University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: English, Department of Department of English 7-1967 The Alchemy of Art: A Study in the Evolution of the Creative Mind of John Keats G. Brian Sullivan University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Sullivan, G. Brian, "The Alchemy of Art: A Study in the Evolution of the Creative Mind of John Keats" (1967). Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English. 105. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishdiss/105 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research: Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 'IHE ALCHEMY OF ABT A SNDY III 7HE EVOLU7IOII OF 7HE CREATIV£ MIND OF JOB. KEA7S by G. Brian Sullivan A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College in the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy DepartD8nt of English Under the Supervision of Profes.or Bernice Slote Lincoln, Nebraslea .July 9, 1967 TITLE THE ATCHEMY OF ART; A STUDY IN THE EVOUJTION OF THE _______ CREATIVE MIND OF JOHN KEATS_________ BY ________ ft. Brian SuTHvan.__ Eh_JL________ APPROVED DATE Bernice Slote__________________ July 31. 1967 Lee T. Lemon___________________ July 3U-1967 Hugh Luke______________________ July 31. 1967 Robert L. Hough________________ July 31. 1Q67 Robert M. Beadell______________ July 31. 1967 SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE GRADUATE COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA ORAD 82002 900 8*6«m Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. It is obvious enough that psychology* beinf the study of psychic processes, can be brought to bear upon the study of literature, for the human psyche is the womb of a n the sciences and arts. -C. G. Jung Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Eighty-seventh Congress of the United States and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1961) who together with the English Department of the University of Nebraska enabled me to study for three years under a National Defense Education Act Graduate Fellowship. This generous support gave me the time and environment that made the writing of this dissertation possible. I wish next to thank Professor Bernice Slote, my thesis director, whose imagination, encouragement, and brilliant editorial advice suc­ cessfully guided me through the «torms of both the Master’s disserta­ tion and the present study. Ify thanks go also to Professor Lee Lemon and Professor Hugh Luke whose helpful suggestions and kind assistance helped bring this work safely and directly to port. i$r deepest thanks go to my wife, Barbara, whose love and inspira­ tion made these six years a happy voyage; her kindness, faith, and per­ severance spared me from forever journeying upon strange seas of thought alone. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE From the time John Keats began Endymion (March 181?) until his aban­ donment of the second version of Hyperion (September 1819), we have thirty vital months comprising a span of development unparalleled in English literature. This dissertation focuses upon the central feature of that development— the evolution of the creative mind of the poet. I do not purpose another factual biography of Keats, but rather an explor­ ation of the internal autobiography of the poet in self-genesis as this evolvement is impressed upon the symbolic structures of his works. In artistic vitality, incisiveness of thought, and individual sublimity, Keats achieved a ripeness that stylistically, philosophically, and psychologically borders upon the miraculous, if the circumstances Tinder which he labored and the short time allotted to him are considered. The areas of style and philosophy have been exhaustively explored in the past fifty years of Keats scholarship, and I will only touch upon these subjects. Walter Jackson Bate’s The Stylistic Development of Keats (19^5) and Clarence Thorpe's The Mind of John Keats (1926) already offer authoritative stands in these areas. Bate’s study of the prosody and rhetoric of Keats is the best book on the poet’s stylistic development, and it clearly reveals a notable progress in his work from early lassitude and weakness to discipline and restraint in the later writing. The trend is toward fewer adjectives and more verbs as seen in the great odes and poems, and a better sense of structure complemented by finer precision of language and form, as is evident in Hyperion, which he finished in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. April 1819, and in The Fall of Hyperion, which was nearly the last thing he ever wrote, completed September 21, 1819. Bather than these issues involving Keats' stylistic growth, my concern is with the question of what activated his intellectual and emotional crystallization during the thirty productive months from the start of Endymion to the end of Hyperion. Of these thirty months, the period of one year, marked by the start of Hyperion in the fall of l8l8 and by the end of The Fall of Hyperion in the fall of 1819, creates the greatest interest, because during that time Keats produced practically every poem that ranks him among the greatest poets of the world. In Bobert Gittings' study of this important phase in the poet's career, John Keats: The Living Year (195*0, the author lists the three principal explanations of this remarkable phenomenon: It is said that he wrote with the desperate energy of one already diseased, already attacked by the consumption which carried off his brother; that he met at this time a Hampstead, neighbor, Fanny Brawne, to whom he soon became engaged, and the most of his work in this year is connected with his love for her; thirdly, that he was working out in this year some coherent scheme of poetry and philosophy, of which his works are the signs and symbols. Gittings does not feel that any one of these is the complete explanation. My own view is closer to the third, which concentrates on the poetry for a clue to the internal changes taking place in Keats. The hmHw proponents C- of this third explanation are J. Middleton Murry in Keats and_ShaVesgearB (1925) and Claude Lee Finney in The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (1936), who both discuss this year in their full-length studies of Keats. In his sensitive and close reading of the major poems, Murry finds a subtle, and pervasive influence penetrating Keats' thought and work. Th-ig is the ^(Cambridge, Mass., 195*0, p. 4. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vi influence of Wordsworth, who becomes particularly evident in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion* Murry sees Hyperion caught between the drive for Miltonic objectivity and a desire for Wordsworthian subjectivity. In his consideration of Keats Murry’s main concern is for Keats' life­ long development into the "complete man:" "The complete man" is a vague phrase. I hope that by the end of this book a real, if not a definable, significance will have been poured into it, and that I shall have been able to show that the pure poet deserves the name of "the complete man" in a special and peculiar sense, that the name belongs really to him pre-eminently among men. «y own view is much closer to Murry's sometimes-oracular, sometimes- mystical approach to Keats than to Finney's minute study of the poet's poetic theory and the philosophic bases for it. Hie source for all the considerations of Keats as a thinker is Thorpe's book The Mind of John Keats, a book which actually produced a revolution in Keatsian studies by shifting emphasis from the sensuous and purely poetic side of the man to an interest in him as a thinker. However, Thorpe says that Keats is first a poet, not a systematic phil­ osopher. He sees in Keats a schema of conflicts, "as between an impulse toward dream and the claims of the actual, between a leaning toward the merely sensuous in art and life and a craving for knowledge and under­ standing."^ Thorpe makes no claim, as did Hugh I' A. Fausset in Keats: A Study in Development (1922), of final reconciliations, but more conservatively points out the important progress toward solutions, as art and the actualities of his existence were seen in their true relationship. Keats' maturity brought with it the awareness that great ^Murry, p. ^Raysor, p. 217* Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vii poetry is created only by discipline, thought, and hard work* In his review of the criticism of Keats, Clarence Thorpe says that there is virtual agreement on one point among commentators: "Keats was a great poet, whose unique genius has never yet been successfully if plumbed." It was the intention of John Middleton Murry in his Keats and Shakespeare " to elucidate the deep and natural movement of the poet's soul which underlies the poetry*"^ In more recent criticism Aileen Ward in John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963) has tried to show some of the inner drama of Keats' creative life as it is recorded in his poems and letters* She, like Murry, is interested in that miraculous unfolding by which Keats' goal in poetry became clear to him— the mystery of Keats* Valter Jackson Bate's John Keats (1963) which is a valuable new research companion to Keats' letters, blends biographical and critical material masterfully into an important study of the poet's technical craftsmanship as it developed simultaneously with his larger, more broadly humane development* The feature that all of these books share is that in one way or an­ other they are all concerned with some feature of the development of Keats.