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“Self-Transformation” in John Keats's Poetry

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“Self-Transformation” in John Keats's Poetry The Recurrent Theme of “Self-Transformation” in John Keats’s Poetry Yong Chen, Ph.D. Department of English National Pingtung University of Education Abstract The major purpose of this paper is to explore further the theme of “self-transformation” seen so often in some of John Keats’s major poems. As observed by many critics, there are two seemingly opposite impulses embodied as “skepticism” and “aestheticism” in Keats’s works; yet, the writer would attempt to “redefine” the above two essential impulses in Keats in a more accurate way, and demonstrate that these two impulses are so compatible that they are incorporated to produce a sort of “self-transformation” in Keats himself; in other words, realizing that the essential unity within these two impulses, Keats has thus transcended the world of opposites through that realization. More important, the writer will add that the best way to understand the real nature of these two central impulses and the real relationship between them is to see them through the thoughts or philosophies manifested in the works of some ancient Chinese philosophers. Key words: John Keats, self-transformation, skepticism, aestheticism, impulses. 78 Introduction When reading through some of Keats’s major poems, critics have had to come to terms with these contraries, which has been formulated in numerous ways: i.e., “the real versus the ideal, the mortal versus the immortal, the earthly versus the transcendent, and the naturalistic versus the visionary, etc,” ever since Mathew Arnold (1865, p.112) pointed out a tough-minded “flint and iron” in Keats’s works along with his more obvious tenderheartedness. Leal (2005, p.1) also adds that in Keats’s works, there always exists a state of suspension between “certainty and ignorance,” “doubt and assurance,” in which the artist can make a “wild surmise” with an engaged imagination. All of these discussions reflect the fact that it is rather difficult to characterize these phenomena successfully; yet, there has been a widespread agreement that they really are two central impulses in Keats. To understand their exact nature and relationship is to bring deeper perspectives to Keats’s individual works and, most important, to perceive a special unity in his art. When attempting to solve this mystery, critics, more often than not, tend to view these two impulses as conflicting. Wassil (2000, p.423), for example, claims that Keats is perpetuating dualistic paradigms of “dispossession and recreation of otherness.” Douglas Bush (1959, p.233) sees at the center of Keats’s works a “tension between the ideal and actual that takes a variety of related forms,” and he adds that “even in his ripest maturity, Keats … was divided against himself.” Jack Stillinger (1971, pp.91-93), moreover, suggests that the tenderheartedness that predominates in Keats’s early poetry finally “gives way to a genuine tough-mindedness as Keats moves away from his earlier trust in the visionary imagination..” Forest Pyle (2003) even in his termed “radical aestheticism” claimed that Keats’s aestheticism, with the experience of a sheer and repeated negation, confronts us with the material sites of culture's own unredeemability and achieves, if it achieves anything at all. What these 79 critics share here is the most popular assumption that these two impulses are incompatible, and that they are fundamentally conflicting. Some other critics (e.g. Belitt, 1991; Leal, 2005; Wassil, 2000; Williams, 1998), on the contrary, will see these two impulses in Keats’s works as a sort of “coexistence” of interacting oppositions, or contradictions, which, as they move from the polar extremities of their spectra to a center of interpenetration, or collision, no longer cancel each other out as incompatibles, but reinforces each other. Of them, Belitt (1991, p.5) summarily proposes the termed “Contrariety Principle” to explain the above phenomenon. What is more, the poetics of “duality” is also inherently evident in many of other Romantic works. For example, it can be seen in Blake’s (1978) famous affirmation: “The contraries are positives” and “Without contraries, there is no Progression,” and in Wordsworth’s work, The Prelude, in which its thesis, as a whole, is centered upon the idea that “transcendence” is indicated by a dialectic between temporality and the moment that is out of time (45, 53), and also in Coleridge’s well-know description of the “imagination” in his Biographia Literaria (1817) as a “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” Amazingly, the idea cited above that suggests that the two seemingly opposing forces will eventually lead to an essential unity is strikingly similar to some ancient Chinese