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The Significance of Lamia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In an article Poetry of Sensation or of Thought? I attempted to show how Endymion and Hyperion: A Fragment are related to the æsthetic problem that Keats first analyzed in Sleep and Poetry. At that time I suggested that the Odes and Lamia, following as they do the abandoning of Hyperion: A Fragment, are the outpourings of a mind released at last from the self-imposed duty of writing a poetry of humanitarian philosophy and allowed to indulge its creative genius for the poetry of sensation. It was my contention (and still is) that Keats had been trying to force himself, like his own Apollo, to accept “Knowledge enormous” as Beauty—knowledge “of the agony and strife of human hearts”; whereas at least one half of his being was affirming passionately that Feeling, particularly that which passes through the refinery of the creative imagination, is Beauty. It was his acceptance of this side of his nature that produced most of the poems written in the spring of 1819. But during the summer of 1819 Keats plunged once more into the old conflict. It will be the purpose of this paper to show how Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion are related to it.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935
References
1 PMLA, xlv, 1129–38.
2 John Keats, 3rd edition (1920), pp. 407–409.
3 Keats: A Study in Development, pp. 84–85.
4 John Keats, ii, 308–309.
5 The Poems of John Keats, 5th edition (1926), pp. xli–xlii.
6 Keats, p. 62.
7 For full text of this letter, see Lowell, John Keats, ii, 320.
8 Keats and Shakespeare, p. 157.
9 Op. cit., 157–166.
10 Ibid., 159.—The letter is given in full, with asterisks in place of Fanny Brawne's name, in M. B. Forman's The Letters of John Keats, ii, 430–432. But there are several problems in this passage. Forman gives as his source for this letter the 1848 ed. of R. M. Milnes' (Lord Houghton's) Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Yet curiously enough that book, in giving this letter, does not include the words, “if you live at Hampstead next winter—I like Fanny Brawne and I cannot help it. On that account I had better not live there”—the very words that Mr. Murry makes so much. of. The words do, however, appear in Lord Houghton's papers, now Lord Crewe's “John Keats' Transcripts and Letters,” where this letter is in Charles Brown's transcript. But dots occur instead of the words “Fanny Brawne.” I am greatly indebted to Charles Williams, Esq., of the Oxford University Press, London, for helping me straighten out this detail.
11 This whole matter is discussed at length in the article referred to in note 1, supra.
12 M. B. Forman, Letters of John Keats (Oxford, 1931), ii, 380.
13 Ibid., ii, 388.
14 Ibid., ii, 399.
15 Ibid., ii, 399.
16 Ibid., ii, 404.
17 Ibid., ii, 414.
18 Ibid., ii, 416.
19 Ibid., ii, 421.
20 Ibid., ii, 418.
21 Ibid., ii, 419.
22 Ibid., ii, 381–384 (July 1); ii, 386–387 (July 8); ii, 389–391 (July 15); ii, 392–394 (July 25); ii, 397–399 (Aug. 5); ii, 400–403 (Aug. 16); and ii, 416–417 (Sept. 13).
23 Ibid., ii, 382.
24 Ibid., ii, 386.
25 Ibid., ii, 393.
26 Ibid., ii, 388.
27 Ibid., ii, 399.
28 Ibid., ii, 404.
29 Ibid., ii, 400.
30 Ibid.,ii, 400–403.
31 Ibid., ii, 404.
32 Ibid., ii, 407.
33 Ibid., ii, 414.
34 The fact that Otho was also in hand at this time is unimportant, for Keats always looked upon this as hack work.
35 Ibid., ii, 416.
36 Ibid., ii, 421.
37 Ibid., ii, 418.
38 Ibid., ii, 419.
39 I need not repeat here the belief that even the Ode on a Grecian Urn is a glorification of sensuous beauty.