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Keats and Hemans
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Poetry and sound
The auditory imagination
Keats and negative capability
The ode (Pindaric; Horatian)
Hemans and feeling
Records of Woman
‘We had been listening, during one of these evening rides, to various sounds and notes of birds,
which broke upon the stillness, and at last I said—‘Perhaps there may be a deeper and richer music
pervading all Nature, than we are permitted, in this state, to hear.’ He answered by reciting those
glorious lines of Milton’s:
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep, &c.
and this in tones that seemed rising from such depths of veneration!’
Felicia Hemans, Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 508
‘Man communicates by articulation of Sounds, and paramountly by the memory in the Ear—Nature
by the impression of Surfaces and Bounds on the Eye.’
- Lectures, 1808-1819, On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes; 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987) 2: 217
‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and
feeling, invigorating every word’
- T. S. Eliot, ‘Lecture on Matthew Arnold’ (1933)
Here are Johnny Keats’s piss a-bed poetry . . . There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my
tables, that I am ashamed to look at them . . . No more Keats, I entreat: - flay him alive; if some of
you don’t, I must skin him myself
– Byron, letter to John Murray, 12 August, 1820
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination –
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have
the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential
Beauty . . . The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth.
– Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817
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It is a wonderful picture . . . But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss,
no face swelling into reality . . . at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement, especially in Literature . . . - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable
of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
– Keats, letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December, 1817
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (11-14)
- Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
Her poems are ‘singularly sweet, elegant, and tender-touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather
than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished throughout with an exquisite delicacy, and
even severity of execution, but informed with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain sober
and humble tone of indulgence and piety, which must satisfy all judgments, and allay the
apprehensions of those who are most afraid of the passionate exaggerations of poetry.’ – Francis
Jeffrey (1829)
‘She is but ever a “deep, majestical, and high-souled woman” - the calm mistress of the highest and
stormiest of her emotions.’ – George Gilfillan (1849)
She has a special ‘aptitude and delicacy in versification, and a harmonious balance in the treatment
of her subject.’ – William Michael Rossetti (1878)
‘There is not a harsh or angular line in her whole mental contour. I do not know a violent, spasmodic,
or contorted idea in all her writings; but every page is full of grace, harmony, and expressive glowing
beauty.’ – Frederic Rowton (1848)
‘If poetry were really what the average person thinks it to be, an idealisation of the feelings, at those
moments when the mind is open to every passing impression, ready to catch at similitudes and call
up associations, but not in the grip of a strong thought or vital passion, then the verse of Felicia
Hemans would be, as people once thought it was, the ideal poetry.’ – Arthur Symons (1909)
Now never more, oh! never, in the worth
Of its pure cause, let sorrowing love on earth
Trust fondly-never more!-the hope is crush'd
That lit my life, the voice within me hush'd
That spoke sweet oracles[.]
- Hemans, ‘Arabella Stuart’