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Memory in Mankind: Keats's Historical Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

J. Philip Eggers
J. Philip Eggers*
Affiliation:
Manhattan Community College, New York, N. Y.
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Abstract

Historical allusions and the theme of history add a psychological and philosophical dimension to Keats's poetry that reflects the change in historical thought during the romantic period. Keats's wide-ranging familiarity with history manifests itself in a development that begins in juvenile hero worship but rapidly matures into a subtle historical vision in the odes and Hyperion poems. His sense of history as a kind of collective memory makes possible a union of poetry and history, since he sees both as products of the imagination that portray the varied particulars of experience. History plays a major part in Keats's deepening acceptance of mortality and an accompanying affirmation of time and process through release from the fear of death. The relative success and failure of his attempts to unite history and poetry confirm his organic analogy: when he relies most on his own imagination and memory, he evokes a more vital sense of the past than when he follows sources rather mechanically. He did not live to effect the revolution in historical drama to which he aspired, but history as a concept within his lyric and narrative poems remains a compelling witness of his powers as historical poet.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , October 1971 , pp. 990 - 998
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

Note 1 in page 997 The Mirror and the Lamp (1953; rpt. New York: Norton, 1958), p. 101.

Note 2 in page 997 See comments in David Hume's essay “Of the Study of History,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Green and Grose (London: Longmans, 1898), ii, 388 ff. See also Emery Neff, The Poetry of History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), p. 39, and Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1961), p. 92.

Note 3 in page 997 Quoted by Claude Lee Finney in The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, 2 vols. (1936; rpt. New York: Russell, 1963), i, 27.

Note 4 in page 998 Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 30–31. All quotations of the poems are from this edition.

Note 5 in page 998 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), ii, 193–94. Hereafter cited as Letters.

Note 6 in page 998 John Keats, the Making of a Poet (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 276.

Note 7 in page 998 Emery Neff, The Poetry of History, pp. 17–18; G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Longmans, 1913), pp. 8–11.

Note 8 in page 998 Victorian England (1936; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. vi.

Note 9 in page 998 John Keats, the Making of a Poet, p. 75.

Note 10 in page 998 The Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 49.

Note 11 in page 998 Table Talk (New York: Dutton, 1960), p. 255.

Note 12 in page 998 E.g., “the mighty dead”—Book i, l. 20; “Thermopylae's heroes”—i, l. 317; “The mighty ones who have made eternal day / For Greece and England”—ii, ll. 251–52.

Note 13 in page 998 See Book iv, ll. 19–24, on the dreary modern world.

Note 14 in page 998 Bush, “Notes on Keats's Reading,” PMLA, 50 (1935), 785–806. The work referred to is Potter's Archaeologia Graeca.

Note 15 in page 998 John Keats (Boston and Toronto: Little, 1968), p. 283.

Note 16 in page 998 See Gooch, p. 11.

Note 17 in page 998 See Cleanth Brooks, “Keats's Sylvan Historian,” The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, 1947), p. 155.

Note 18 in page 998 In Tennyson's line from The Princess—“O Death in Life, the days that are no more!”—is the same agony of memory, and possibly of history as well.

Note 19 in page 998 Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Random, 1959), pp. 101, 19. Brown writes that the romantics “inherited and secularized the mystic aspiration for Eternity” (p. 93).

Note 20 in page 998 Table Talk, pp. 321–22.

Note 21 in page 998 The Romantic Comedy (New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), 149–50.

Note 22 in page 998 Letters, i, 277. Keats owned quite a few substantial works of history, including Livy, Raleigh, Xenophon, and Voltaire, and such works as Potter's Archaeologia Graeca, Davies' Celtic Researches, Marmontel's Les Incas, Vertot's three-volume history of the Roman Republic, and Alexander Adams' Roman Antiquities.—“Charles Brown: List of Keats's Books,” The Keats Circle, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), i, 256–60.

Note 23 in page 998 See Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 536 ff., 562–68; Ward, pp. 300–10; Gittings, pp. 326, 332.

Note 24 in page 998 See Gittings, p. 335.

Note 25 in page 998 John Keats, p. 621.

Note 26 in page 998 Letters, ii, 234. Keats even expressed a desire to study church history at one time and planned to read Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ.—Letters, ii, 70.

Note 27 in page 998 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (1932; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1960), p. 198.