John Keats

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Editionsbericht
Literatur

Brief an Richard Woodhouse

[Post-mark, Hampstead, 27 Oct. 1818.]      

MY DEAR WOODHOUSE,

            Your letter gave me great satisfaction, more on account of its friendliness than any relish of that matter in it which is accounted so acceptable in the "genus irritabile." The best answer I can give you is in a clerklike manner to make some observations on two principal points which seem to point like indices into the midst of the whole pro and con about genius, and views, and achievements, and ambition, et cætera. 1st. As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – it has no character – it enjoys light and shade – it lives in gusts, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated, – it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of [222] things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If, then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess, but it 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 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 so to press upon me, [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated – not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children. I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough to let you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I said that day.

[223] In the second place, I will speak of my views, and of the life I purpose to myself. I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years – in the interval I will assay to reach to as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. The faint conceptions I have of poems to come bring the blood frequently into my forehead. All I hope is, that I may not lose all interest in human affairs – that the solitary indifference I feel for applause, even from the finest spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have. I do not think it will. I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever shine upon them. But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live.

I am sure, however, that this next sentence is from myself. – I feel your anxiety, good opinion, and friendship, in the highest degree, and am

                                                Yours most sincerely,

                                                              JOHN KEATS.

Erstdruck und Druckvorlage

Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats.
Edited by Richard Monckton Milnes.
Vol. I. London: Edward Moxon 1848, S. 221-223.

URL: https://archive.org/details/lifelettersliter00keat
URL: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001024007
URL: https://books.google.de/books?id=NioEAAAAQAAJ

Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck (Editionsrichtlinien).

Kommentierte und kritische Ausgaben

• The Letters of John Keats 1814 – 1821.
  Hrsg. von Hyder E. Rollins. 2 Bde.
  3. Aufl. Cambridge, Mass. u.a. 1976.
  Text u. Kommentar: Bd. 1, S. 386-388.
  
  
• John Keats.
  Hrsg. von Susan J. Wolfson.
  New York u.a. 2007 (= A Longman Cultural Edition).
  Text u. Kommentar: S. 213-215.
  
  
• John Keats: Selected Letters.
  Hrsg. von John Barnard.
  London u.a. 2014 (= Penguin Classics).
  Text u. Kommentar: S. 262-264.

Literatur

Barnard, John: Keats's letters. "Remembrancing and enchaining". In: The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Hrsg. von Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge u.a. 2001 (= Cambridge Companions to Literature), S. 120-134.

Brandmeyer, Rudolf: Poetiken der Lyrik: Von der Normpoetik zur Autorenpoetik. In: Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Hrsg. von Dieter Lamping. 2. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016, S. 2-15.

Callaghan, Madeleine: Letters. In: John Keats in Context. Hrsg. von Michael O'Neill. Cambridge 2017, S. 66-74.

Chai, Leon: Romantic Theory. Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era. Baltimore, Md. 2006.

Chandler, James u.a. (Hrsg.): The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge 2008.

Crinquand, Sylvie: Les Lettres de John Keats: D'un poète épistolier. In: Mosaic. An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 50.3 (2017), S. 125-140.

Duff, David: Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford 2009.

Duff, David (Hrsg.): The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. Oxford 2018.

Hanke, Michael: John Keats in Deutschland. In: Die Rezeption europäischer und amerikanischer Lyrik in Deutschland. Hrsg. von Christine Fischer u. Ulrich Steltner. Frankfurt am Main u.a. 1997, S. 33-52.

Mahoney, Charles (Hrsg.): A Companion to Romantic Poetry. Oxford u.a. 2011.

Matthews, Geoffrey M. (Hrsg.): Keats. The Critical Heritage. London 1971 (= The Critical Heritage Series).

Matthews-Schlinzig, Marie I. u.a. (Hrsg.): Handbuch Brief. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart. 2 Bde. Berlin u. Boston 2020.

Pott, Sandra: Poetiken. Poetologische Lyrik, Poetik und Ästhetik von Novalis bis Rilke. Berlin u.a. 2004.
Vgl. S. 306-332.

Rejack, Brian / Theune, Michael (Hrsg.): Keats's Negative Capability. New Origins and Afterlives. Liverpool 2019.

Robinson, Jeffrey C.: 1820: Poetics "In the Spirit of Outlawry". In: European Romantic Review 33.2 (2022), S. 157-174.

Simonis, Linda: Die Heteronomie des l'art pour l'art. John Keats und Théophile Gautier. In: Heteronomieästhetik der Moderne. Hrsg. von Irene Albers u.a. Berlin 2022, S. 103-124.

Wolfson, Susan J.: Keats the Letter-Writer: Epistolary Poetics. In: Romanticism Past and Present 6.2 (1982), S. 43-61.

Wolfson, Susan J.: The new poetries. In: The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature. Hrsg. von James Chandler. Cambridge 2009, S. 403-426.

Wootton, Sarah: Consuming Keats. Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature. Basingstoke u.a. 2006.

Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer