Abstract
Chapter 3 explores the sumptuously Elizabethan Endymion for its testimony that Keats, in the aftermath of Poems (1817), already wanted to distance himself from the Cockney circle, although less from Leigh Hunt than from Percy Bysshe Shelley. The chapter begins by reading the philosophical speculations employed in Endymion and outlined in Keats’s letters as his systematic critique of Shelley’s poetic idealism. It ends by focusing on the poem’s treatment of love: the political liberation of love staged in Endymion’s rehabilitation of Glaucus, and the failure of love intimated by the poem’s enervated conclusion.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin Aske discusses Keats’s “language of flowers” as his compensatory response to absence (53–72); Karen Swann treats the disturbing excesses of Keats’s style in “Endymion’s Beautiful Dreamers” (2–36); the phrases cited in my third clause come respectively from Bennett (72) and Patricia Parker (181); and my final citation is from Wolfson (238).
- 2.
Discussion of Keats’s use of particular Elizabethan sources in Endymion occurs throughout the secondary literature, but the most comprehensive reconstructions of the poem’s unremitting Elizabethanism are the notes in Alcott’s KCP (120–284) and in Douglas Bush’s Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats (317–324).
- 3.
As noted in previous chapters, Butler discusses the politics of mythmaking among writers of the second Romantic generation—especially Byron, Shelley, Peacock, and Keats—and particularly their cultivation of a “universal sexual myth” (129), a myth indebted to Greek paganism as the vehicle of an ideological critique of Christian orthodoxy and the conservative political establishment allied with it.
- 4.
Reiman, “Keats and Shelley: Personal and Literary Relations” (Shelley and His Circle 5.406). In related fashion, W. J. Bate will only allow, noncommittally, that “it can also be argued…that Alastor was almost an ‘anti-model,’ and that Endymion was written as a sort of rebuttal” (173, my italics); and Barnard that Endymion “may, indeed, be in part a reply to the apparent pessimism of Shelley’s Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude” (40, my italics).
- 5.
Brown (628). Allott lent her authority to the idea of Endymion “consciously recollecting and replying to ‘Alastor,’” in “Keats’s Endymion and Shelley’s ‘Alastor.’” (159). Stillinger emphatically agreed and implied further that the version of idealism in both Endymion and Keats’s letters critically transposes the dramatic situation of Shelley’s poem: for Keats, Stillinger writes, “Alastor is a denial of the imagination’s ability to provide authentic transcendental truths—‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty’ proves to be a false lure—and the poem is a calmly despairing lament over the situation” (Stillinger 23n.14, 25). Just so, I see even the claims of Keats’s famous letter to Bailey as refutations aimed at Alastor.
- 6.
Smith served as Shelley’s banker and unfailing supporter in later years. For the origins of his enthusiasm, see the account of his first meeting with Shelley cited by Arthur H. Beavan in James and Horace Smith (136–138).
- 7.
Noting “that in Keats’s circle Shelley had become something of a whipping boy,” Reiman adds that “it would seem that many of Keats’s friends felt stronger antipathy toward Shelley than Keats himself did” (Shelley and His Circle 5.407, 408). For Taylor and Hessey’s irritation with Shelley over his meddling in their business relations with Hunt, see Hessey’s 17 March 1818 letter to Taylor and Taylor’s 23 March 1818 letter to Hunt in Shelley and His Circle (6.517–518, 6.530–539, respectively). Severn commented that “When actually compared Keats & Shelley set off each other, Keats as a good & Shelly as a bad man” and related a story about Keats annoying Shelley by judging that he had lost an argument about religion with Severn (KC 2.136, 233–234). Also on religious grounds, Bailey attributed “abominable” principles to Shelley and worried over his prospective influence on Keats, as his 29 August 1818 letter to Taylor shows (KC 2.34–35).
- 8.
There are obvious elements of the personal sketch to Hazlitt’s description of Shelley as someone who “has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced,” with so self-centered and idiosyncratic an outlook that he “has no ballast to his mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting”; in “On Paradox and Common-Place” (CWH 8.148–149).
- 9.
Lamb reported that “Shelley I saw once. His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I was ever tormented with,” and he disparaged Shelley’s poetry as emotionally detached and frigid; his sarcastic response to the news of Shelley’s death was the witticism, “Shelley the great Atheist has gone down by water to eternal fire!”; see The Letters of Charles Lamb (2.338, 333). For Haydon’s well-known account of Hunt and Shelley goading him into an argument over Christianity, see his Autobiography (298–300). Haydon also disapproved of Shelley’s conduct on the moral grounds that “he had seduced Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter & enticed away Mrs. Godwin’s own daughter, to her great misery” (Diary 2.89).
- 10.
Rollins, following Sidney Colvin, annotates Keats’s reference to Shelley on the death of kings as an allusion “to the well-known story of Shelley dismaying an old lady in a stage-coach by suddenly, a propos of nothing, crying out to Leigh Hunt in the words of Richard II (III.ii.155f.), ‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,’ etc.” (KL 1.140 n.1).
- 11.
