“Music, Magic, and the Poetry of John Keats” - Dr. Jason Baxter
Our spring college retreat concluded on May, 28, 2026, with Dr. Jason Baxter’s lecture on John Keats’s poetic craftsmanship. Unlike earlier Romantic were suspicious of form and convention , Keats matches his orientation toward the transcendent with equal attention to lyrical texture and artistry.
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Transcript
Once, when reflecting on literature, C. S. Lewis suggested that there were some stories so perfect that you could boil and boil them down, boiling off all of the rhetoric and all of the psychologically convincing characters, and then keep boiling off all the plot developments — and what you finished with, if it were the right sort of story, would still be moving. "There is then a particular kind of story which has a value in itself, a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work." The stories he's thinking of have a very simple narrative shape, "a satisfactory and inevitable shape," he says, "like a good vase or a tulip." What are you talking about, Lewis?
Not all stories are equal, but stories this perfect Lewis called myths. He didn't particularly like the name "myth," because he thought that most stories from ancient mythology are cruel and senselessly violent, and, he says, sometimes simply stupid. And yet — "out of this rank and squalid undergrowth the great myths — Orpheus, Demeter and Persephone, the Hesperides, Baldur, Ragnarok, Ilmarinen's forging of the Sampo — rise like elms."
These stories feel like they come from another world, he says. "Human sympathy is at a minimum. We do not project ourselves at all strongly into the characters. They are like shapes moving in another world. We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life, but we do not imaginatively transport ourselves into theirs." And what do they feel like? The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be one of Lewis's five favorite words — we feel it to be numinous. "It is as if something of great moment had communicated itself to us. The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp — we mean chiefly to conceptualize — this something are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they." Doesn't this kind of sound like our discussion of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner yesterday?
Rather than having lots of action, Lewis says that myths have a peculiar flavor, or even a smell. They are like chords, as in the opening measures of Mahler's First Symphony — and then of course it goes on for another two and a half hours, right? Or Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. You could hum these chords over to yourself, over and over again, all day long. And indeed my thirteen-year-old son has done this to the point that I wanted to kill him. And you could still find pleasure in these measures, even if you never developed the piece into the whole.
For Tolkien, there's something not just old about myths, but ageless. In this way he calls them fairy tales, of course. Fairy tales and myths have always been old. Even in antiquity, they were already ancient. As Tolkien enigmatically puts it, these myths have a remoteness even older than antiquity. Isn't that beautiful? Even older than antiquity. I feel like I need to use that title for a book. I've got to just come up with the inner contents — I've got the cover, right? Even older than antiquity. Fairy stories, Tolkien says, are now old, and antiquity has appeal in itself; and yet always the chief flavor of these tales in the memory is distance. In a great abyss of time, not measurable even by two thousand years, they open a door on other time. And if we pass through, those only for a moment, we stand outside our own time — outside time itself, maybe.
But now we come upon a paradox. Although we find satisfaction in these simple intervals — bum bum bum bum bum bum ba, that's satisfying right there, and we could hum them all day long — we also find ourselves at the same time longing for an expansion. We want to hear these chords prolonged and worked out in a full composition. Imagine the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. We want to experience a world in which they make sense and move about.
And now we come to the very heart of Lewis's thought on story, and probably his vocation as a storyteller. Because throughout his life, C. S. Lewis was not only a champion of old values, a guardian of an old religion — one that modernity thought it had outgrown — but he was also a defender of the old ways of knowing, the old forms of seeing the world. Some readers, he thought, had a tendency to be so greedy for facts, so avaricious for content — what he called narrative lust — so avaricious for content that we strip the useful out of context, find the point, and reduce it into plot points. In contrast, Lewis thought that the essence of literature, good literature, involved the marriage of content and form, and the how was as important as the what. The facts could be choreographed, he said — choreographed into a literary dance.
This is Lewis from An Experiment in Criticism. "A work of literary art can be considered in two lights. It is both logos, something said, and poema, something made. As logos it tells a story, or expresses an emotion, or exhorts or pleads. As poema, by its aural beauties and also by the balance and contrast and the unified multiplicity of its successive parts… To enjoy the shape of a poema is something very different from enjoying the literal shape of a house or a vase. The parts of the poema are things we do ourselves. We entertain various imaginations, imagined feelings, and thoughts in an order and at a tempo prescribed by the poet."
