 edition includes the text of the letter based on John Jeffrey’s transcript, which, in Jeffrey’s defense, is one of his more accurate and comprehensive ones. The entire manuscript can be viewed via Houghton Library at Harvard

And for your additional pleasure and delight, we have two posts in response to this journal letter. First is “Improper Time” from Kamran Javadizadeh (Villanova), who focuses on the temporal oddities that occur when writing letters across the ocean in 1818-19. And then we have a set of paired responses by Kathleen Béres Rogers (College of Charleston) and Brittany Pladek (Marquette), both of whom focus on Keats’s reflections on illness and death in their piece “Sensation and Immortality.” Enjoy!

Sensation and Immortality

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a joint one by Kathleen Béres Rogers and Brittany Pladek, who collaborated on their responses to, via Keats’s 16 Dec 1818–4 Jan 1819 letter, related issues around illness, death, and dying. We indicate below the authorship of each section.

Kathleen Béres Rogers
College of Charleston

Memories. Sensations. We think of pictures in our minds, but pictures fade, they change, they can be altered. When I remember the two weeks I watched my father dying, I remember the sterile hospital room, the nurse who sat by his side, his bloated body and his ashen face. I remember his eyes, open but not seeing. But more than these things, I remember the smell of that hospital room, the sounds of the machines keeping him alive, the (non)taste of hospital food. I remember crying a great deal or, conversely, not being able to feel anything at all.

But there are also positive memories: I remember talking with him, singing to him, feeling like he was listening. Holding his hand, feeling that he knew I was there. I remember telling him that it was all right to go … and then he did.

In Keats’s December 16, 1818–January 4, 1819 letter to George and Georgiana, a long letter detailing his thoughts about grief, sensation, and memory, Keats has been through a somewhat similar process. “The last days of Tom,” he writes, “were of a distressing nature” (II: 4). For the person observing the dying process, the sensations can often be unnerving. John Ferriar, the physician to the Manchester Infirmary, writes about it in a 1798 essay on “On the Treatment of the Dying,” detailing the “tossing of the arms … the rattling noise in respiration, and difficulty of swallowing” (III: 203). The “death rattle” remains with survivors as a persistent, often traumatic memory, and Keats would have experienced this multiple times as a surgical student and dresser at Guy’s Hospital. In Consumption and Literature: the Making of the Romantic Disease, Clark Lawlor expands on this, adding the “fetid smell” often present in a patient dying of tuberculosis” (5). He continues to write that the consumptive death “can be extremely unpleasant, with patients becoming more and more short of breath, increasingly unable to control their coughing and expectoration, unable to gain a moment’s peace” (5). The indescribable smell of phlegm, the sound of constant coughing and spitting, and, finally, the rattle of death, are sensory memories that must have stayed with Keats until the end of his short life.

Yet Keats had already developed an ideological system—again, as a surgical student, he had to—for coping with death, and the literature of his day allowed for a different “reading” of consumption.  Specifically, the consumptive was often compared to a flower (Shelley repeats this move in “Adonais”), as in Coleridge’s “On Observing a Blossom.” Here, Coleridge apostrophizes the “flower that must perish” and asks whether he should “liken thee / To some sweet girl of too too rapid growth / Nipped by consumption mid untimely charms?” The notion of the consumptive as clearly effeminate (the “sweet girl” and the flower) intersects with and complicates the cultural and medical notion of these patients as poets, thinkers, members of, as Keats would say, the “Dreamer tribe.” In observing dying patients, Ferriar writes that he “[has] always been impressed with an idea, that the approach of actual death, produces a sensation similar to that of falling asleep” (195). Later, he quotes Spenser, who compares death to “sleep after toil” (Complaints). If death is like a sleep, then Keats must have wondered about dreams, which featured prominently in most of his poetry, and served, through the senses, as routes to memories—one can think here of Moneta, whose name means memory, in The Fall of Hyperion, and the fact that the Poet encounters her in a dream. Perhaps Keats thought of death as a sort of sleep, a pathway to a sensory universe that might more perfectly mirror reality. “Do I wake,” he asked, “or sleep?” (80).

