{"id":74570,"date":"2014-07-25T16:25:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T20:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74570"},"modified":"2014-07-25T16:30:38","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T20:30:38","slug":"the-vale-of-soul-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/25\/the-vale-of-soul-making\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vale of Soul-Making"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Keats coped with fever.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"keats_pic\"<\/a>

Tuberculosis seemed to pursue Keats his whole life.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1821, three months after he learned of Keats\u2019s death, Percy Shelley wrote Adona\u00efs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats<\/em>, in which he described the poet as a delicate, fragile young flower of a man:<\/p>\n

\n

Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That dragon was a cruel critic who had mocked Keats\u2019s literary ambitions\u2014John Gibson Lockhart, who, writing under the pseudonym Z, had scolded Keats as if he were a child, insisting in a review of Endymion<\/em> that \u201cit is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr John, back to the \u2018plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.\u2019\u2009\u201d Lockhart had classed Keats among the Cockney School of politics, versification, and morality, known\u2014at least by readers of Blackwood\u2019s Magazine<\/em>\u2014for its \u201cexquisitely bad taste\u201d and \u201cvulgar modes of thinking.\u201d In Shelley\u2019s formulation, it was this bad review that sent Keats to an early grave, and gazing back through history, one begins to accept this two-part narrative of Keats\u2019s legacy. The fallen poet had lived a life of abstractions\u2014he was not only an<\/em> aesthete, but the<\/em> aesthete\u2014and he had been, as Byron quipped, \u201csnuffed out by an article,\u201d too beautiful and frail for this harsh world.<\/p>\n

But Keats was immersed in the realities of life; his poetry and letters reveal an allegiance to radical politics as well as a concern with economic and scientific issues. Far from childlike and apolitical, he\u2019s now thought of as having been \u201cdangerous \u2026 a poet who embodied and gave voice to the anxieties and insecurities of his times \u2026 a poet whom the establishment would be obliged to silence,\u201d as the scholar Nicholas Roe puts it. We often overlook, for instance, that Keats spent six years studying medicine, successfully earning a license to practice in London from the Society of Apothecaries\u2014hence Lockhart\u2019s insult about the \u201cplasters, pills, and ointment boxes.\u201d To think that he was \u201csnuffed out by an article\u201d trivializes the intense pain he experienced as his lungs were slowly consumed by tuberculosis, robbing him of his work, his love, and his life at the age of twenty-five.<\/p>\n

The myth of the frail genius is attractive, even to contemporary readers, because of its quintessential Romanticism. But the truth is that Keats\u2019s writings\u2014especially when they seem fanciful or escapist\u2014are grounded in real-world concerns. And nowhere is this more evident than in the letters and poems of his that deal with feverish suffering. <\/p>\n

During the early nineteenth century, London had fallen into the grip of fever mania. The city was working to combat a host of diseases associated with the colonies: yellow fever, typhus, influenza, smallpox, child-bed fevers, agues, and St. Anthony\u2019s fire, among many others. With almost a million people living in the city in the early 1800s, including more than ten thousand prostitutes, disease spread quickly, inducing public panic. Between 1816 and 1817, the number of admissions to the Fever Hospital spiked from 124 to 781, and the fever epidemic remained a major news story for the duration of Keats\u2019s life. Whereas some historians have viewed the fever as a foreign invader, striking from the colonies upon the homeland, Keats would have recognized it as a recurrent, intimate presence that followed him throughout his life.<\/p>\n

The patients whom he attended at Guy\u2019s Hospital haunted him, as did the memory of his mother\u2019s fatal consumptive fever, which he would relive as he nursed his brother, Tom, throughout 1818. Because of his family\u2019s history of illness, his own medical training, and the epidemic of fever that spread throughout London, Keats was intimately familiar with feverish suffering; he used his writing to make sense of a pain for which there was no reasonable explanation. Two letters\u2014one written before Tom\u2019s death and one after\u2014outline Keats\u2019s philosophy of suffering as a creative force.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

On May 3, 1818, Keats wrote a letter to his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, comparing a human lifespan to \u201ca large Mansion of Many Apartments.\u201d He imagined two rooms in a mansion through which one must pass before confronting a vast number of potential third rooms. For an unspecified length of time, one remains unthinkingly in the first apartment, in spite of the fact that the doors leading to the second are wide open. Eventually, the impetus to think moves one from the first chamber into this second, called the \u201cChamber of Maiden-Thought,\u201d which is full of intoxicating delights and thus initially very pleasing. But time spent within it leads to a \u201csharpening [of] one\u2019s vision into the heart and nature of Man \u2026 convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

One becomes aware<\/em> of one\u2019s own fever and the suffering that afflicts humanity\u2014which were present all the while, even amid the delights. Keats thought he\u2019d only made it to the end of this second room. He saw nothing but darkness and mist in the hallway beyond it. He told Reynolds that he wished to explore the dark passages to seek out some form of salvation by way of his poetry, though he offered no compelling evidence that any of the unexplored rooms might contain something redemptive, or even pleasant.<\/p>\n

