Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc. Revisionary Company: Keats, Homer, and Dante in the Chapman Sonnet Author(s): Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Source: Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 56 (2007), pp. 39-49 Published by: Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30210557 Accessed: 29-10-2015 18:01 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Keats-Shelley Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions News and Notes 39 NOTE Revisionary Company: Keats, Homer, and Dante in the Chapman Sonnet I. Keats's Revisions ON FIRSTGLANCE,Keats's 1816 sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,"seems to strike a note of primacy.Asan account of initial sight, it conjures an untainted air of"pure serene,"associatedwith the excited discovery of "a new planet"or the wild anticipationof sighting a new ocean, the Pacific.The sonnet'splace within Keats'spoetic careerheightens its inauguralquality:composed at daybreakone morning after an exhilaratingnight of reading Homer aloud with CharlesCowden Clarke,it has often been deemed Keats'sfirstsuccessful poem, one that,in the words of his early mentor and publisher,Leigh Hunt, "completely announced the new poet taking possession."lYetthere is a glimpse of second sight beneath this celebration of first looking. Acts of looking are curiously doubled in the sonnet: the speaker has seen both "states and kingdoms";he feels like a "watcher"or like eagle-eyed Cortez; he "stared"while his men "looked." He has not had a primary sight of Homer's epic expanse, but only a secondary glimpse through Chapman'stranslation,and we all know that Balboa beat his figure of vision, Cortez, to a first look at the Pacific. Given these instances of second looking in a sonnet that dramatizesan aspiring poet's encounter with the originator of the poetic canon, critics have often construed Keats'srelationshipto literarytraditionas one of anxious inadequacy. Harold Bloom gave impetus to this interpretation by taking Keats'sagonized statement on Milton, "Life to him would be Death to me," as the motto for English poetry in TheAnxiety of Influence,and Marjorie Levinson revived early nineteenth-century reviewers' snobbery toward an ill-bred "Cockney" poet who had to read Homer in translationby calling attention to Keats's"alienation" from his poetic forebears,even the "contained badness"of his canonical readings.Most recently,Charles Rzepka, while distancing himself from Levinson's reading,cites Bloom explicitly to present Keats in rivalrywith poetic traI. Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries,2nd ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), I, 4Io.WalterJackson Bate likewise credited the sonnet with giving its author "a new confidence": having quit medicine for poetry, Keats could now lay claim to his first real accomplishment. See Bate,John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 84-89. More recently, Helen Vendler has argued that the sonnet showed Keats in possession of an authentic poetic form for the first time, having finally found "fictive correlatives adequate to the particulars of his experience." See Vendler, Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Pound, Plath (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 200oo3), p. 67. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 40 Keats-ShelleyJournal dition, acutely aware of his secondary status as indicated by the mediated title of the Chapman sonnet. Rather than read Cortez as a mistake for Balboa, as many critics since Tennyson have done, Rzepka claims that Keats deliberately identified with Cortez, knowing that he came after Balboa, to underscore the poignant "belatedness"of his "own sublime ambitions."2 Another dimension of the sonnet's second sight, however, suggests an alternate way of understandingKeats'sconception of his poetic place. Keats'srevision, his tendency to look again through the eyes of the second man on the scene, was in part a product of his literal revision to the Chapman sonnet as he modified his first draftfor publication in Leigh Hunt's Examinerfrom October to December of 1816. In the version of the sonnet that Keatssent to Clarke the morning after their reading party in October 1816, Keats compared himself to "stout Cortez, when with wond'ring eyes / He star'dat the Pacific,"whereas in the version Hunt published on I December, Keats had changed Cortez's "wond'ring eyes" to "eagle eyes."3A difference of one adjective may appear minor, but the eagle altered the entire tone of the sestet. Before Keats revised Cortez's epithet, the explorer staredin passiveamazement,his "wond'ring eyes" linked sonorously with the "watcher of