“Intensity is known today as the ’souerayne’ distinction of Renaissance poetry” in Professor Geher’s judgment.1 Keats was probably enchanted by this intensity when he first read Spenser’s Epithalamion and next, when he read The Faerie Queene, “[h]e ramped through [it]…like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow”.2 If it was his enchantment with this intesity that made him a poet, one of his own seminal theses about poetry is also connected with the concept of intensity. After he had composed some verses, at first mainly imitative of Spenser, Leigh Hunt, Chatterton, Wordsworth, and Byron, later, but amazingly close in time to the imitations, he had written sonnets that have already the flawless perfection and the intellectually and emotionally exceptionally complex metaphoric idiom of his characteristic and distinctive voice, like On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, After Dark Vapours, On the Sea, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, and after the successful experimentation with verbal, musical and painterly recreation of the sensuous beauty of natural sceneries like I stood tiptoe upon a little hill and his first ars poetica, Sleep and Poetry, at the time when he was working already on Endymion, though still young and without too much experience about man or woman, life and poetry, in December 1817, he hit upon one of his profoundest statements about what quality it was that made great poetry: “the excellence of every Art is its intensity capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” (Keats 1970.42)
After the publication of his first volume in 1817, he started a systematic and strict regime to educate himself to be a poet (“That which is creative must create itself”, he says most enigmatically in one of his letters3), and wanted to test his own qualifications by writing a long poem. Although according to the Preface to the long poem, Endymion, he found everything he had composed previously, including his long poem, “a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished”, in his letter to Benjamin Bailey, one of his best friends and critics of the period, he insisted upon a long poem being the best test of one’s inventive vigour, which he takes “to be the Polar Star of Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails, and Imagination the Rudder.” (27). In the same letter he defined the long poem in terms of a Renaissance garden: “Do not all lovers of Poetry like to have a little region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are
1 Geher 125.
2 C. Cowden Clarke quoted in Gittings 68.
3 Keats 1970, 156.
forgotten and found new in a second Reading: which might be food for a Week’s stroll in the Summer? Do not like they this better than what they can read before Mrs Williams comes down stairs?” (27)
His poetry is full of defintions of the qualities of poetry or mental conditions by the use of some of the garden and forest images he found in Renaissance poetry, first of all in Spenser and Shakespeare.
The first known poem of his, Imitation of Spenser, composed early in 1814, consists of four Spenserian stanzas, in which the influence of the isle of Mirth and the Bower of Bliss (II Cantos 6 and 12 in The Faerie Queene) has been identified by Miriam Allott.4 One can also detect traces of the Garden of Adonis (III. Canto 6) where everything seems to be on the move and the transition from one form of being to another seems to be a dominant narrative principle.
And all about grew euery sort of flowre,
To which sad louers were transformed of yore;
Fresh Hyacinthus, Phoebus paramoure, And dearest loue,
Foolish Narcisse, that like the watry shore, Sad Amarinthus, made a flowre but late, Sad Amarinthus, in whose purpe gore Me seems I see Amintas wretched fate,
To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date.
(Canto 6, stanza 45)
In Imitation of Spenser Keats employs not only the very difficult stanza, the classical references and the lush, painterly effects of Spenser, but also the attempt to reconcile the drive to escape from and the obligation to be engaged with reality.5 What, however, is more interesting, is his Spenserian attitude to character. Probably his interest in metamorphosis was encouraged, apart from Ovid, by the miraculous transitions in the characters of Spenser in The Faerie Queene as represented in the typical stanza quoted above. The constant metamorphosis of his creatures or, at least, the ambiguous or fluid identity of his characters is something that will be a distinctive aspect of Keats’s understanding of human nature. The ambiguity of the angelic Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes is unexpectedly revealed when, awakening from her sleep, she looks at Porphyro and “suddenly / Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone; / Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.” Her eyes have the petrifying effect of Medusa (296-7). Or the faery’s child in La Belle Dame Sans Merci appears to be both seducer and seduced and most famously in Lamia the snake lady is ready to help Hermes find his nymph fleeing from him on the condition that she is
4 Keats 3, introduction to the poem by Miriam Allott.
transformed by him into the charming woman she used to be once, and indeed, she becomes “a lady bright, / A full-born beauty new and exquisite”(I.