Coleridge writes in “A Day Dream” that in a dream, “My eyes make pictures when they are shut” (313). This notion of “seeing” without physically seeing recurs throughout this letter in the form of blindness. Writing to George and Georgiana in the wilds of Kentucky, Keats had to rely on these mental pictures, as well as on other sensory memories. “We shall be,” he writes, “as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room” II: 5). In Keats’s letter, blindness serves as a metaphor for physical, but not spiritual distance: the latter distance can be filled by memories and, of course, by sensation. The notion of blindness connects Tom’s death with George’s distance, but it is this very lack of physical sight that allows for sensory (and extra-sensory) memories to let the “viewless wings of poesy” do their work (33).

It is, in fact, words that allow for the poet (or, here, the letter-writer) to develop what Keats, in “To Homer,” calls “a triple sight in blindness keen” (12). Words seem to allow for the senses of sight, smell, and touch to assume equal importance. It is therefore no accident that Keats, in this letter, writes about arctic exploration and, more specifically, about “snow-blindness”:  “[The explorers’] eyes were so fatigued with the eternal dazzle and whiteness that they lay down on their backs upon deck to relieve their sight on the blue sky” (II: 5–6). The purely visual input of the snow becomes overwhelming, and the sense of sight must be mediated, “relieved.” Analyzing this same passage, Larrissy envisions the snow blindness as “an image of a malign excess, an overburdened parody of sublimity, which might well destroy artistic accomplishment” (167). The intensity and power of the visual sublime detract from the other senses, destroying the possibility both for poetry and, for Keats, artistic immortality.

Brittany Pladek
Marquette University

With Tom’s death, the idea of immortality became more than just artistically important to Keats. After describing his brother’s “distressing” final days with an austerity that suggests how hard he found it to relate the harrowing details, he concludes, “I have scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature [or] other—neither had Tom” (II: 4). It’s a comforting thought, likely written for Keats himself as much as George and Georgiana. But it’s also an intellectual problem he had wrestled with for some time. As Noel Jackson has argued, Keats was keenly interested in the “sensation” of states we might not normally understand as felt, the afterlife included. Tom’s death made that interest agonizingly personal. Surely immortality meant you didn’t have to hurt anymore? John Ferriar’s essay on medical conduct at the deathbed had recorded the commonplace belief that to “put [a patient] to death” meant to “put the patient out of pain.” In the winter of 1818, Keats needed to believe this was true. Just after consoling George and Georgiana that Tom’s “last moments were not so painful,” and just before averring his faith in “immortality of some nature,” he remarks that the “commonest observations of the commonest people on death are as true as their proverbs” (II: 4–5).

Several sentences later, he tries to flesh out those observations. It’s a peculiar metaphysics, born of new grief and growing loneliness. “That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality,” he tells George and Georgiana, who he has not seen since June: “there will be no space and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other.” The heart of this intelligence is spirits’ memory of one another’s earthly identities, which Keats imagines as the sum of their physical mannerisms:

…they [spirits] will completely understand each other… I will give an example… I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I rememb{er} your Ways and Manners and actions… I know the manner of you walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laug{ing,} punning, and evey action so truly that you seem near to me. (II: 5)

In this vision of immortality, spirits move about walking and talking and laughing, but it’s all memory, not real sensation. They “understand each other” not through the sensual ear, but an eternal “intelligence” of no tone. Since they do not move in “space,” they have no bodies; since they have no bodies, they feel no pain.

Here, Keats returns to ideas he had been developing since 1817, and which would culminate in the famous “vale of Soul-making” letter of May 1819 (also addressed to George and Georgiana). In that letter, Keats would outline a “system of Spirit-creation” that sees a soul’s identity as the result of the pains it endured on earth, where “the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” (2.102). This “system” will darkly revise Keats’s 1817 hope that after death, “we shall enjoy ourselves… by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone… such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation” (II: 185). The difference between these views is sobering. In 1817, Keats saw immortality as an extension of earthly pleasures, a repetition of the “happiness” of all “who delight in sensation.” By May 1819, it will become a form of identity dependent on a lifetime of pain, a “heart” suffering thousands of times over. The winter of 1818 drastically altered Keats’s opinion on how immortality felt.

That Tom’s death would be the event that taught Keats how nothing was painless, not even pleasure and certainly not eternity, is so widely accepted that it’s sometimes difficult to remember the cruelty of the lesson. In 1818, Keats the grieving brother tries hard to reassure George and Georgiana—and himself—that Tom died “without a pang.” He plays the good doctor, “pour[ing] the sweet balm of consolation” onto “those unhappy persons, who fear to survive the loss of the objects of their love,” as Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis instructed medical students in his widely-read 1798 Essay on the Certainty of Medicine (114–7). So, too, Keats the metaphysician tries hard to imagine a comforting afterlife, where spirits retain their distinctively embodied “Ways and Manners” but escape the agony their living bodies suffered.