the skies"in the previous simile. The eagle metaphor pierced the succession of alliteratedw's followed by short vowels in "when with wond'ring,"rendering Cortez's vision precise and powerful. This second look was not an anxious one. Most critics have recognized the centrality of the eagle to the power of the sonnet, developing readings that would be implausible if Keats had kept the weaker "wond'ring eyes,"but few have askedwhy Keats made the revision that created the powerful tone.4 "Eagle eyes"was the only substantialalterationthat 2. HaroldBloom, TheAnxietyof Influence (NewYork:Oxford UniversityPress,1973),p. 32;Marjorie Levinson,Keats'sLifeofAllegory:The Originsof a Style(Oxford:BasilBlackwell,1988),pp. Ii 15;Charles J.Rzepka,"'Cortez-or Balboa,or Somebody LikeThat':Form,Fact,and Forgettingin Keats's'Chapman'sHomer' Sonnet,"Keats-Shelley Journal51 (2002), 39.JenniferAnnWagneralso readsthe Chapman sonnet as motivatedby "the poet'sawarenessof literarybelatednessand inadequacy"in A Moment's Monument:Revisionary Poeticsand the Nineteenth-Century EnglishSonnet(Madison,N.J.:FairleighDickinson UniversityPress,1996),p. 89. 3. The firstdraft,now in the HarvardKeatsCollection,is reprintedin Bate,JohnKeats,p. 87.The first publishedversionappearedin TheExaminer, ix, I December 1816,pp.761-62, reprintedin GregKucich and JeffreyN. Cox, eds., The SelectedWritingsof LeighHunt (London:Pickeringand Chatto,200oo3), II, 73-75. 4. Vincent Newey'sargument,for example,thatCortez'svision implies"stalwarteffortandresources," "the qualitiesthe poem finallyvalorizes,"dependson thatvision being aquiline,ratherthanwondering, as does Nicholas Roe'sargument,that Cortez'sstareconveys"imperialpower."See Newey,"Keats,hisin KeatsandHistory,ed. Roe (Cambridge:CambridgeUnitory,and the poets"andRoe,"Introduction," versityPress,1995),pp. 13, 184-85. Rzepkareadsthe revisionas anotherindicationof belatedness,mitigating the sense of discoveryof"wond'ring."Rzepka'sreasoningexplainsKeats'smotive for deleting "wond'ring,"but does not accountfor the powerfulonset of the eagle metaphor. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions News and Notes 41 Keatsmade to the sonnet before it appearedin December - a sonnet celebrated for its otherwise spontaneous composition that feverish dawn. The revision therefore reflected a deliberate stylistic choice on Keats'spart to shift the tone of his sestet from passiveamazement to aggressiveobservation.And the change marked the first appearancein Keats'spoetry of the eagle, a bird that would make more than twenty subsequent flights through his fancy.Eagles evolved in significance for Keats as he modified his own conception of the poet's calling, but frequently they served as a metaphor for his assessmentof his poetic capacity.5Since Keats chose to registerthe shift in the sonnet's tone with an aquiline metaphor, his revision may have indicated a new sense of himself as a poet, a more confident sense than he felt on the night he initiallycomposed the sonnet. If a source for "eagle eyes" were found, it might explain Keats'smotivation for revision.All critics agree that the Chapman sonnet, while signaling a newfound authority in Keats'svoice, had deep roots in his reading beyond Chapman'sHomer; Keatshimself wrote in the fall of I816 that "when I sit me down to rhyme, / [Bards]will in throngs before my mind intrude."6But which bards was Keats reading? In 1963,WalterJackson Bate, Keats'sbiographer,declared that every echo in the sonnet had been sounded out, but although scholarshave delved through Milton, Chapman, Shakespeare,Wordsworth, Coleridge, John Bonnycastle,andWilliam Robertson in search of allusionsin the sestet, no one has uncovered a source for its most deliberatelychosen trope:"eagle eyes."7 I believe, however, that Keats,in revising"wond'ring"to "eagle,"was signaling an affiliationwith Dante, and through Dante with Homer himself. In the fourth canto of Dante's Inferno,when Virgil points out Homer to the pilgrim, Dante described the Greek poet soaring "like an eagle" above his fellow poets 5. Beth Lau catalogued these mletaphors in "Keats's Eagles and the Creative Process," RomanticismPast and Present o10.2 (1986), 49-63. 6. Keats, "How many bards guild the lapses of time!" in The Poems ofJohn Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), lines 5-6. 