After his death at the age of twenty-five, the English poet John Keats left behind a legacy of hundreds of letters in addition to his published poems. These letters to family and friends feature a few common recipients, including his brothers Tom and George, his sister Fanny, his latest love Fanny Brawne, and his good friend Reynolds, among others. A notable feature of these letters is the inclusion of poetry. This poetry ranges from completed pieces to simply fragmentary lines. Scholar Grant Scott writes, in his introduction to the Selected Poems of John Keats: "What is perhaps most surprising and delightful about Keats's letters, especially alongside the polished, anthology-ready gems of his poetry, is their unpredictability… The proximity of the mundane and the profound leads to another salient feature of Keats's letters: their harmonious integration of everyday life with the life of the mind”[1]. The towering 20th-century poet TS Eliot said of Keats's letters: “[they] are what letters should be; beautiful things happen unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown, but between trifle and trifle”[2].Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay The "seamless integration" recognized by Scott is a unique reconciliation that runs through, across multiple levels, all of Keats's poetry, but above all the poetry found in his letters. The incorporation of poetry into Keats's letters – written in prose – unconsciously brings together several layers of seemingly opposing forces. By inserting verse into his prose letters, Keats brings together first stillness and movement, then individuality and otherness, and finally the understanding of art as both a personal quest and a public presentation . Keats's overall goals in including poems in his letters are practical: he gives himself the opportunity to critique his own work, he shares his new and currently present ideas with family and friends, and finds an expressive outlet that functions differently from prose. Therefore, rather than examining the roles these poems were intended to play, it is now more interesting to know what roles these poems came to play. By looking at a work that uses a letter form within a poem – or, depending on perspective, a poetic form within a letter – the multi-layered process of reconciling oppositions can be better understood. Although not all answers to questions about the roles embedded verse play can be fully addressed by examining a single poem, the insights provided by this work will inevitably shed light on broader, connected answers regarding the letter poetry of Keats in general. A poem that meets the above criteria is found in a letter to Keats's friend J. H. Reynolds, written on March 25, 1818.[3] Keats met Reynolds (1796-1852) in 1816 at the home of a mutual friend; the two quickly approached each other; “Of all the people Keats met at Hampstead, Reynolds seems to have had the most genuine poetic talent, the keenest critical sense, and the greatest sympathy for his friend's intellectual interests. Like Keats, he was greatly influenced by Wordsworth…We are therefore not surprised to find that when Keats wishes to discuss the deeper issues of life and art, his letters are usually addressed to Reynolds”[4]. This poem from the letter of March 25, 1818 deals precisely with such a vast and abstract problem: “If physicality is the criterion of value, what value can we attribute to mental perceptions?... This questioning takes on a particularly poignant character in the versesby Keats. epistle to Reynolds…what troubled him [Keats] most was the inability of the human will to regulate events, and events were unpredictable, cruel and inescapable…The idea is expressed through a series of images in the "A verse epistle to Reynolds, as a statement of the poet's inner crisis, the poem deserves deeper critical attention than it has hitherto received."[5] Scholar Chatterjee presents a series of paraphrased interpretations from other scholars who have analyzed this epistle-poem to date.[6] Amy Lowell "regards the poem as 'unrelated' and believes that Keats's aim was to make a painting purely to amuse his sick friend. (Reynolds suffered from rheumatic fever.)" Albert Gerard, after analyzing the poem in detail, believes that "a fundamental aesthetic problem underlies the epistle", which has to do with the consideration of "unpleasant » in the products of the imagination, in dreams, in art and in poetry. Mary Visick argues that the poem calls for “the need to reconcile complex imaginative values ​​with natural or moral philosophy; the poet finally abandons the whole dilemma and seeks refuge in a “new romance”. Walter Evert states that the poem is overall "concerned with the unfortunate vagaries of the imagination." These three in-depth analyzes highlight the tension of unreconciled opposites within the poem. However, scholar WJ Bates believes that "it would have troubled rather than flattered Keats that, long after his death, these lines, like much of his impromptu verse, were recovered, printed as 'poetry,' and then addressed with formal expectations that are absolutely irrelevant. Therefore, instead of conducting any in-depth analysis of the poem, we will instead examine how its formal qualities contribute to its macro role in contemplating art presentations, in line with the aim of this article. While Chatterjee acknowledges