But he cannot forget Tom’s final days, which his reticent letter calls “distressing” but whose visceral details haunt his poetry: the youth who “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (26); the Titans “pent in regions of laborious breath” (2.22); worst of all, Moneta’s ghastly face, consumed by the nightmare of an “immortal sickness that kills not” (1.228). During the summer of 1818, Keats had reread Dante’s Inferno, whose gruesome portraits of eternal pain he would, in 1819, try to rehabilitate into a fine and private heaven where “lovers need not tell / Their sorrows” (II: 91). But his efforts there feel forced, much like this letter’s lukewarm endorsement of an “immortality of some nature [or] other”—a no-place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Both letters yearn to imagine an immortality without suffering. Neither quite manages it. By the winter of 1818, Tom’s death would confirm what Keats had already begun to suspect: that, as the sonnet “To Burns” he wrote earlier that summer admits, “pain is never done” (I: 308).

Contributors’ Notes
Kathleen Béres Rogers is an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston, and she works on Romantic medicine, proto-psychology, and disability. Her book, Creating Romantic Obsession: Scorpions in the Mind, is forthcoming from Palgrave.

Brittany Pladek is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University. She writes on Romantic poetics and literature and medicine. Her book, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850, is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press.”


Works Cited

Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges. An Essay on the Certainty of Medicine, trans. R. La Roche. Philadelphia: Robert Desilver, 1823.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “On Observing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796,” in The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William Keach. Penguin Classics, 1997.

Ferriar, John, M.D. “On the Treatment of the Dying.” Medical Histories and Reflections. 3 vols. Manchester: G. Nicholson, 1798.

Jackson, Noel. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Keats, John. Collected Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Larrissy, Edward. The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Lawlor, Clark. Consumption and Literature:  The Making of the Romantic Disease. Palgrave Macmillan: 2007.




Letter #112: To Ann Griffin Wylie, 1 January (?) 1819

The first letter of 1819 may have actually been the last letter of 1818, but we’ll go with Hyder Edward Rollins’s guess at the date. Keats is writing to Mrs. Wylie, the mother of Georgiana Wylie Keats, who would have then been nearing her first anniversary of her marriage to George Keats. Since the letter was delivered by messenger, we have not postage marks to help us with the date. But Keats does mention a sore throat, which he had also mentioned to Fanny Keats on 30 December 1818. And we know that he will indeed send off his second journal letter to George and Georgiana on 4 January 1819, so the reference to the ship bound for Philadelphia fits in that time frame as well.

The first/last letter of 1819/1818 has another distinctive honor: it is one of the few letters to have been rediscovered in the past century. As regular KLPers may remember, we’ve encountered some relatively recently uncovered letters before. One of them was in fact first published by the same figure who is responsible for bringing today’s letter to light: Louis Arthur Holman. We last heard from him back on March 25, 2017, when we wrote about his first publishing of a letter to Charles Cowden Clarke written on that date in 1817. Today’s letter Holman came across in the holdings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and he published the letter in his pamphlet, Within the Compass of a Print Shop in October 1935. Below we reproduce the letter via image from Rollins’s edition, and from Holman’s original publication! KLP co-editor Brian Rejack was lucky enough to find a copy of Holman’s pamphlet for purchase on the interwebs a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

From Hyder Edward Rollins’s The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821 (Harvard UP, 1958). Screenshot via Google Books
The letter as it was first published in Louis Arthur Holman’s Within the Compass of a Print Shop, October 1935. Image via Brian Rejack’s personal copy.

Letter #111: To Fanny Keats, 30 December 1818

Keats writes to Fanny today to explain that a sore throat is keeping him “confined at Hampstead,” and that he won’t be able to visit her for at least a few days. He also recognizes that he has sometimes been careless of his health and vows to be a bit more careful: “I intended to have been in Town yesterday but feel obliged to be careful a little while–I am in general so careless of these trifles, that they tease me for Months, when a few days care is all that is necessary.” If only that had been true for Keats for longer…

And with that we leave 1818 behind! Another milestone, if you’ve been following along with your trusty copy of Hyder Edward Rollins’s scholarly edition of the letters: we’re now embarking on volume 2! A halfway point of sorts, then. The KLP is pleased to have you along for the next stage!

