PARTISAN REVIEW
507
poetry, according to Dickstein, presents the self in OpposItIOn to reality
and expresses longing for a condition in which the experience of op–
position is absent, a condition of something like sleep, of safe enclosure,
as in a bower. After
Endymion,
in the psychologically stormy year of
1818 whose conflicts and tensions Dickstein shows to be definitely present
during Keats's visit to Scotland ( to the heaths of the North rather than
the bowers of the South), Keats learns to confront the self that longs
for passive oblivion. As a result of the confrontation, a new self emerges;
and the dialectic of the two selves is the major theme of the great odes.
That is, Keats "turns inward like Wordsworth and writes of the growth
of a poet's mind," and the outcome is "self-renewal rather than extinc–
tion." The first half of the book is somewhat long-winded and repetitive,
most notably in the seventy-seven-page chapter on
Endymion,
and will
probably be of interest only to Keats specialists. But in the last half
of the book the argument becomes tighter, more precise and economical,
sometimes even eloquent. One may not be convinced by Dickstein's
thesis, but there is much to be learned from what he has to say about
some of the great later poems.
In my judgment, Dickstein's thesis is convincing - but incomplete.
What is so impressive about Hoffman and McGann is the comprehen–
siveness of their work; while they certainly do not exhaust their subjects,
there seem to be no willful exclusions. That Dickstein writes off
The
Eve of St. Agnes
and calls
To Autumn
a "seemingly effortless footnote
to the odes of April and May" is symptomatic of the minimal attention
he pays to the rich and precise sensuousness of Keats's later work. He
sees the cryptic message of the Grecian Urn -" 'Beauty is truth, truth
beauty' " - to be severely limited in its application by Keats's sense
of the sterility of fixity. Many beautiful things mislead, and many truths
are ugly. Yet it seems almost willful to minimize the profound and
healthy attractiveness of those fixed moments of delicious anticipation
imaged on that urn, and to gloss over the exact lushness of diction:
"Thou still unravished bride of quietness ... What leaf-fring'd legend
haunts about thy shape?" This controlled sensuousness bears with it a
strange authority, at the very least the authority of discriminating ap–
preciativeness. Beauty can strike the mind with the impact of truth, and
Keats, in confessing this, is not merely expressing "nostalgia for the
kind of art he has left behind"; he is facing a human reality.
There are few critics practicing in the present day who can write
as intelligently and sensitively about a poem as Thomas Edwards, author
of
Imagination and Power : A Study of Poetry on Public Themes.
Ed-
