Keats and Me Jack Stillinger Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2008, pp. 12-21 (Article) Published by Society for Textual Scholarship For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/240792 Accessed 6 Dec 2017 18:23 GMT
Keats and Me Jack Stillinger Abstract Starting from Speed Hill s whimsical and ahistorical notion that authors and editors intuitively choose one another, this brief essay traces Keats s and my interactions over the past six decades in Austin, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Urbana, Illinois. For me, it is a story of old-fashioned biographical approach to literary study succeeded by New Critical slow reading that is then sophisticated (perhaps also muddled) by the addition of several types of literary theory. For Keats (who once, in a marginal scrawl, posed the question whether criticism is a true thing ), it is a story of increasing semantic and textual complexity with, all along, a detached twinkle at the prospect of large numbers of English professors proclaiming definitive interpretations of his poems. So m e f o u rt e e n m o n t h s a g o, in Ja n ua ry 2006, Speed Hill p h o n e d to ask if I would take part in a session on the special connections that can exist between an editor and the writer being edited psychic links (I think he called them), connections transcending the usual relationship of scholar to his or her material and possibly representing a dangerous subjectivity undermining cool scholarly objectivity. It is still not perfectly clear to me what Speed had in mind, but I shall forge ahead as if there were no question about the matter. It is now forty-nine years since I finished my Ph.D. While I have produced scholarly editions of several other writers, and the Romantics section of the last four editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, my principal textual and editorial work over the half century has focused on the poems of John Keats. It is the possible psychic links between Keats and me that I shall discuss in my paper this afternoon. Walter Jackson Bate, in the opening pages of his masterful biography (1963), likens Keats to Abraham Lincoln as a person of great achievement rising out of humble beginnings. Part of the story of my relationship with Keats is, in effect, how we grew up together in Texas. Keats has several obvious qualities that would make him an attractive writer to connect with. There is the line-by-line richness of his poetry. At the time Keats wrote, no one had created such palpable, finely detailed pictures in poetry since Spenser and Shakespeare, and it can be argued that no one has done it so well again since Keats. There is Keats s clear-headed thinking on some basic problems of human life his acceptance and even
Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me 13 championing of the pleasure-pain complexity of mortal existence; his understanding of death as another stage of life; his skepticism concerning romantic fantasies about the possibility of escaping the consequences of mortality. Add to these Keats s character or personality in his life, letters, and poems. He was one of the least egotistical successful writers in the history of all the literatures of the world, and in a letter to his brothers he coined the term Negative Capability to make a theory out of it. And there is Keats s sense of humor. Possibly he does not rate a superlative in this category, and his poetry is usually pretty serious. But in his life and letters he was constantly relishing the humorous content of his and other people s experiences. None of these qualities, however, explains why I (in particular) connected with Keats at least not in the beginning. The real story of how Keats and I got together is a series of circumstances in which I was mainly a lucky participant rather than an active cause of effects. And it has to do more with pieces of paper than with any of Keats s qualities that I just mentioned. I ve been increasingly appreciating those qualities over the years, but the earliest stage of our relationship involved manuscripts. I did grow up in Texas, where my dad was in the chain-link fence business. I worked on and off at the company from about the age of fourteen, and it was always understood that I would follow him in the business. So when I went to the University of Texas I had no obligation to learn a trade, therefore became an English major, and just by chance Keats was practically the first author I studied in my beginning semester of college literature courses. I read whatever I wanted as an undergraduate and, with the exception of Shakespeare, hardly anything earlier than the Romantics. In my senior year one of my professors suggested that I apply for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to go to graduate school and become a teacher (graduate school What is that? I wondered). I did apply, and was selected as one of the year s hundred recipients (two from each state of the Union). During that senior year, a friend who worked for the University of Texas alumni association gave me a scholarly publication that had been gathering dust in her office, Hyder Rollins s The Keats Circle, a two-volume collection of letters and memoirs by people who had known Keats personally. (Rollins was a Texas alumnus, and Harvard Press had sent a review copy when the work came out a few years earlier, in 1948.) I read into the volumes, then started thinking about what was involved in collecting and presenting such documents, and gradually conceived an idea for my future upon graduating from Texas: I wanted to go to Harvard and work on Keats with Hyder Rollins. On my Woodrow Wilson application I put down Harvard, Yale, and Princeton as my three top choices for graduate school, but because most of
