Amy Lowell on Keats and the Question of Quality. . . .

After my reading of Sidney Colvin’s book on Keats, I took up Amy Lowell’s book and have begun to read it. Amy Lowell was, of course, a poet in her own right and was a cousin of the poet James Russell Lowell. The wealth of the Lowell family gave Amy exceptional opportunities in research because she was able to purchase a great deal of Keats material that other researchers would have had a difficult time obtaining. However, her efforts in compiling the Keats story were not all successful. Unfortunately, a great deal of Keats material, including a number of important letters, were in the hands of the great American photographer Fred Holland Day and, for reasons that remains obscure to me, he would not share all of these materials with Lowell.

However, despite any challenges that Amy Lowell may have faced in her bibliographic work, her massive two-volume book on Keats is still a magnificent monument of work and, arguably, her greatest legacy.

Having said that, I should also say that one of the things that Amy Lowell’s book does is raise that thorny question (the one that has always bothered me and surely bothers any self-conscious artist), the question of quality. I began, from an early age, as a visual artist, keeping a daily sketchbook and drawing regularly from life. I attended by first life-drawing class when I was thirteen. When one first starts out on the journey of visual art one is primarily concerned with achieving the technical competence to simply draw a ‘realistic’ image. In our modern time, this realistic competence, once achieved becomes quickly tedious for many artists as the notion of art has increasingly involved conceptual issues. But as one expands the horizons of one’s aesthetic interests, the question of quality becomes ever more problematic. This philosophical problem become profoundly complex (and often seemingly intractable) when one takes an interest in other arts. And arguably no other art form is more problematical in terms of quality than that of poetry.

I began reading poetry at a fairly early age because both my parents had an interest in the art form. My father was born and raised only a few yards from Bunhill Fields where William Blake was buried and his father was a profound admirer of the radical poet. My mother was raised in the fifties in the US and took an early interest in the Beat poets. My interest in poetry expanded significantly in high-school when I took a specialty English class that was geared specifically to the production of a small literary journal once a semester. However, the more I learned about poetry, the more I found the whole problem of quality problematic. I thought about it and thought about it until it nearly drove me mad (like the narrator of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and even as I aged and became more knowledgeable about the subject I could never really clear my mind. Graduate school certainly didn’t help. If anything, it just made it more complicated. I gradually came to the conclusion that poetry (like all arts) was the ability to say that which otherwise couldn’t be said, and the art of criticism was even more vague and problematic.

Now, getting back to the biography of Keats by Amy Lowell. Unlike me, Lowell has not difficulty at all throwing her aesthetic judgments around like chuck-farthings. But even though she is not at all shy about her aesthetic judgments, I don’t believe that she is any closer to a defensible answer about what is good and what is not in the art of poetry than I have ever been. In fact, she is spectacularly sloppy and hopelessly subjective in her ability as a critic.

Throughout her biography, Lowell continually chides Keats for his poetic failures. (A rather bold endeavor no doubt!) However, Lowell’s criticisms are vague and take as their starting point some unstated and abstract standard of poetic diction to which only she seems to be privy. Lowell makes a distinction between youthful verse and authentic poetry, but her distinction is never made clear, it just sort of hang in the air like some inalienable assumption. “Poor Keats!” Lowell has the gall to observe. “Poetry is not written at a table sitting opposite another man who is cramming for an examination. The best that can be done under such circumstances is verse, and there is an abundance of mere verse in the Third Book [of Endymion].” (1:402) It would be nice if Ms. Lowell would demonstrate somewhere what constitutes the difference between authentic poetry and “mere verse,” and I would love for her to make it clear why poetry cannot be written while sitting at a table while someone sits on the other side cramming for an examination.

At one point Ms. Lowell makes things a little more clear for us when she criticizes one of Keats’ sonnets (Leaving some Friends at an Early Hour). Lowell tells us that the sonnet is “so strained and jejune, so overladen [sic] with weak ornament, so smothered beneath clap-trap prettiness, that I should unhesitatingly place it as written in the Spring, at the time when Keats first met Hunt.” (1:212) I am not sure what constitutes a strained and jejune poem but I would certainly like to know. Lowell highlights one line for her particularly powerful distain. That line reads “For what a height my spirit is contending!” Lowell seems to be significantly offended by this line that tells us that “this boarding-school-miss kind of nonsense is not to be tolerated.” (ibid.)And then she laments that “it is a pity that some one was not there to say ‘My dear fellow, tear that stuff up at once. It is rubbish.” (Ibid.) Wow, I suppose that Ms. Lowell regrets that she had not been the one to sit at Keats’ shoulder and tell him which lines were good and which were mere rubbish. The result, if we are to follow Lowell, is that Keats would have been a significantly better poet than he turned out to be. With this brilliant, encyclopedic knowledge of quality in the fine art of poetry, one can’t help but wonder why Keats is continues to be nearly a household name while Lowell’s books are unread and out of print.

Now, given the criticism that Lowell levels at this sonnet (and this line in particular), one might consider a few lines of her poetry.

When you, my Dear, are away, away,

How wearily goes the creeping day.

A year drags after morning, and night

Starts another year of candle light.
O Pausing Sun and Lingering Moon!

Grant me, I beg you, this boon.

Are we to believe that this is genuine poetry or “mere verse?” I am not sure. But either way, it seems to me that if any lines of poetry bring to mind verses which can be said to be “boarding-school-miss kind of nonsense,” it is surely these. To use more of Lowell’s language, I would think that many poetry lovers would consider the lines sappy and overly sentimental. And from a purely technical point of view it looks as though she has added the second “away” on the first line purely to ensure the consistency of the meter.

But perhaps this is an unfair criticism of Ms. Lowell. Certainly if one hesitates to construct a theory of quality in art, and is cognizant of the degree to which the ever fickle and changing question of fads and fashions go into the value given to authors and artist, then one surely must assume to a certain degree that Lowell’s works are not given the attention which, say, those of Keats are precisely because they have not captured that misty and ephemeral attention of a powerful reading public. However, this question leads us to a digression that is probably not appropriate at this moment.

Suffice to say that one of the great problems of holding to a fixed and notion of quality in art is that your own work might (and probably will) be subjected to the very standard which you advocate. And the result may be less appealing than you might hope.

Amy Lowell, a woman that was well known for her frankness, is not atypical in her readiness to pontificate on aesthetic questions. Writers and literary theorists have always been eager to give their opinions on the work of others. However, for many years now (since the emergence of what people commonly call the ‘post-modern’ age) people have found it more and more problematic to simply make sweeping aesthetic judgments which are very often rationally unsupportable and based upon some vague, usually unstated, assumptions that more often than not are based upon an inherent elitism or hidden political agenda.

However, even though Lowell’s book is now over eight-five years old, I still find it shocking the casual ways in which she throws out unsubstantiated aesthetic judgments on a poet of the fame of Keats.