that “the clash between the inner world and the outer world undoubtedly constitutes the theme of this troubled poem; the ramifications of this theme demand careful consideration” – this article will focus on important unreconciled opposites outside of the poem itself. This epistle-poem is composed of 113 lines told in 56 series of heroic couplets. (The only notable line is line 105, where the final word "humours" rhymes with nothing and has no paired lines at all.) The poem is rather long for anything to be included in a letter; In many other letters, Keats wrote the majority of his content in prose, before inserting, here and there, sections of verse (usually much shorter than 113 lines). This oddity is mitigated by the fact that the poem is essentially the letter. He thus absorbs the letter's welcome message in its first line: “Dear Reynolds, As I lay last night in bed,/There came before my eyes that which lacked thread. » The quality of the poem, that is, its use of language, has been criticized as having "certain obvious errors of taste, [such as] the meaningless caprice of the opening paragraph with the unnecessary banality of the verse 11 and the vulgar pronunciation of perhaps as p'raps in line 14, all due to some extent to the rapidity of its production, [but this epistle-poem again] marks a great advance in style and treatment of the subject in relation to the earlier epistles. The heroic couplet is well controlled throughout, the enjambment is used sparingly and effectively, and there is no double ending in the verses”[6]. This speed of production is the same reason cited by Bates for the unnecessary close readings of this and other similar epistle poems. Yet,despite the validity of such a claim, reading the poem as a less significant product of its more significant context is valuable insofar as it reflects the fleeting and momentary state of mind of its author. The speed of production of this poem is all the more striking when its content is taken into account. The epistle-poem devotes several lines to a table. The end of the letter, written in prose, will be discussed in more detail later in this article; for now it is sufficient to mention that in this document Keats draws the recipient's attention thus: "You know, I am sure, Claude's Enchanted Castle and I would like you to be pleased with my remembrance." of this,” he writes in prose after his epistle-poem. The Enchanted Castle (1664) is an oil painting by the English Baroque painter Claude Lorrain, depicting the story of Princess Psyche and her love affair with the god Cupid. While Psyche appears as the main and only human subject of the painting, she is overshadowed by the rest of the picture, which contains a lush and mystical landscape. In much of Keats's poetry, that is, not only this epistle-poem, there is a "tendency…towards an imagery of calm or repose [which] has been the subject of frequent critical comment »[7]. Scholars have said that "Keats's imagery is characterized by a 'sense of momentarily restrained power, of massive rest, which yet promises decisive action';" that there is not simply “an absence of movement, but things on the edge of action, their movement briefly stopped and ready to continue.” Bate argues that Keats's ideal in poetry is "dynamics caught in momentary rest." In this epistle-poem, in his remembrance of the Enchanted Castle, Keats does not paint a picture with his words per se, at least not in the way he explicitly does in works like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819). . Rather, Keats performs a kind of ekphrasis, a linguistic illustration of a work of art. Nevertheless, the literal anchoring of this epistle-poem in the memory of a single static painting is a certain way for Keats to express this quality of tranquility which permeates his corpus. “His images give silence a certain being. It is not a simple negation of sound or noise, but a presence to be felt and almost heard. Keats conveys the experience of complex and paradoxical personifications,” writes Swaminathan in The Still Image in Keats's Poetry[8], in a return to the paradoxical or opposing natures of the elements in Keats's works. The Enchanted Castle inspired the completed poem "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), one of Keats's most loved, acclaimed and studied poems, but these lines linked in a single letter also contain a reference to this painting and offer a different meaning. Letters are something that inherently involves movement and transition – and, one might even say, a lack of stillness. The fact that this letter will be transported from Keats to his friend, and will be withdrawn from its author or creator, goes against the tendency towards calm found in its poetic content. However, it is the content of this epistle-poem, and the content of the life of its author who created it, which require this calm. Points of immense gravity are found in Keats's own life at the time of writing this letter. His dear brother Tom is seriously ill with tuberculosis, which weighs heavily on Keats's heart, especially after nursing his mother on her deathbed during his teenage years. In line 110 of the epistle-poem, he explicitly mentions his daily worries for his brother: “Have you health – and Tom too – I will dance,/And from hated moods in a new romance/Take refuge. » Moreover, by inserting certain lines of still images in this poemdynamic, then in this letter, which is a vehicle of movement – ​​an element of transmission and communication – Keats infuses his personal letters with a respect that extends beyond the simple presence of verses of these correspondences. It is by starting from the reconciliation between calm and movement that this epistle-poem finds a balance between the value of the individual and the value of the other. The importance of reconciliation is not completely new in theoretical work on Keats; Scholar Robert Gittings describes Keats's letters as constituting the body of a "spiritual diary" and that they were not so much intended for specific people as for a "synthesis".