14 Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008) the other ninety-nine winners had also listed those same three as their top choices I was offered several other institutions to choose from instead. The one that appealed most was Northwestern, because they had, for their M.A. in English, a comprehensive exam on what was then considered the proper subject matter of English and American literature that is, seven centuries of English and at least three of American, making ten centuries in all (in effect, what would become, when they were published a few decades later, the complete contents of the Norton English and American anthologies amounting, in the latest editions, to some eleven thousand pages plus a sizable selection of novels and plays). I had at that point read sketchily in maybe the last century and a half of English and a handful of writers, not even making up an identifiable period, in American. At Northwestern I read all the rest of what counted then as English and American literature and did pass the M.A. exam. During the year I had applied to Harvard, wanting to continue my plan to work on Keats with Hyder Rollins, and in the spring they offered me a fellowship to come join their Ph.D. program. I was wonderfully treated by Rollins. When after a few weeks into the first semester I showed up at his office his initial greeting was, What took you so long to come around? We hit it off beautifully in every respect. Rollins was then working on his edition of Keats s letters (1958), and I took his seminar in the editing of Keats s letters. Then I became Rollins s research assistant. My principal training at Harvard was working day after day in the Keats Collection with manuscripts of the letters and discussing with Rollins the various problems of textual representation, ordering, annotating, and the rest. I was trained, that is, as a letter editor, and I just incidentally, in my spare time, edited the letters of Keats s friend Charles Armitage Brown for my Ph.D. dissertation. One of the things I especially profited from was helping Rollins put together the elaborate chronology of Events in the Life of Keats that, in highly abbreviated form, occupies some thirty-plus pages of the introductory material in his 1958 edition. This includes every fact, no matter how trivial, that could be gleaned from the letters, poetry manuscripts, and other biographical and textual sources. The result of such a compilation is that Keats scholars frequently, for any given day and time during his life, know exactly where Keats was, what he was doing, what he was wearing, whether he was sitting, standing, or walking around, what he was eating and drinking, what he was reading and writing, even (at least sometimes) what he was thinking. As a scholar, and as a role model for me, Rollins put a high value on the factual reality behind a writer s writing. It was the single most important thing that I learned from him.
Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me 15 With Ph.D. in hand, I got my first real job, in the University of Illinois English department, and I have lived in Champaign-Urbana ever since, for most of the time within walking distance of one of the greatest research libraries in the world. An early benefit of coming to Illinois was discovering, in the Rare Books Library, some twenty volumes of photostats of manuscripts that had been assembled by a Keats scholar on the Illinois English faculty named Claude Lee Finney during the 1930s and 1940s. 1 I had thought, on leaving Harvard, which had more than three-fourths of the Keats manuscripts then known to exist, that I was leaving the manuscripts behind forever. Instead, the Finney collection of photostats had pictures of all the manuscripts at Harvard plus pictures of those at the Keats House in Hampstead, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Huntington Library in California, the University of Texas, and numerous other collections, including even outof-the-way places like the public library in Buffalo, New York. In my early years at Illinois I did both critical and textual work on Keats and the other Romantics. In the critical line, I was especially interested in the realistic elements of Romantic poetry (this in opposition to the old New Humanist attack on Romanticism as a literature of escape). In an essay titled The Hoodwinking of Madeline (1961) which was well known for awhile as the dirtyminded reading of The Eve of St. Agnes I argued for a view of Keats as skeptical of the imagination s ability to transcend problems inherent in human mortality; and in the introduction and commentary of a 1965 edition of Wordsworth in Houghton Mifflin s Riverside series I aligned Keats and Wordsworth as the two Romantics most concerned with things of the real world (as opposed to transcendental and pantheistic schemes favoring a higher reality somewhere else). I proposed that this common focus made them the two earliest moderns among the major English poets (St i l l i n g e r 1971, 120 49). In the textual line, with the twenty volumes of photostats in the Illinois Rare Books Library I was set up in the best possible way to work more systematically on some problems in Keats s texts that had been worrying me since graduate school. I was dimly aware that for many of Keats s best poems there existed, in manuscripts and alternative printings, two and sometimes three or more different textual versions, and yet the standard editions always chose the same single text, frequently without even hinting at the existence of competing versions. On the basis of the photostats I began to inquire more seriously into our sources of Keats s poems such basic matters as which texts were more authoritative (in whatever sense) than which others, who copied what from whom, how the poems first got into print, and 1. Finney (1936) used these materials in his monumental study The Evolution of Keats s Poetry.
