3 February 1818: Another Hazlitt Talk, No More of Wordsworth or Hunt,
& Composting
a Head in a Garden-Pot
Surrey Institution, Blackfriars Road, London
On 3 February, Keats attends another of William Hazlitt’s successful lectures on the English poets at the Surrey Institution (mainly on Pope and Dryden). The lectures began 3 January, running until 3 March. Although his passions reside in philosophy and in painting (which he tries in his early years), Hazlitt’s fame (yet modest financial success) by 1818 resides mainly in his work as an essayist, journalist, literary critic, and lecturer. He knows many of the great figures of the age, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Robert Southey, and he will have plenty to say about them, particularly in his Spirit of The Age, published 1825. Hazlitt’s natural and energetic prose style, coupled with his desire to speak out and have the final say, didn’t always function to create friends.
That Keats, aged 22, knows and converses with someone like Hazlitt tells us about the circles Keats now moves easily within—a faction of liberal London intelligentsia of the day—though he is nowhere near as famous or experienced as most of his literary/artistic friends; that Keats is extremely attentive to Hazlitt’s critical views tells us something about the direction of Keats’s poetic progress. [For more on Hazlitt’s influence on Keats, see 22 October 1818.]
Hazlitt is the third in what might be called the Triple-H influence on Keats’s poetics, the others being his friends Hunt and Haydon. But Keats has now largely moved away from Hunt’s poetical sway (mainly the poetry of fancy and sociability), especially now that he is close to leaving his year-long project of Endymion behind. Haydon (who casts aspersion on Hunt’s influence) continues to encourage Keats’s independence, ideas, and genius in conversation and letters; and Hazlitt’s thinking about Wordsworth’s poetic egoism and the qualities of truly enduring poetry—like that of Spenser, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan poets in general—are developed by Keats in what might be called his epistolary poetics: letters to his friends.
Keats writes a letter to his friend John Hamilton
Reynolds, 3 February, about the bullying, limiting egoism of contemporary poetry, and
he mainly has Wordsworth in mind: We hate
poetry that has a palpable design upon us [ . . . ] Poetry should be great &
unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze
it with
itself but with its subject. [ . . . ] Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in
this.
Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how
many
straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching
that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the antients were
Emperors
of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit
them.—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular
[ . . . ]
Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be
owls,
when we can be Eagles?
Poetry, Keats suggests, needs to avoid pettiness, pedantry, and
personality. Why remain flightless in the dark rather than soar above and see all?
Once more, Keats’s strong and significant declaration of independence—I will cut all
this
—derives a fair amount from Hazlitt,
who is consistently critical of Wordsworth’s
all-consuming subjectivity, while applauding the Elizabethans. Keats desires a subtle
yet
intense poetic voice—great & unobtrusive
—and one that comes from the subject rather
than from trifling, picky subjectivity and egotism. Keats desires to take in a larger
scope, a
scope without an obtrusive and petty palpable design.
The subject, and not
subjectivity, must govern poetry.
Keats will not want his poetry to be, as it were, driven by circumscribed, trivial
purpose.
At this point we hear Keats more determined than ever to, as it were, distance himself
from
his contemporaries, those Modern poets.
But we have to remember: Keats hugely respects
Wordsworth’s depths—his moments of grandeur
and genius, in fact—in understanding nature and the complex relationship between joy
and
suffering, based on restoration and acceptance. In all of this then, here is one of
the
moments we see Keats strongly articulating his personal aspirations, even with a little
rhetorical panache.
The fourth lecture by Hazlitt on 3 February further impacts Keats. It motivates him
to turn
to a work named in the talk: Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century collection of 100 stories,
The Decameron. In particular, over the next few months, Keats significantly
massages one of its tragic tales, one of greed, illicit love, and murder, with an
added dab of
the supernatural to assist with the plot: Isabella; or The Pot of
Basil. In Keats’s hand, the story of socially—or economically—mismatched lovers
generally lacks much that is profitably suggestive or even compelling, despite a few
digressions on melancholy and love, as well as some sideways commentary on the false
pride of
avarice. It generally pleases with art rather than by probing with thought; that is,
at
moments, the poem seems arbitrarily decorative rather than purposefully dense or complex.