Text of the letter can be accessed via Harry Buxton Forman’s 1901 edition of the letters, courtesy of HathiTrust.

Letter #110: To John Taylor, 24 December 1818

Just a brief note from Keats to Taylor, and really only one main purpose for sending it: money money money! Keats has really come a long way regarding his anxiety about money matters. Just compares today’s note to the one Keats sent to his publishers Taylor and Hessey back in June 1817 (and while you’re at it, read David Sigler’s insightful and hilarious analysis of the letter). Whereas Keats bent over backwards to excuse his request for a loan 18 months ago, here he simply begins the letter by asking for the cash outright! Good for you, Keats.

The manuscript of the letter resides at Houghton Library at Harvard. You can view the images below, courtesy of their online resource.

Page 1 of Keats’s 24 December 1818 letter to John Taylor. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.44). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Page 4 of Keats’s 24 December 1818 letter to John Taylor. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.44). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #109: To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 22 December 1818

As we saw two days ago, Keats had canceled on a dinner engagement with Haydon on 20 December, but the two got together for the day of 21 December. It appears that Haydon the next day had sent a message to Keats apologizing for his “going out of the room” before they sat down to their meal. Keats writes back explaining that he was not offended at all. In other words, typical stuff for Keats’s correspondence! Particularly with Haydon, who was rather sensitive and quick to worry about having offended his friends (and quick to be offended by them himself), we often find letters like these which aim to smooth over any potential hurt feelings. It’s safe to say Haydon would have empathized with the members of Flight of the Conchords.

But we do digress. Another topic of importance comes towards the end of the letter. Keats offers to help Haydon financially, but also asks that Haydon first apply for assistance from “the rich lovers of art.” As we’ve seen in other letters by Keats, and as probably all of us know from experience, money issues can certainly lead to some hurt feelings! Over the next two years, of course, financial woes become more and more pressing for Keats. At this point, though, he seems to have been pretty sanguine about his prospects.

Another significant moment, which our contributor for today has much more to say about, is Keats’s mention of “all the vices of a Poet,” especially that of “irritability.” As Jeanne Britton writes in her piece, irritability signifies in several interrelated ways for Keats. Read the whole post to find out more!

Text of the letter to Haydon can be read via Forman’s 1901 edition here. Images below come courtesy of Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Page 1 of Keats’s 22 December 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.43). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Page 2 of Keats’s 22 December 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.43). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Page 3 of Keats’s 22 December 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.43). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Page 4 of Keats’s 22 December 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.43). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

“All the Vices of a Poet”: Keats to Haydon, 22 December 1818

Jeanne Britton
University of South Carolina

RE: Keats’s 22 December letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon

Keats’s letter to Benjamin Haydon of 22 December 1818 treads through the anxieties and hardship of artistic production that the aspiring poet and struggling painter shared. Dissatisfied with Hyperion, which he had cast aside for the time being, Keats opens his letter with disdain for the literary marketplace: he scorns its mercantile operation but admits to seeking “love and effect.” “I never expect to get any thing by my Books,” he declares, “and moreover I wish to avoid publishing.” His desire to write is not, it would seem, a desire for fame: “I should like to compose things honourable to Man—but not fingerable over by Men.” But earlier in this same paragraph, his admission—“I feel in myself all the vices of a Poet, irritability, love of effect and admiration”—might seem to contradict this disdain.[i]

His reference to “irritability” might also be understood to echo the famous letter of the previous December in which he defines “Negative Capability” as the ability to remain in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”[ii] Precisely what Keats means by this term in either context is difficult to say. My sense, though, is that he is drawing in these two letters on an intertwining of irritability’s literary and medical significance, a feature that defines much of his finest poetry. While this intertwining of the literary and medical offers a different gloss on the term, it would not be wrong to take “irritability” to mean bad temper; indeed, Keats’s encounters with William Wordsworth, one of the age’s most prominent specimens of “the genus irritabile”—that is, poets—certainly provide him with an example of prickly crotchetiness.[iii]

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (1820)
Haydon, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (detail). Wordsworth is bowing his head; Keats’s profile appears directly above Wordsworth’s.

