Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

Keats’ Negative Capability

The Hiker - The Romantics - Tadpole of the Lakes

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The Hiker

Caspar Friedrich’s painting The Hiker Above the Sea of Fog (c.1817) might be seen as representing both Byron and Keats as Romantic poets, although it gets closer to Byron than it does to Keats.

Painted about a year before Keats wrote his poem on climbing Ben Nevis, The Hiker suggests an optimistic assessment of our ability to see the overall pattern of Nature’s vast sublimity. As much as I appreciate its optimism, I think Keats’ agnostic take on human awareness is more realistic:

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud
Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!
I look into the chasms, and a shroud
Vapourous doth hide them, — just so much I wist
Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead,
And there is sullen mist, — even so much
Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread
Before the earth, beneath me, — even such,
Even so vague is man’s sight of himself!
Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet, —
Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,
I tread on them, — that all my eye doth meet
Is mist and crag, not only on this height,
But in the world of thought and mental might!

Keats’ poem ends with a diminished capacity to appreciate Nature, saying that all his eye meets is mist and crag and that he is a poor witless elf. And yet Keats is also the quintessential Romantic, with poems so rich with natural beauty that he becomes an inspiration for poets like Tennyson and aritists like Harry Clarke — as we see in these spectacular stain-glass windows into The Eve of St. Agnes (1819):

Keats’s poetry has also inspired musicians like Bryan Ferry, who was once asked about his use of Fitzgerald’s title Tender is the Night, at which point Ferry tactfully reminded the interviewer that the original source of the phrase was John Keats.

My point here — going back to The Hiker — is that Keats doesn’t lack the capacity to describe Nature in all its richness and awe. But in his poem about Ben Nevis he foregoes the awesome Manfred and Faust possibilities of surveying all of Nature. Instead, he clouds his vision and shrinks himself into a poor witless elf. He doesn’t do this because he can’t appreciate or describe Nature, or because he sees himself as a small idiot (or a mythical hallucination). Rather, he closes down the possibility of a grand vision of Nature because he understands that such a vision is a type of illusion, a type of dreaming which aggrandizes the ego at the expense of the power and immensity of the universe. It may seem like he’s denigrating his powers in the poem, but I would argue that he’s getting closer to what our powers really are: very little in the larger scheme of things.

In this sense, Keats is like the epic figure from “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which I analyze in The Epic Heroine, in Existential & Then Some: The Mermaid. The heroine’s would-be seducer implies that she’s been around the block when he says, “You must be the mermaid / who took Neptune for a ride.” The epic heroine doesn’t respond to this crass advance, but instead makes a bigger point about her — and anyone’s — inability to control the greater forces of Nature, represented by Neptune: she “smiles at [him] so sadly / that [his] anger straightway died.

Keats’ ability to pare his vision to fit nature, rather than pare nature to fit his vision, is related to two concepts which he talks about in his letters: 1. the chameleon poet, who has no fixed self but instead identifies with his subject matter, and 2. negative capability, a psychological mode of openness that prizes experience over reason, the phenomenological over the empirical. This allows Keats to remain open to “Beauty,” which can’t be boiled down to “fact and reason”:

I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

It may seem that Keats is here aiming squarely at aesthetics, as he also seems to do in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” when he states that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Yet Keats’ bent toward aesthetics comes largely as a result of his ability to maintain his intellectual respect for the Age of Reason yet open up a space for the experience of the Romantic Age. In this sense he may be like Camus, unwilling to let the existential facts crush the possibility of connection. Like his contemporary Byron, Keats was a great fan of the classical, and both were heirs of the Enlightenment. Yet both were also Romantics, with a capital R, and refused to see the world only through the lens of Reason.

We see this phenomenological bent in even the most mythic and sensual of Keats’ poems. In The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream he highlights the crucial distinction between a poet and a dreamer — “The one pours out a balm upon the world, / The other vexes it” — especially when it comes to accepting the fact that systems never last. The fallen power system in The Fall of Hyperion is that of the Titans, yet the point can be extended to the political and cultural power of the Greeks, Romans, English, Americans, Christianity, Religion, Science, Technology, etc.

In The Eve of Saint Agnes (1819) Keats also does his best to bring poetry down to earth — as we see in Harry Clarke’s stain-glass version of the poem. In the first graphic below, I’ve juxtaposed separate panels so that Madeline walks from her mystic trance, her fantasy of love, to her bed, where Porphyro blends himself into her fantasies. In the second, Porphyro clearly takes advantage of her (and the poem might be attacked from this angle), yet Keats’ point is that Madeline’s dreamy spiritual vision is no match for the physical reality which Porphyro represents. In the final graphic, Madeline has risen from her bed and is walking with Porphyro out into the real world.

The poem is wonderfully sensual and highlights the beauty of Madeline’s religious vision, yet it also critiques her superstition and dreaminess, and in the end bolsters the type of skepticism which concludes “Ode to a Nightingale”: “fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”

This process of disillusionment may be necessary, yet it also robs us of delightful fantasies. In a 1818 letter Keats writes,

I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by awakening of the thinking principle — within us — we no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the nature and heart of man — of convincing one’s nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression — whereby this Chamber of Maiden-Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open — but all dark — all leading to dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil — we are in a Mist — we are now in that state — we feel the burden of the Mystery.