In other words — when you watch Shakespeare, and Shakespeare even says this, doesn't he? When you watch Shakespeare, your brain becomes the stage. You remember there are oftentimes the last scene and the last act where the actor comes on stage and says, "You can wake up now," right? "This is less like looking at a vase than like doing exercises under an expert's direction, or taking part in a choric dance invented by a good choreographer." So you should be a really good reader of literature, Keats.
It's also for this reason that Lewis could talk about the logic of fairy tales. By that he meant not a chain of if-then statements — no, that's Daniel's logic — but a kind of associative world-building, a web of intelligently chosen details which enhanced the atmosphere of poetry. And it is this web of related details which he calls the poema of literature. Another quotation from Lewis. "I happened to remark to a man who was sitting beside me at dinner the other night that I was reading Grimm in German of an evening, but never bothered to look up a word I didn't know. 'So that it is often great fun,' I added, 'guessing what it was that the old woman gave to the prince, which he afterwards lost in the wood.' 'And especially difficult in a fairy tale,' said he, 'where everything is arbitrary, and therefore the object might be anything at all.'" His error was profound, says Lewis. The logic of a fairy tale is as strict as that of a realistic novel, though different.
Every time we read a work of literature, we don't just ask, what is this about — its logos. We also ask, what does it feel like to read it — its poema. But we arrive at that by asking how the poet uses the nuts and bolts of poetry to create an overall atmosphere. All of those details stack up to create an air, an atmosphere — or, to translate into your language, a vibe. But part of the reason we work so hard to weave together this web of associations, this net, as Lewis calls it, is because we're seeking something elusive, something difficult to put our finger on. Charles Taylor calls it the Chopin effect. We find a longing opening up when we listen to a nocturne or an etude, but it's sometimes difficult to identify what it is exactly we're longing for.
The difficult thing for Lewis, though, is how to figure out, as a writer, how to keep the story going — how to keep adding to it in a way that doesn't allow the inner core to evaporate. You might start off with this brilliant idea. Lewis uses the example of the children's story The Well at the End of the World. There's this well, and it's at the end of the world. Like, wow — how do you get there? What happens if you drink from it? Is it hard to find? Do other people know about it? And so in some sense Lewis says that The Well at the End of the World, that very title, is kind of like those opening measures of Mahler, right? But the difficulty is, how do you keep the magic of that going after the first three bars?
Lewis says, in real life, as in a story, something must happen. Actually — if I can just interrupt myself — this is related to an earlier question. If you get a moment of inspiration, how do you make it a permanent part of the fabric of your life, rather than just allowing it to evaporate out, and you forget that you had it? Lewis is interested in that. In real life, as in a story, something must happen. Eventually you'll have to leave the Valor retreat and go home, work a job. "That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis, which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story, is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the journey has once begun." So in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. "Nor is this merely because actual hardships and dangers shoulder it aside. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?"
"If the author's plot is only a net — and usually an imperfect one — a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all, is life much more? The bird has escaped us; but it was at least entangled in the net for several chapters. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage." And now the bird flies on — the bird of whatever elusive reality you really want to talk about — the sort of fluttering of the glimpse of the best self, your best self, that you get.
And thus Lewis concludes: "Whether there is in real life any doctor who can teach us how to do this, so that either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we shall be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is sometimes done — or very, very nearly done — in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making."
Lewis is talking about stories, of course, but his comments on them provide a good way for us to begin to articulate what is so magical about the poetry of John Keats. On the one hand, all of Keats's best poems have a mysterious mythic core, some quiet, numinous reality at the center of them, something like a Chopin nocturne, which we can sense even if it's difficult to put our finger on exactly the sensation of spiritual longing evoked. At the same time, while possessing this mythical quality to a high degree, Keats's obsession with his craft went beyond Wordsworth and Coleridge. Even more so than Wordsworth, Keats worried about the tonality of his vowels, the musicality of his phrases, the percussion of syllables, the shapes of his stanzas — like some kind of Schubert in words. I know I just compared him to Chopin, but for this reason you could also call him a second-generation Romantic.