Despite the interest of Vellum referring to the Conjuror as a “Snake casting his Skin,” Shelley had not in 1817 acquired the nickname “the snake,” which originated as a pun on the Italian bischelli (small snake) among his later Pisan acquaintances. On the other hand, The Drummer does include a character named Mr. Tinsel, an atheistic fop who, upon confronting Mr. Fantome at his spectral masquerade, makes a credulous fool of himself by insisting that he has seen a real ghost. “While yet a boy I sought for ghosts,” the atheistic Shelley had of course written in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (49).
- 12.
Shelley later used this phrase about Epipsychidion in a letter to John Gisborne (Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2.434).
- 13.
In her “Note on Alastor, By Mrs. Shelley,” Mary Shelley writes that “in the Spring of 1815 an eminent physician pronounced that [Shelley] was dying rapidly of a consumption” (Shelley: Poetical Works 30). From beginning to end, this note presents Alastor as a reflection of the poet’s personal life and typical interests. In a letter to Hunt, Shelley refers to himself as a “social outcast,” twice mentions his “self-love,” parades his gentleness and good intentions towards humankind, and declares that as a result of his unmerited vilification, he lives in virtually unrelieved “solitude of heart” (Shelley Letters 1.517–518)—all of it just like the Poet of Alastor.
- 14.
Bate (173). Platonism had recurred in Shelley’s Hampstead conversation often enough to leave Horace Smith, at least, decidedly “impressed by his knowledge of Plato,” as Andrew Motion notes (139).
- 15.
Keats’s remarks on “Men of Genius” having “no Character” lean heavily, of course, on Hazlitt’s account of Shakespeare as “the least of an egotist that it was possible to be” in “On Shakespeare and Milton” (CWH 5.47). My reading of this letter depends on Stillinger’s appendix “Keats’s Letter to Bailey on the Imagination” (Stillinger 151–157); Earl Wasserman’s analysis in “Keats and Benjamin Bailey on the Imagination” (361–365), which reconstructs the theological ideas of Bailey as a context for Keats’s thinking; Sperry (63–65); and W. J. Bate’s magisterial analysis of the letter’s two key premises (237–242).
- 16.
Keats studies at one point denied the poet’s idealist interests by arguing that he construed even the term “essence” materially. Countering this view, Stuart Sperry agreed that “What Keats means by ‘essence’ begins with his whole sense of the particular ‘identities’ of the material forms that confront the poet,” but cautioned that nevertheless “the two terms are not, as they have sometimes been made to appear, synonymous. Although the process may begin with the realization of particular identities, these are nevertheless synthesized and purified by the intensity of the poet’s imagination which transforms them to a higher state, akin to the ‘ethereal’” (Sperry 46–47).
- 17.
Brown presents a chart of similar passages in the two poems that includes several likenesses in the descriptions of each text’s erotic epiphany (628–632); he was also the first to propose that Keats’s Indian Maiden was modeled on the Arab maid of Alastor.
- 18.
See Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems. Morris Dickstein discusses the Harvard Keatsians in Keats and His Poetry (ix–xvii).
- 19.
The quotations and references in this paragraph are all from articles appearing in The Examiner at a time when Keats was reading it. For Hunt’s reference to July and August, see “Royal and Military Claims Upon Our Respect,” The Examiner (23 January 1814): 49; Hunt contended that England owed its victory at Waterloo less to Wellington’s expertise as a field commander than to the valor of the English troops in “Victory of Waterloo—Bonaparte’s Abdication,” The Examiner (2 July 1815): 417; and reviled Napoleon for reviving ancient imperialism in “Impossibility of the Continuance of the Present State of Things in Europe,” The Examiner (12 January 1817): 17. Haydon’s lament comes from the first installment of his two-part review of Napoleon’s “Manuscript Venu De St. Helene,” The Examiner (27 April 1817): 263. Hunt’s attack on “mere hereditary power” occurs in “Bonaparte in France Again,” The Examiner (12 March 1815): 163; his belief that the masses are no longer awed by the spectacle of rank was expressed in the “Impossibility of the Continuance” article cited above, 17. Hunt’s ironically entitled “Sketch of the History of the Good Old Times” was published in the 6, 13, and 20 April numbers of The Examiner (1817); the second installment exemplifies Cockney vilification of the Lakers at the time of the Holy Alliance, but also see Hunt’s “Heaven Made a Party to Earthly Disputes—Mr Wordsworth’s Sonnets on Waterloo,” The Examiner (18 February 1816): 97–99. Never someone to leave a job only partly done, Hazlitt savaged Coleridge’s Lay Sermon in print three times; his two reviews for Hunt appear in The Examiner (8 September 1816): 571–573 and (29 December 1816): 824–827. For Southey, there is Hunt’s delectably cheeky “Death and Funeral of the Late Mr. Southey,” The Examiner (13 April 1817): 236–237.
- 20.
