The Bourgeois Keats and the World of Capital

Cockney? Sure.  Aesthete? Absolutely.  But John Keats also took many of his cues from the dominant culture of his time and place, and the dominant culture of nineteenth century London was as bourgeois as a lace antimacassar on an Empire settee.  Consider, for example, his narrative poem “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  For all of its medieval trappings—creepy gothic castles, feuding aristocratic dynasties, pale maidens, daring youths, bloated knights sprawled out dozing in the great hall with haunches of beef, flagons of ale, and drowsy hounds in attendance—the fundamental ideological architecture of the thing is of a piece with that of the great nineteenth century novels that taught the burgeoning middle class how to be, well, middle class.

Firstly there’s the emphasis on a kind of inner synthesis, a balancing of the individual’s urges.  This is the stuff of many a bildungsroman: passions and reason, sociability and self-containment, sympathy and judgment—in one way or another, we find the great genre of the middle class creating protagonists who learn to police themselves.  They model the creation of a personality type the sociologist David Reisman saw as typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the inner-directed subject.  Such subjects were the result of populations torn from the tradition-bound life of pre-industrial villages, where mores were inherited from, and enforced by, a longstanding and close-knit community.  In an age of increased mobility, greater personal freedom, and the disruption of old communities—in, that is, the capital-accumulating societies of western Europe and America in the nineteenth century—a new way of life called for a new kind of person.  As Reisman put it, the new society bred “character types who can manage to live socially without strict and self-evident tradition-direction.”  They do so with reference to an “internal gyroscope,” which allows them to reach some form of moral balance in the absence of external direction from established community.  My personal touchstone for this kind of novel is Jane Eyre, where the passions symbolized by fire and the anti-social self-control symbolized by water threaten to overwhelm Jane until, at the end, we see her control and balance them, as she brings the chastened Mr. Rochester a tray with a glass of water and a candle—the emblems of forces she has learned to control.

In “The Eve of St. Agnes,” we see a synthesis of the bodily urges and the spiritual ones.  We begin and end with images of unmitigated bodily bloat—in the form of a feast-hall of overstuffed and indolent nobles—and equally unmitigated spiritual sterility—in the form of a holy man, cold and alone, counting his rosary in ashen reverie.  In between, we find the tale of Madeline, a pure maiden who goes to bed without eating in hopes of seeing a vision of her future husband on St. Agnes’ eve, the night when such things happen, according to ancient lore.  Unknown to Madeline, the young Porphyro, scion of a rival noble house sworn to enmity with her own, has found his way into the castle and, planning to seduce her, has hidden himself in her chambers.  The poem associates him with bodily lust and with the warm colors—red, purple—and her with spiritual purity and cold colors like white and silver.  When the would-be lover sees Madeline in her chamber, we get a kind of fusion of the two symbolic colors, foreshadowing the union of spiritual and bodily elements in the birth of love:

       A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,

       All garlanded with carven imag'ries

       Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,

       And diamonded with panes of quaint device,

       Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,

       As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;

       And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

       And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

       A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

       Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

       And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,

       As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;

       Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

       And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

       And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

       She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,

       Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:

       She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

       Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,

       Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

       Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

       Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees

       Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

       Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,

       Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,

       In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,

       But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Well, it goes on, with the sheer spiritual innocence of Madeline converting Porphyro’s bodily lust into something finer, and the physical presence of Porphyro leading Madeline out of the realm of spiritual visions and into the reality of love.  It’s another one of those grand bourgeois moments of synthesis, forging an inner ethos for the characters.  Sure, we’re in a castle, but we’re miles from the way actual medieval romances like, say, Gawain and the Green Knight, work, with their tests of whether a protagonist can live up to an externally determined virtue.  With Keats, we’re much closer to the bildungsroman than to the medieval quest romance.

And then there’s the matter of the ending of “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  The story of young lovers from feuding families inevitably brings Romeo and Juliet to mind, but Keats’ tale is significantly different.  Shakespeare allows the tragic death of the lovers to bring the feuding houses together: we end with Montagues and Capulets reconciled, and inasmuch as there is any redemption in the play, it comes in the form of a restoration of harmony among noble houses.  In Keats, the emphasis isn’t on the houses at all—dynasties simply aren’t as important in the world of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie as they were in Shakespeare’s day.  Instead, we end with the two lovers escaping, not to an assured happiness, but to a storm.  They leave Madeline’s clan behind, not for the security of Porphyro’s ancestral house, but to hazard their fortunes in a world of large and brutal forces, indifferent to their happiness or unhappiness:

       They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;

       Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;

       Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,

       With a huge empty flaggon by his side:

       The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,

       But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:

       By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:—

       The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;—

       The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

       And they are gone: ay, ages long ago

       These lovers fled away into the storm.

       That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,

       And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form

       Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,

       Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old

       Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;

       The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

       For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.

