Are Keats' Minor Sonnets Send-Ups?

Twentieth century master narratives around British Romanticism, I predict, may come to look stifled and jejune in the twenty-first century. One of the (if less cherished) myths around this body of work is that Keats' minor sonnets, all written in the nineteenth century Teens, express sentiments without undue irony, and with an inhering spirit of earnestness and naive appreciation of Keats' young life, of literature, and of the social circle around the three Keats brothers. Keats, we were told in century XX, was not being coy when he wrote this (for instance) about painter Benjamin Robert Haydon:

Highmindedness, a jealousy for good,
A loving-kindness for the great man's fame,
Dwells here and there with people of no name,
In noisome alley, and in pathless wood:
And where we think the truth least understood,
Oft may be found a "singleness of aim,"
That ought to frighten into hooded shame
A money-mong'ring, pitiable brood.
How glorious this affection for the cause
Of steadfast genius, toiling gallantly!
What when a stout unbending champion awes
Envy, and Malice to their native sty?
Unnumbered souls breathe out a still applause,
Proud to behold him in his country's eye.

That Benjamin Robert Haydon was by no means a Byron-level celebrity, in collusion with the fact that Haydon's paintings are seen as reasonable if not spectacular successes, leads me to an inescapable conclusion: Keats is "taking the piss" here, deflating both Haydon's ego and the idea that Haydon imagines himself to have a rabid following among the general public. He most assuredly did not, and Keats, being no naif and demonstrating the arch streak which often shows up in his minor (and major, as in Melancholy) writing, enjoys the game of showing us this facet of who Haydon is. Since motifs and games like this recur endlessly in the early sonnets, it is easy for me to imagine that they are dotted with ironic subtexts, and that twentieth century Romantic criticism was abased, as was most twentieth century literary criticism, by a willingness to stay on the surface, and read the surface as adequate in/of itself.

Splendor in the Ghosts: Shelley and Adonais Pt. 2

Another determinative factor in (ironically, and against Romanticism’s century XX master narrative) gauging that the Shelley who writes Adonais is a mature, if perverse, adult, is his conception of variegated nature, “halved” between benignity and the “ghastly, scarred, riven” component parts he identifies in Mont Blanc and revisits here. It is a realistic counterpoint to what in Wordsworth verges on fantasy— the poet (Wordsworth) stands atop Snowdon, surveys the “perfect image of a mighty mind,” and leaves it at that, while Shelley balances the perfection of the natural world with what in it is misshapen, ugly, and impotent. Why Wordsworth’s single-mindedness must fail in relation to Shelley’s sense of variegation, especially in 2015, is that it becomes too clear to practiced human consciousness that the mightiness of nature’s own consciousness cannot account for the devilish duplicity and capacity for self-mutilation of the human race. The twentieth century, which would dare place William Blake with Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, inverted Shelley into an idealistic humanist, which he intermittently was; but his most penetrating writing offers insights in a deeper, darker, miasmic wilderness space in which Shelley’s own brain, in mirroring “halved” nature, see-saws between his own creative and destructive capacities.

Indeed, one of the ambiguities which Shelley successfully builds into Adonais is his own innocence and/or culpability in regards to Man and Nature. Is he, as he suggests in the self-portraiture segment, half Cain, half Christ? Why is his brow “ensanguined,” suggesting that he is, himself, a kind of slave to forces which oppress him? As he also employs the metaphor of a deer fleeing from naked Diana, mistress of the hunt, what thoughts is he having which so torment him? Furthermore, all that the “nameless worm” is, Keats’ assailant, rings with ambiguities as to whether, in a subterranean way, Shelley identifies more with him, his remorse and self-contempt, then he does with flower-like, angelic Keats? To use a popular culture metaphor, Shelley appears to be a protagonist with hell-hounds on his trail. Shelley’s biography is, indeed, riddled with ambiguities, and it is not for nothing that the Second Gen. Romantics (Keats, Shelley, Byron) are often referred to as the “Satanic School.” Yet ambiguities make for better art (literary or otherwise) then simplicity, and what is tepid in Wordsworth and Coleridge becomes pungent in Shelley and Keats. It also stands to reason that, when Venus herself mounts Keats’ corpse and must be held back by Death, we have the seeds here of Gothic awareness which elevate Adonais out of wonted elegiac territory and make it memorable past these generic constraints. Twentieth century Romantic criticism is short on these insights, into narrative-thematic levels, and long on generalizations and tap-dancing around key issues. But erecting a twenty-first century Keats and Shelley, from awareness not just formal but imaginative, and colored by the lurid constraint of global loss and recession, seems like a potential imperative worth following through, necrophilia and all.

Ode: On Exile

No bells strike at Saint Matthew’s; midnight

   means lights out; across Fayette Street, windows

send slow signals; but for hope of daylight,

    no means of evoking, painted or not, halos.

Occasional cars; the 7-11 parking lot empties

   not completely, the night crew forced to spill

      laced coffee, pills, down throats, past painted

faces reflecting gloom, as they plan candies

      passed around to kill behind, enemies

         locked in basements, unwilling dross killed.

Dull, dense, reptile-laden world— nature’s phantom

    side, scarred with imperatives to destroy— I

stride past Calvary Episcopal, its handsome,

     enchanted spires, trying to forge a “who” and “why.”

Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, crouched darkly

     in murk, I superimpose on Conshohocken at

       night, including the succession into severed head—

knowing that in there (7-11), warnings sharply

    uttered mean nothing, less than nothing at that,

       humanity is lost, then its corpse is bled.

This is not the world I was born for— Butler

    Pike, a Honda pulls into the abandoned

Dairy Queen lot, the young male driver scuttles

    out into the apartment complex, fear-flattened—

as to what John Milton would say about these

    suburban straits, everyone changing form

       like Satan, a poet singed by lost innocence

up all night on his own pills, thoughts, caffeine—

     I divine he knew all this, putrid fires warmed

         to kill brains, rigid rules passed on, idiot to idiot.

Adam Fieled, 2015

Splendor in the Ghosts: Shelley and Adonais Pt. 1

Why someone might be drawn to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais in a major recession is no mystery— an elegy on the death of his contemporary John Keats, it explores one poet’s struggle with mortality, what constitutes life and death as a chiasmus, and metaphysics among the human race in general. Some quirks of Adonais that make it even more simpatico with macabre 2015— as has not been widely noted in Romantics scholarly criticism, Adonais, as a long poem, evinces consonance with both visionary spiritualism and horror-movie level luridness, down to the convulsions of Keats’ corpse as female “splendors” engage in necrophilia-related antics with it. That, in fact, most of the poem represents, textually, a procession past Keats’ corpse, with different characters issuing speeches over it, and with the corpse itself always visible, has as a subtext which suggests a temperament rather morbid in relation to physical mortality, and uneasy with processes of change, time, and mutation of matter into other matter.

However, a few constituent elements redeem the poem past mere adolescent morbidity. Shelley’s suggested system of metaphysics is a quirky one— that “life,” being bound to time and change, stands opposed to eternity, or a kind of eternal fire (or “burning fountain”), where all worthwhile matter returns. What Shelley calls “splendors”— not exactly apparitions or ghosts, but pieces of the eternal fire which girds up the statelier half of visible reality, and which may take, like Urania (Venus) and her sisters, semi-human form— are what animate (he suggests) a consciousness such as his or John Keats’. Meanwhile, most of the human race, to Shelley, seems to be constituted by “phantoms,” “invulnerable nothings,” vultures, ravens, wolves, and other vicious predators. About humanity, Shelley is a realist-bordering-on-misanthrope here, and what Adonais demonstrates is that the idealism Shelley is often given credit for is balanced by a firmer, harder grasp of human frailty and foible then Shelley’s often featherweight “Romantic” image suggests. In fact, if I declare Adonais to be Shelley’s masterpiece, the most lucid, cohesive, ideologically and intellectually sound of his major poems, it is because (for one thing) it inverts adolescent escapism (to an extent) into a very adult realization of just how vicious, scabrous, and mortifying human life and death is, in a world where “invulnerable nothings” are allowed to hold sway over the likes of Keats and Shelley, and “unwilling dross” resists splendor.

