“a distant Idea of Proximity”: How Keats Handled Beauty1

John Keats had a genius for friendship. The gestures of friendship embodied in his

letters, and in the poems they enclose, offer occasions for thinking about the poet’s

proper attitude towards the beautiful. Keats worried about whether beautiful things can be

tarnished or nullified by mishandling. In his letters, Keats’ thoughts on solitude and

sociability continually intersect with his fears of damage to the beautiful. He felt fully

both the beautiful’s powerful self-sufficiency and its touching fragility. Keats’ practice of

enclosing his poems in handwritten letters to friends, I argue, works out a social solution

to the vulnerability of beautiful things by hand.

Mishandling the Beautiful

In his beginnings and his endings, Keats offers powerfully categorical statements

about the self-sufficiency and invulnerability of beauty:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:Its loveliness increases; it will neverPass into nothingness2

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know. 3

Taken together, we read that beauty is immortal and sufficient (the only form of

knowledge we have or need). Both of these statements, however, are bracketed as

reported speech. I will never fade and My beauty is all you need to know are what the

artworks say about beauty, not what Keats says about art.

Statements attributed to art works have a relationship to veracity that Philip

Larkin discriminatingly called “not untrue” or “almost true.”4 They say what only

artworks can mean about truth and permanence. The prosopopoeic quality of these

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statements is obvious in the Ode, which offers a dialogue tag “man…to whom thou

say’st.”5 In Endymion, the immortality and ever increasing loveliness of the myth are

placed in figurative quotation marks by Keats’ prefaces. In the first, Keats is moved to

apologize to the lovers of simplicity for touching the spell of loveliness that hung about Endymion….6

Similarly, in the expresses the “hope” that

I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness.7

Through his revision, Keats heightened the anxiety of potentially damaging touch. As

Keats worked on Endymion, he was preoccupied with the notion of thinking as touching,

and touching as injury. While composing Book II, he visited his friend Benjamin Bailey

in Oxford.8 In a letter recounting their conversation, he described the emotion of injustice

as “like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of thought.”9

Keats is revolted by destructive misinterpretation of the beautiful. In a letter to

George and Georgiana Keats, he recoils from Leigh Hunt’s mishandling of the “fine” and

the “beautiful”:

Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful—Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts—and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing10

Hunt injures his auditors by contaminating the beautiful things with his “vain, egotistical

and disgusting” approach to “taste and…morals.” Hunt’s talk is not just mistaken, it does

one harm by interrupting the correct perception of beauty and seemingly nullifying the

beautiful things he mentions.

The gravamen of Hunt’s offense is his lack of intellectual generosity towards his

listeners:

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He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses—he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually.11

Hunt’s egotistical interpretations interpose between Keats and the beautiful things. It is as

if, in pointing out a delicious morsel to Keats, Hunt also wants to taste it for him in

advance. Putting a beautiful thing before other people is an exercise of tact, and of trust.

It is a social gesture that respects the solitude of “other minds” in aesthetic perception by

crediting them with equal and reciprocal powers.12

For Keats, Hunt is guilty of exactly the sort of profaning and vulgarizing of

classical culture with which John Lockhart’s famously contemptuous review charges

Endymion.13 Keats’ vindication against Lockhart’s charge begins with his felt lack of

“egotism” in handling the beautiful myth. Calling himself a “camelion Poet,” he

explicitly disavows an egotistical theory of poetic creation. Keats is concerned not to

express a beautiful character, but to use the poetic character to register and reflect the

beautiful. This allows him to bid defiance to the reviewers who accuse him of vulgarity:

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own Works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict.... 14

Keats’ own “solitary reperception” is his sole and final tribunal of judgment.15

In Solitude: “seeing great things in loneliness”

As Keats was aware, there is a strain of unsociability, even fanaticism, in the

abstract love of beauty.16 It leads Keats to entertain the idea of creating beautiful poems,

not for the enjoyment of others, but as hermetic tributes to beauty itself. As Keats worries

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about “touching” and “dimming” the beauty of classical mythology, his revulsion at the

idea of people mishandling his own poems incites him to near misanthropy:

…I wish to avoid publishing—I admire Human Nature but I do not like Men—I should like to compose things honourable to Man—but not fingerable over by Men17

