Aaron McCollough

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Wordsworth/Keats: Some Class Notes

Posted on September 29, 2008 - Filed Under | 2 Comments

Today, in the poetry intro class, we had a pretty successful conversation about Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Keats’ letters. We are using Kwasny’s Poetics Anthology, Towards the Open Field. As I expected, students found the philosophical tenor of the language a bit challenging (and also a bit dull, I think). We started out with Keats and tried to work backwards to Wordsworth. So, first, I laid out these three famous Keats squibs:

1. “As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, 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 every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from this 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 any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually [informing]—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 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? … It is a wretched thing to confess; but 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 that, I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.” (45-46)

2. “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (44)

3. “the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout” (44)

Obviously, we needed to try to suss out what Keats could mean by “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” and I figured that would help us a) get some kind of handle on what Wordsworth himself thought he was up to—even as Keats is disagreeing with it—and b) what kind of alternative Keats could be offering in the guise of “Negative Capability.”

We began by looking more closely at the idea of the “poetical Character” that has “no self.” When asked what that could mean, one student suggested it sounded like acting, which I thought was a great way to open things up a little bit. We spent some time talking about the range of typical associations we pair with acting and actors, and things got very interesting.

As a working analogy, we tried talking about Keats’ description of poetical Character alongside the idea of “method acting.” One student told us that Daniel Day-Lewis never broke character while filming Last of the Mohicans (including camping on location, etc.). This was helpful as we pushed further into what it is we think good actors do when they take on a role. One student suggested that they must imaginatively try to project themselves into another person’s situation and (in doing so) filter out the parts of themselves that don’t fit. Others countered with a description that sounded more like spirit possession. To me, this pair sounded like a pretty good way of describing a fundamental difference between the way Keats views Wordsworth’s project on one hand and his own on the other. Wordsworth wants to project some of himself on to characters and objects in the world, whereas Keats wants to let the same into himself and into his poems. A subtle difference semantically but a major difference in attitude towards the poetic “role.”

We talked about Wordsworth’s professed interest in “common men” and “rural occupations,” as complicated by an interest in “elevating” the passions while also practicing selection, e.g. “removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion” (14).

A student asked the class (I was very pleased that he directed the question at the group) whether it didn’t seem that Wordsworth felt a moral obligation to his society that Keats seemed to lack. In response, another student said she thought Keats seemed to feel an obligation to “art” in contrast to Wordsworth’s stated obligation to society. This struck me as helpful insofar as it helped us get away from calling Keats “selfish,” which doesn’t really make sense, given his repeated protestations to having “no self.” I suggested that both seemed to feel moral obligations and both felt those moral obligations were bound to be mediated by art; they have slightly different emphases. I then reminded them of our conclusions regarding the different kinds of acting performance we’d imagined earlier in the class.

I pointed to the apocryphal story about “Ode to a Nightingale” having been written in one go (and brought in Keats’ “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all” (45)). I then briefly compared that to “The Thorn” and Wordsworth’s claim that he’d wanted “by some invention [to] do as much to make [a real thorn] permanently an impressive object as the storm ha[d] made it” to his eyes on a stormy day on the ridge of Quantock Hill.

From this position, we were able to pretty much agree that Keats’s openness to light and shade, Imogen and Iago amounted to imagining the poetic self as a kind of neutral vessel or conductor for the full range of phenomenal experience, whereas Wordsworth’s “proportional capability” (wherein, “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulant” and by which “one being is elevated another” (8)) aims at an fairly idealistic, even Platonic, amount of control over what should be experienced. We briefly talked about the threat posed by violent movies and video games as 21st Century fields in which these questions are still contested.

Wordsworth probably got the rough end of the conversation ultimately, but I was delighted that the discussion was so lively. I had been somewhat apprehensive about the day’s prep because I found Negative Capability to be an extremely slippery concept when I was an undergrad. Today, my overall impression was that folks had a pretty solid grasp of what Keats could have meant, and I’m impressed. Wednesday, we will talk about the poems more, and it should be interesting to see how the Poetics informs our take on the poems: as Keats admits, “it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it” (45). Likewise, dare we say, “to read it”?

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