7. Bate,John Keats, p. 88. See John Barnard'sand Miriam Allott's notes to their respective editions:John Keats, The Complete Poems, 3rd. ed. (London: Penguin, 1988), pp 570-71; and The Poems ofJohn Keats (Harlow: Longman, 1970), pp. 60o-62. Critics traditionally follow Leigh Hunt in tracing the metaphor to a visual source. Hunt wrote in 1828 that "Cortez's 'eagle eyes' are a piece of historical painting, as the reader may see by Titian's portrait of him" (Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries,I, 412). It is not entirely clear whether Hunt simply compared Keats's poem and Titian's portrait, or whether he meant that Titian inspired Keats. Recent scholars have discounted Hunt's suggestion. Allott pointed out that no Titian portrait of Cortez is known, and lan Jack deemed it unlikely that Keats drew on a particular visual work (Jack, Keats and the MirrorofArt [Oxford: Clarendon Press, I967], p. 141). It is hard to imagine that Keats derived such a precise and subsequently crucial verbal metaphor from a painting.John Roe suggests that Hunt's reference has led scholars on "something of a false trail,"yet Roe's own proposal of Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece," besides being derivative of Amy Lowell, can only yield "still-gazing eyes," or at best, "cockatrice dead-killing eye," but no eagles. See Roe, "A Shakespearean Echo Transformed in Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,'" Keats-Shelley Reviewu8 (1993-94), 21-26; Lowell,John Keats, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1925), I, 180-8 I. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 42 Keats-Shelley Journal (in the Reverend Henry E Cary's 1805 translation).8In the poem where reading Homer inspiredKeatsto announce his poetic vocation, he borrowed a trope from the last great poet to secure a canonical seat upon encounter with the blind bard.Keatslooking into Chapman'sHomer became Dante looking atVirgil's Homer, poetasovrano(the supreme poet), and thereby gained the greatness of vision ("eagle eyes") that the soaring Homer imparted to both. Rather than showing alienation or belatedness, Keats's second sight revealed his deep identification with the poetic tradition and his ability to revise an earlierpoet's scene to place himself within it. The phrase "eagle eyes" had often appeared in English poetry before the nineteenth century,but the context and poetic effect of Keats'susage resembles soaring"like an eagle"powerfully enough to merit investigation.HelenVendler reads the revision of "wond'ring eyes" to "eagle eyes" as a kind of soaring (though she does not trace the revision to any source), since it elevates the speaker's(and reader's)vantage point above the perspective of the "watcher of the skies,"who had to look up at a new planet.9Keats'srevision would therefore signal an elevation in perspective comparableto Dante's simile of Homer "soaringlike an eagle"above other poets.There is certainly a sense of pre-eminence, at least,in Keats'sseparationof"stout Cortez" from "all his men": Keats cast himself as the stalwartexplorer who can focus his piercing gaze directly at Homer's "wide expanse,"while the other indistinguishablemen merely "[look] at each other."But there is also a sense of companionship in this scene, suggesting the affiliationKeatsfelt with his poetic peers. He could "[soar]like an eagle above the rest,"but he did not need to cancel the rest out, or deny them life to secure his own, as Bloom would have it. Dante offered Keatsa way to re-envision his fraternitywith the great poets.10 II. On First Looking Into Cary'sDante Most critics believe that Keatsdid not startreadingDante until at least September 1817, severalmonths afterhe revised the Chapman Sonnet, when his friend Benjamin Bailey hosted him at Oxford and told him to study the Italianpoet." 8. Henry Cary,trans.,TheInfernoofDanteAlighieri (London:Carpenter,I805), rpt.in TheDivineComedy:TheVisionof Dante,ed. RalphPite (London:J.M. Dent, 1994),P. 15. 9. Vendler,ComingofAgeas a Poet,p. 56. Io. ForVendler,Keatsincludes Cortez'smen because"One makesliterarydiscoveriesnot alone,but as a memberof a trans-historicalculturalcompanyof writers,readers,and translators" (ComingofAge as a Poet,p. 55). I would add that Keatsenjoyedthe specifichistoricalcompanyof Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon,which I will detailbelow,in additionto that of Chapman,Homer, and Dante. 11. Bate,JohnKeats,p. 213;Robert Gittings,JohnKeats(Boston:Little,Brown and Co., 1968),pp. 152, 172.PaulFry claimsthat"we cannotprovethat [Keats]readCary'sDante before 1818,"but Keats'squotationfrom the Infernoin his December 1817playreview suggestsotherwise.See Fry,A Defenseof Poetry: on the Occasion Reflections ofWriting(Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress,1995),p. 150. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions News and Notes 43 Keats'sinterest in Dante burgeoned over the next year:Robert Gittings (who did the most thorough-though to my mind still incomplete-analysis of Keats's use of Dante) showed that in June 1818, Keats'spublisher was persuaded by Coleridge to acquirea miniaturethree-volume 1814 edition of Cary'scomplete Divine Comedytranslation,and Keatsrequesteda copy. ("Rememberme to Hessey saying I hope he'll Carey[sic] his point,"Keatswrote to his publishers,Taylor and Hessey, on 21 June 1818.)12The miniature edition fit nicely into his knapsackas he set off for his tour of the LakeDistrict. He relishedthe early cantos of the Infernoon a coach ride in July and soon began marking the margins in earnest as he preparedto compose Hyperion,a poem whose debt to Dante is widely acknowledged.3 But Keats also owned another edition of Dante that opens the possibility for an earlierreading.He kept his three-volume 1814 edition of Cary'sDivine Comedy until sometime around the winter of 1819, when he gave it to Fanny Brawne,who notably copied the "Bright Star"sonnet into the front inner cover of the first volume. That book's provenance has been traced, and Gittings has analyzedKeats'sannotationsin it. But Gittings notes that another copy of Cary's Dante translation-this one a two-volume octavo edition of the Infernoalone, published in 1805-o6-appeared on the list of Keats'sbooks cataloguedafterhis death by his friend CharlesArmitage Brown. Brown's notes show that he first intended to split the volumes between himself and CharlesLamb,a noted Dante admirer,but then substitutedIsabellaJones for Lamb.Both volumes, according to Gittings,have disappeared,and Gittings does not speculate as to their origin or fate,perhapsconfident that since Keats'smarkingsin the 1814 edition explain his borrowings for Hyperion,that three-volume copy is all he needs to know.14 But if there is reason to believe that Keats began to allude to Dante before 1818, the question of the 1805 edition becomes important.It might have been that copy that allowed Keats to quote directly and explicitly from Cary'stranslation of the Infernoin his review of the actor Edmund Kean in December 1817, seven months before his publishers provided the three-volume edition. Keats wrote that Kean stood alone from all his contemporaries,"remindingus of him, whom Dante has so finely described in his Hell:'And sole apartretir'd,the SolIt is worth emphasizingthat this line comes from the same canto dan fierce.'"'15 12. Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of]ohn Keats 1814-1821 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 296; hereafter cited as Letters. 13. Gittings,"Keats's Debt to Dante," The Mask of Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 7; Gittings,John Keats, p. 222. For a contrasting view, see John Saly,"Keats'sAnswer to Dante: The Fall of Hyperion,"Keats-ShelleyJournal 14 (I965), 65-78. 14. Gittings, The Mask of Keats, pp. 6-8. s15.Champion,21 December 1817, reprinted in The CompletePoems,ed. Barnard, p. 53 I; the line comes from Cary's translation of 7TheInferno,I, 63. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 44 Keats-Shelley Journal (Canto Iv) as the eagle metaphor,justthirty-five lines afterHomer soars.Thisis significantnot only in showing that Keatsknew the passagein Dante that could have inspired the eagle, but also in showing that Keats was prone to revisiting passagesthat he valued.Gittings noted that Keatspaid specialattention to Canto Iv when he read Dante on his Northern tour in July 1818; Keats'sreview of Kean revealsthat he had alreadyread that canto and had returned to its verses for more inspiration-this time for his sonnet "OnVisiting the Tomb of Burns." The other canto that fascinated Keats while he traveledin Scotland, Gittings argued,was Canto v; he would return to that canto eight months later to compose another sonnet, "A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca,"at a time when he wrote that "the fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more."16That assessmentalone shows that Keats was rereading the same passagesin Dante; his dream,for example, came after at least his second reading of Canto v. Keats'sreference to a specific passagein Dante, therefore, does not indicate that he was encountering the passagefor the first time; on the contrary,since he often rereadpassagesbefore employing them explicitly in his own writing, his reference to a passagewould likely indicate that he had read the passageat least once before.A quotation from Canto Iv in December 1817, therefore,could very well mean that Keatshad first looked into that canto several months earlier. The presence of another Dante allusion in the Chapman sonnet makes this hypothesis more probable.Between the sonnet'sDecember 1816 publication in the Examinerand its March 1817 appearancein Keats'sPoems,Keatsmade a second significant revision:he changed the seventh line from "Yet could I never judge what