[9] Despite this immediate attraction to synthesis, Keats's letters give due importance to the individuality of the recipient. His letters to different family members and friends vary in tone and style, and perhaps most significantly in the poetry they contain. For example, his poems to his brother George and his wife Georgiana contain some of the longest, brightest and most comprehensive lines of his letters; his tone here is also more familiar. His tone with his friends changes from person to person, whether he is "ambitious with Haydon" or "thoughtful and philosophical with Bailey and Reynolds" or "fatherly with his sister Fanny".[10] Furthermore, the epistle-poem of March 25, 1818 was composed solely for Reynolds: Keats specifies, after the end of his lines, that he hopes to have comforted the ailing Reynolds, and chose the subject of The Enchanted Castle because he thought Reynolds would appreciate The differentiation, as well as the rapprochement, of the individual and the other inevitably raises the question of personal versus public consumption. This is of particular concern to artists. In another letter to Reynolds, written on April 10, 1818, Keats complained that he had "never written a single line of poetry with the slightest shadow of public thought".[11] This is clearly untrue to some extent, as the young poet was praised by others for his poetic talents and sought publication, as poetry became his professional career. The “public thought” that Keats is unhappy with here is linked to the opinions of certain critics. At this time, just a few years before his death, which no one predicted at the time, Keats's poetry was scathingly criticized by professional literary critics. This criticism only deepened his uncertainties about the purpose and value of art. “Poetry,” he once wrote to his friend Benjamin Bailey on March 13, 1818, “is perhaps no more than a simple Halloween pumpkin to amuse anyone lucky enough to be struck by its brilliance. The artist should be a friend of man – a physician to all men – but how can an artist work for the good of mortals and relieve the giant agony of the world? »[12]. This demonstrates, at the very least, that Keats clearly had public opinion in mind when composing poetry, for he considered - even if he doubted it from time to time - the consumption of art by others as a means of healing. the fragility of humanity. Reynolds, the recipient of the 1818 epistle-poem, also seems to agree with Keats's belief in sharing poetry with the world. In response to the Quarterly Review's unpleasant review of Keats's Endymion, Reynolds wrote that: “The genius of Mr. Keats is peculiarly classical; and, with the exception of a few faults which are the natural adepts of youth, his imagination and his language have a spirit and an intensity which one would look for in vain in half the popular poets of the time... Poetry is a thing of generalities. — a wanderer among people and things — andnot a pause on one thing or with one person”[13]. Reynolds' use of the terms "pause" and his expression "for a thing or with a person" recall the unique function of poetry contained in letters sent to other people. The poetry contained in Keats's letters does precisely what Reynolds presents as the mission of the poetic arts: wandering from person to person and thing to thing. Not only does the epistle-poem blur the lines between the individuality of the creator and the recipient, but it also forms a bridge between the personal mission of creating poetry and the public goal of receiving, consuming, and appreciating the works. Just as poetry is an extremely personal process, it is also an extremely public presentation. Because of the artist's goal of alleviating "the great agony of the world," these processes become one. In this same protest to the Quarterly Review, Reynolds wrote: “The morals of the world, the fictions and wonders of the world.” other worlds are its subjects [of the poets' minds]; not the pleasures of hope, nor the pleasures of memory. The true poet does not limit his imagination to any thing: this soul is an invisible ode to the passions”[14]. The role of the poet's mind must encompass as many universes as possible, and the role of the poet is to make sense of these realities in understandable works. “Keats undoubtedly considered poetry his vocation in the religious sense of the word,” writes Baker in John Keats and Symbolism.