As 1818 drew to a close, Benjamin Haydon was still at work on the huge, ambitious Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. This painting took him six years to complete, and its outmoded style of historicism was his relentless “great object.”[iv] Another object was to include great writers of modern times in this historical, religious subject; Newton, Voltaire, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, and Keats himself also appear. It was this painting that, in a half-finished state, brought Keats and Wordsworth together for what Haydon himself termed the “immortal dinner” of the previous December.

Haydon’s life-mask of Keats. Keats-Shelley House, Rome.

Haydon had made Keats’s life-mask in Dec 1816 as a study for this painting. He also measured Wordsworth’s height for the same purpose, noting in his diary that his “very fine, heroic proportion” of nearly 5’10”—indeed tall for the time—apparently made the poet of egotistical sublimity so pleased that, as Haydon also records, “He made me write it down.”[v] Keats, who was just over five feet tall, experienced the brunt of Wordsworth’s ego, if not his irritability, on meeting him earlier in December of 1817 and, at Haydon’s request, reciting the “Hymn to Pan” from Endymion. Wordsworth’s response—“a Very pretty piece of Paganism”—was, according to Haydon, “unfeeling,” “ill-bred,” and “nonsense.” He believed Keats felt its sting, intended or not, “deeply.”[vi]

Perhaps, if we want to be charitable to Wordsworth, he was simply grumpy. And perhaps Keats is, too, when he proclaims in this letter of December 1818 that he feels “all the vices of a Poet, irritability, love of effect and admiration.” But in addition to peevishness, irritability carried two other meanings in these years: it had been associated with the character of the poet since classical antiquity (hence the aforementioned term, genus irritabile), and it was posited as the origin of muscular mobility in eighteenth-century medicine. Keats invokes irritability’s literary sense in other letters, and the wide currency of “irritability” as a physiological concept in the work of his teachers at Guy’s Hospital informs his complaints about his health—his “nervous irritability” and “irritable state of health.”[vii] He calls on the term’s literary significance with the reference to “the ‘genus irritabile’” of poets that ushers in his definition of the chameleon poet and, indeed, its distinction from the Wordsworthian “egotistical sublime.”[viii]

In medical discourse, “irritability” names a property of the muscles that determines contraction. Swiss anatomist and physiologist Albrecht von Haller defined irritability as the tendency of muscles to contract when stimulated. Sensibility, the property of the nerves, communicated the muscular response to stimuli to the brain. After Haller’s mid-eighteenth-century attempt to prove the existence of irritability, nearly every medical treatise referred to this concept and its more prominent counterpart, sensibility, in some fashion. Many readers of Haller attributed more significance to irritability than Haller did himself: even the English translator of his Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals claims that “irritability is the long-sought vital principle, the key to nature itself” in a contradiction of Haller’s explicit warning that this principle should not be taken as the principle of life.[ix] In Haller’s system, irritability is an involuntary, physiological force that determines mobility, and sensibility is associated with feeling and expressive of the soul. According to Haller, an irritable body part “becomes shorter upon being touched,” and a sensible body part that is touched communicates with the soul.[x] The reception of his terminology in later medicine blurred these distinctions, and sensibility came to be associated with the vital principle.

Critics have stressed Keats’s proximity to prominent advances in early nineteenth-century science. Less prominent, perhaps, but especially significant for their role in the medical history of irritability, are reinterpretations of this concept carried out by Keats’s own teachers and their sources. His teacher Astley Cooper refashioned his mentor John Hunter’s concepts of physiological sympathy and irritability, and the Scottish physician John Brown influentially adapted Haller’s distinct categories of sensibility and irritability into his more capacious concept of excitability. According to Brown, “The blood by its quantity distends the muscular fibres of the vessels; that distention stimulates the excitability in the fibres, and produces excitement, commonly called their irritability; thus excited, the fibres contract.”[xi] Eighteenth-century origins of the medical concept of irritability continued to have traction in early nineteenth-century definitions of the term, appearing in the entry for “irritability” in the 1810 and 1823 editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The version of irritability that circulated within and beyond Guy’s Hospital draws on the blurring of Haller’s distinction between sensibility and irritability and the later conceptualization of a generally responsive principle in the human body.