men could mean" to "Yet never did I breathe its pure serene." According to Clarke,who introduced Keatsto Chapman'sHomer one night in October 1816 and received Keats'ssonnet at Too'clock the next morning, Keats said that the original line was "baldand too simply wondering"-a phrase that links this revision to his previous elimination of Cortez's"wond'ring eyes"and suggeststhat the two changes may have been coordinatedin Keats'smind."7The new seventh line hinted of poetic "inspiration"in its etymological sense, improved the rhyme with the sixth line, and suggested the vastnessand purity of Homer's "demesne,"since "serene"is derived from the Latin serenum,meaning a clear or bright sky.And the new line may have indicated another facet of Keats'sreading,since the distinctive phrase"pure serene" (with the unconventional use of "serene"as a noun) occurs in Cary'stranslationofDante's Paradiso: "As oft along the still and pure serene, / At nightfall, glides a sudden trail of 16. Gittings,John Keats, pp. 222, 298. 17. Charles Cowden Clarke and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollectionsof Writers(London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1878), p. 130. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions News and Notes 45 Severalcritics,following Keats's1925 biographerAmy Lowell, have sugfire."'18 gested, then, that Keats found his "pure serene"in Dante-where, I would add, he had previously found his "eagle eyes" to supplant Cortez's "wond'ring" ones.19 Dante would twice, therefore, have provided Keats with the sharper metaphors he needed to keep his poem from being "too simply wondering." III. Revisionary Company This evidence raisesthe possibility that Keatswas reading Dante by the winter of 1816-17. He may have acquired his own copy of the Infernoby this date;at the very least he was deliberatelyinserting phrasesinto his own poetry that also appearedin Dante passagesto which he would return over and over again during the next three years.Furthermore,in October and November 1816, Keats made two key friends,Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon, who had strongconnections to Dante and an equally strong influence on Keats during the period he was reworking the Chapman sonnet, and who may have inspiredthe change to "eagle eyes."Thestory of these friendshipsis well known, so I will focus only on the aspects of Keats'srelationshipswith Hunt and Haydon that bear on his revision of his sonnet and his reading of Dante. Keats'searlypoetry shows the influence ofHunt's literarystyle,and in at least one instance Keats deliberately tried to replicate Hunt's poetic achievement. That instance came sometime in the spring of 1816 when Keats read Hunt's Storyof Rimini,a lengthy treatment of the story of Paolo and Francescafrom, 18. Cary,The Divine Comedy,p. 293.The phrase,however,also appearsin Coleridge's"Hymn before Sunrise,in the Valeof Chamouni,"and Bate and Barnardboth assignedthis allusionto Coleridge.But Laupointed out thatColeridge'spoem, though composedin 1802, was not publisheduntilAugust 1817, after the revised Chapmansonnet had appearedin print. Keats could have encountered Coleridge's poem in The Friend,possiblyin P B. Shelley'scopy.Shelley enteredKeats'scircle aroundthe time Keats was preparinghis poems for publication,though Keatslaterdistancedhimself.There is no mention of their discussingColeridge.See Beth Lau,Keats'sReadingof theRomantic Poets(AnnArbor:Universityof Michigan Press,1991),pp. 77-78.John Kandlhas arguedthat"pureserene"parodiesa line from Pope's Homer ("When not a breath-disturbs the deep serene")that Hunt had satirizedin his 1814"Feastof the Poets."Kandl thinks Keatscast Chapmanas a purerversion of Pope to suit Hunt'sradicalismand Comperhapsat Hunt'ssuggestion.SeeJohn Kandl,"ThePoliticsof Keats'sEarlyPoetry,"TheCambridge panionto Keats,ed. SusanJ.Wolfson (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,200oo1), p. 3. But Kandl's readingignoresthe specificchronologyof events.If indeed Hunt suggestedthatKeatsrevisehis seventh line to poke fun at Pope'sstiffness,or if Keatsdid so to pleaseHunt'spoliticalsympathies,he would have complied for his poem's appearancein Hunt's reform-mindedpaperin December 1816, when Hunt printedthe Chapmansonnet as evidence of a "new school of poetry"now emerging that would overturn the Age of Pope and return to a more natural,democraticpast.But Keats did not insert "pure serene"then;he waited until the March1817 edition of his Poems.Furthermore,KandlignoresClarke's recollectionthat Keatschangedhis seventhline for stylisticreasons,consideringit "baldand too simply wondering."Since eagle-eyedDante helped Keatsovercomehis wonderingimpulsesbefore,it would be naturalfor Keatsto seek his help again. 