I see the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Byron, as very similar to agnostics today. They have the idealism of The Hiker, which allows them to remain open to capitalized Beauty and Truth, yet they also have the skepticism which allows them to accept the world as it is, with its struggle and pain. The Mystery is here, somewhere, but for the most part we’re surrounded by small m mysteries, far from the intoxicating Light.

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The Romantics

The second-generation Romantics (Keats, Shelley, and Byron) were especially well-placed to accept reason and science and yet remain open to faith and theology. Living after the Age of Reason and during the first wave of the Industrialization Revolution, they were witnesses to the way science took potent form in the real world. They saw the drawbacks — the dark satanic mills Blake warned about, and the displacement of jobs that workers revolted against (Byron defended these workers in the House of Lords) — yet they also saw the immense advancements in areas such as medicine. For instance, only in the decade after Keats’ death from TB (1821) did we learn that it was caused by a specific disease involving tubercules. While the Romantics didn’t have the benefit of Darwin’s explanation, they had every reason to believe that science was explaining more and more of their existence every day. And yet they also had their fill of Reason with a capital R, and wanted to make room for the exploration of emotion and for the re-assessment and reconsideration of aspects of religion thrown out with the bathwater.

The second generation English Romantics (Byron, Shelley, & Keats) have different takes on the question of doubt and infinity. Byron and Shelley use the grandeur of Nature, especially the archetypal Mountain, to suggest an Infinity that lies beyond human conceptions of Truth or God. From the slopes of the Jungfrau, Byron’s Manfred (1817) champions free will, even in the face of damnation. In Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley asserts the human right to question everything, and asserts that Prometheus is a Christ-like hero who stands up against a controlling God.

Like Byron and Shelley, Keats is in favour of questioning established systems (one might remember here that another name for the Romantic Age is the Age of Revolution). Yet Keats takes a more humble, human-scale approach. Shelley may have written about equality and atheism, yet he thinks in grand neoplatonic terms. Byron may have undermined the epic tradtion throughout Don Juan, yet his poem ends up being the longest poem in the English language, with an epic sweep and depth that anticipates Joyce’s Ulysses in its mix of the epic and a comic deflation of the epic. Keats’ rejection of the epic mode is more definitive: in rejecting the Miltonic language he uses in his two unfinished plays on Hyperion, he also drops the idea of locating his quest for meaning in grand or epic terms. In two 1819 letters, he writes, “I have given up Hyperion — there were too many Miltonic inversions in it”; “I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me.” Instead, he goes back to the earlier, earthier stand where even though he’s on the top of the highest mountain in England, all he can see is crag and mist.

Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,
I tread on them, — that all my eye doth meet
Is mist and crag, not only on this height,
But in the world of thought and mental might!

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Keats also came from a humble background. Unlike Byron, he didn’t go to Harrow and Cambridge, and unlike Shelley he didn’t go to Eton and Oxford. Unlike Montaigne, he didn’t have a chateau, and unlike Byron he didn’t have an ancestral abbey.

Unlike Montaigne, he didn’t have clavichords and zithers to provide him with background music for his day. He didn’t have money to travel around Europe, or to meet on the shores of Lake Geneva, as did Shelley and Byron in 1816, around which time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Shelley wrote “Mont Blanc,” and Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. Keats couldn’t afford to be a poet so he studied to become a doctor. But he didn’t practice medicine because all he really wanted was to write poetry — and to marry Fanny Brawne, although he didn’t feel he had enough money to do that either.

Byron and Shelley are liberal democrats, yet at times subject to the grandiosity of their wealth, education, and privilege. And yet I’m sure that Byron, could he read comfortably in his burial vault, would regret calling Keats ‘a tadpole of the lakes,’ that is, a lowly imitator of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In Byron’s first speech in the House of Lords (1812), he sympathized with the workers whose jobs were being replaced by machines. In his second speech, he sarcastically attacked those who would deny Catholics equality. Keats had none of these opportunities, and he was far, far less well-known. Among the two, only Shelley understood Keats’ talent. In the final (55th) stanza of his sublime eulogy, Adonais (1821), Shelley flies like Dante to the heavens, where Keats is found among the immortals:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar!
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

Keats of course would have been flattered, but he was unlikely to have dreamed of such a posthumous status, especially as he sat quarantined in his ship off the coast of Naples (1820), or as he lay coughing up blood in his little room on the Spanish Steps. And yet this tadpole of the lakes may have got at the human condition as powerfully as either Shelley or Byron.

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Tadpole of the Lakes

I stood on a mountain top, deep within the white folds of mist

yet I didn’t see Demogorgon rise, nor devils circling on the rim

of some gigantic crater, somewhere near Interlaken, or where the gates to Tartarus lie.

I stood atop Ben Nevis, where others might have seen spirits —

where Shelley, kind Percy, would have seen a phalanx of satyrs, and a chorus of nymphs,

and where Byron (my caustic unmet friend George Gordon Byron,

6th Baron Byron, descended from James I of Scotland)

would have twirled Mephistopheles seven times round Ixion’s wheel.

There on the mountain top, neither Olympia nor Jungfrau,

I saw mist, nothing but mist.

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