CHAPTER VII

THE IMAGINATION

I

In both his letters and his poems Keats has, first to last, many things to say about the imagination. Always he understood it to be the supreme active principle in poetic composition. But how decisively with the rapid maturity of his intellect and critical judgment during the brief, fitful working period of his life did his ideas change and develop. Through the unquiet days and restless nights of burning thought, the puerile, vaporish notions of the 1815-1816 period became alchemized into sinewy convictions which, expressed in vigorous and picturesque language, stand as some of the most striking comments upon the nature of the imagination to be found in critical literature. In previous chapters I have pointed out how Keats's early notions of the ecstatic trance and "direct divination" methods of imaginative activity merged into the later more ripened conception of insight based on knowledge and experience. But in both of these views the imagination is all important as the vital element in poetic activity; Keats has merely arrived in his later thinking at a more comprehensive understanding of the intuitive faculties.

An analysis of his utterances on the subject from the middle of 1817 on, reveals that he has reached two significant conclusions as to the nature and function of the imagination. First, the imagination as an instrument of intuitive insight is the most authentic guide to ultimate truth; second, the imagination in its highest form is a generative force, in itself creative of essential reality.

II

Plato has said, "Not by wisdom do poets write, but by a sort of genius and inspiration." If by wisdom Plato means knowledge through reasoning, and I think he does, Keats would have been in complete agreement. For, though he believed firmly in the wisdom that springs from close contact with a harsh world and flowers into gracious human sympathy, Keats had no faith in mere cold knowledge and reason. "One of the first characteristics of the genuine and healthy poetic nature," declares Professor Shairp, "is this-it is rooted rather in the heart than in the head." So Keats thought. For to him poetry has its genesis in imagination, and feeling is both its rudder and its sails. Deep feeling makes possible thinking with our whole selves, soul and body. It emancipates the poet's mind from the incidental and temporary, leaving it free to probe the deeper mysteries of existence.

Imagination, with its springs in the heart rather than the head, though the head too has its place, becomes with Keats the highest and most authentic guide to truth. Not only is the imagination to be trusted more implicitly than reason in matters where both are operative, but there are even things clear to the imagination of which the reason knows nothing. As Joubert says, in words that well express Keats's thought on this subject, "Heaven, seeing that there were many truths which by our nature we could not know, and which it was to our interest, nevertheless, not to be ignorant of, took pity on us and granted us the faculty of imagining them."

"Keats," says James Russell Lowell, "certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these later days." If this be true, Keats had realized in achievement one of his favorite poetic theories. For, supplementary to his demand for a detached state of spirit for poetic

experience, was his conception of the poetic nature as a free entity with capacity to penetrate wherever it may choose, able to project itself into and merge itself in complete identification with the objects of its contemplation, yet in that mingling never losing its proper native qualities of unity and power.

In Endymion, torn by conflicting earthly and immortal loves, perplexed by a confusing, tangled web of circumstances, drawn by feeling and instinct in one direction, by reason in another, and, withal, carried out of himself by the power of his emotions, the poet cries out

What is this soul then? Whence
Came it? It does not seem my own, and I

Have no self-passion or identity.

(Book IV, 11. 475-477.)

This is Keats himself speaking, uttering a thought that often came into his mind with the teasing interest of the novel and unexplained. "Nothing startles me beyond the moment," he declares to Bailey, evidently when thinking in this vein. "The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." Again he writes, "One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another." And these reflections at once suggest to our minds his definition of a poet —

Where's the Poet? Show him! show him,

Muses nine! that I may know him.

'Tis the man who with a man

Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan,
Or any other wondrous thing

A man may be 'twixt ape and Plato;
Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren, or Eagle finds its way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger's yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.

Through the power of the imagination, then, the poet is one who in spirit intimately lives with the feathered and wild creatures of the forest, who shares the identity of, hence, in thought and imagination, becomes equal to, king or beggar, or any that wear the semblance of man, and who, because he has partaken of the existence of bird or beast of prey, can understand the meaning of its every move or cry.

In a second passage in Endymion, there is suggested the other imaginative extreme- from the very earthy, we ascend at a leap to the ethereal. "Wherein lies happiness?" the poet has asked. It is, he replies, in that which raises our ready minds to a "fellowship with essence," leaving us completely "alchemized and free of space."

Feel we these things? — that moment have we stept

Into a sort of oneness, and our state

Is like a floating spirit's. But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity.

(Book I, 795-800.)

Here plainly is implied a complete identity with the infinite, when the mind of the poet shall merge itself imaginatively into the spirit of the universe, to lose itself in a divine " fellowship with essence."

In a self-revelatory letter to Richard Woodhouse, written October 27, 1818, Keats presents further evidence. Here we find that this power of identification is reciprocal; not only does the poet's self go out to others, but the identity of others forces itself upon him, until he is helpless before its might:

Ist. As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical Sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self—It is everything and nothing. It has no character-it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,1 be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. –

1 Tragic poetry, Hazlitt declares, "has its source and ground-work in a common love of excitement."-On Poetry in General.

It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.2 What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity - he is continually in for and filling some other body. The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity- he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. -If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature - How can it, when I have no Nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery

of Children.

Keats's conception is that the poet's being is a sort of detached entity- an unfettered spirit-like thing independent of earthy circumstances and vision, free to take leave of the body to roam about where it will, penetrating into the mysterious chambers of the soul's deepest recesses, or, soaring into the shadowy and illimitable spaces of the universe, to mingle with "essence" in "fellowship divine"; its delight is ever fresh, adventurous speculation, whether down into the darker regions of existence or up into the majestic realm of "Saturn and old Ops." This process with Keats is not merely a submergence of one's self into another; it is not a substitution where the poet puts himself in the place of the object of his contemplation: it is rather a sort of etherized penetration, in which the poetic soul, acting as

2 Note Hazlitt's words: "Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing." — On Poetry in General.