Context - Keats' Letters

Keats’ letter to Benjamin Bailey 23rd January 1818

“I sat down to read King Lear yesterday, and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a Sonnet” — ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once again.’

Keats’ Letter to Reynolds 17 April 1817

“the passage in Lear — “Do you not hear the sea?” — has haunted me intensely”
- Links to ‘On the Sea’ and ‘On Sitting down to Read King Lear again’ - the power of the sea and the intensity of ‘King Lear’ reflects this haunting quality

How does Keats’ letter to Reynolds April 1817 link to ‘On the Sea’?

The power and might of the sea in ‘On the Sea’ is clearly a haunting force for Keats — “its mighty swell” “eternal whisperings” “wideness of the Sea”

Form of the Sonnet - Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, May 1819

“I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have.” “I do not pretend to have succeeded - it will explain itself.”

How does this discussion of a “better sonnet stanza” link to ‘To Sleep’? What is the effect of Keats’ experimentation with the sonnet form?

To Sleep is a hybrid sonnet - He combines the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan Sonnet, using a Shakespearean sonnet but making modifications in the sestet, which he rhymes bc efef, therefore avoiding the final couplet and tying the sestet’s rhyme scheme into the octet’s — by not adhering to to either form, he reflects the liminality of sleep - a state existing between life and death, and consciousness and unconsciousness. Also, as the poem does not end in the anticipated rhyming couplet, there is a sense of incompletion - mirror’s Keats’ unfulfilled desire for sleep.

Letter to Benjamin Bailey November 22nd 1817
(Imagination, Beauty)

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth”
- Imagination is a way of experiencing the world as real as that which is gained through the rational
“O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts!” - a life not wedded to rationalism to have a finer and more accurate perception of the world — King Lear, O Solitude, Ode on Melancholy, Chapman’s Homer p p
This letter can relate to all of the Odes and Eve of St Agnes

Letter to Benjamin Bailey 22nd November 1817 (Men of Power, Men of Genius)

Men of Genius “have not any individuality, any determined character” — Grecian Urn, On the Sea - speaker absorbed into the object - no self
- This idea later develops into Keats’ concept of Negative Capability

Letter to George and Tom Keats, 27 (?) December 1817

“The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate”
“I mean Negative Capability - when Man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”
- The ability to contemplate the world without the desire to reconcile its contradictory aspects or fit it into a closed or rational system — Rejection of the Age of Reason/Enlightenment
- Grecian Urn blends a transcendent imagination with a yearning for certainty and answers

Which poems link the most to this concept of negative capability?

• Grecian Urn, Melancholy, Nightengale, Psyche, Bright Star

Letter to Richard Woodhouse 27 October 1818

“I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or the egotistical sublime”
Camelion Poet - “It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.”
A Camelion Poet “has no identity; - he is continually in for - and filling some other body”
- Keats’ concept of the Camelion Poet ties in with his concept of Negative Capability

Letter to George Keats April 1819

“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
- Keats’ theory of the Vale of Soul-making - that pain and suffering is a distinctly human trait, which is needed to make a soul
- Links to ‘In Drear Nighted December’; ‘Ode on Melancholy’