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The Meaning of Endymion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2021
Extract
Newell Ford has recently sent several bombshells into the ranks of Keatsians by utterly rejecting allegorical interpretation of Endymion. His accomplice, out of the past, is Amy Lowell, but all of the real ammunition belongs to Ford. With admirable persistence and patience he has brought heavy critical guns to bear on the allegorical fortress and has finally demolished it, as he believes, in the name of truth. The time has come, surely, to make a stand against this total destruction and reconsider the question, “Is Endymion an allegory?”
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953
References
1 These bombshells consist of two articles and part of a monograph: “The Meaning of ‘Fellowship with Essence’ in Endymion,” PMLA, LXII (Dec 1947), 1061-76;‘ ‘Endymion —A Neo-Platonic Allegory?“ ELH, XIV (March 1947), 64-76 (though published a few months earlier, this article logically follows the other); The Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats (Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 9-86.
2 John Keats (New York, 1925), p. 205.
3 Collected Essays, Part iv (Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), p. 87.
4 The Poems of John Keats, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (London: Methuen, 1951), p. xl. Called the “seventh edition,” this is substantially the same as the fifth edition, which ap-peared in London in 1926
5 The Mind of John Keats (New York, 1926), pp. 55-56. Margaret Sherwood, in her excellent chapter on Keats in Undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press, 1934), also stresses, wtile discussing Endymion, Keats's, apprehension of unity—in the sense of the organic harmony of the universe, the “oneness of life in all things” (p. 244). And back in the late Victorian period, Mrs. F. M. Owen, in her pioneer work, John, Keats: A Study (London, 1880), wrote that “the idea which underlies his poetry most deeply is that of the oneness of all true life” (p. 25).
6 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 4th ed. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), p. 468. See also pp. 67,355-356.
7 The Mystery of Keats (London, 1949), p. 144. Mrs. Owen's interpretation of Endymion, like Murry's, is in the transcendental vein; see e.g., her Study, p. 102.
8 The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), I, 298-299.
9 John Keats (Boston and New York, 1925), I, 318, 456, 365. James Ralston Caldwell (John Keats' Fancy, Cornell Univ. Press, 1945) she rejects allegorical interpretation and comments, like Miss Lowell, on the poem's intimate relation to sleep and dreams Endymion illustrates the technique of the dream: “The essence of it is spontaneity, liberty of the ...its essential form and quality ... from the shape and texture of the dream” (p. 95). Keats associates sleep and the imagination (p. 119); indeed, sleep it the “leitmotif,”and the poem illustrates only the “fluctuant allegory of the dream” (p. 131).
10 “‘Fellowship with Essence’ in Endymion.” Before reading Ford's article, I had arrived independently at the same conclusion.
11 While I agree with Ford's interpretation of “essence” in this article, I do not accept his reading of the whole “Wherein lies happiness?” passage. Deprecating Platonic and Neo-Platonic interpretations of those lines (I.777ff), he contends that Keats is describing an “hedonistic hierarchy.” Thus Ford rejects one extreme for anoter.
12 “Endymion—A Neo-Platonic Allegory?”
13 Set, e.g., Colvin, pp. 153-155; De Selincourt, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii; Thorpe, pp. 64-65, 110-112; and D. G. James, Scepticism and Poetry (London, 1937), pp. 189-191. I have hesitated to enter the lists myself at this time and place lest the general case be obscured.
14 Another theme of the Poems is the worship of great poets, which is reflected only indirectly in Endymion, as in the opening lines of Book IV
15 See Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Harvard Univ. Preee, 1937), p. 85.
16 See Leonard Brown, “The Genesis, Growth, end Meaning of Endymion,” SP, xxx (1933), 618-653. Brown considers Endymion a reply, in the sense of a “reaction.” However, Keats's poem may also be regarded as complementary to Shelley's thought in Alaster. To some extent, Brown is indebted to A. C. Bradley, who, over forty years ago, observed the resemblances in Endymion to Alastor—Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd ed. (London, 1909), pp. 140-1414. It is significant that Newell Ford overlooks these two critics and the subject of Endymion's structural, occasionally thematic (e.g., the Arab maid and the Indian maid) relationship to Alastor.
17 It is likely that Shelley had Wordsworth's poetic decline in mind when he wrote Alastor, as Paul Mueschke end E. L. Griggs contend : “Wordsworth as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley's Alastor,” PMLA, XLIX (1934), 229-245. It is certainly true, as they illustrate, that “Alastor is permeated with the diction, meter, sentiment, and even philosophy of Wordsworth.” But they go too far in saying that the poem is “an allegory of the tragedy that befell Wordsworth in middle life.” They must push aside too much that is, as they themselves admit, decidedly autobiographical. I hold with Samuel C. Chew that “on its deeper levels Alastor is indubitably autobiographical”-A Literary History of England ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1948), p. 1234.
18 I am aware that I am again indebted, in this sentence and the one following, to Pro-fessor Bush (Mythology, p. 96).
19 Letters, p. 90, Newell Ford pounces upon “pleasure thermometer” in connection with his interpretation of the “Wherein lies happiness?” lines (see n. 11, above), but he dis-regards Keats's complete statement.
20 The Selected Letter, of John Keats (New York, 1951), p. 13.
21 Of course, there critics are by no means consistently or rigidly Platonic or Neo Platonic in their interpretations. However, they do not make clear enough distinctions between systematic Platonism or Neo-Platonism and what they conceive to be Keats's ideality. I am sure that the young poet had some faith in the “unseen realities,” though in a rather vague, misty, Romantic way. His empirical nature, his intense admiration for Shakespeare, his unconcern for Plato or, indeed, any doctrine, all tend to confirm my belief in hit one deep and abiding idealistic faith, which emerges in Endymion: spiritualization-through-humanizaton.