The Entry of John Keats's Letters into Critical Discourse, 1836-1895 Abolfazl Ramazani Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph. D. University of York Department of English and Related Literature March 2004 - i. 1 _E ''" "" TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments iv Abstract A INTRODUCTION I CHAPTERI The Reception and Construction of Keats 1817-1848 10 CHAPTER 2 Keats the man and Keats the poet in Milnes's Life, Letters, and Literary Remains ofJohn Keats (1848) 38 1 Milnes's political, social, and literary career 38 11 Keats enters history: LLLR 49 III Jeffrey and Milnes in dialogue: poetic self-education in the letters 73 IV Responsesto LLLR in the periodicals, 1848-50 79 CHAPTER3 Forman's Letters ofJohn Keats to FannyBrmvne (1878) 138 1 The history of the ownership and publication of the love-letters 138 II Scandalousenterprise: Forman's LJKFB 156 CHAPTER 4 Responsesto Letters ofJohn Keats to Fanny Brcnvne, 1878-1884 187 1 Reviews of LJKFB, 1878 187 11 Arnold on Keats's poetry, letters, and character 210 III Swinburne on Keats's poetry, letters, and character 232 CONCLUSION Keats the man and Keats the poet, 1883-1895: a sketch 256 APPENDICES I Letters of Keats as they appear in LLLR 264 ii 2 Letters of Keats as collected in LLLR and arranged chronologically as they appear in the editions of Giltings (or in Rollins) 268 3 The Contents of Milnes's 'Literary Remains' 276 4 The love-letters of Keats as they appear in LJKFB 279 5 Index to the first lines of the letters in LJKFB 281 6 Swinburne's four sonnets'In Sepulcretis' 285 BIBLIOGRAPHY 287 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor Dr Jack Donovan who has been my intellectual guide and a source of delight and inspiration in many respectsthroughout the years of my PhD research. Were it not for his insightful comments, great patience, devotion, and perpetual monitoring of my progress I could never have completed the thesis. I am deeply grateful to Dr Jane Moody, the other member of my thesis advisory panel, for her valuable comments, helpful suggestions,and the delightful conversationswe had on numerous occasions. My thanks go to the F.R. Leavis Fund Committee of the Department of English, University of York for awarding me two travel grants: one to attend Poswaduate Futures, the 2nd annual postgraduateconference held by Anglia Polytechnic University, (Cambridge, Saturday 8 July 2000) and to carry out a research in the University of Cambridge Library the same month, and a secondone to do further researchin the same library in summer 2001.1 am also thankful to the BARS Stephen Copley Postgraduate Awards committee for awarding me a grant to retrieve the materials necessaryfor the completion of the final part of my research the period 1878-1895, in the University of Cambridge Library, (2 Sep.-6 Sep. 2002). 1 am grateful to the librarians of the Special Collections department at the University of Cambridge Library, the Special Collections department at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Special Collections department of John Rylands University Library, Manchester, University of Sheffield, and to Ms Margaret Dillon at the Inter-library Loans department of the J. B. Morrell Library, University of York for her various generousservices. Marta and Simon Hardy provided me most generously with accommodation in iv their house. My wife Jila Jalal-Jabbari and son Reza have been pleasant companions throughout my years of PhD research. They have been with me during some upheavals and now will be delighted to see the fruit of my research. To them this thesis is most humbly dedicated. V ABSTRACT Charles An-nitage Brown's lecture delivered on 27 December 1836 to the Plymouth Institution marks the first public use of Keats's letters in a critical estimate of Keats. It was only after the publication of Richard Monckton Milnes's Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) that public awareness of Keats as an important English poet grew significantly. Out of 252 items in H. E. Rollins's edition of Keats's letters (1958), Milnes published 82 either in part or in full. For the first time, it became known to the reading public that Keats's letters and poems were closely related as the letters record, among other things, the process of Keats's poetic self- education. Thirty years later, Forman published thirty seven love-letters by Keats, documents that greatly altered contemporary understanding of Keats the man. Forman was aware that his edition risked creating a backlash against himself and his subject. Therefore, in his long introduction, which carries the hallmarks of meticulous scholarship and serious criticism, he introduces the letters, in a guarded manner, as 'sacred' documents