For
example, the poem might spend a little too much time describing how the tender feelings
of the
secret lovers—Lorenzo and Isabella—grows irresistibly passionate with, on the way,
faster-beating hearts, fevered restraint, pale foreheads, much anguish, some flushing,
much
unbearable desire, timid lips growing bold, the sharing of the lovers’ fragrance,
not to
mention comparisons with unfolding blossoms that need some tasting, as well as great,
blissful
happiness growing like a lusty flower in June’s caress
(72). Whew! Teasing narrative?
This is sensual excess, but is it senseless excess?
Isabella and the Pot of Basilby William Holman Hunt, 1868 (formerly part of the Delaware Art Museum; auctioned to a private collector, 2014). Click to enlarge.
Well, despite this excess of one kind or another, the poem remains fairly assured
in its
formal qualities and general narrative fashioning. Keats, though, ends up thinking
that Isabella; or The Pot
of Basil is simple, weak, and mawkish (amusing or diverting at best), and
therefore open to criticism and dismissal. With its gothically-inflected plot line,
it brushes
up against sensationalism that, Keats knows, could sink it into the farcical. Nevertheless,
there remains some novelty and something potentially evocative in Keats’s (re)telling:
yes, we
can often read about the doomed loved of young, pining, passion-filled lovers from
different
worlds. But now, piggybacking on Boccaccio, we have the brutal murder of one lover,
Lorenzo,
by profit-driven brothers of the other lover, Isabella; their intention has been to
marry her
off her to some propertied nobleman, and so they must eliminate Lorenzo, a poor lad
from the
lower classes. The brothers use their swords to kill him; they bury Lorenzo’s body
in a
forest; and off they ride, Each richer by his being a murderer
(224). Eventually a
spirit comes to Isabella and tells her the truth of Lorenzo’s fate; she exhumes and
decapitates the body; and, after much grooming of and swooning over the head, she
secretly
places it in a garden-pot, adds a little soil, and plants some basil; where, composted
by the
head and watered by tears of love and loss, the plant fairly flourishes while Isabella,
withering, obsesses over it. When the head-filled pot is taken by her suspicious brothers
who
discover the rotting but recognizable head, she quite naturally pines away and dies
forlorn;
the brothers flee.
Keats is not quite finished with the bones of this story. In two later poems written in the first months of 1819, he will return to medieval romance and once more to stories of struggling love and unsettled, mismatched lovers—but now he does so in both extraordinarily condensed and expansive forms, and, better yet, with measured intensity that identifies these later poems as Keatsian: La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St Agnes.
In these later poems, then, we see how the treatment of a subject over a period of
not much
more than a year marks a clear measure of Keats’s poetic progress. And now think how
far he
has come since his randomly-plotted, stretched, and overly poeticized poem about other
mismatched lovers, drawn from classical myth, Endymion, written mainly in 1817. We
can at the very least conclude that Keats is attracted to the poetic circumstance
mismatched
lovers, since he again returns to it in Lamia, written mainly July-August, 1819, and now we have mismatched lovers in
the form of a mortal human (a novice philosopher, no less) and supernatural woman-serpent.
Notably, Keats writes this later poem for potential financial success, thinking it
has
something sensational about it that the public might take to. At the same time, he
places it
above Isabella, calling his earlier poem weak-sided
(letters, 22 Sept. 1819),
while the later poem is written with deliberate Judgement
(letters, 11 July 1819). In a
way, the performance of Lamia seems more purposely professional than almost all of his earlier work—yet,
in its sensually-clothed topic shifts and convoluted messing around with truth/illusion
issues, the irresolute handling of the story leaves us with an uncertain blend of
naughtiness
and knottiness.