A little domestic pair, removed from stability, exposed to the indifferent forces of the storm—it’s an image of the modern bourgeois couple, cut free from the traditional bonds of extended family, hoping for the best in a world in which they may or may not thrive, but which they cannot control.  The presence of the beadsman and his “ashes cold” reminds us that fertility and worldly happiness depend on couples like Porphyro and Madeline, and that retreat from the stormy world they hazard is a retreat from modern life itself.  We root for them, the way we root for any young couple setting out in the world capitalism has made.  We wish them well, and tremble.

A Turing Machine is a Nightingale

The medieval streets of Cambridge are haunted by the ghosts of all the great minds who’ve called the town home over the centuries—and so are the poems of Göran Printz-Påhlson.  He, too, called Cambridge home, and met many of the luminaries (most notably the titular character of the poem “My Interview with I.A. Richards”).  Some of the early innovators of what became computer technology were Cambridge men, and Printz-Påhlson has a particular fondness for them: Charles Babbage, for example, strides through a Printz-Påhlson poem, as does Alan Turing.  In fact, Printz-Påhlson has a poem called “Turing Machine,” after the hypothetical tape-driven, algorithm-crunching machines Turning dreamed up in the 1930s.

The poem begins with what may seem like the most un-Romantic of subjects: the algorithms that inhabit Turing’s machines.  But by the end of the poem, we’ve twisted around until we’re in the same territory as that quintessential Romantic lyric, Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”  Here’s how Printz-Påhlson’s poem begins:

It’s their humility we can never imitate,

obsequious servants of more durable material:

     unassuming

they live in complex relays of electric circuits.

Rapidity, docility is their advantage.

You may ask: “What is 2 times 2?”  Or “Are you a machine?”

   They answer or

refuse to answer, all according to demand.

From here, we move to more complex types of machines, and more complex operations—including recursive functions, which reference and replicate themselves:

It is, however, true that other kinds of machines exist,

more abstract automata, stolidly intrepid and

    inaccessible,

eating their tape in mathematical formulae.

They imitate within the language. In infinite

paragraph loops, further and further back in their retreat

    towards more subtle

algorithms, in pursuit of more recursive functions.

So far, it’s all very reminiscent of math class, and unless you’re the type who sees the beauty in mathematical formulae, you’re probably not jumping out of your seat in excitement.  You’re certainly not anticipating a turn toward anything John Keats may have found interesting.  But then there’s this:

They appear consistent and yet auto-descriptive.

As when a man, pressing a hand-mirror straight to his nose,

    facing the mirror,

sees in due succession the same picture repeated

in a sad, shrinking, darkening corridor of glass.

That’s a Gödel-theorem fully as good as any.

    Looking at infinity,

but never getting to see his own face.

The reference is to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which tell us that no system of axioms that can be listed by a computer is capable of demonstrating its own consistency.  That is: the system, no matter how elaborate or recursive, no matter how much such a system can reveal, no matter how far it can take us, it can’t turn around and show us itself in its own consistent nature.  It’s terribly abstract, of course, especially to those of us who haven’t done any math more complicated than that which a tax form requires for many years.  But then we get something the poem’s been daringly light on so far: an image.  The image of a mirror, held close to another mirror and aimed at just the right angle, reflecting itself forever in a kind of trippy, curving infinity of recursion.  I remember when, as a kid, I discovered that I could line my mother’s hand mirror up against the bathroom mirror like this, and how I’d try to like the mirror up so I could see all the way to forever, which, it turns out, you can’t quite do.  Printz-Påhlson juxtaposes this image with that of a mirror in which we gaze on our own face, and notes that we can only have one or the other—an image of infinity, or an image of ourselves.

Here, at last, is where we tread on very Romantic ground: this business of infinity and the self comes straight out of the playbook of Romanticism, and is embodied most powerfully in Keats’ great “Ode to a Nightingale.”  The ode begins with a speaker—let’s just call him Keats—listening to the song of a nightingale hidden in the woods, and drifting off into a kind of narcoleptic state as he listens.  He begins to lose himself, hovering between wakefulness and sleep, until he senses himself disappearing as an individual, and merging into an unconscious state much like death (the ultimate end of the division between the self and the other):

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
The next stanza tells us how the individuality of the bird is lost in the timelessness of its song, which is the same for all nightingales everywhere and always. An ornithologist pal once told me that this is, in fact, false: that birds have regional accents, and that their songs evolve over time, so we might have to file “Ode to a Nightingale” with Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” where he gets his explorers wrong and Cortez when he means Balboa, as a Keatsian fact-blunder.  But who cares?  In the context of the poem, the point is clear enough:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
But this drawing away from selfhood toward the infinite doesn’t last: that word “forlorn” reminds Keats of his own little selfhood, and he recoils from identification with the infinite:
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades: The final two lines of the poem are really wonderful, leaving us in a state where we can’t decide what is real and what is a dream:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? Are we little individuals who only dream we can vanish and become one with something infinite?  Or is our sense of identity illusory, a brief dream between the infinities of non-selfhood that precede and follow our deaths?  Keats leaves it there, with no searching after certainty.  We can have our sense of identity, or we can have the mystical union with the infinite, but we can’t have them both at the same time. And this is the same place Printz-Påhlson leaves us in his much more austere, cerebral poem: with the mirror reflecting itself forever, without us; or with the mirror reflecting us, whole, with no infinite recursion of reflections.  A Turing machine is many things: a grand thought experiment, a model for computer technology, a meditation on the limits of mechanical computation and, in this particular case, a nightingale.