philosophies, especially the notions of “Ying” and “Yang” (the negative force and the positive force, so to speak) in “Tai-Ji.” The major purpose of this paper, therefore, is to “redefine” these two essential impulses in a more accurate way, and, furthermore, demonstrate that they are actually perfectly compatible, and that these two seemingly opposite impulses, embodied as “skepticism” and “aestheticism” in Keats’s works, are ultimately incorporated to produce a sort of “self-transformation” in Keats himself; that is, realizing that the essential unity within these two impulses, Keats has, therefore, transcended the world 80 of opposites through that realization.. More important, the writer will add that the best way to understand the real nature of these two central impulses and the real relationship between them is to see them through the works of some ancient Chinese philosophers. Most critics couldn’t help noticing that there was a kind of literal and metaphorical excursion between the ideal and the actual world in the structure of some of Keats’s masterpieces. The contradictions are exactly the focus of our discussion in this paper. In line with Sharp’s (1979, p.8) observations, we claim that it is the synthesis of these two central impulses, which begins with his ever-increasing “skepticism” and ends with his total absorption in “aestheticism,” leads Keats to undergo a sort of self-transformation in himself. Referring to the concepts of duality being discussed, we might claim that “aestheticism” actually functions as the solution to “skepticism,” the problem. Skepticism: The Problem Like some other romantics, Keats does not alienate himself from the skepticism, which was popular in the age of Romanticism. However, what distinguishes him from the first generation Romantics in this regard is his significantly greater skepticism. For example, Keats tells Bailey, “You have all your life I think so) believed everybody ... I have suspected everybody.” (Letters: 1:292). Again, Keats writes to Bailey, “I must once for all tells you I have not one idea of the truth of any of my speculations …. I shall never be a Reasoner.” (Letters, 1:243). “Things cannot to the will / Be settled,” Keats said in the epistle “To J.H. Reynolds…,” “but they tease us out of thought” (Lines 76-77). Since a truly radical skeptic like Keats can never rest with the established church, Keats writes to Bailey in 1818, “…nothing in this world is provable.’ (Letters, 1:242). 81 It should not come as a surprise that young Keats is such a radical skeptic if we know a little more of his life, short but full of sufferings and despairs. Keats had tow brothers and one sister early deprived of both father and mother, so ties of intimate and passionate affection bound them to each other. Tom, the youngest, was fatally ill with tuberculosis. George, the middle one, had to emigrate to America to gain independence. Keats felt: “Now I am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death – without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose …. My love for my brothers, from the early loss of our parents, and even from earlier misfortunes, has grown into an affection of “passing the Love of Women.” I have been ill – tempered with them, I have vexed them – but the thought of them has always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon me. I have a sister too, and may not follow them either to America or to the grave – Life must be undergone …” (Letters, 1:293) That was John Keats at the age of twenty-two. Later on, Tom dies; almost immediately, Keats fell into love with Fanny Brawne. At that time, the disease began in his throat, and he came to realize that he would never marry Fanny. In another letter to his friend, Keats writes: “Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering—while we are laughing the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events—while we are laughing, it sprouts, it grows, and suddenly bears a poison—fruit which we must pluck. Even so, we have leisure to reason on the misfortunes of our friends: our own touch us too nearly for words. Very few men have arrived for words. Very few men have 82 arrived at a complete disinterestedness of mind …” (Letters, 2:78). Suffering the agony, both emotionally and physically, Keats begins to dream of the ideal state of “a complete disinterestedness of mind.” In 1980, Keats writes to Browne: “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all of this a dream?” (Letters, 2:346). This can be seen as the culminating statement of Keats’s skepticism when he begins to doubt the whole existence of his is nothing but a dream. Aestheticism: The Solution Keats writes in a letter, “I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight …. I must choose between despair and Energy—I choose the latter” (Letters, 2:113).
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