Mark Halliday’s ‘There: For Keats’ and Keats’s ‘Epistle to J. H. Reynolds, Esq.’: Against Monumental Poetry

Abstract

The final piece for review is a short poem, published in Poetry in 1992, by Mark Halliday, called ‘There: For Keats.’ Like many of the tribute poems, this one quotes from Keats himself but not from the typically referenced poems, the odes and some of the sonnets and the letters. This plays upon one of his most interesting works, the so-called ‘Epistle to J. H. Reynolds, Esq.,’ a rambling poem of heroic couplets that saunters through the telling of a nightmarish dream, imagines its opposite in a serene painting by Claude, philosophizes on the relationship between imagination and truth, and recounts his own unease facing the ‘core / Of an eternal fierce destruction,’ all in the service of granting his friend Reynolds improvement in health. It moves, in other words, in and out of certain generic expectations, passing through what Keats calls ’moods.’ It is, compared to his odes and sonnets, shapeless and unpredictable but very much grounded in the world of ‘here,’ his phenomenal life, never seriously entering the image-world of mythology and the collectivity. Moreover, Halliday’s poem rhymes every line the same, and the rhyme itself comes from the ‘Epistle.’ The effect of this poem is, as with Clark’s book, to free Keatsian language from the traditions of curtailing it in the expectations of tragedy, but in this case it also returns the reader to Keats’s poem to show that he too was both capable of and interested in a gaming with language.