If irritability identifies the tendency for muscular contraction, then the “irritable reaching” that negative capability overcomes suggests both contraction and extension; it would produce either paradox or pain.[xii] The physicality of what I take to be the instinctive, unreflective “reaching” that negative capability overcomes urges us to identify Keats’s consideration of the embodied nature of irritability and negative capability. Horace’s complaint about the fretful tribe of scribbling lyricists seeking fame is echoed in the writings of Coleridge and Byron.[xiii] The term’s long-standing literary associations complement the immediate context of negative capability’s definition in Keats’s 1817 letter—the assimilating character of Shakespeare as opposed to the determined objectivity that Keats rather attributed, however oddly, to Coleridge.Along these lines, negative capability suggests that the ideal poetic character sheds the historical stereotype of the fame-seeking scribbler. 

In Keats’s references to irritability, the dovetailing of the literary and the medical approximates the complexity of the poet’s relationship to literary inheritance and sensory experience. Rather than lingering over the sting of Wordsworth’s dismissiveness, I prefer to think that this snub from one of his literary influences may have inspired the pugilistic young poet to continue reaching, so to speak, towards new poetic horizons. In the following year, of course, the great odes reconfigure the weight of literary influence and the strain of poetic aspiration—without irritable reaching—in their sublime manifestations of negative capability.

Contributor’s Note:
Jeanne Britton is a Curator in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. Portions of this essay are drawn from “‘Irritable Reaching’ and the Conditions of Romantic Mediation,” which appears in Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives, ed. Brian Rejack and Michael Theune (Liverpool UP, 2019).

References
[i] The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 414.

[ii] Letters, vol. 1, p.  193. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817.

[iii] Letters, vol. 1, p. 386. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct 1818.

[iv] Letters, vol 1, p. 416. Letter from Benjamin Haydon, 23 (?) Dec 1818.

[v] Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 115.

[vi] Cited in Bate, pp. 265-66.

[vii] The reference to irritability appears in the scattered style of his lecture notes: “Sympathy.  By this the Vital Principle is chiefly supported.  The function of breathing is a sympathetic action—from irritation produced on the beginning of the Air Tube affects the Abdominal Muscles and produces coughing.” Anatomical and Physiological Note Book. Printed from the Holograph in the Keats Museum, Hampstead. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. (New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1970), p. 56.

[viii] Letters, vol. 1, p. 386. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct 1818.

[ix] Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). p. 27-8.

[x] Albrecht von Haller, Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals, trans. Tissot (London: Nourse, 1755), p. 4.

[xi] John Brown, The Elements of Medicine; or, a Translation of the Elementa Medicinae Brunonis with large notes, illustrations, and comments by the author of the original work. Trans by the author. 2 vols. (London: Johnson, 1788), vol. 1, p. 111. For a fuller discussion of John Brown’s excitability as a development upon Haller’s irritability, see de Almeida, pp. 66-73. 

[xii] See Janis Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 378.

[xiii] In the second chapter of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge has a section, which may refer covertly to Byron, on the supposed irritability of men of genius. Byron refers to the irritability of poets in Don Juan: ‘But he had genius, —when a turncoat has it / The ‘Vates irritabilis’ takes care / That without notice few full moons shall pass it; / Even good men like to make the public stare’ (Canto III, stanza 81). 

Letter #108: To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 20 December 1818

We know that Keats got himself in a bit of a sticky situation regarding Christmas invites (see his letter to Charlotte Reynolds from a few days back). Today’s letter involves another declined invitations, but it seems this one was rather easier for Keats to get out off. This letter to Haydon involves just a few lines in which Keats explains that he “had an engagement today,” and as such, he would not be able to dine with Haydon. He promises to do so the next day when, he tells Haydon, “we will hate the profane vulgar & make us Wings.” One hopes that they enjoyed their flights of fancy that day!

Text of the letter can be read via Forman’s 1901 edition of Keats’s complete works (where he has the letter dated as 2 January 1819). Images of the manuscript below come courtesy of Houghton Library at Harvard.

Keats’s 20 December 1818 letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.42). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #107: To Fanny Keats, 18 December 1818

As we have occasionally remarked since encountering the first of Keats’s letters to Fanny, most of those manuscripts were given by her (through Harry Buxton Forman) to the British Museum towards the end of her life. Those forty-two letters now reside at the British Library. However, there are a few others that took different paths into public existence. Today’s letter is one of three such letters.

For background on these letters, we direct you to Maurice Buxton Forman’s piece in the Times Literary Supplement from 4 October 1934. The details of how Fanny kept these three letters in her possession is outlined as such:

From the Times Literary Supplement, 4 October 1934.