Devotion to beauty in the abstract threatens to replace his affection for individual human

beings. Perhaps their grubby fingers cannot be trusted not to tarnish or damage his

compositions. Thus, contempt for public admiration is the other side of his devotion to

abstract beauty. 18

Trusting to abstract Beauty, and mistrustful of men in general, Keats contemplates

hermetic rules of conduct for himself. He feels possessed of “the strength to refuse the

poisonous suffrage of a public.” And he imagines ways of testing that strength by solitary

devotion to the principle of beauty in all things.19 He tells Richard Woodhouse:

…I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine on them.20

This solitary, Penelope-like making and unmaking is not just a parable expressive of

Keats’ disinterested poetic work ethic. It is also a vision of a burnt offering. Keats thinks

of beautiful poems sacrificed—sight unseen—to Beauty itself. Fire, after all, refines and

translates what is too pure for human uses.21 Keats imagines himself a “patient, sleepless

Eremite” in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds:

…if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox’s…I could pass my life very nearly alone though it should last eighty years.22

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Thus, for Keats, this prospect of hermetic solitude is a test of body as much as much as

will. His solitary ascent to the “summit in Poetry” is limited only by “the nerve bestowed

upon me.”23

Yet too much time in company, Keats suggests, can also be unnerving. Solitude

can be a relief from the annihilating pressure of social intercourse on the poetic character:

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 that, I am in very little time annihilated….24

Pressed by other personalities, the exquisite responsiveness of the camelion poet is

abjectly exposed. Like the white Busts mishandled by Leigh Hunt’s “egotistical”

interpretation, he “becomes a nothing.”25 If Keats’ identity contracts from “commerce

with the world,” he finds consolation in imagining a reciprocal expansion of Soul: “The

soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home…the rest of mankind, they

are as much a dream to me as Milton's Hierarchies.26 Here Keats escapes from the threat

of unreality in the social world by casting society itself as unreal.27

If Keats’ visions of solitude can figure as test of strength or refuge from personal

annihilation, they also suggest ecstatic self-communion:

The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children. The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness…I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone.28

In this letter, Keats is skeptical of matrimony because it would seem to substitute one

particular, socially-embedded beauty (that of a happy family home), for the “the mighty

abstract idea…of beauty.” Yet even in this exultant description, Keats imagines the

consummation of solitude as marriage and procreation. In other words, the activity of

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“Seeing great things in loneliness” is itself seen in terms of the fundamental unit of

human society.29 Indeed, when Keats writes to Haydon of his plan to give up “Life in

Society,” he emphasizes the irrevocability of his resolution with the nuptial image, “I will

buy a gold ring and put it on my finger.”

For Company: gestures of interassimilation

The social context of Keats’ imagination of solitude is vividly real in his journal

letters to his brother and sister in law in America. His rejoicing in their union prompts

him to rejoice in solitude as transcendental intermingling (“I melt into the air with a

voluptuousness so delicate I am content to be alone”). As much as he bemoaned the

annihilating interference of other personalities, Keats feared being out of touch with those

closest to him. His medical training leads him to “the uneasy thought that in seven years

the same hands cannot greet each other again”:

We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same… for the careful Monks patch it and patch it for St Anthony’s shirt. This is the reason why bosom friends, on being separated for any number of years, afterwards meet coldly, neither of them knowing why—the fact is they are both altered…30

Keats’ material imagination literalizes the notion of bosom friends growing apart. In

evoking states of separation or lack, he was attuned to antitheses that do not entirely

cancel each other out. The phrase “the same and not the same” finds the same semantic

resource in not-quite-contradiction as “The feel of not to feel it.”31

Those who dwell in amicable proximity do not merely unconsciously become a

part of each other’s lives, they become a part of each other:

Men who live together have a silent moulding and influencing power over each other. They interassimilate.32