Surrounding this philosophical discussion are the details of Tom\u2019s illness. The letter begins with what appears to be good news: \u201cAfter a Night without a Wink of sleep, and overburdened with fever, [Tom] has got up after a refreshing day sleep and is better than he has been for a long time,\u201d and ends with restrained melancholy: \u201cTom has spit a leetle [for<\/em> little] blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper.\u201d But insofar as Keats was hoping to justify the purpose of suffering to himself, both of these statements are heartbreaking. Because of his extensive experience with ill patients, Keats surely knew that his brother\u2019s condition was grim, even in May 1818. His reactions hint at a kind of denial\u2014an insistence that there be an identifiable purpose<\/em> to justify the trauma he continued to witness and endure. And once he has convinced himself that there is a purpose to suffering, it is only another small leap to start thinking of the fever as something constructive. Indeed, as odd as it may seem, it was his brother\u2019s grim condition that prompted, even forced, Keats to expand his philosophy of suffering to embrace fever as beneficial. The search for the third room, undertaken in the midst of suffering, had to <\/em>lead to the creation of something meaningful and redemptive, as Keats would try to convince himself after Tom\u2019s death in December 1818.<\/p>\n

\"k<\/a>

Joseph Severn\u2019s drawing of Keats on his deathbed.<\/p><\/div>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1819, Keats was at the height of his genius; within the next few months he would write his finest poems. In a letter from April 21, 1819 to his other brother, George, who had emigrated to America, Keats revisited his philosophy, unveiling the \u201csystem of Spirit-creation\u201d that he\u2019d been designing and testing for more than a year: the world as the \u201cvale of Soul-making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keats argued that any attempts to improve one\u2019s life still end in death\u2014a fate that he acknowledged as unbearable without some notion of redemption. And yet he rejected the idea of the afterlife or religious salvation\u2014those, in his view, devalue the act of suffering, because they serve no creative purpose and teach nothing to the human individual.<\/p>\n

Instead, he referred to the raw material of a soul as an \u201cintelligence.\u201d All humans have (or are<\/em>) an intelligence, but they\u2019re not considered souls until they develop an individual identity. Soul creation takes place over the span of many years and requires two components\u2014the human heart and the world of feverish suffering\u2014comprising a process that Keats likens to an education:<\/p>\n

\n

I will call the world<\/em> a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read\u2014I will call the human heart<\/em> the horn Book<\/em> used in that School\u2014and I will call the Child able to read<\/em>, the Soul<\/em> made from that school<\/em> and its hornbook<\/em>. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cvale of Soul-making\u201d celebrated the fever that had followed him through his life. And yet what Keats could not, or refused to, see is that the irrationality he perceived in religious salvation is present in his own system, too. There\u2019s no ultimate purpose to the suffering that he, his family, and his patients have had to endure; it\u2019s not as if the fever of tuberculosis consciously, benevolently struck Keats\u2019s mother and brother to help them shape their souls. But Keats went to great lengths to convince himself of just that.<\/p>\n

While the fever had surrounded him for most of his life, it consumed Keats during the months following Tom\u2019s death, insisting that he find some way to rationalize its irrational effects. In fact, compared with other medical terms, Keats uses the word fever<\/em> sparingly in his poems: blood<\/em> is explicitly referenced forty-seven times (and implicitly in at least a dozen other instances), and there are 157 variations of heart<\/em>, but only twenty-three instances of fever<\/em> appear across the body of Keats\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n

This shouldn\u2019t mislead us into thinking that it\u2019s a less potent image for him. His prudent use of the term demonstrates its importance\u2014it\u2019s loaded with personal significance. All but five of these uses of \u201cfever\u201d occur after Tom became ill, the most poignant of which comes in \u201cOde to a Nightingale,\u201d written only a few days after the \u201cvale of Soul-making\u201d letter.<\/p>\n

The feverish heart overwhelms the speaker of the \u201cOde to a Nightingale,\u201d who suffers a heartache as he listens to the nightingale\u2019s song, hoping to mirror the bird\u2019s ability to transcend real-world circumstances. The speaker describes the world as<\/p>\n

\n

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
\u00a0\u00a0 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
\u00a0\u00a0 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And leaden-eyed despairs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Keats must have had Tom\u2019s death in mind when he composed these lines; every phrase is loaded with the common suffering of humanity from which the nightingale\u2019s song seems to escape.<\/p>\n

Less than two years later, Keats died of tuberculosis in Italy, where he\u2019d traveled in the hope of recovering, accompanied by the artist Joseph Severn. Even as he grew shorter and shorter of breath in early 1821, Keats repeatedly rejected his dear friend Severn\u2019s belief in the afterlife, suggesting that he was committed to his philosophy of Soul-making until the end. Severn wrote in mid-January: \u201cthis noble fellow lying on the bed\u2014is dying in horror\u2014no kind hope smoothing down his suffering\u2014no philosophy\u2014no religion to support him.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the end came, it was the fever, and not an article with obvious political motivations, that killed Keats. The pleasures of his life\u2014beauty, love, poetry\u2014had always been bundled up with suffering and death, and we may empathize with him in his desire to articulate a purpose to it all. He was not too frail for the world: his devotion to making the most of his mortality drove his creative process. He was a man who had a deep need to create meaning where there was none.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey C. Johnson is a writer living in California. His writing can be found on his website<\/a>, and he is on Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Keats coped with fever. In 1821, three months after he learned of Keats\u2019s death, Percy Shelley wrote Adona\u00efs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, in which he described the poet as a delicate, fragile young flower of a man: Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert,Why didst thou leave the trodden paths […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":728,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[88,14743,6749,14745,12985,11908,7221,165,1786,6434,14744,9791],"class_list":["post-74570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-england","tag-fever","tag-john-keats","tag-joseph-severn","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-ode-to-a-nightingale","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-religion","tag-romanticism","tag-tom-keats","tag-tuberculosis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Vale of Soul-Making by Jeffrey C. 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