When Keats wants to, he seems to have an almost orchestral ability to play his words in a minor key with an ominous kettledrum in the background, like he does at the beginning of his incomplete poem Hyperion: "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn." Indeed, Keats himself, in a verse letter to an old teacher, recalls how he used to enjoy listening to music with his tutor, including Mozart. And in the same verse epistle — if we have time in the question-and-answer session, you can ask me about it — he also expresses gratitude to his teacher for teaching him the music of language, the music of vowel sounds. He thinks of vowel sounds kind of like half tones.
And so Keats's poems not only have that mythic core, but because he's writing lyric poetry — unlike Jane Austen or Tolstoy, who have these plots — Keats doesn't need to introduce characters or exciting events to speed along a plot. Thus he could focus on weaving the net of musicality. He could focus on the poema, the poetic technique of his poems. So, even more so than Wordsworth, the poetry of Keats feels like it's suspended, timeless. And Keats is okay with lingering longer with the phenomenon, employing what he calls an ardent listlessness. You understand the oxymoron? An ardent listlessness. Listless, of course, being incapable of moving; ardent meaning passionately burning — thus an oxymoron, to describe a passionate longing, an intense state of feeling that you have nothing more to do. An ardent listlessness.
And because he's willing to linger with what he's describing, without feeling the need to rush off to the next incident — I like Wordsworth; we convinced you yesterday that The Prelude is a really great poem. At the same time, Wordsworth does have to rush off to the next event: I was running around in a thunderstorm, and then I went bathing, and then I stole eggs, and then I hung from a crack, and then and then and then. Because Keats is willing to linger longer with what he's describing, without feeling the need to rush off to the next incident, he can zoom in on the poetic texture. If we have time in the question-and-answer session, ask me about the painter Caspar David Friedrich.
It was because of Keats's ardent listlessness and his attentiveness to the musicality of the poetic texture of his words — his obsession with weaving the net of poema — that many consider Keats the purest lyric poet. Keats is to lyric poetry what, say, Tolstoy and George Eliot are to the novel. Keats's first successful poem was published in 1816, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Bright Star might have been his last poem, a poem he revised in 1820, when Keats was on his way to Italy, where he died of tuberculosis; he is buried in Rome, in the Protestant Cemetery.
If Wordsworth had a naturally epic mind, wanting to turn his own lyrical experience into a tale of gigantic length, thousands of pages, Keats's intensity was better suited for shorter lyric poems, which he fired off when he was inspired. His best love poems are the six great odes, all of which were written in 1819: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Psyche, Ode on Indolence, and To Autumn. In other words, Keats's life finds its reflection in the poetry he wrote: it was intense, as intense as it was brief. Unlike Wordsworth, who lived into venerable senectitude, and whose poems got longer and longer with greater age — as Wordsworth struggled to turn his own psychology into an ever-longer epic poem — Keats spent all of the energy of his youth in the passionate pursuit of short verse, and struggled with writing long poems. (Keats calls Wordsworth's style the egotistical sublime.) When Keats died, he hadn't even made it to his twenty-sixth birthday, thus making himself into a kind of English Schubert of words, who incidentally was thirty-one when he died.
Taking Keats, then, as the paradigm for lyric poetry at its best might help keep us from misunderstanding what lyric poetry wants. The scholar Jonathan Culler — and if you are not sick of lyric poetry by the end of the seminar, then I'd recommend reading his Theory of the Lyric — contends that the generation before him had too much of a tendency to read lyric as a subcategory of drama. Indeed, that's the way that I was taught to read poetry in high school: you read a poem and tried to imagine what type of person might say this, and to whom, and under what circumstances, as if the poem were a speech given by a character on a stage. Sometimes it is the case — like Tennyson's Ulysses, or Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — that we have a character who makes a speech. But Culler thinks this approach is limited and limiting, because, he says, it turns the reader into a psychologist whose attention is directed primarily at looking for psychological clues, like a Sherlock Holmes of literature. Culler worries that if we get in the habit of doing this dramatic reading on every single lyric poem, we'll miss out on the lyricality of lyric. And thus, in Theory of the Lyric, he argues that we need a new model to replace the drama-based mode of reading lyric.