from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #14

One branch I've got going which many of my friends don't notice is an interest in modern and post-modern art. By this time, I'm fascinated by post-modernity generally, and I learn the charmed names— Warhol, Nauman, Koons. Nauman, especially, attracts me— the West Coast, stalagmite creepiness of his early video work (product, I can't help but believe, of high marijuana intake), matched with a penchant for absurdism, balance out the direct and uncompromising brutishness of the East Coast life I'm leading. My nightly routine, when I get home from Barnes & Noble (where both I and Lisa work as booksellers) and when I happen to be alone, involves a pile of post-modern art books and approximately two bowls of weed. If I like Basquiat's playfulness, I'm repulsed by the vacuity of Jeff Koons; if Paul McCarthy is a bit too Willy Wonka, Ed Ruscha's sense of language, space, and minimalism in two dimensions gets under my skin. New York art, I learn, likes to stay on the surface, with big, bold gestures about the guts it takes to take up space in the world. The sense of spirituality is just about raw courage, raw guts. When Warhol, for instance, means it, that’s what you get. Because PMA is a short walk from Logan Square, I am there often, gawking at the Great Stair Hall, and Diana, trying to decide how much of the past centuries work I can assimilate (like Rubens’ Prometheus), and not just settle for what’s there that everybody knows. Including, it turns out, the famous Nauman neon “The true artist…,” which I’ve been vibing the right way at home. There's no one to talk with about visual art yet; but a young lady named Trish Webber works with me at B & N, and I have my eyes on her. There’s a high and mightiness to Ms. Webber against post-modernity, which is very crisp. Trish likes the Renaissance and is a student of Renaissance Humanism. The first few months I know Trish Webber, and am informed of her association with PAFA, she’s terse, slightly defensive when I define myself to her as an artist. It is by no means love at first sight. Even if, in the parlance of those times, she’s a Gwyneth and a half. Once, in the summer of 2000, I called her randomly. I don’t even remember how I got her number. She was still with John from Media, another aesthete, who I grew to like very much. The phone call, however, tanked fast. For Trish, I later learned, there was a version of Pride and Prejudice playing itself out. John wasn’t directly competitive with her the way I was. Still, in 2000 that’s in the background. Conversely, it’s taken for granted by me by 2000 that visual art for me is both an interest and an issue. When I walk around Center City stoned, I try to imagine what life would look like through a painter's eyes— West Philly, especially, is oddly picturesque, and many of the houses (half-dilapidated though they might be) are exquisite, as is all the architecture in Philly. I can still walk around with a good clean buzz on; if there is any danger, I don't notice it. For Bill and Pete (who, together, prefer the spaciness of semi-primitive, semi-formal art, somewhere between New York and Philly) and I, this is what everything reduces to— a buzz. We move forward on waves from the buildings.

On Exile

No bells strike at Saint Matthew’s; midnight

   means lights out; across Fayette Street, windows

send slow signals; but for hope of daylight,

    no means of evoking, painted or not, halos.

Occasional cars; the 7-11 parking lot empties

   not completely, the night crew forced to spill

      laced coffee, pills, down throats, past painted

faces reflecting gloom, as they plan candies

      passed around to kill behind, enemies

         locked in basements, unwilling dross killed.

Dull, dense, reptile-laden world— nature’s phantom

    side, scarred with imperatives to destroy— I

stride past Calvary Episcopal, its handsome,

     enchanted spires, trying to forge a “who” and “why.”

Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, crouched darkly

     in murk, I superimpose on Conshohocken at

       night, including the succession into severed head—

knowing that in there (7-11), warnings sharply

    uttered mean nothing, less than nothing at that,

       humanity is lost, then its corpse is bled.

This is not the world I was born for— Butler

    Pike, a Honda pulls into the abandoned

Dairy Queen lot, the young male driver scuttles

    out into the apartment complex, fear-flattened—

as to what John Milton would say about these

    suburban straits, everyone changing form

       like Satan, a poet singed by lost innocence

up all night on his own pills, thoughts, caffeine—

     I divine he knew all this, putrid fires warmed

to kill brains, rigid rules passed on, idiot to idiot. 

        

Adam Fieled (West Philadelphia, USA): "On Love"

What tide is the realest, which pulls in a kiss?
     The rigor of reaching the thing-in-itself,
from subject to object, chaos to bliss,
     our frail intuition of heavenly health?
Our love is not molecules, dumbly colliding,
     nor is it knowledge, formal and static,
         nor is it accident, reasoned and plumbed—
it's real, meta-rational, soaring and gliding,
     felt like an earthquake, bringing up panic,
         taking our parts and achieving a sum.

The greater part of love is sacrifice—
     flesh intermingled, tensing (push!) tingled,
this is the secret I learn from your eyes.
     Giving my body, knotted, single,
tiny eruptions that come from my tongue;
     plunging down surfaces, slicking the flesh,
         thoughtless as leopards or hurricane winds—
watching you shudder, watching you come,
     rapt in the throes of an innocent death,
         giving my life to an inch of your skin.

Thus, we trade in secure oblivion
     for reckless reality, messy and fleeting.
Such is the cosmos— creation, carrion,
     motions of molecules merging and meeting.
Nothing is lost but notions of self-ness,
     hard ideations that close and clatter,
         rages of ego that strain at their walls—
nothing is gained but a sense of the deathless,
     "there-ness" of spirit, "there-ness" of matter,
         ultimate "there-ness" that scares as it calls.

© Adam Fieled 2003-2025