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Even as he imagines men in general an insubstantial kingdom of shadows, his friends

have “grown as it were a part of myself”; they belong on the same plane as the primary

reality of his own soul.33 “Touch has a memory,” Keats writes.34 Touch can also be an

index of a discomfiting amnesia. The bosom friends are the same in their mental affinity

for each other, but—living apart—they are not the same and are betrayed into cold

forgetfulness by a failure to interassimilate. In Keats, hands touching register with

immediacy textures of human affinity or interference.35

After studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital and nursing his dying brother, Keats’

grasped the difference life makes to flesh. To touch dead flesh is to sense the insensible,

to feel something—however loved and beautiful—already subject to corruption. The

uncanny power of “This Living Hand” derives from its reach towards a posthumous and

extra-literary existence. The “living hand” is impossibly both warm and cold. Its wild

vampiric surmise (“…thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood | So in my veins red

life might stream again”) is simply a radical example of Keats’ textual gestures of

interassimilation.

For Keats, what would be the unconscious intermingling of mere proximity must

become a conscious effort of sociability:

’T is an uneasy thought that in seven years the same hands cannot greet each other again. All this may be obviated by a willful and dramatic exercise of our Minds towards each other.36

Keats thought of a letter as “a willful and dramatic exercise,” a conscious effort

embodied in a textual gesture. By reaching those out of touch with an exertion of the

mind and the hand, he could prevent the process of growing apart:

I know the manner of your walking, standing, sauntering, laughing, punning, and every action so truly that you seem near to me. You will remember me in the

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same manner.37

According to Keats, the conscious exercise of social sympathy can overcome distance.

Sharing the same words—reading a passage of Shakespeare at the same time—can

gesture towards physical proximity: “you read one at the same time and we shall be as

near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.” Though it outrages Keats that

the beautiful is “fingerable over by Men,” in this instance having the same beautifully

wrought text to hand is the basis of social sympathy.38

John writes to George and Georgiana, “in a letter one takes up one’s existence

from the time we last met” even if one has “altered completely.” Letters tend to imply a

falsely static portrait of their author. Keats counters this tendency through the mixed and

multifarious composition of his correspondence: “there can be nothing so

rememberancing and enchaining as a good long letter be it composed of what it may.” “A

good long letter” from Keats is a driftnet of his existence. It gathers—with deliberate

indiscrimination—thoughts on poetic vocation, gossip, acrostics and, crucially, his

poetry.

This way of writing “In solitude, for company” points towards a resolution of

Keats’ double passion for isolation and fellowship.39 Beauty in the abstract, for Keats,

demands devoted isolation; friendship requires ever-renewed intermingling. The problem

of whether beauty can be damaged by mishandling is intimately connected to the problem

of the poet’s relationship to other people. In overcoming distance, Keats’ remarkable

letters also pointed to a means of preventing the beautiful from being mishandled. Keats

entrusted his compositions to his friends. He was anxious to distinguish between the

public, which he viewed with animosity, and those elective affinities with friends who

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had become “part of himself.” In a material sense, his poems “interassimilate” with the

amicable gesture of the letters that often enclose them.

In Solitude, for Company: Keatsian enclosures

The poems in Keats’ letters are doubly enclosed. Before envelopes, the body of a

letter would literally enfold the poems it included included, protecting them as they

passed through many hands to their destination.40 Since paper was expensive, and postage

paid by the recipient, letters were frequently “crossed.”41 This “chequer-work,” as Keats

called it, is especially legible in the letter he sent to Benjamin Bailey on 30 October

1817.42 The body of the letter is written in a neat small hand. The body of the letter

contains congratulations, encouragement, and reflections on a literary dispute between

Hazlitt and Wordsworth. This writing wraps around the poem, which appears in a lighter,

larger and more flourishingly expansive hand. The lines that speak of the primal solitude

of the native muse—“Long didst thou sit amid our regions wild | Wrapt in deep prophetic

Solitude.”—are themselves set off from the crowded crossings of the rest of the page.43

The poem’s evocation of solitary inspiration is held in the textual gesture of the friendly

letter.44 Keats’ letter to Bailey, then, is an object lesson in the way solitary communion

with beauty and social sympathy can coexist and sustain each other.45 The letter’s layout

testifies to the reciprocal accommodation of solitary body of poem and the social body of

the letter.

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“To Benjamin Bailey, 28-30 October 1817.”

This cross-written letter embeds a copy of the opening to Book Four of Endymion.

