The politics of literary biography in Charles Brown's Life of John Keats.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-05

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THE EDITORS OF THE ONLY PUBLISHED EDITION OF CHARLES ARMITAGE Brown's Life of John Keats (1830) call it "a disappointment." "Its weakness results," they argue, "from the fact that Brown wrote not so much a biography as an invective aimed at those whom he considered responsible for his friend's untimely end." (1) Fueled by grief, Brown directly attacks the critics whose harsh reviews he believed hastened (or even caused) Keats's demise: "Brown felt the injustice and the disaster of the attacks so deeply that he returned to the subject time after time, emphasizing the point even to the exclusion of personal recollections" (Bodurtha and Pope 34). In short, he wrote not a thoughtful biography, but a hot-headed polemic.

The editors' claim that "had Charles Brown been less a champion, he would have been more a biographer" (35) may seem justified. His bias very nearly precludes accuracy and insight. Though of some interest as source material for later, more capable biographers, Brown's text can be dispensed with as yet another example of the literary propaganda that came swiftly upon the heels of the poet's death. Recent criticism has rightly interrogated the origin and persistence of the sentimental "Keats myth" established in early responses (like Brown's) to the poet's death. Susan Wolfson, for example, argues that around the time of Adonais' publication "Keats's death was gaining an impressive 'afterlife' indeed, a modern myth of 'the Poet' cast as a figure necessarily doomed by a wretched world unable to appreciate him, and calling for revival by a coterie of more refined sensibility." (2) Viewing Shelley's Adonais as the most well known and preserved of such attempts "to elevate the poet as moral authority, acknowledged legislator," Wolfson asserts that champions of Keats like Shelley help produce a Romantic cult of the suffering, unappreciated sensitive artist--another version of the authorial hero-worship that underpins the traditional Romantic canon (32). Envisioning a disingenuous Shelley driven by self-centered motives in his lament for Keats, she argues that "No small part of his performance of sympathy for Keats was staging his own martyrdom" (35). For Wolfson, the dead Keats becomes a hapless tool in sensational and sentimental narratives of others' poetic greatness, his own "real" story left behind in the dustbin of irrelevant personal history. Andrew Motion, Keats's most recent biographer, similarly notes the inadequacy of portraits of "a supersensitive soul brought to an early grave by hostile reviewers" or of "a beautiful weakling"--images that find their way into biographies of Keats even in the twentieth century. (3)

Such critical assessment of Keats's posthumous life provides an important corrective to Keats studies and coincides with more general critical tendencies to demystify what has been seen as a distinctively Romantic investment in the power of individual authorial personality. The very clearly gendered elevation of the individual author, critics often argue, is meant to deflect or contain threatening expansions in literary production and dissemination. Marion Ross sees Romantic poets as cultivating a "myth of masculine self-possession," which "enables the historical resituation of the poet" and "allows him to adapt psychologically, philosophically, and pragmatically to historical forces [such as increased print production] that are beyond his control as a human being." (4) Sonia Hofkosh similarly examines the developing discourses of masculine authorial property and personality in works like The Prelude and the Biographia Literaria as efforts "to locate authority over the production, dissemination, and evaluation of meaning, of the work." (5) Building upon feminist rhetorical readings of the Romantic male author's attempts to avoid contamination in a promiscuous linguistic economy, Hofkosh places the individuating efforts of writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge within the historical context of a growing feminine readership. "The romantic author's strenuous claim to personality and agency," she writes, "is complicated by its articulation within a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by (fantasies of) feminine desire--by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how and where they look for pleasure" (8). Clifford Siskin reads the Romantic period's interest even in defective authorial personalities as a "psychologizing" of the technology of writing (a shorthand term that also refers to reading and printing (6)), a domestication of its otherness and non-humanity under the categories of affect and intellect that shifts concern away from the technology of writing to authorial personality (Siskin 15). Even representations of writers as diseased or dysfunctional ultimately recuperate the humanity and integrity of the authorial subject in the face of a threatening textual overload.

Just as scholars of Romanticism in general have so thoroughly dismantled Romantic myths and legends of authorial personality, Keats critics like Wolfson and Motion have re-examined the many reproductions of the poet as a martyr in the cause of individual artistic genius, ostensibly freeing the story of his death from cultish trappings. Yet sympathetic early responses to Keats's life, career, and death possess an interest and value outside of questions of accuracy and serve purposes other than those of sentimental literary hero worship. In this essay I argue that one such intensely biased response, Brown's seldom read Life, tells Keats's sad story for the purpose of cultural criticism. Brown's attempted recuperation engages rather than occludes the pragmatic complexity of producing a credible authorial persona during a period of burgeoning textual output and dynamic change in the configuration of reading audiences. He hopes to turn the public's scrutiny upon the power of dominant reviewing organs to virtually dictate the reception and transmission of new authors and texts.