The two letters “regard as of too sacred and personal a nature for publications during her lifetime” we’ll come to later this spring and in fall of 2020, respectively. But the third, as Forman notes, was written by Keats on the back of a letter written by Mrs. Dilke to Fanny on 18 December 1818. Keats appears to have added his brief note on that same day, although the letter was not posted until a few days later, 21 December (as indicated by the postage marks).

The content of Keats’s note is, much like other ones to Fanny around this time, mostly concerned with apologizing for not seeing her as often as he would have liked. He promises to come see her the following week. As we’ll see when we get into early 1819, obstacles continued to be placed in between the siblings, primarily by Fanny’s guardian Richard Abbey. But Keats would persist and write on an almost biweekly basis to his sister for much of 1819.

The brief note, along with additional contextual information, we reproduced below from Forman’s TLS article in 1934. This piece marked the first publication of all three letters from Keats to Fanny which had not made their way to the British Museum through the elder Forman a few decades prior.

From the Times Literary Supplement, 4 October 1934.

Letter #106: To Richard Woodhouse, 18 December 1818

A fascinating letter from Keats to Woodhouse, not so much for the content of the letter as for the context it alludes to. Some background, then. Woodhouse had a cousin named Mary Frogley, whom the Keats brothers had known through their friendship with George Felton Mathew (and his cousins, Ann and Caroline). Earlier in 1818 Frogley had borrowed Woodhouse’s copy of Endymion. She and her future husband, Henry Neville, asked Woodhouse for more time with the book, explaining that their friends Jane Porter had seen the book on Neville’s table while visiting with him, and asked if she might borrow it from him. After she (and her sister Anna Maria) had read the poem and been pleased with it, the Porters asked if Neville knew the author and might be able to arrange an introduction with him. Through Woodhouse, Neville passed along a letter from Jane Porter in which she expressed this desire.

Keats’s letter to Woodhouse, then, is in response to Porter’s letter and Woodhouse’s offer of making the “introduction to a Class of society, from which you may possible derive advantage as well as gratification, if you think proper to avail yourself of it.” The Porter sisters were already well-established authors, each of them having published several books by this time in 1818. Keats, however, was not overly inclined to make new friends at the moment. We see an increasingly anti-social side of Keats over the next few months: he writes to George and Georgiana in January 1819 of Woodhouse’s offer, and in that same letter he also expresses his frustration with Leigh Hunt and his social circle. So part of Keats’s hesitancy surely results from his desire for a bit of solitude. He writes to Woodhouse, “I have a new leaf to turn over–I must work–I must read–I must write–I am unable to affrod time for new acquaintances–I am scarcely able to do my duty to those I have.”

There is, however, another factor likely at play here. As we’ve seen in the past, and as we’ll see on multiple occasions again in 1819, Keats had an anxious relationship with women writers. One senses his condensation in his letter to Woodhouse: “I must needs feel flattered by making an impression on a set of Ladies–I should be content to do so in meretricious romance verse if they alone and not Men were to judge.” Keats elsewhere associates women’s writing with popularity as against the seriousness of male discourse. One imagines that Keats’s disdain for popularity is in part a result of not achieving it. An easy defense mechanism for the little-read poet is to dismiss more popular writing (in this case, by women) as less significant, less consequential, less serious.

Keats’s disdain comes across more fully when he copies Porter’s letter to George and Georgiana, after which he offers this gloss on the invitation: “Now I feel more obliged than flattered by this–so obliged that I will not at present give you an extravaganza of a Lady Romancer. I will be introduced to them if it be merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it.” One hopes that if Keats had met the Porter sisters, he would have changed his attitude about “Lady Romancers.” Surely he had a thing or two to learn from them if he would have been willing to know them genuinely, and not just as fodder for ridicule.

The letter can be read via Harry Buxton Forman’s 1895 edition here. Below are images of Keats’s letter, as well as Woodhouse’s transcript of the letter from Jane Porter to Henry Neville (both courtesy of Harvard’s Houghton Library).

Image of Keats's letter to Woodhouse.
Keats’s 18 December 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.41). Houghton Library, Harvard University. Note the signature was at some point cut away.
Image of Jane Porter's letter to Henry Neville as copied by Woodhouse.
Woodhouse’s transcript of Jane Porter’s 4 December 1818 letter to Henry Neville. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 3.3). Houghton Library, Harvard University.