Poetry and the Market: John Keats' Moment of Doubt

So, as part of my ongoing process of poking away at the project whose working title remains "The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, or: How Poetics got to Now from Then," I've been rooting around in Keats' letters. It's been a while since I've read them, and it's good to meet them again. You get to see Keats pine for love, recover from a black eye he got in a game of cricket, you get to watch him hang with Coleridge and talk nightingales, nightmares, and poetics, and, most importantly, you get to confirm your sense of Keats as the ultimate aesthete — most of the time.

Poetry, for Keats, was about poetry — a radical position at the time. It wasn't about anything like a quest for truth (his famous idea of negative capability meant we needn't seek after certainties), and it certainly wasn't about persuading anybody of anything ("we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us," he writes, a line I think of whenever I find myself at some kind of "poets for social justice" event). Beauty must not only reign as the supreme value, for Keats: it must "obliterate all consideration" of other things.

Keats has a tremendously strong sense of the autonomy of the imaginative act: if you're a real Keatsian, you don't write with a goal in mind (not, say "this poem will convince them that the war is bad," nor "I must complete a full-length manuscript that'll win the Picayune Press Emerging Writers Award," still less "I need something they'll publish at the kind of journal the tenure committee cares about" nor even "this'll show her I'm sensitive and then she'll want to meet for clove cigarettes and some snogging"). If you're a real Keatsian, you surrender to the imagination's own imperatives. "If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree," says Keats, "it had better not come at all."

The most challenging part of this, for a lot of people, is the lack of a sense of ethics, the failure to worry about whether one is writing something morally acceptable or not ("what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the cameleon poet"). But the ethical content of a poem isn't a problem for Keats, because he believed, like Philip Sidney before him, that the poet affirmed no particular truth; and he believed, like Auden after him, that poetry made nothing happen. It simply existed, as beauty.

It wasn't a position shared by all the Romantics. In one letter, you can catch Keats chiding Shelley for being too political in "The Cenci," saying "you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist" — and this when Shelley was scratching up some cash to haul Keats' tubercular ass down to Italy, lest he die of an English winter. Keats was an aesthete, but that didn't mean he wasn't aggressive.

So: no surprises here about Keats and aestheticism, at least not yet. But there is one moment in the letters when we see, ever so briefly, young Mr. Keats' faith in aesthetic purity and the autonomous imagination shaken. For a brief moment, we can watch that growing force of the nineteenth century, the logic of the marketplace, put the fear into Keats. Is poetry, he wonders, nothing more than a commodity? Check it out:

(From a letter to Benjamin Bailey, March 13, 1818, for those keeping score at home)

I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lantern to amuse whoever may be struck by its brilliance — as Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer — being in itself a nothing...

Look out! Tradesmen are trudging across the well-kept lawns of poesy, their hobnailed boots mucking up the flowerbeds! What's poetry worth? What's it for? Is it just a low-returning venture in the entertainment industry? One hears echoes of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's dictum that pushpin (a pub game worth trying) is as good as poetry, when it comes to having a good time. All that was solid in Keats' aestheticism melts into air, and the poem is "in itself a nothing," just a blank slate onto which the market will inscribe a (no doubt deeply-discounted) price.

But even as the abyss of market-value opens before Keats, we see him shifting things around, and finding a way to value poetry other than by market appeal. When he speaks of the work taking its value from "the ardor of the pursuer" he opens a door to a different set of values than those of the market. After all, the market isn't about the individual's degree of passion for something: it's about big groups, and tipping their passion just to the point where they'll buy. When Keats shifts the ground of value from a poem being "worth what it will fetch" in the market to the degree of ardor a poem can incite in a single reader, he changes the rules. Suddenly, the poem's value isn't something you can put on a price-tag. Rather, the value is determined by how much any one person can love the poem. Poetry, it seems, doesn't need a big demographic appeal — the poet can settle for what Milton called "fit audience though few." If, to cite that doyen of aesthetes, Walter Pater, the poem can make a few people burn with the light of a hard, gem-like flame, then it has value, no matter what the broader market may feel.

I'm pretty sure that the little mental-judo move Keats comes up with to escape his moment of doubt is one still in use today. In fact, I remember invoking something similar when I was arguing for the importance of the great, and greatly unpopular, poet John Peck: "I don't foresee a world in which Peck's readers outnumber those of the laureate who sings the praises of television," I wrote, "but for a small number of readers Peck will always matter tremendously. Be one of them." I didn't know I was being Keatsian.

***

In other news, John Gallaher has written "Robert Archambeau: We're Still Shopping at the Romanticism Store," an intriguing response up to my earlier post "Poetry/Not Poetry."