16 January 1818: Dinner with Reynolds & the Goals of Keats’s Progress
Little Britain (street), adjacent to Christ’s Hospital, London
John Hamilton Reynolds is about a year older
than Keats, but he has already had some significant literary experience. Perhaps because
his
talents are largely derivative (in particular, of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Walter Scott), in 1818 he mainly gives up his literary career for a so-so career in
the law, though he continues to dabble: he wittily writes, As time increases, / I give up
drawling verse for drawing leases.
Perhaps his literary highpoint as a poet comes in
April 1819, when he cannot help but offer a very funny and ingenious parody of William
Wordsworth’s
Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse, entitled Peter Bell, A Lyrical Ballad, and published under two weeks before Wordsworth
actually publishes his own poem (Reynolds’ satire actually reveals how utterly familiar
he is
with Wordsworth’s writing). Reynolds’ father is a writing and math master at Christ’s
Hospital
school. Previously, the Reynolds family reside at 19 Lamb’s Conduit Street.
Keats meets Reynolds through Leigh Hunt mid-October 1816. Reynolds in turn introduces Keats to Taylor & Hessey, who become Keats’s publisher, and assume right over Keats’s first 1817 collection (which had been published on commission). Among others, but importantly, Reynolds also introduces Keats to Charles Wentworth Dilke, Benjamin Bailey (who becomes a good friend and literary influence), and Charles Brown (who also becomes an extremely close friend, travelling companion, collaborator in writing a drama, and a financial supporter in Keats’s time of need).
Keats writes a sonnet based on a visit to the Reynolds’ 16 January, entitled To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat—Mrs.
Reynolds
being Reynolds’ mother, with whom Keats has, at this time, a very friendly
relationship. Reynolds also has four sisters, and Keats greatly enjoys them; later,
though,
this changes when they seem to collectively disparage someone Keats likes, and then
later,
loves: Fanny Brawne. The sonnet, which actually
addresses the cat—who hast past thy grand climacteric
—appears light and playful, and
seems to have been composed to fulfill a whim rather than to mark a significant, insightful
occasion. Yet, within its witty tone, we encounter a genuine hint of mastery in Keats’s
ability to profitably enter the subject—in this case, empathetic entry into history
of this
old, embattled cat. The cat is not exactly the perfected form of, say, a Greek urn,
but Keats
is clearly intriqued with the soft, lasting beauty and the unknowable truths in the
various
hidden lives of Mrs Reynolds’ cat.
Reynolds remains a very strong supporter (both publicly and privately) of Keats’s poetry and abilities, perhaps most strongly after Keats’s death. The two poets share literary tastes (especially Shakespeare), and Reynolds also plays a part in weaning Keats from Hunt’s influence, as does another close friend at the time, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon.
This is a very social period in Keats’s life, but not for the first time is Keats
both vaguely amused and put off by petty quarrels between some of his friends, ranging
from broken social engagements, touchy and inconsistent personality traits, and unreturned
silverware. He begins to write a number of shorter occasional
poems, and not always on important topics, and not always that good. Revisions and
corrections to his long poem Endymion are slow-going, and no doubt he needs distraction.
Toward February, Keats will begin to move relatively quickly toward genuine poetic
independence and maturity, though signs appear first in his poetics in letters to
his closest
family and friends. At the same time, making revisions and corrections to Endymion forces a necessary and important re-assessment of the
poem’s limited achievement and his own poetic goals; these insights inform in his
greatest
work to come. One of these is that art should not overreach, especially, and paradoxically,
when it reaches for deeper knowledge that explores and represents subjects like sorrow,
joy,
love, and mortality—which takes us to what Keats suggests may be the most important
part in
Endymion (there are very few): the Pleasure
Thermometer
passage, as he calls it in a 30 January letter to John Taylor. Keats adds some lines to this part of his poem (Book
1, 777-181). Here we have the idea that the Imagination can be seen as the means to
take him
to a Truth.
The short passage is indeed compelling, appearing, as it does, among the
other 4,000 or so lines of a poem that, for the most part, moves uneasily between
drowsy,
overwrought, and arbitrary sentiments, and an equally drowsy and random plot—not so
mention
some slack, bumpy, and cutesy rhyming. The passage, despite its complex and somewhat
confusing
logic of gradations working toward some sense of fulfillment, steadies Keats’s idea
that Truth
and Beauty, even within the human realm of a quest for happiness, are not exclusive,
that they
necessarily interpenetrate and complete each other. In this way—in a way we can now
call
Keatsian—the Imagination is a kind of spiritual faculty that places us in both the
mortal and
immortal realm, in both the flesh and in the soul, in the human realm and the natural
realm.
To poetically represent these tensions in a composed, undogmatic manner is the goal,
and the
result will mark Keats’s progress and characterize some of his best work.
