The Absent Self Across Keats

What fascinates me about Keats always comes back to his “awkward bow” with which he ends several letters, notably his last ever written (980). During his life, and his “posthumous existence” Keats is “vassal” to not only Fanny Brawne but also, and most importantly, to “the burden of the Mystery” (978, 971). His uncertainty solely pledges allegiance to “the truth of Imagination” (965), yet he knows he must exist in the world and of the world, a servant of “mammon” (979). There is that awkward bow: it exists, but it is uncertain and lacking a completeness. Who can really be totally certain about uncertainty? Keats believes the true artist and/or those with a “complete disinterestedness of mind” – the Shakespeare, the “seldom appearing Socrates” (974, 976) – dwell in “negative capability,” which is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (968). How does one begin performing this Kirkegaardian leap of faith into the abyss? Isn’t one scared of the abyss “staring back,” to paraphrase Nietzsche?

To be truly uncertain, to perform the awkward bow, one must almost be so self-conscious as to totally sublimate the self – to let the self move among other selves, other forms. “If a Sparrow come before my Window,” Keats writes in another letter. “I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel” (967). The dangerous zone of “no-self” is desired by Keats – to annihilate the thinking “I” and flit, with sensation and feeling, from person to person, object to object, animal to animal. This is Keats’ Poet, who is the most “unpoetical thing” (973).

I object to Keats’ notion, which, in some ways, reminds me of thinkers from Gandhi (his desire to be “zero”) to Roland Barthes (Death of the Author). There is always the pen, but for it to exert force upon the page there must be the pen-handler. “There now I think what with Poetry and Theology you may thank your Stars that my pen is not very long winded,” Keats concludes a letter to his brother and sister (977). The vassal, the filter, the being-changer, the no-self self is still in some way a self, a person, an identity. When one claims “no identity,” one makes a liar out of the self – its an assertion of absence that is really a presence. One advances a type of selfhood that sees the whole world teeming and the eye through which the mass is understand as unimportant, awkward, an organ that needs to bow out. Imagination, sleep – to Keats, these exist in the mind but also on some higher plane, in the grand mystery that is both burdensome and celebratory. The subject of self becomes absent, or at least un-speaking, quiet, silent: “the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness” (966).

Here I’m unfairly conflating and combining Keats’ letters across years and to various subjects. It would be better to consult the poems, perhaps, for a “truer” sense of his vision and philosophy, if only because those works were intended for a kind of public consumption and separation from individual addressees. Two more notes from the Letters (for the Letters are really quite striking and tremendous): “I am however young writing at random – straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness – without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion” (975) and finally: “Do you not think I strive – to know myself?” (975). Randomness is still a kind of direction; and the knowledge of oneself may be a kind of throwing up of hands, a surrender, an awkward bow: but it is a bow made by a person, not a shadow nor a ghost, nevertheless.

In the early poem “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats writes, concerning sleep: “What is it? And to what shall I compare it?” (24). The subject: the writer: the poet must compare “sleep” to something or he awkwardly bows out and compares it to nothing (or, paradoxically, to everything). The poet desires complete loss of poetical “self,” instead wanting to merely be the vessel or the continuously copying Monk of the imagination’s Monastery (979). Keats notes that the flowers do not trot out their identities; so should the poet also not? (969). Yet the poet must: for the poet controls the pen. “O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen / That am not yet a glorious denizen / Of thy wide heaven” (48-50) – this is a complaint of the poet, not a description of “Poesy” nor sleep. The lack of metaphor, the complaint of “no comparison” above in terms of “Sleep” is also a celebration of the self: it is the poet who is described, his awkwardness and fumbling, not sleep itself. This poet-subject, even in absence, desires “an eternal book / Whence I may copy many a lovely saying / About the leaves, and flowers” (74-76). He wants to be the Monk and surrender to the darkness and its small particles of light. Keats, admittedly, for all his gestures toward surrendering the self and identifying with that “Other I” claims: “I am continually running away from the subject” (966). And running toward what? Perhaps a stable person: a body: a mouth that will eventually heave blood.

For what is really about the Elgin Marbles in that poem? “My spirit is weak – mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep” (1-2) – the poet’s weakness (thus the poet) is the subject, and that becomes a way of describing the “dizzy pain” of “these wonders” (11). Nor do we really understand what about Chapman’s Homer in that poem is so exciting to Keats, merely what the sensation of reading the translation does for him. He doesn’t even read the poem – Keats “looks into” it, he has “seen” and “been,” he “breathes its pure serene,” he “hears,” he becomes like “some watcher of the skies.” Every other sense seems to shine except that of understanding. For Keats, this is perhaps not a problem. After all, “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration” (968). The beautiful Vision is important; the understanding is not, for it can never come, at least not in a way that will stay fixed.

Then we run back into the arms of “Sleep and Poetry,” where, with a bit more lines and wiggle room than the sonnets, we arrive at the point where: “The visions are all fled …  and in their stead / A sense of real things comes doubly strong” (155-157). What is the “real” to Keats? Is it that which gives only pain and not passion, nor a mixture of the two? Does the real destroy “negative capability”? Is there no great mystery that burdens in the “real things”? Is it different from that “dizzy pain”? Is this, finally, what one makes an awkward bow to – not the vision, the uncertainty, but the sense of waking to discover reality, like with Adam, the real Eve beside? (966).