Hunt, “Royal and Military Claims Upon Our Respect,” The Examiner (23 January 1814): 49. With its allusions to Samson firing the fields of the Philistines and to authorities destroying England’s “comfortable green and juicy hay” by unpenning “Their baaing vanities” (3.3–4)—by cropping grass so closely, sheep render pasturage unfit for other livestock—Keats’s Induction to Book 3 also supports Hunt’s 1817 concern that “the government was using economic policy—the national debt, the sinking fund, and high taxes—to oppress the populace” (editors’ introduction to “The Examiner, 1817” in SWLH 2.83).
- 21.
Allott’s annotations explain these references (KCP 206–207). Keats’s phrase “empurpled vests,” as Allott suggests, alludes to an incident especially noteworthy for Hunt because it epitomized the corrupt hegemony of Church and State on the continent: informing his readers that certain French prelates had been made cardinals and assumed the scarlet attire of their new rank, Hunt quoted Louis XVIII’s remark to one of them that “The Roman purple sits well upon him, who, like St. Paul in bondage, employed the time of his exile in consoling the faithful”—after which he quipped that the King’s reference to St. Paul was appropriate because Paul, in his injustice and intolerance, “began with persecuting the faithful, and ended with denouncing the infidel. The Roman purple too! they will cry,—the garb of the Antonines,—and of the Neros!”; see The Examiner (31 August 1817): 551. Nicholas Roe discusses the anti-clericalism of the Induction to Book 3 (JKCD 202–206).
- 22.
June Q. Koch shows how liberal criticism of the doctrine of Divine Right, and the related aspiration of kings to ascend to deific status, became associated for liberals of Keats’s time with the Tower of Babylon myth and inspired George Cruikshank’s extremely popular political cartoon “Louis XVIII Climbing the Mat de Cocagne,” in which, Koch writes, “Louis is pictured attempting to scramble up a soaped pole in order to reach the crown which tops it. He is supported by a pyramid made up of Wellington, the King of Prussia, the Tsar, and the Emperor of Austria, all, in turn, resting upon money bags inscribed English Subsidies” (494). Hunt had mentioned the expectation of worship in deploring monarchical arrogance in the article cited previously, “Bonaparte in France Again,” The Examiner (12 March 1815): 163.
- 23.
Haydon’s second installment of his review of “Manuscript Venu De St. Helene,” The Examiner (4 May 1817): 275; Hunt’s first installment of his “Sketch of the History of the Good Old Times,” The Examiner (6 April 1817): 209.
- 24.
For the resemblance of Keats’s Venus and Adonis interlude to Spenser’s Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene, see Dickstein (103–105) and Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (177 n.22). Keats will invoke Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss explicitly in his account of Circe in Book 3.
- 25.
Newey (“‘Alternate uproar and sad peace’” 275); Swann (“Beautiful Dreamers” 26). Many commentators note Keats’s allusions to “Resolution and Independence” in the lines introducing Glaucus. Newey remarks that “Keats reverses the ‘action’ of ‘Resolution and Independence’ so as to foreground the youthful Poet’s role and status as a redeemer, an agent of both personal and collective renewal” (“‘Alternate uproar’” 275); while Frank W. Pearce discusses analogies linking Endymion to The Rime (13–15).
- 26.
Koch first called attention to the “Compagnons du Lys”/“compagnons d’Ulysse” pun as an element of Endymion’s operative political context (498–499); Newey stresses its importance for interpreting Circe (“Keats, history, and the poets” 173–174).
- 27.
For discussion of Keats’s Preface and epigraph, see Swann (“Beautiful Dreamers” 27); and Dickstein (Keats and His Poetry 54–56). In alluding to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17, Dickstein observes, Keats bequeaths Endymion “an ironic double perspective. He asserts the claims of imagination and at the same time registers a skepticism about those claims” (56).
- 28.
Keats has “learned to lisp sedition” from Hunt, according to Z’s “Cockney School” review of Endymion in The Quarterly Review (August 1818): 519–524 (KCH 109).
- 29.
Watkins (35–36, 43). Watkins argues that the poem’s individualist ethos mystifies the historical determinants that shape human political experience, and signifies ironically as an expression of the poet’s historical and cultural alienation. He regrets in particular the poem’s missed opportunity, in treating the Indian Maiden, to disclose “the historical role of gender relations and of imperialist ideology in the construction of the specific beliefs and values set down in the poem” (46).
- 30.
See Barnard (John Keats 50) on sexual revulsion in Endymion itself. The poem recognizes an ego-dissolving thanatopic sexuality in both its account of erotic union and in Endymion’s lassitude when waiting for the Indian Maid (see 1.655–657; 4.89, 918–919). Also see Barnard’s “Keats’s ‘Forebodings’” for its discussion of “Keats’s repressed anxieties and uncertainties about his story of a mortal’s love for the moon goddess,” a conflict “which if allowed the opportunity would subvert the whole Endymion project” (3)—as I am suggesting that it in fact did. The obverse traditional appeal of Endymion is conveyed by Robert Gittings’s remark that, for many appreciative readers, “it is a poem about young people, caught in the first and most natural complication of the world’s adult dilemmas, the state of being in love” (164).
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Ulmer, W.A. (2017). The Idealism of Endymion . In: John Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47084-9_3
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