Abstract
The way we typically organize a poet’s written legacy, in discrete, standard editions of poetry, (usually) letters and, where relevant, prose, enforces a generic framework that tends to conceal certain forms of writing, especially those with a hybrid character. This chapter is concerned with a particular hybrid form, the poem that is contained within, and is commented on by, one of a poet’s letters. Focussing on some of Keats’s poems that explicitly signal their connection to their surrounding epistolary prose, the chapter explores what we lose when we extract and collect poems out of letters.
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Notes
- 1.
For a notable exception, see Michael O’Neill, ‘Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet’, The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 239–55 (pp. 239–40).
- 2.
Daniel Karlin, ‘Editing Poems in Letters’, Letter Writing Among Poets, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 31–46 (p. 31, p. 35).
- 3.
The sonnet appears to have been copied into the letter from a draft holograph which no longer exists. The only version of the sonnet we have in holograph, therefore, is part of the letter text. Karlin discusses the implications of editing in this situation in detail. My analysis owes a debt to Karlin’s work.
- 4.
Keats’s letters are quoted from The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2. p. 81. Subsequently quoted in the text.
- 5.
In Leigh Hunt’s Pocket-Book for 1819 (1818). There is a ‘definite possibility’, according to Jack Stillinger, that the changes were Hunt’s. Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 179.
- 6.
When Terence Hoagwood claims that the ‘passage assimilates to the fictional symbolism of money not only poetry but likewise the structure of “every mental pursuit”’, he mistakes the nature of the connection Keats is making. There is no assimilation of poetry to money (symbolically or otherwise) because the only relevance of the ‘Tradesmen’ to poetry is entirely to do with relative value. Terence Hoagwood, ‘Keats, fictionality and finance’, Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 127–42 (p. 131).
- 7.
Andrew Bennett, in his reading of the letter, notes that ‘most literature […] is likely to be in the middle [category]. Reading may be understood as precisely such a “greeting”, reading involves active participation in the making of the text’. Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 53. This seems right in general, but it does not appear to be what Keats is saying. If ‘Poetry’ is an instance, as I take Keats to be saying, of a ‘mental pursuit [that] takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer’, then surely it is being associated not with the second category but with the third, ‘Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit’.
- 8.
Unfortunately, the revised version is worse: ‘He has his Summer, when luxuriously/Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves/To ruminate’. Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), p. 132. This edition is used for Keats’s poetry unless otherwise stated.
- 9.
‘Some time since I began a Poem call’d “the Eve of St Mark” quite in the spirit of Town quietude. I th[i]nk it will give you the sensation of walking about an old county Town in a coolish evening’ (Letters: JK II, p. 201).
- 10.
Amy Lovell claimed that ‘Sunday [19th September 1819] seems to have been largely spent in going over and revising the fragment of the Eve of St. Mark’. Amy Lovell, John Keats, 2 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), II, p. 325. If this is so, then the changes do not reflect the level of revision Lovell implies. David B. Pirie considers the emendations to be of ‘great interest’ but does not elaborate. David B. Pirie, ‘Old Saints and Young Lovers: Keats’s Eve of St Mark and Popular Culture’, Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 48–70 (p. 69). All of the major editors list the changes as variants but offer no further comments. The most striking change comes in the first couplet, the letter version of which reads ‘Upon a Sabbath day it fell; / Thrice holy was the sabbath bell’. The draft holograph (now in the British Library), on which most editions are based, has ‘Twice holy’. The emendation must be intentional because ‘Twice holy’ is part of a refrain, and Keats changes it each time in the letter version. The reason for ‘Twice’ is clear: it is both a Sunday and St Mark’s Eve. ‘Thrice’ is harder to explain: Keats indicates that he copied the poem into the letter on Monday 20th, but if Lovell is right, that Keats had been working on the poem the previous day, then the third Sabbath could be Sunday 19th. Of course, this would have meant nothing to George and Georgiana, who had not seen the holograph, and so had nothing with which to compare their version.
- 11.
Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 224–25.
- 12.
The phrase is part of the Chaucerian imitation included in the letter and usually printed as a coda to ‘The Eve of St Mark’. Keats uses it to describe himself in a letter to Reynolds (21 September 1819; Letters: JK II, p. 166) but also in the letter to George and Georgiana currently under discussion (Letters: JK II, p. 209).
- 13.
I quote the poem from Letters: JK II, p. 201–04.
- 14.
Barbara Everett, Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 140–41.
- 15.
Jack Stillinger, ‘The Meaning of “Poor Cheated Soul” in The Eve of St Mark’, The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 94–98 (p. 95).
- 16.
Keats, Narrative and Audience, p. 197.
- 17.
Cox’s edition, by placing poems and letters together in chronological order, provides the best available reading conditions, among editions of the poetry, for a poem such as ‘The Eve of St Mark’, which Keats did not publish and which is commented upon by its containing letter in ways that go beyond the easily detachable facts of composition.
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Howe, A. (2020). ‘don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes’: Keats, the Letter and the Poem. In: Callaghan, M., Howe, A. (eds) Romanticism and the Letter. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_15
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