that can only enhance Keats's reputation. Many reviewers of the love-letters consideredthem to be barren of literary value on the understandingthat they were written when Keats the man was unwell and morbid in spirit. In 1878, a sufficient number of Keats's important letters were in the public domain for a fair estimate of them and their significance to be made. Milnes made use of Keats's letters to his family and friends to demonstratethe poet's noble character and to take issue with the picture of the poet as victim propagated by Byron and Shelley. The letters to Fanny Brawne provoked another unfavourable estimate of Keats's character and poetry as many critics, chief among them Arnold and Swinbume, saw traces of a feeble and dissolute nature in them: taking Keats's letters in Milnes's biography into serious consideration, Arnold vi judged that Keats wrote great poetry because he had an elevated character. Arnold brushes aside the letters to Fanny Brawne and tries to compensate for their despairing sensuality by reference to aspects of Keats's manliness and gentlemanly behaviour in many other letters of the poet, from which he quotes. Arnold's analysis of Keats's character set a new course for future critics of the poet who strove in their own ways to show that Keats the man and Keats the poet were one. Like Arnold, Swinbume was of the opinion that a poet is great because he is a great human being; nevertheless he expresseda harsher criticism of Keats the man in his love-letters than that by Arnold. He did not object to the writing of the love-letters but wrote four aggressively critical sonnetson the occasion of the publication of Letters ofJohn Keats to Fanny Braivne, in which he employs his considerable poetic resources to chastise and debase Buxton Forman for publishing them. In 1891, Colvin concluded that Keats's letters must be read and valued for their own intrinsic literary merits and that Keats the man and Keats the poet are one. After Robert Bridges's essay on Keats in 1895, Keats's sensuousness began to be looked upon as a virtue and a theme that formed the subject of many books and articles that appearedafterwards. Today, we owe our high estimate of the letters in their entirety as documents that rank in literary interest with the poems, to the editorial and critical tradition begun by Milnes (1848), Forman (1878 and 1895), and Colvin (1891). vii INTRODUCTION A. C. Bradley's chapter 'The Letters of Keats', written in a lively conversational style in 1905, is the first essay to explicate terms and phrases such as 'Negative Capability', 'Pleasure Thermometer', 'voyage of conception', 'Mansion of Many Apartments', 'A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence', 'The vale of Soul-making', and 'primitive sense" and to emphasise that 'the letters throw light on all [poems]12 Today discussion Keats's is the . no of poetry complete without a glance at appropriate passagesand critical remarks in the letters for the light they shed on the poems. In his essayon 'Shelley and Keats', T. S. Eliot writes that Keats's greatnesslies in his letters becausethey are Shakespearian: 'The Letters [sic] are certainly the most important by English [in them] the fine notable and the most ever written any poet.... in introduced [and they] things come unexpectedly, neither nor shown out ... so are of finest deepest Keats's the quality of criticism, and the penetration. ... sayings about poetry, thrown out in the course of private correspondence,keep pretty close to intuition [because he has 0 In his fine influential 'The Poet ... a] poetic mind. and essay, as 1 From letters of 21,27 (?) Dec. 1817 to George and Tom Keats, of 30 January 1818 to John Taylor, of 19 February 1818 to J. H. Reynolds, of 3 May 1818 to J. H. Reynolds, of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, of 14 Feb-3 May 1819 to the George Keatses, and of 30 November 1820 to C. A. Brown in Robert Gittings, ed., Letters of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 42-3,60,65-67,95,157,249, and 398 respectively. Hereafter Gillings. All subsequentreferences to Keats's letters are to this edition or to Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Leiters of John Keats 1814-1821,2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958) in the case of a letter not included by Gittings. Hereafter cited as Rollins. 2 A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909), 209- 239. In his essay, first presentedas a lecture in Oxford, he gives referencesto Colvin (1891) and Forman's (1895,1901) editions of Keats's letters. I shall analYse the significance of these two sources in the processof the reception of Keats as poet and as man in the course of the thesis and in the Conclusion.