Well then, you want to know: if we're not trying to read poems as speeches delivered with specific rhetorical ends, what are we looking for in lyric poetry? Culler himself begins with a list of six characteristics compiled by a German lyric theorist, Eva Müller-Zettelmann, and then he compresses it down to four. She begins: lyric has six characteristics that distinguish it from, say, epic poetry or realist fiction or drama or other forms of literature. One, brevity — okay, you could have figured that out, right? Two, reduction of the fictional element; that is, it's less motivated to tell a story. Three, it takes more intense interest in formal structures — stanzas, rhyme schemes, meter. Four, it has a greater aesthetic self-reference; that is, not only is it hyper-verbal, but it is also aware of it, and delights in the fact that it is, and points it out to us. Five, it has greater linguistic deviance; that is, it allows itself to use words in unusual ways more often. Six, it has a greater epistemological subjectivity.
Broadly agreeing with Müller-Zettelmann, Culler thinks we can streamline this list and reshape it as four broad parameters for lyric. For Culler, lyric poetry has four essential properties. One, it loves apostrophe. Lyric poems have what Culler calls effects of voicing, or of orality. Very often these effects of voicing take an explicit imagined voice of a poet addressing a beloved person or some part of nature. So, apostrophe. Two, performance. Lyric poetry has a tendency to want to be an event rather than describe an event. Which is kind of tricky, isn't it? Imagine a newspaper reporter going to a wedding of, you know, famous celebrities, and the reporter says, "And then she smiled at him and said, 'I do.'" But now imagine being the woman in the wedding: "Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?" "I do." That's a performative aspect of speech, which is different from a descriptive one, says Culler. Culler thinks that lyric poetry wants to be like that — a performance of a reality, not a description. Which kind of goes hand in hand with apostrophizing something, doesn't it? "O nightingale."
Three, lyric poetry loves ritual. "Insofar as lyrics offer not representations of speeches by fictional characters, but memorable writing to be received, reactivated, and repeated by readers, they partake of what I have broadly called the ritualistic. The formal dimensions of lyrics — the patterning of rhythm and rhyme, the repetition of stanza forms — contribute to their ritualistic, as opposed to fictional, aspect." And four, hyperbole. "Finally, most of these lyrics have an explicitly hyperbolic quality." Baudelaire, the French poet, himself writes that hyperbole and apostrophe are the two forms of language which are not only most necessary but most pleasing in lyric. Why? Culler also refers to the optative — to the optative character of poems, which often seek transformations of experience. Not "the world is like this," but "oh, would that the world were…" "The world is too much with us." Would that the world were not too much with us. It has this optative quality. He adds, "Lyrics seek to remake the universe as a world, giving a spiritual dimension to matter."
But what does all this look like in the actual reading of an actual poem? To illustrate all of this, let's look at John Keats's poem Bright Star. It's in your Keats book, page three hundred thirty-seven, so we can read this poem together. And what I'd ask you to do while we're reading it is look for elements of apostrophe, elements of performance, elements of ritual, and elements of hyperbole, according to Culler.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.
Keats uses an intricate and complicated syntax. That is, the grammar of his sentences doesn't wrap up in one line — in each line of the poem, does it? Rather, it spills over from line to line to line to line, and sometimes even over stanzas. Look how Keats expresses his longing in the first verse: to be steadfast as a star, a star whom he apostrophizes — "O bright star." The star, standing at an inconceivable distance from the Earth, he suggests, can see absolutely everything that happens on our globe. And, not being made of blood and bones, the star can watch sleeplessly the earth's waters lapping the shores. And because it doesn't change — Keats describes the rhythms of the sea and oceans as priest-like, rituals of cleansing. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, in daily ablutions, kind of like ritualistic religious cleanings, like the priest washing his hands with water before the consecration — that's an ablution. The star also watches as snow falls softly on mountains and moors. For Keats, this bright star is a hermit of the natural world, taking its stand within the infinite night of a spiritual vigilance that contemplates the music of the universe.
