9 - Keats and language

Summary

What kind of topic is this? What else is there? Language in Keats: that wouldn't get us where we need to go, either. Keats in language? Up to his ears in language. Some writers in English, some very few, have written more brilliantly. None has worded more gorgeously. Vowels are for Keats a passion, consonants an ecstasy, syntax a life force. Okay, then: Keats in language. And we respond in kind. There is no way to approach Keats with mere close reading. Proximity breeds immersion. Like his verse, reading operates from the inside out, silent music rippling with inference.

So rapt by the syllables of English verse was Keats that even (or especially) at his most aching, gripped by mortality and stung by frustrated ambition, his words often become his theme. Ideally wielded, they heal. In the process, they become his diagnosed means as well. Trained as a physician, selfschooled as a poet, Keats was an intuitive anatomist of language, its closely articulated skeletal structure, its ligaments and fibers, its muscular tensions and release, its rhythmic corridors of breath – while also a genetic specialist in its origins and mutations. With pen rather than stethoscope, he took the phonetic pulse of his every word through the listening ear of script.