171-2) to be reduced once again to the the status of a snake on her wedding day under the eyes of Apollonius, the philosopher, since “Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy? (II. 229-230).
Judit Horgas claims that “[t]he forest beyond the city walls and the garden represented the natural environment for man in the Renaissance.”6 Often enough Keats combines the typical elements of the Renaissance forest and garden when he describes internal processes, the working of the brain or the texture of the soul. In the Ode to Psyche he gives an anatomically accurate description of the working brain and uses elements of the Renaissance forest and garden to give body to his concept of the interrelationship of the erotic impulse and creativity in the poet:
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untroden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountain steep by steep;
And there by zephirs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm love in.
(lines 50-67)
Psyche will assume her divine status in the poet’s brain: it is poetic imagination that, inspired by love, will be able to realize the divine potential of the soul.
More specifically, the gardener Fancy is reminiscent of Spenser’s Neoplatonic description of the never ceasing creative effect of the Intellect to produce forms forever new in the Gardin of Adonis The Faerie Queene (III Canto 6). In Keats’s ode the garden is completely interiorized, in Spenser the Gardin is allegorical of the Neoplatonic concept of the origin and the fate of
6 Horgas 112.
the soul. In the Gardin there is a porter, Genius, who seems to be responsible for the creation of the souls and their submersion in the world of matter:
It sited was in frutifull soil of old,
And girt in with two walls on either side;
The one of yron, the other of bright gold,
That none might thorough breake, nor ouerstride:
As double gates it had, which opened wide, By which both in and out men moten pass;
Th’ one fair and fresh, the other old and dried:
Old Genius the porter of them was, Old Genius, the which a double nature has.
He letteth in, he letteth out to wend, All that to come into the world desire;
A thousand thousand naked babes attend About him day and night, which doe require, That he with fleshly weedes would them attire:
Such as him list, such as eternal fate Ordained hath, he clothes with sinful mire, And sendeth forth to liue in mortall state, Till they againe returne backe by the hinder gate.
(Stanzas 31, 32)
Helen Vendler was the first to observe that the 5th stanza of the Ode to the Nightingale is composed of the same flowers that constitute the bower of Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream .7 Shakespeare, whose constant presence in Keats’s mind was a source of frustration at the beginning, soon became one of the most effective stimuli for Keats’s creativity. In the sonnet On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again he associates the drama, or perhaps Shakespeare himself, with an old oak forest:
Chief poet, and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme!
When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But, when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
(lines 10-14)
Interestingly enough, in Hyperion, in which the kinship between Saturn and King Lear was observed as long ago as in 1925 by J. Middleton
Murry8, Lear as well as Shakespeare’s memory is evoked again and again by oak trees:
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the early stars
(Book I, lines 73-4)
This is the way the scenery is characterized where Saturn is sitting
“quiet as a stone” (I. 4) with his unsceptred hands (I. 4) lying “nerveless, listless, dead” (I. 18-9) and where Thea appears to comfort him.
It has been observed several times that Keats’s concept of nature is unique among the English poets of the Romantic Period. One of the most specific aspects of his natural landscapes is their literary character: by collocating images of gardens, bowers, and forests, carefully picked from the poems of mainly Spenser and Shakespeare, he creates sceneries that have nothing to do with nature observed, but by evoking the legacy of Renaissance intensity his things of nature instantly become quasi-symbolic signs of interior events.
Works Cited
Geher, István. Utószó in Edmund Spenser. Királyi szépség, mennynél fényesebb. (Budapest, Magyar Helikon, 1978).
Gittings, Robert. John Keats. (London, Penguin, 1968)
Horgas, Judit. Hálóval a szelet. Ökokritikai tanulmány a reneszánszról.
(Budapest, Liget Műhely Alapítvány, 2005)
Keats: Keats. The Complete Poems. Ed. by Miriam Allott. (London, Longman, 1970)
Keats 1970: Gittings, Robert. Letters of John Keats. A Selection Edited by Robert Gittings. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970)
Motion, Andrew. Keats. (London, Faber and Faber, 1997)
Murry, John Middleton. Keats and Shakespeare. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1925. Repr. 1964)
Spenser. Poetical Works. Ed. by J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1912. Repr. 1975)
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. (Cambridge, Mass. 1983)
8 „Saturn is a Lear without his folly.” Murry 85.