But grammatically speaking, all of the second stanza is made up of things in the accusative case — or, to translate it out of classics talk, it's made up of a series of direct objects. These are all of the things that the star is looking at. O bright star, you who look at: one, water; two, snow; three, mountains; four, moors. But then, after the eighth line, there is, by convention within the Petrarchan sonnet, a new movement begins. Like all sonnets, each of those fourteen lines is made up of ten syllables, which can be further subdivided into five feet, little metrical units. Scholars who study the use and meaning of meter talk about how a poet establishes a metrical contract with a reader, creating expectations, kind of like how a composer adopts a time signature. But especially in English poetry, poets don't feel bound to the ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum of every single line — that would be mechanical, and that's why the Romantics criticized Alexander Pope. Rather, they feel entitled to create meaningful substitutions. In other words, you can violate the metrical compact, provided that you have a good reason to do so, just as Romantic composers would modify the sonata form, or even the symphony — like Beethoven. Beethoven squashes his third and fourth movements together without giving the usual rest, to create something which is technically a four-movement symphony, but kind of gets squashed together to move it along.
With one possible exception, Keats is on especially good metrical behavior in the second stanza. "Soft-fallen" — "gazing on the new soft-fallen" snow. "Soft-fallen mask." If I'm right, that might be one of those metrical violations, in which Keats substitutes a spondee — a long, long — where he quote-unquote should have done a long-short, or a short-long. But it kind of makes sense there, doesn't it? "Soft-fallen mask," when he wants to talk about snow. That incredible feeling of the first snow of late fall and early winter — that kind of sense of stillness: Keats is slowing down his own language to temporarily imitate it.
Okay, so with one possible exception, "soft-fallen mask," Keats is on especially good metrical behavior in the second stanza. He gives us a whole stanza of perfectly regular iambic pentameters. But what happens with the first word of the ninth line? "No." This "no" comes right at the turning point of a Petrarchan sonnet, the so-called volta — the turning, la volta. Not only is "no" a strong monosyllabic word in English, but it's a word buried near the very center of our nervous systems. If you have toddlers, you know that it is the second word that they learn, right after "mama." "Mama." "No." Right? At the same time, this short, powerful, percussive word runs against the gently ascending metrical current that pulls you toward the right throughout most of the poem.
But after that we have a strong repetition of the word "still": "No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable." In fact, "still" is used four times in a poem of seventy-two words. The repetition is already strong. But then, as in Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats seems to be playing on the double meaning of "still." It can mean quiet — to be still — but it can also mean ever: "Are you still doing that?" When you add all of these things up — the violated metrical contract at the turning of the volta, the repetition, the double meaning — we see that Keats in a way is not just talking about being still, but he's performing slowness. He's slowing us down so that we let this stillness pool up within the heart. He's making us star-like in steadfastness.
And this is also the moment that Keats clarifies in what sense he wants to be like the star. He wants to be star-like in its unchangeableness, but certainly not in its remoteness. Because, come to find out, this is a love poem to Fanny — and maybe actually to his earlier beloved, Isabel, which he then rewrote. To whom Keats wrote scores of passionate letters. Although he does want to be star-like in the sense of being alert and ever wakeful, he doesn't want to be millions of light years away from his beloved, separated by oceans of cold and empty vacuity. "Not in lone splendour hung." In this way, Keats is the opposite of the star, and certainly the opposite of a hermit. If you read the sayings of the Desert Fathers, you will not find many recommendations to lie on the chest of your beloved and listen to her heart. "To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, / Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever — or else swoon to death." The "still, still" also violates the metrical contract, perhaps in imitation of a heartbeat or breathing. And just as the star looks on the soft-fallen snow, Keats wants to feel the soft fall and swell of his beloved's chest.
In conclusion: in this web of words — this ritualistic web of words, this hyperbolically ritualistic web, this apostrophically, hyperbolically ritualistic web of performative words — with its internal echoes and rhymes, we have a kind of two-way street. Natural elements are likened to human activities: the star is likened to a hermit, the water is likened to a priest, the snow is called nature's mask. But the street also runs the other way, too, because the speaking poet hopes that he will be elevated into something as enduring as the night — as enduring as a watching star, undulating seas, and falling snow, those non-human elements. And so the poema of the poem becomes the web in which star-likeness is temporarily suspended. Keats wants a non-restful stillness, and an attentiveness that is characterized by the transcendent stability of a non-human star, but without the cold distance. He wants, in other words, to be able to participate in the ardent listlessness of love.