these options create alternative ways of understanding the poem, alternatives which contradict each other to such a degree that they invent an impasse of understanding just at the poem’s entryway. We do not need to repeat the specifics of de Man’s argument here, but it is important to note that for de Man, this undoing of grammatical sense is not mere play.xix Rather, such reading practices constitute the heroic appeal of literary theory, for it is precisely this “disturbance of the stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic” (17) that allows theory to do the work of “upset[ting] rooted ideologies by revealing the mechanics of their workings” (11).
The choice of Keats as an object-lesson for such “upsetting” is no accident, of course, for Keats theorized the pleasures and profits of indeterminacy long before de Man. “Negative capability”—the capacity to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—is one way of defining de Manian “reading.” And yet, what we find when we move beyond the title of “The Fall” is that for Keats, language’s opacity, rather than simply imposing a destabilizing force into ideologies, presents ethical problems, problems that Keats does not resolve (and neither, of course, does de Man). And it is precisely these ethical problems, as we will see, which resound so deeply in the works of nineteenth-century poets who follow him.
In “The Fall of Hyperion,” the aspiring poet engages in a developmental process by which he attempts to advance from “dreamer”—one who vexes the world—to “poet”—one who “pours out a balm” upon it. The final step in this process is a direct confrontation with the muse. Clearly, for Keats, the true poet is a healer, deeply engaged in the world and responsible toward others. And yet the advancement of the speaker into the role of “poet” leads, in this poem, to a tautological silence that speaks less for the poet’s healing capacity than for his vacancy. The poem opens on the speaker’s worry that despite his best efforts, he might turn out to be nothing but a dreamer, but its conclusion touches a more central anxiety: the tragic vision to which the speaker aspires fails in this poem, and in the earlier Hyperion fragment, not because of the speaker’s unworthiness, but because of language’s opacity, its potential failure to “mean” beyond its surface.xx
Once Keats’s poet (under the threat of death) has successfully mounted the muse’s altar steps, he is confronted with her veiled face, which both attracts and terrifies him. This muse, a “veiled shade,” refuses to reveal meaning, and thus presents an irrepressible challenge to the poet who has staked his life on poetry’s power to heal. Moreover, once he lifts the muse’s veil, her opacity only thickens, for the exposed face is itself a veil—her “visionless” eyes express nothing and immediately he desires to see into them as well. He is then remarkably allowed access to her “hollow brain,” and yet what should be a moment of revelation is instead a tautology: “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,” the passage begins, and this is the key rhetorical move of the poem: within the veiled shade is a shady vale. Keats’s muse has no within. Language, to say it more simply, is its own referent. Again de Man: “It is not . . . a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language” (Resistance, 11).
And yet I believe the poem speaks of more than just language, and thus forces us to stretch away from the “linguistic turn” de Manian reading can stand for here. For again, the poet’s muse, this hollow, barren “womb”—is Mnemosyne. The act of identification between the poet and his muse, figured as an invasion of her mind, is the self’s attempt to penetrate its own history, its own depths. That the scene thus revealed is one of non-redemptive and non-productive stasis (and what could be more static than tautology?) suggests that the poetic self is finally construed as lack. Keats’s question, articulated in “The Fall” as whether the poet vexes the world or pours out a balm upon it, suggests that for Keats, the emptied selfhood of the poet is bound in moral tension. For if the writing self “has no identity,” if the writer/muse is an empty space, then where does one locate one’s responsibility to others? If there is no “I,” then what can I do for you?
In Keats’s famous October, 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse he writes:
If then [the poet] has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would right write no more . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to to [sic] press upon me that I am in very little time an[ni]hilated. (Letters, 151)
Here is Keats’s anxiety about his cipher-like subjectivity. Even the error—“right” where he meant, “write”—seems to betray the problem of social isolation that arises from the absented self as a moral problem. The painful moral self-doubt is amplified in the next paragraph of the letter when Keats writes, “I am ambitious of doing the world some good . . . I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer.” In this prose rendition of the poet’s ascent to tragic vision in “The Fall,” we see clearly that the ascent is meant as a movement toward social usefulness, or healing power. And yet we also see that for Keats, whose understanding of the poet’s selfhood strips it of ground, of center, and of necessary relation to others, this moral ambition is in crisis.
The barren scene within the muse’s mind, as I’ve said, returns us directly to her opacity, her veil/vale. And while the speaker has acquired, in this moment, the vision which wins him the right to be called a poet, what he sees has “No stir of life,” for it is the scene of the fallen Titans, the mythical moment of post-revolutionary disappointment. Saturn, the fallen deity, “degraded, cold, upon the sodden ground,” speaks only to instruct his “brethren” gods to “moan” for their own loss of power. This “moaning” is the inarticulate sound of energy stripped of agency. It is, in another way of reading, the failure of language that results from the poet’s full identification with the muse, which is to say, the poet’s full identification with himself as poet, as negativity. The burden of the vale/veil is, then, the suffocating burden of language’s self-reflexivity, a burden that is all the more painful because of the manner in which it radiates outward toward the moral and indeed political tensions within Keats’s larger poetic project. xxi
3.
If Paul de Man provides us with one way of thinking about the relationship between Keatsian indeterminacy and excess and the social uses of the literary, a critic much closer to Keats’s moment does as well. Matthew Arnold’s 1853 Preface to Poems, in setting out to describe and prescribe the function of poetry at the present time, rails against “the Keatsian School” precisely because of what Arnold deems contemporary poets’ (such as his unnamed antagonist, Alexander Smith’s) overindulgence in affect and sensation, including the sensations of language itself. Such work, Arnold argues, can serve no useful social function because it is too enamored of surfaces—too fascinated by momentary and sudden expressions of beauty, which fail to add up to any determinate meaning. Yet for Arnold, the problem is not only or even primarily that such work is too interested in its own language, it is also that such work is over-invested in affect, in specifically the non-productive affect of unresolved desire—an emotional territory we cannot not associate with Keats.
Perhaps the largest problem that Keatsian poetics brings up for Victorian readers is this problem of desire. Expressions of intense and ongoing longing press against Victorian masculinity’s dominant ethos of renunciation, disinterestedness, rationality, and social usefulness. James Najarian argues that while Keats was one of the major figures of influence in the Victorian period, his “sensuous diction made writers both imitate it and fear the ways that it might implicate their own bodies” (1). And Susan Wolfson calls Keats “the sign of an unseemly desire,” arguing that for Romantics and Victorians alike, Keats’s celebrations of Eros, his perpetual youth, his immersion in the languages of physical pleasure
