Abstract
T.S. Eliot regarded Keats’s letters as “certainly the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet.” The famous mini-essays include the passage on the “vale of Soul-making,” presented as a more satisfactory “scheme of salvation” than Christianity; for Keats, a world of “circumstances” is necessary for the creation of a soul. This chapter considers the letters in detail, focusing on the character of the writer and the sense of humanity and responsibility the letters embody. The letters are read, that is, regarded as poems are and treated as essays (that is, attempts, trials) and understood as more than straightforward expositions of set ideas. Many of the letters, as Eliot said, “are of the finest quality of criticism.”
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Notes
- 1.
The standard biography is by Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1979).
- 2.
For such publication history, see, for example, Bate.
- 3.
The Quarterly Review, April 1818, 204–8 (quoted in wikipedia)
- 4.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818), 519–24 (Nineteenth Century Literary Manuscripts), quoted in wikipedia.
- 5.
Andrew Motion, The Guardian, 23 January 2010, quoted in wikipedia.
- 6.
Hugh Miller, Essays (London, 1856–62), 1.452; and William Michael Rossetti, Life of John Keats (London, 1887), 183.
- 7.
John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958), 2:163.
- 8.
See Grant Scott, “Keats in His Letters,” in Poetry and Prose of John Keats. Norton Critical Editions. (New York: Norton, 2008): 555–63.
- 9.
T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 100.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Quoted, Ibid., 100–1.
- 13.
Ibid., 101.
- 14.
Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 279.
- 15.
Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 101.
- 16.
Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 33.
- 17.
Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 102.
- 18.
Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 274.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., 275.
- 21.
Ibid., 284.
- 22.
Ibid., 287.
- 23.
Ibid., 287–88.
- 24.
Ibid., 288.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid., 288–89.
- 29.
Ibid., 289.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
T.S. Eliot, Animula (London: Faber and Faber, 1929). On Keats’s letters, see Grant Scott, “Keats in His Letters,” in the Norton Critical Edition of Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2008), 555–63; and Susan J. Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), passim.
- 34.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943).
- 35.
T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1930).
- 36.
Ibid., 285.
- 37.
In The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1978), 88.
- 38.
Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 261.
- 39.
See T.S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 303; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69; James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 1955), 113.
- 40.
Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 279.
- 41.
Ibid., 257–58.
- 42.
Ibid., 260.
- 43.
Ibid., 330.
- 44.
The best discussion of Keats and religion remains, in my judgment, Ronald A. Sharp, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979). It is perhaps not surprising that at points our treatments take parallel lines, both of us having been students of E.D. Hirsch at the University of Virginia, he in the 70s, me in the 60s. My original article on “The Eve of St. Agnes” preceded Sharp’s book by some 6 years. Sharp essentially defines Keats’s religious position by means of the supposed compatibility of its skepticism and aestheticism. In the end, Sharp finds in Keats a “new and radically untraditional humanized religion,” a religion of beauty (4). Although I remain interested in Keats’s “religious instinct” (as I prefer to call it), I am more concerned here with prior matters, especially how we read the poetry, what Keats’s words say, and how the poems actually work.
Bibliography
Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920.
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Atkins, G.D. (2016). Reading the Letters: “The vale of Soul-making”. In: On Keats’s Practice and Poetics of Responsibility. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44144-3_2
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