[15] and thus "his understanding of the nature of art is organically linked to his understanding of larger problems." But, as we saw earlier, Keats's understanding of the nature of art falters. He apparently alternately appreciates and devalues ​​him. In his letters, he often uses the prose surrounding his verses to criticize his own work. After the poem in the epistle-poem he wrote to Reynolds: My dear Reynolds, Hoping to encourage you for a minute or two, I was determined not to send you a few lines, so you will excuse the subject unrelated and careless verse. You know, I am sure, Claude's Enchanted Castle and I would like you to be satisfied with my memory. The rain has returned. I think with me, Devonshire has very little chance. I'll damn him high and low if he lasts an average of 6 nice days in three weeks. Give me better news about you. Your loving friend, John KeatsTom memories for you. Rem. all of us — He asks to be excused for his poem's "unrelated subject" and "careless verse." Keats's understanding of larger issues does not necessarily give him a better understanding of the nature of art, although Baker is right that the two are closely related. For example, the larger issues of global pain and human physical incapacity are the reasons for the vacillation of Keats's ever-evolving understanding of the value of art. In a letter to George on March 19, 1819, after Tom's death, Keats revealed his painful state of mind: "Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love has any vigilance when they pass before me : they look more like three characters on a paper. Greek vase – a man and two women whom no one but me could distinguish in their disguise”[16]. Hints of this melancholy can also be found in the epistle-poem of 1818, in which an optimistic attitude is maintained, but overtones of fatalism still shine through; it seems that “beauty itself, whether natural or artistic, seems no more valid than the enchanted castle which is only a delicious illusion”[17]. The value Keats places on art, or his own art, depends on larger factorsat stake in his life, and his “sensitivity was [deeply] moved by reality. It is true, of course, that in some of his early poems he offers an evasive vision of poetry... Yet even in his abortive tales of chivalry (Calidore, Specimen of an Induction), the grasp of reality is clearly intended to furnish the substance of poetry, and is not an accidental and hardly welcome intrusion into a pleasant reverie”[18]. How Keats chooses to understand his reality determines how he produces his poems, even as he comments on these poems again and again, and reshapes them into pieces more complete than the epistle-poems found in his letters. Many of Keats's letters themselves foreshadow important and comprehensive poems to come, in that these letters reflect the poet's current state of mind and his most recent view of the world. The letters, too, show "no embarrassment in mixing serious ideas with bits of useless gossip, light jokes, comments on women and the weather"[19], even if they include poetry both from the creation of Keats and that of others. “Here the poems are not isolated aesthetic events… but rather natural extensions of his [Keats’s] ordinary existence. Some of Keats's most flexible and original sonnets develop organically from specific contexts, reflecting both the patterns of his thought at the time of writing and the interest of his individual correspondents," writes the scholar Grant Scott, “The happy marriage of poetry and prose in the Letters tells us that for Keats, poetry was not a job or a career but a necessity, like breathing. The marriage of poetry and prose is not the only union that takes place. Like generations, other reconciliations take place, involving the movement of letters as objects of correspondence and the natural functions of letter writing; the self-evaluation that is evident in Keats's epistle-poems and his general thoughts on the value of art are also highlighted. By bringing prose closer to poetry, regular correspondences with verse; to link the artificial profession to organic respiration; Keats finds the ultimate solution by bringing life together and writing about life.NOTES (References)[1] Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), xxii.[2] Eliot, TS The use of poetry and the use of criticism: studies in the relationship between criticism and poetry in England. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 100.[3] Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 107.[4] Keats, John, John Gilmer Speed ​​and Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton. The letters and poems of John Keats. Flight. 1. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1883), 537.[5] Chatterjee, Bhabatosh. John Keats: his mind and his work. (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1971), 284.[6] Keats, John, John Gilmer Speed ​​and Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton. The letters and poems of John Keats. Flight. 1. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1883), 537.[7] Swaminathan, SR The Fixed Image in Keats's Poetry. (Salzburg, Austria: Institut Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1981), iii.[8] Swaminathan, SR The Fixed Image in Keats's Poetry. (Salzburg, Austria: Institut Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1981), 44.[9] Gittings, Robert. John Keats: The Living Year, September 21, 1818 to September 21, 1819. (London: Heinemann, 1954), 121.[10] Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), xxxi.[11] Keats, John, John Gilmer Speed ​​and Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton. THE, 1972.