16 Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008) so on leading to my 1974 book called The Texts of Keats s Poems, a study of the history and transmission of all of Keats s poetic texts. And then this textual study led to my editing of Keats s complete poems, in an elaborate scholarly presentation published by Harvard in 1978, followed by a modest reading edition based on the textual edition four years later, in 1982. In working with Keats s texts I became so involved in the physical character of the manuscripts that I sometimes felt as if I had written them myself (the manuscripts, that is, not the poems!), and I occasionally had almost supernatural experiences with them, as a couple of times when I was talking on the phone to rare-books librarians in California and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and amazed them by telling them correctly, without the manuscript in hand, what would be on the verso side of a certain leaf if they would just turn it over to take a look. This kind of textual work, like the critical work, had a center in Hyder Rollins s valuing of factual reality. Keats himself at least one part of the very complex character that Keats was also acknowledged the value of factual reality (as in the lines of Ode to a Nightingale where the speaker laments being cut off from the bird in the forest: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet [...] the fancy cannot cheat so well ). I think the essence of the psychic connection between Keats and me has to lie somewhere in this valuing of factual reality. I would apply this even to the rather antiquated principles on which I edited Keats s poems in the 1970s. The basic idea there, following Walter Greg and Fredson Bowers, was choice of copy-text and editorial treatment of that text according to what one could recover of the author s considered intentions. 2 Now the factual reality of Keats s intentions in particular is no deep secret. Above all, Keats wanted to be, as he predicted he would be in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America, among the English Poets (Ro l l i n s 1958, 1: 394). What being among the English Poets meant in Keats s day was the kind of scholarly presentation that Spenser and Milton were getting elaborate biographical, critical, and textual introductions with apparatuses of explanatory notes and textual variants and the kind of popular presentation typified by multivolume editions that had been appearing since the 1770s, a couple of decades before Keats was born, with titles such as The British Poets, The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper, and so on. 3 In other words, what Keats really wanted, in the long run, was my elaborate textual editing for Harvard 2. For simplified explanations of Greg-Bowers principles, see St i l l i n g e r 1978, 5 14, and St i l l i n g e r 1991, 194 200. 3. On these multivolume editions and the formation of a national canon, see St i l l- i n g e r 1999, 115 120.
Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me 17 Press and substantial inclusion in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Ab r a m s 1986, 1993, 2000, 2006). The factual reality of Keats s intentions plus my editorial principles is unimpeachable! (And I can include reconciliation of Greg-Bowers copy-text theory with Jerome McGann s social theory of literary texts [1986] as just one more benefit of the factual-reality scheme.) Now, in spite of what I ve just said about the importance of factual reality (with implications for its superiority to the instability of critical opinion and the abstractness of literary theory), I have, in the last couple of decades, turned theorist myself a theorist of multiples in the three basic components of a literary transaction: Author, Text, and Reader. That is, I ve become interested in (and published books about) the multiple authorship of works that we routinely assume to have been written by the single author named on the title page; the multiple textual versions of famous works that we almost always study in isolated single texts, unaware of the competing versions that exist; and the multiple interpretations of those famous works everywhere one turns in the critical literature (by the most sophisticated of readers) and in the classroom (by the most naïve). 4 Keats had helpers contributing to the wording and lesser textual features of all his most admired poems. Friends, relatives, publishers, printers, and editors altered Keats s texts in large and small ways from the beginning to the end of his short career; and almost always he was grateful for the help and indeed depended on it. In the matter of texts, virtually all of Keats s poems exist in multiple versions, some of them drastically different from some of the others. And for multiple interpretations, there have been hundreds of thousand of readers of Keats s poems over the nearly two centuries since he died, and I ve argued repeatedly and at length that each reader sees something in the text a little differently from each of the other readers. The fifty-nine ways of reading that I ve proposed in recent books for The Eve of St. Agnes and Ode on a Grecian Urn are just token representations, standing for fifty-nine hundred or even fifty-nine thousand different ways of reading those poems. 5 But these theories of multiple authorship, multiple texts, and multiple readings are by no means objectionably abstract in the way that calling them theories might suggest. The presence of Keats s helpers, entering into the authorship of some of the most distinguished pieces in all of English poetry, is a matter of biographical and textual reality. The existence of the multiple versions of Endymion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, the odes is again demonstrable fact. And the existence of multiple readings is the easiest of all to prove. Theory and factual reality are one hundred percent compatible in all 4. See St i l l i n g e r 1991, 1994, and 1999. 5. See Stillinger 1999, 35 77, and Stillinger 2006, 201 7, 240.