19. See alsoAntonellaBraida,DanteandtheRomantics (Houndmills:PalgraveMacmillan,200oo4), p. 209 n. 40. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 46 Keats-ShelleyJournal notably,Canto v of Dante's Inferno.Thoughfew contemporary critics admired Hunt's effort,Keatsembracedit, and declared:"Lo!I must tell a tale of chivalry" in Hunt's manner.He wrote a "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem" and then began "Calidore,"a chivalricpoem based on the Knight of Courtesy from Book VI of Spenser'sFaerieQueene.Hunt's poem may have alertedKeatsto Dante, for he clearly saw The Storyof Rimininot as a model of an original tale of chivalry, but as a model of how to rework an episode from a great author of the past. Spenserprovided his source,as Dante provided Hunt's,and Keatsvalued Hunt's interpretation of his source so highly that he invoked Hunt ("thy lov'd Libertas") in his "Induction to a Poem" to intercede with Spenser'sspirit on his behalf and convince the Renaissancepoet that Keatswould follow his example "with due reverence"-as, presumably,Hunt had followed Dante.20 Keats did not finish Calidorein the spring of 1816, but aftermeeting Hunt in October, he returned to The Story of Rimini many times over the next few months. He used a line from Riminias his epigraphfor "I Stood Tip-Toe upon a Little Hill," which he completed in December 1816, although he probably began the poem in the previous summer;he wrote a sonnet "On The Storyof Rimini"as Hunt was revisingthe poem in March 1817;and in May,Keatshelped Hunt coordinate the reading of Riminiproofs for the printer.Keats also revisited Hunt's source (Canto v of the Inferno)many times over the next few years, as I have shown above,most notably in his 1819 sonnet,"A Dream,After Reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca."Given Keats'spattern of rereading favorite Dante episodes, his perception of Riminias a successfuladaptationof a literary source (Dante), his desire for Hunt to help him adapt his own source (Spenser),and in particularhis many encounters with Hunt and with Riminiin the months between his original composition of the Chapman sonnet and its publication (firstin Hunt's own newspaper,then in a book dedicated to Hunt), he might very well have looked into Hunt's source at some point in 1816.21 Even if Keats had not acquired his copy of Cary's translationby this time, however,he could easily have encountered Dante through another friend:Benjamin Haydon. Keats first visited the painter'sstudio on 3 November 1816 and soon became a frequent guest of Haydon, who began to rival Hunt as the adored object of Keats'srhapsodicsonnets;Bate andVendlerboth proposed that Keats'sgrowth from 1816 to 1817 was markedby a shift from Hunt's influence 20. Quotations in this paragraph come from Keats,"Specimen of an Induction to a Poem," The Poems ofJohn Keats, lines I, 61,63. 21. Ralph Pite opines that Keats probably picked up the Infernowhile reading The Story ofRimini. Pite does not discuss the Chapman sonnet. See Pite, The Circleof Our Vision:Dante's Presencein English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), P. I119n. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions News and Notes 47 to Haydon's.22Most relevantfor our purposes,though, is Haydon's great admiration of Dante. IanJack,in his study of Keats'spainterlyinfluences, noted that Haydon owned two editions of Dante, as revealedin the auctioneer'scatalogue of his books when they were sold in 1823 to remedy his bankruptcy.Haydon had obtained at least one of his editions by the time he started to host Keats, since he wrote in his Autobiography that in 18 Io,"I devoted a great deal of time to Homer,Virgil, Dante andAeschylus,to tune my mind to make a fine picture of Macbeth."AndKeatscertainlyfelt comfortablebrowsing through his friend's volumes, at least making a pretense of reading them: Haydon observed in his that when, at his famous dinner in December 1817, CharlesLamb Autobiography mocked a foolish guest, Keats,embarrassedat CharlesLamb'streatmentof a fellow guest, tried to hide his laughter and "put his head into my books."23Keats would have spotted the eagle metaphor quickly enough, since he read with a poet's eye, and,as Clarkeremarkedon Keats'sreadingof Spenser,"especiallysinWith Hunt's adaptationof Dante's episode swirling in his gled out epithets."24 mind, he might very well have been drawn to an edition of Dante that he spied on his new friend'sshelf. It is also possible that Haydon helped Keats revise the Chapman sonnet and steered him toward Dante in the process.Later on, in March 1818, the painter would whimsically write to Keats:"WhenI die I'll have my Shakespeareplaced on