Keats letters Short Answers

General Introduction

John Keats has over 240 surviving letters that were addressed to family and friends. He wrote those letters in the last
five years of his life where some of them included his literary interest- his personal relationship with poetry, his
theories of Beauty and Truth, the Imagination, Negative Capability and Soul making. His poems and letters exhibit a
parallel quest for his own identity as a poet.

Benjamin Bailey
“The Authenticity Of The Imagination” was a letter written by John Keats on November 22, 1817 to his good friend
Benjamin Bailey speculating on religion and imagination. Keats was striving to finish “Endymion” and had just taken
leave from a month stay at Oxford, In his letter, Keats says “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s
affections and the truth of Imagination– What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth”. His very popular
phrase was also seen in Keat’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Keats compares gaining insight into reality through
imagination or creativity to waking from a dream. He says in his letter to Benjamin, “Imagination may be compared
to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth”. Keats writes on saying, “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of
Thoughts”. By sensations Keats means the direct intuitions of the imagination. As Keats believed that imagination as
an instrument of intuitive insight is the most authentic guide to ultimate truth. He says that Reason and Knowledge
are requisites , it is true, but only as educators of the imagination. Hence, he trusted the light of imagination more
than the voices of reason. Imagination in its highest form is a generative force that creates essential reality. This letter
is a perfect example of his tie to the Romantic period. He discusses imagination and uses strong use of emotions.
Keats was totally consumed with the idea that imagination has the capacity to create spiritual reality. He tells his
friend Benjamin specifically that his hunger after truth or use of reason, is futile and that he must seek the beauty of
truth in imagination. Plato has said - “Not by wisdom do poets write but by a sort of genius and inspiration.” If by
wisdom Plato means knowledge through reasoning, Keats would completely agree as he had no faith in mere cold
knowledge and reason. He believed that imagination springs in the heart rather than the head and it is through this
imagination that the poet possesses his power of identification with all of the beings of universe.

George and Thomas Keats

In his letter to his brothers George and Tom Keats on December 22, 1817, Keats starts with the general cultural news:
Keats has been to see Death on the Pale Horse, a monumental painting by the grand old man of American painting
Benjamin West, but he doesn’t think much of it, because the art was not intense enough. Then later in that letter he
goes on commenting upon his discernment on ‘negative capability’. However, Negative capability could not have
been formulated without Hazlitt. He led Keats thoughts which resulted in his criticising of Coleridge in this letter.
Against Coleridge's obsession with philosophical truth, Keats sets up the model of Shakespeare, whose poetry
articulated various points of view and never advocated a particular vision of truth.

Keats understood Coleridge as searching for a single, higher-order truth or solution to the mysteries of the natural
world. He went on to find the same fault in Dilke and Wordsworth. All these poets, he claimed, lacked objectivity and
universality in their view of the human condition and the natural world. In each case, Keats found a mind which was
a narrow private path, not a "thoroughfare for all thoughts". Lacking for Keats were the central and indispensable
qualities requisite for flexibility and openness to the world, or what he referred to as negative capability. This concept
of Negative Capability is precisely a rejection of set philosophies and preconceived systems of nature. In his own
words, Negative capability is – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He demanded that the poet be receptive rather than searching for fact or
reason, and to not seek absolute knowledge of every truth, mystery, or doubt. It is not known why Keats settled on
the phrase 'negative capability', but some scholars have hypothesized that Keats was influenced in his studies of
medicine and chemistry. In the same way that the negative pole receives the current from the positive pole, the poet
receives impulses from a world that is full of mystery and doubt, which cannot be explained but which the poet can
translate into art.
John Taylor

In February 27 1818, Keats writes a letter to his publisher John Taylor. Keats attempts to put the final touches
on Endymion before publication. Keats expresses he is extremely indebted to Taylor for his editorial attentions
on Endymion. Perhaps thinking of what Endymion does not achieve, to Taylor, Keats outlines three Axioms of
Poetry: that it should surprise by fine excess and not by singularity; that its Beauty should be natural, complete, calm,
and yet leave the reader in the luxury of twilight. It should make the reader breathless and not content. The rise,
progress and setting of Imagery should be like the sun which comes natural to him shines over him and sets soberly.
And that if poetry does not come naturally, like the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. All these axioms are
Keat’s idea about poetry which compels him to doubt himself, on his immaturity while writing and completing
Endymion, though he states that inspite of his immature state, his understanding of Shakespeare is in fact mature.
The phrase fine excess as poetic goal and principle is particularly striking—and helpful; it captures the idea of
embracing and balancing the opposite qualities of impulse and control. And this, in fact, may be key in understanding
the nature of Keats’s achievement in his greatest poetry, where intensity is measured by disinterestedness, and the
vagaries of truth are necessarily trumped by invariable beauty.

Richard Woodhouse

The letter of 27 October 1818 was written as a reply to Richard Woodhouse’s rising concern for Keats’s declining
poetic morale. In his response to Woodhouse, Keats reflects on the limitations and powers of Wordsworth by
distinguishing ‘the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’ from his own ideal of ‘the poetical Character’. He celebrates
the ‘chameleon Poet’, a person who does not have an identity because its character ‘is not itself–it has no self–it is
everything 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’. Through the power of the
imagination then the poet is one who in Spirit intimately lives with the feathered and wild creatures of the forest
who shares the identity of both the king and beggar. It is the power of identification of the poet. However, this power
of identification is reciprocal and not only does the self of the poet goes out to others but the identity of others,
forces itself upon him.

Keats says that the poet is a sort of detached entity independent of at the circumstances and is free to roam to his
will and penetrates into the mysterious chambers of the soul’s deepest recesses or soars into the shadowy spaces of
the universe. This is not nearly a submergence of one’s self into another it is not a substitution where the poet put
himself in the place of the object of his contemplation it is rather a sort of etherized penetration where the poetic
soul acts as an ethereal chemical operating on man and the physical world. While critiquing the Wordsworthian
egotistical sublime he says that a true poet has no permanent identity to express. The only means of strengthening
one’s intellect is to make up once mind about ‘nothing’. A poet’s mind can roam freely and can see and apprehend all
clearly and bring home it's fruits Of Truth untainted by bias or prejudice. Therefore, Keats confirms that great poets
have gusto because their works are not impeded by their own created sense of identity or character, - the ‘Poet is the
most unpoetical of anything in existence’.