18 Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008) these matters. Keats and I stand together before you guiltless of any inconsistency or logical contradiction that we didn t plan in the first place. Through all this critical and textual study, Keats and I have enjoyed amazingly pleasant and friendly feelings toward one another. Some years ago I wrote and published a poem about this under the title Keats and Me (the same title as this paper), which I d like to read to you here. 6 The poem is set in the fourth-floor office that I ve had in the University of Illinois Library for nearly half a century. I picture myself at work at my desk, with the plaster life mask of Keats on a bookcase behind me, positioned so that the poet can look over my shoulder to watch what I write about him. (This life mask is a copy that Hyder Rollins gave me when I finished my dissertation, which he said had belonged to Amy Lowell, who besides being a major American Imagist poet was the best biographer of Keats up until the 1960s.) In the situation of the poem, I had stuck a child s costume pirate hat on top of the life mask appropriately so because Keats s birthday is October thirtyfirst, the same date as Halloween in this country. Here s the poem. Keats and Me In my lofty library study a plaster life-mask of John Keats (the copy owned by Amy Lowell, propped on the bookcase behind me) looks over my shoulder while I write my explications. Wearing a pirate s hat cocked at a jaunty angle (relic of a child s Halloween costume), he seems quite at home in this place, and we have established good rapport. So it s true, I says, picking up where I d left off, that Madeline was only faking her dream, knowing all the while that Porphyro was hiding in the closet? 6. The poem first appeared, with the heading Epilogue, in St i l l i n g e r 1971, 179 80.
Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me 19 Here Keats tips me the wink, Signifying agreement. And that at the end of his tale Endymion really went off into the old oak forest with the Indian maiden? Again the affable confirmation. What about that wretched knight-at-arms? Stoned, he says, the sedge withered by his breath and no sedge, no birds, obviously! And the philosopher Apollonius? A pederast, he says, grinning, which explains why he was so grumpy at Lycius wedding, and made the tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade. I turn around to my desk to write furiously for an hour, Keats over my shoulder occasionally snorting, once or twice guffawing out loud, but not really interfering. When I get to a hard place he says, in friendly wise, Leave off this foolishness awhile. So I go out to play tennis with a graduate student, whom I beat 6 2, 6 3, 6 1. Then I return to my study, give Keats the usual nod, and he says, plainly glad to see me again and renew our conversation, Well, Jack, did you win?
20 Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008) Early on in my teaching I invented a simple Keats Map to explain a basic structure common to both the narrative poems and the odes. I drew a horizontal line across the blackboard and assigned various elements of the poems to positions above and below the line heaven, immortality, the supernatural, timelessness, and so on above the line and earth, mortality, the natural, time, and so on below (in short, magic above the line and reality below). In The Eve of St. Agnes, Madeline s bedroom dream was above the line, while Porphyro, physical love, the rest of the castle, and the storm outside were below. La Belle Dame s magical grot was above the line, while the knight s cold hillside of reality was below. The Nightingale s forest was above, while here, the world of hungry generations, was below. And so on. More recently, in connection with my thinking about the interpretive inexhaustibility of Keats s good poems, I have been pondering the problem of how to put Keats himself on the Keats Map, and in my most recent essay I answered the question by imagining the negatively capable Keats himself standing outside the text of Ode on a Grecian Urn, looking on with his readers and wondering, with each successive reading, how the various conflicts will get resolved, with the possibility (for Keats and readers alike) that they will be resolved a different way each time (St i l l i n g e r 2006, 207). In my essay I suggested that this the idea of Keats being on the reader s side, taking pleasure in each fresh reading was a better basis for approaching the poem than a fifty-minute lecture in which the professor tells the student in effect, dictates for the student to write down in his or her class notes what the poem really means. In the same spirit I ll suggest to you, in friendly wise, that Keats may be in the audience this afternoon listening to this paper. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Works Cited Ab r a m s, M. H., et al., eds. 1986, 1993, 2000, 2006. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5 th -8 th eds. 2 vols. New York: Norton. Ba t e, Walter Jackson. 1963. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fi n n e y, Claude Lee. 1936. The Evolution of Keats s Poetry. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McGa n n, Jerome J. 1983. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ro l l i n s, Hyder Edward, ed. 1948. The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816 1878. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me 21, ed. 1958. The Letters of John Keats, 1814 1821. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. St i l l i n g e r, Jack. 1961. The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St. Agnes. Studies in Philology 58: 533 55. Reprinted in Stillinger 1971, 67 93., ed. 1965. William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces. Riverside Edition. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.. 1971. The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats s Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.. 1974. The Texts of Keats s Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press., ed. 1978. The Poems of John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.. ed. 1982. John Keats: Complete Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press.. 1994. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems. New York: Oxford University Press.. 1999. Reading The Eve of St. Agnes : The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction. New York: Oxford University Press.. 2003. Fifty-nine Ways of Reading Ode on a Grecian Urn. In Ode on a Grecian Urn : Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy, edited by James O Rourke. Published electronically at www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/grecianurn. Reprinted in St i l l i n g e r 2006, 201 07, 240.. 2006. Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.