1 The ‘Aching Pleasure’ of John Keats’s Poetry 1818-1820 Ellen Nicholls Registration Number: 150227988 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield Faculty of Arts & Humanities School of English February 2019 2 Abstract This thesis investigates how John Keats explores the diverse and continually shifting relationships between pleasure and pain. It considers how far Keats engages with, advances, and departs from a medical understanding of affective experience by thinking about how poetry becomes the means by which Keats tests, explores, and experiments with the idea that pleasure and pain are intrinsically linked. This study hones in on Keats’s most productive years of poetic composition, between 1818 and 1820, as a period in which Keats intensely experimented with poetic form and genre even as he experienced a painful decline in health. Through a new formalist and reader response approach, this thesis shows how the nuances of poetic language and the subtle manipulations of poetic form are the spaces through which Keats navigates the dynamic nature of ‘aching Pleasure’ (‘Ode on Melancholy’, 23). The opening chapter focusses on weeping in Isabella, analysing the liminal status of tears as psycho-physiological manifestations that encompass both the pleasures and pains of the mind and body. The second chapter continues to look at selfhood and grief in Hyperion. A Fragment, focussing on the figure of Saturn to discuss how Keats tests the notion that identity can be shaped and perfected by pain and loss. Chapter three moves away from individual suffering to investigate how The Fall of Hyperion and The Eve of St Agnes situate the reader on the outside of spectacles of pleasure and pain, highlighting the unsettling pleasure experienced during the act of observing another’s encounter with anguish or delight. In chapter four, the uncertain and ‘bitter-sweet’ (Lamia, I, 59) ‘truth’ status of pleasure is explored in Lamia; a poem that teasingly provokes analytical choice-making at the same time as it refuses to take sides. The final chapter looks at Keats’s 1819 spring odes to show how numbness is not an experience that is analogous to the annihilation of all feeling, but a sensation that incorporates the elusive tinglings of pleasurable pain. Keats’s poetry never defines a single theory of how pain and pleasure intermingle. Instead, it relishes in exploring painful pleasure as an uncertain affective state, demonstrating the inexhaustible diversity of human experience. This thesis shows how Keats’s profoundest insights and most intellectually challenging lines of poetry occur at those moments when the young poet attempts to ‘unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain’ (Lamia, I, 192). 3 Acknowledgements I wish to thank my primary supervisor, Dr Madeleine Callaghan, for her invaluable guidance and substantial support throughout my thesis. Thanks also go to my second supervisor Dr Katherine Ebury for her thought-provoking responses to this project and for her advice on how to approach a medical reading of Keats’s works. I consider myself especially privileged to have received the generous and insightful feedback of Professor Michael O’Neill for my second chapter on Hyperion. I am also very grateful to my girlfriend, Daisy Ferris, for her careful proofreading and her unwavering support and understanding. This project was funded by the Wolfson Foundation. 4 Table of Contents Page Introduction: ‘Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow’ ………………………………………………………………………………………… 5-28 Chapter One: ‘She Weeps alone for Pleasures not to be’: The Science and Romance of Tears in Isabella; Or, the Pot of Basil ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 29-64 Chapter Two: ‘[H]orrors, Portion’d to a Giant Nerve’: The Pain of Saturn’s ‘Soul-Making’ in Hyperion: A Fragment ………………………………………………………………………………………. 65-101 Chapter Three: ‘Ach[ing] to See’: Spectacles of Pain and Pleasure in The Fall of Hyperion and The Eve of St Agnes ……………………………………………………………………………………… 102-137 Chapter Four: Confusing ‘Intrigue with the Specious Chaos’: The Impurity of Pleasure in Lamia ……………………………………………………………………………………… 138-176 Chapter Five: ‘Pain had no Sting, and Pleasure’s Wreath no Flower’: Numbness as Painful Pleasure in Keats’s Spring Odes ……………………………………………………………………………………… 177-215 Conclusion: Keats’s ‘Voyage of Conception’ ………………………………………………………………………………………. 216-222 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………. 