In full critical awareness of the important role played by the myth of a suffering Keats in the formation of the Romantic canon and in spite of our tendency to laugh with Byron at the notion of a poet being snuffed out by an article, I want to read the mobilization of Keats's physical suffering and early death as part of an effort to call attention to the problem of constructing and circulating an authoritative poetic identity in an increasingly complex literary market. In order to indict a literary culture they perceive as plagued by political prejudice and increasing alienation between poets and readers, Keats advocates like Charles Brown, I argue, return obsessively to images of Keats as viciously, even physically assaulted by cruel critics bent upon silencing a potentially powerful emerging poetic voice. (7) Their attribution of Keats's death to harsh reviewers, however sensational or "inaccurate," constitutes a critique of dominant forces in England's literary critical institution capable of frustrating the transmission of new, culturally energizing poets and their work, an institution whose influence is literalized as the power to cause physical harm and even death. In Brown's narrative of events, Keats's literally and symbolically battered authorial corpse manifests not an individual poet's failure to fashion a credible public voice, but early nineteenth-century English literary criticism's failure to provide proper guidance to its reading publics and proper support to its emerging poetic icons. Moreover, Brown's text, in performing its own failure to fashion posthumously for Keats the potent voice and image he lacked in life, ultimately dramatizes the complexities of authorial construction and transmission in an unstable and contested literary culture. In doing so, it suggests (as do other literary biographies of the period) an English Romanticism very self-conscious about its own manufacture of literary icons, rather than uniformly and uncritically witnessing the rise of the author as individual genius and cultural spokesman.

In the first part of this essay I survey selections from Keats's early posthumous reception in order to clarify the terms of the debate that Brown's text enters. Building upon the work of critics like Marjorie Levinson, William Keach, and Jeffrey Cox, who have brought scholarly attention to the politics of literary authority in contemporary responses to Keats's work, I show that after his death debate over Keats's claims to authorship and the public ear is resituated within the context of questions regarding the meaning and causes of his suffering and death. Briefly put, while critics of Keats and the Cockney school cast the poet's physical and psychological ills as signs of his mental and affective inadequacy to the task of producing poetry worthy of public notice, many allies present Keats as the victim of a critical elite responsible both for sabotaging his authorial performance before the public and for hastening the end of his authorial, and even his physical life. These supporters mobilize Keats's emotional and physical pains not simply as signs of the ill luck of one poet in the literary market but as a manifestation of the corruption of English letters by a narrow elite hostile toward the democratizing renovation of a fragmented literary culture lacking legitimate critical guidance.

The earliest attempts at Keats's biography continue the discourse initiated in the reviews by evaluating Keats's public performance in terms provided by accounts of his bodily and emotional suffering. Among the first of such attempts is Leigh Hunt's brief recollection of Keats in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828). In the final and most substantial section of this essay, I read Charles Brown's unpublished Life (written around 1830 and delivered as a lecture in 1837, but not published for over another hundred years) as it dialogically engages with and contests Hunt's account. Hunt, like Brown, sympathizes with Keats's cause and seeks to install him within the canon of English poets. Yet while Hunt retrospectively attributes the poet's failure to achieve a sound reputation during his lifetime to a congenital physical and affective weakness, Brown much more insistently and pessimistically indicts a reactionary literary critical institution as willfully and cruelly silencing an authentic young poetic voice. Countering Hunt's characterization of Keats's defeat in the periodical public sphere as inevitable and even self-inflicted, Brown casts the poet's literary struggle, compounded with the probably resultant physical suffering, as produced by a critical institution that hinders rather than promotes the transmission of poetry among increasingly distant and indiscernible reading audiences. While Hunt elides questions regarding the stability or health of the literary environment surrounding Keats by attributing his suffering ultimately to a congenital hypersensitivity and by confidently forecasting his posthumous literary fame, Brown returns obsessively to his unjust physical and emotional strife as the product of a narrow literary culture that thwarts the efforts of its own best writers to reach their audiences. For Brown, Keats's canonization and transcendence of the material circumstances of his career have not yet occurred (and may never), the poet hovering uncertainly somewhere between death and literary afterlife. The memory of his suffering and death in Brown's text insistently calls to mind the unresolved cultural conflict (embodied for Brown in Keats's corpse) between the forces of literary democratization and the keepers of aesthetic and social hierarchies. His ultimately desperate biography therefore not only dramatizes his failure to consecrate the poet's memory, but also questions the possibility of an English community imaginatively unified by aesthetic values and stable authorial icons. Brown's text demonstrates that attempts to canonize can generate, rather than resolve, critical debate and cultural conflict.

Strong Disgust and Deep Admiration: The Poles of Keats's Posthumous Reception

In an 1840 review of Gilfillan's Gallery of Literary Portraits, Thomas De Quincey offers a succinct formulation of Keats's troubled place in English literary history, asserting that "As a man, and viewed in relation to social objects, Keats was nothing." (8) At the very most, Keats for De Quincey constitutes a genuine curiosity in the English poetic tradition:

It is in relation to literature, and to the boundless questions as to the true and the false arising out of literature and poetry, that Keats challenges a fluctuating interest,--sometimes an interest of strong disgust, sometimes of deep admiration. There is not, I believe, a case on record throughout European Literature where feelings so repulsive of each other have centered in the same individual. (II: 388-89)

As the last sentence in particular demonstrates, Keats's life and career arouse not only curiosity but also critical disagreement well after his death. De Quincey's extremes of "strong disgust" and "deep admiration" recall the polarized responses generated by Keats's forays into authorship in the intensely politicized reviews of the early nineteenth century. Was Keats "nothing," capable of arousing only disgust both at his ultimately ineffectual and contemptible Cockney politics and at his mangling of the English language? Or was he indeed the "Muses' son of promise" (as he was called by Cornelius Webb) (9) emerging miraculously on the threshold of adulthood out of unlettered suburban obscurity to redirect the course of English literature itself, only to have his poetic ambitions thwarted during his lifetime by an unfeeling or unready literary culture?

Disagreement regarding not only the decorum of Keats's work but also his right and capacity to address the English reading public marks his early reception. As Donald Goellnicht argues, Keats's...

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