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Keats’ letters enclose solitary poetic compositions in the consciously social

gesture of letter writing. The biographical and textual contexts of “On First Looking Into

Chapman’s Homer” describe a progress from a shared experience of beauty, to act of

solitary composition, and finally to the sharing of the newly created beautiful poem. In

the poem, Cortez’s men “Look’d at each other with a wild surmise”, just as Charles

Cowden Clark and Keats are filled with “teeming wonderment” as they read over

Chapman together. “We had parted…at day-spring,” Clark writes, “yet he contrived that I

should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles, by ten o’clock. 46 Keats

needed distance and solitude to compose a poem evoking the intensity of the encounter

with the beauty of Chapman’s Homer. After leaving Clark, Keats subjected their shared

experience to “a solitary reperception” he memorialized in the sonnet.47

Unlike the section of Endymion in Keats’ letter to Bailey, the text of “On First

Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is not surrounded by an amicable personal letter. It

stands alone on the page.48 In delivering his poem, Keats was anxious not to interfere

with its interpretation. The blank margins of the surviving text credit Clark’s mind with

the “degree of perception” requisite for grasping the poem. The astonishment of Keats’

sonnet also credits Chapman’s adroit translation of classical beauty.

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“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Houghton Library. Cambridge, MA. MS Keats 2.4. A.MS., early draft.

“I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than the famous sonnet.”

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For Keats, a thing of beauty is defensible, not impervious. If the public is an

enemy, and the reviewers are inconsequent, only sustained intercourse with friends

offered some protection for the beautiful things Keats created. Keats’ gift for friendship

does not derive from great poetic gift. Yet his impassioned sense of fellowship found a

social use for the beautiful things he created. The amicable gestures of his letters—

including the poems they enclose—sustain that fellowship. In the same way, his receptive

poetic sensibility was alive to both the powerful grasp of social sympathy and the sublime

exposure of solitude.

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1 “Notwithstanding their bad intelligence I have experienced some pleasure in receiving so correctly two Letters from you, as it gives me if I may so say a distant Idea of Proximity.” “To George and Georgiana Keats, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27 September 1819.” John Keats. Selected Letters. Eds. Robert Gittings and Jon Mee. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009: 306.2 John Keats. Keats’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. New York: Norton, 2009: 148.3 Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 462.4 See “Talking in Bed” and “An Arundel Tomb,” respectively. In the first, “It becomes still more difficult” to find something “not untrue and not unkind” in an artlessly intimate situation; in the second, the “untruth” “stone fidelity” of the couple on the tomb expresses a he “almost true: / What will survive of us is love.” Philip Larkin. Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2003: 100, 116.5 The status of the quotation marks is a vexed textual question, see Jack Stillinger “Who Says What to Whom at the End of Ode on a Grecian Urn” in “The Hoodwinking of Madeline” and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971: 167-173. For the purposes of literary interpretation, however, “[t]he last two lines are spoken by the urn,” as Helen Vendler notes. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983: 134.6 Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 148.7 Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 147. Keats’ second preface refers specifically to the unwarranted incompletion of “the first two books,” thus implicating Endymion’s “cry of its occasion,” to borrow Wallace Stevens’ term.8 Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 143.9 “To Benjamin Bailey, 23 January 1818” in Selected Letters: 51.10 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 16-18, 22, 29(?), 31 December 1818, 2-4 January 1819” in Selected Letters: 169.11 Ibid. 12 According to Keats, bad art is both overfamiliar and anti-social. It wants to lay hands on us, then sullenly withdraws its hands if we reject the imposture: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” “To J.H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818” in Selected Letters: 57.13 John Gibson Lockhart “The Cockney School of Poetry” (October 1817), reprinted in Lewis M. Schwartz. Keats Reviewed by His Contemporaries. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press: 125.14 “James Augustus Hessey, 8 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 146.15 “James Augustus Hessey, 8 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 146.16 “…the Public…a thing I cannot help looking upon as an Enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of Hostility….” “To John Hamilton Reynolds, 9 April 1818”; “All I hope is that I may not lose all interest in human affairs….” “To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 80, 148. The opening of The Fall of Hyperion notes the uncomfortable resemblance of inspiration to fanaticism:Whether the dream now purposed to rehearseBe Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be knownWhen this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 498.17 “To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 22 December 1818” in Selected Letters: 162-163.18 “To George and Georgiana Keats 14, 16, 24, 31 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 160.19 “To John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819” in Selected Letters: 262.20 “To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 148-149.21 Dante says of the poet Arnaut Daniel in purgatory, “Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina” (“he hid himself in the refining fire”). Purgatorio XXVI.148.22 For “patient, sleepless Eremite” see “[Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art—]” in Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 338. For Keats’ letter to Reynolds see “To John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819” in Selected Letters: 262.23 “To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 148.24 Ibid.25 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 16-18, 22, 29(?), 31 December 1818, 2-4 January 1819” in Selected Letters: 169.26 “To John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819” in Selected Letters: 262. Keats learned this strategy of consolation from Milton’s Satan. See Paradise Lost I.254-255: “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.”27 A sensibility overawed by a room full of babies, yet indifferent to the reality of an entire kingdom of men and women, might seem in the throes of an “hateful siege of contraries.” However, these extremes are only expressive of an ideal receptivity and self-created creative power.28 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 14, 16, 24, 31 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 159-160.29 This transposition can be likened to the tendency for celibate religious traditions to discuss the communion with the transcendent in terms of love and marriage. 30 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 17,18, 20, 21, 25, 27 September 1819” in Selected Letters: 299.31 See the concluding lines of “Stanzas.”:But were there ever any Writhed not at passed joy?The feel of not to feel it,When there is none to heal it,Nor numbed sense to steel it,