223-241 5 Introduction: ‘Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow’ Welcome joy, and welcome sorrow, Lethe’s weed and Hermes’ feather; Come today, and come tomorrow, I do love you both together! I love to mark sad faces in fair weather, And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder. Fair and foul I love together (‘Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow’, 1-7).1 The interdependency of pleasure and pain is a central preoccupation in the poetry of John Keats. Keats explored the animating and changing relationships between these ostensible contraries, welcoming joy and sorrow as equally desirable sensations and as feelings that repeatedly come ‘both together’. Keats shared in the conviction of his poetic contemporaries that ‘Joy & Woe are woven fine’ and that ‘Under every grief & pine / Runs a joy with silken twine’.2 But unlike Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, Keats’s belief in the ‘sweetness of the pain!’ (‘Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow’, 23) was informed and enriched by first-hand encounters with dissecting, medicating, and surgically operating upon the diseased and ailing body in an often extreme state of suffering. Keats’s apprenticeship as an apothecary; his medical training and duties as a surgeon’s dresser at the united hospitals of St. Thomas and Guy’s; and his painful and suffocating experiences nursing his mother Frances and brother Tom through terminal pulmonary tuberculosis, were defining encounters with pain that appear to be far removed from any trace of delight. And yet the young poet believed that misfortune offered man ‘the pleasure of trying the resources of his spirit’ (John Keats: Letters I, 186),3 ardently pursuing the idea that ‘branchèd thoughts’ are ‘new grown with pleasant pain’ (‘Ode to Psyche’, 52) so that suffering is counterpointed by the pleasure of personal, intellectual, and imaginative growth. Keats embraced medicine as a branch of knowledge that was compatible with his poetic ambitions. While he resisted the taxonomic and axiomatic logic of those 1 John Keats, John Keats The Complete Poems, ed. by John Barnard, 3rd edition (London: Penguin Group, 1988). All poems will be cited from this edition and are cited parenthetically hereafter. 2 William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, 59 and 61-62, in William Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. by Alicia Ostriker, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 1977). 3 John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1818, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). All citations are indicated parenthetically hereafter. 6 disciplines that classified existence into certain and distinct states of being, Keats gained from medicine a relish for exploring, speculating upon, and thinking deeply about the life of sensations, even as he acknowledged the inherent unknowability of embodiment and of man’s internal existence. Critics repeatedly recognise that pleasure and pain are inextricably bound in Keats’s imagination, but none have yet teased out in a full-length study the ways in which Keats characterises and explores their relation. This thesis redresses this gap, arguing that Keats utilises his poetry as a site of experimentation in which he tests how far it is possible to ‘unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain’ (Lamia, I, 192) and thereby show how tightly the gordian knot of ‘aching Pleasure’ (‘Ode on Melancholy’, 23) is wound. ‘Gross Slang of Voluptuousness’ During his lifetime, Keats was characterised as a poet of pleasure who unthinkingly and irresponsibly indulged in imagining and articulating experiences of sensuous delight. Contemporaneous responses to the publication of Poems in 1817 and Endymion in 1818 attacked Keats’s poetry for its ‘gross slang of voluptuousness’,4 associating the ‘uncouth language’ of Keatsian pleasure with Leigh Hunt’s bourgeois,5 liberal politics and the cockney school of ‘loose, nerveless versification’.6 In particular, Endymion’s sexualised imagery and crude language were obscenely direct: Keats did not shy away from describing the young hero’s arousal at the ‘slippery blisses’ (Endymion, II, 758) of the moon goddess’s lips or from depicting the Latmian shepherd swooning after he has ‘Drunken from Pleasure’s nipple’ (Endymion, II, 869). John Gibson Lockhart’s anonymous review of Endymion in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine famously derided such sensory luxuriousness, labelling Keats as a ‘fanciful dreaming tea-drinker […] without logic enough to analyse a single idea’.7 Lockhart’s review echoed Byron’s more cutting remark that Keats is ‘always frigging his imagination’ and creating poetry of ‘mental masturbation’.8 Like Lockhart, Byron considered Keats to be an immature poet who solipsistically and mindlessly indulged in the private pleasures of the imagination without thinking through how poetry might help both the reader and poet to gain 4 Endymion was anonymously attacked for its ‘gross slang of voluptuousness’ in a June 1818 review in the British Critic, which can be found in Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. by G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1971), pp. 91-96