Thoughts Taking Shape

The correspondence of literary men is commonly dull. In Wordsworth’s letters one finds hardly a fragment of that massive genius to which nature revealed herself like a bride. No doubt if Shakespeare’s letters had been preserved for us, they would have turned out to consist mainly of flattering notes addressed to possible patrons, complaints of poverty, bald business references to plays performed. In fact, a letter is a one-sided conversation; and to write great or even charming letters requires a gift as special and rare as that of a greatpage 229 conversationalist. Perhaps one aspect of the gift is humility – a warm intense interest in the lives of others, a quick response to each new situation – but another aspect is pride, aesthetic pride, the settled conviction that one’s vision of the world is the real world and one’s opinion worth the reader’s attention.

Byron’s letters show this response and conviction; and so do those of Keats. In this full selection by Mr Page the enormous richness and variety of Keats’s imagery is shown at its source. Surely there never was a mind and heart so generously awake to every impression of the senses and subtle movement of another’s spirit! Fortunately, Mr Page preserves the words which Keats crossed out in his letters. One has the impression of seeing his thoughts take shape. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ appears (with several emendations made by Keats on the spot) sandwiched between Voltaire and an expedition to the North Pole, in a long letter to his brother George and wife. What did they make of it? To Fanny Keats, as Mr Page remarks, he is the perfect elder brother. To his correspondence with John Hamilton Reynolds we owe what is perhaps the first coherent exposition before Rimbaud of Romantic aesthetic theory. Concerning Fanny Brawne, to whom Keats wrote little, a reader of those few intimate and tortured lines can best say nothing.

1955 (106)