Was never said in rhyme.Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 105. See also Keats’ statement to Reynolds (quoted above), “then not myself goes home to myself.” “To John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819” in Selected Letters: 262.32 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 17,18, 20, 21, 25, 27 September 1819” in Selected Letters: 299.33 “To John Hamilton Reynolds, 24 August 1819” in Selected Letters: 262.34 “To—-—-.” in Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 375.35 The joining of hands as a basic synecdoche of fellowship is detectable in the etymology of the Latin word “dexter,” meaning right (hand) and pledge (of friendship).36 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 27, September 1819” in Selected Letters: 299.37 “To George and Georgiana Keats, 16-18, 22, 29(?), 31 December 1818, 2-4 January 1819” in Selected Letters: 165.38 For “fingerable over by Men” see “To Benjamin Robert Haydon, 22 December 1818” in Selected Letters: 162-163. Keats links Shakespeare with certitude in a truth “from clear perception of its Beauty”: “[the poets] Mrs Tighe and Beattie once delighted me—now I see through them and find nothing in them…Perhaps a superior being may look upon Shakespeare in the same light—is it possible? No.” “To George and Georgiana Keats, 16-18, 22, 29(?), 31 December 1818, 2-4 January 1819” in Selected Letters: 175.39 “Lauds.” W.H. Auden. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 2007: 639-640.40 Stephen Hebron. John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts. London: British Library, 2009: 59-60.41 Since a long, expensive letter could be an imposition to the impecunious Keats circle, letter writing was a business of tact. Keats Brothers: 239.42 For “chequer-work” see “To Miss Jeffery, 9 June 1819” in Selected Letters: 242.43 “To Benjamin Bailey, 28-30 October 1817” in Selected Letters: 28-31 and Houghton Library. Cambridge, MA. MS Keats 1.14 (seq. 46). 44 Helen Vendler notes that in Keats’ manuscripts, a given word can be “‘corrupted’ by the simultaneous presence in Keats’s mind of another, contiguous word.” Alone, the muse is rapt in solitude. In this letter (not in the published version) Keats writes “wrapt,” however, suggesting that the “w” of “wild” carried over to the next line. Also contiguous in Keats’ mind, perhaps, was the image of a lone figure embodying inspiration being wrapped in loneliness itself—just as the poem is embraced by Bailey’s letter. See Helen Vendler’s essay “The Living Hand of Keats” in John Keats. John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990: xv.45 “Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another…” Wallace Stevens. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Wallace Stevens. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1997: 339.46 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in Keats’s Poetry and Prose: 55.47 “To James Augustus Hessey, 8 October 1818” in Selected Letters: 146.48 Houghton Library. Cambridge, MA. MS Keats 2.4: A.M.S., early draft of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”