my heart,with Homer in my right hand & Ariosto in the other,Dante under my head,Tasso at my feet ... -I leave my other side ... for you, if you realize all of which your genius is capable,as I am sure you will."This wish is notable not only for its generous inclusion of Keats in Haydon's poetic pantheon, but for its own revision:Hyder Edward Rollins, the editor of Keats'sletters, found that, in a deleted passageof his letter, Haydon had proposed that Shakespeare's plays would bedeck his corpse (with "Lear placed on my head"), but subseThus Hayquently alteredhis decorations to reflect his broaderreadingtastes.25 don deliberatelymodified his letter to bring Homer, Dante, and Keatstogether; in November 1816, he might have encouraged Keats to modify his sonnet to include aquiline Homer and Dante as well.26 22. Bate,John Keats, pp. 96-IoI;Vendler, Coming qfAge as a Poet, p. 44. 23. Quoted in Jack, Keats and the MirrorofArt, pp. 29, 37-38. 24. Clarke, Recollectionsof Writers,p. 126. 25. Letters, I, 258. 26. Keats did accept suggestions for revision from Haydon during this period: in November 1816,just before the Chapman sonnet appeared in Hunt's Examiner with "eagle eyes," Haydon proposed a change to another sonnet, which Keats happily adopted. Keats sent a sonnet to Haydon that began "Great Spirits now on Earth are sojourning," in response to a dinner Haydon gave for himself, Hunt, and Wordsworth. Haydon, promising to share the sonnet with Wordsworth, suggested that Keats cut five beats This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 48 Keats-Shelley Journal Speculations aside,November 1816 found Keats imitating a poet who based his verses on Dante and accepting revisions from a painter who wanted to be buried with his copy of Dante under his head. He was borrowing lines from a poem that reworked Canto v of the Infernoand attending dinner partieswhere he buried his head in the books of a collector who owned two editions of Dante.And he was being welcomed by a publisherwhom he had askedto help him rework a classicsource and an artistwho thought he could join the company of the classicauthors.Keatscould hardlyhave failed to be thrilled by these lines from Cary'stranslationof Canto Iv of the Inferno: So I beheld united the bright school Of [Homer] the monarch of sublimest song, That o'er the others like an eagle soars. When they together short discourse had held, They turn'd to me, with salutationkind Beck'ning me; at the which my master smil'd: Nor was this all;but greaterhonour still They gave me, for they made me of their tribe; And I was sixth amid so learn'da band.27 GreatSpiritswere indeed sojourning on Keats'searth:in November 1816, Hunt and Haydon celebrated his poetry "with salutation kind" and made him "of their tribe."In that same month, Keatslost the timid"wond'ring"gaze of a newcomer bedazzled by celebrity and gained the confidence of a poet whose sonnets Haydon wanted to send to Wordsworthand Hunt wanted to print as evidence of a "new poetic school." He was flying so high in "so learn'd a band" that he wrote to Haydon: "I begin to fix my eye upon one horizon," namely, literaryachievement.28He fixed his poetic eyes on that horizon as well, giving them the power of the bardhe had not only looked into, but joined-the power of the eagle. When the revised Chapman sonnet appeared in Hunt's Examineron I December 1816, it declared Keats'snew vision, not merely of Homer, but of himself. Inclusion in Hunt and Haydon's tribe propelled Keats to revise his adjective,and reading of Dante's newfound tribe gave Keats the metaphor he needed to registerhis newfound elation. Ratherthan suffera sense of alienation out of the sonnet's thirteenth line to create a dramatic pause for the reader to comprehend the Great Spirits' grandeur: "hear ye not the hum / Of mighty workings? - / Listen awhile ye Nations and be dumb!" Keats reveled in revision: "My feelings entirely fall in with yours in regard to the Ellipsis," he wrote back,"and I glory in it." See Letters,I, 117-18. 27. Cary, The Divine Comedy,p. 15. 28. Letters,I, I18. This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions News and Notes 49 from the foreign-language classical tradition or a sense of belatedness from coming after the great poets, Keats used Dante to identify with the tradition. Dante, like Keats,encountered Homer through a mediating figure. (Dante'swas Virgil. He did not read Greek and there was no Latin translationof Homer available.)That figure did not distanceDante from the sovereignpoet, however; Virgil "smil'd"at Dante's inclusion in Homer's band. Focused by Keats'srevision, his second sight through eagle eyes, we can see Keats,too, surroundedby all his men: Chapman,Homer, Cary,Virgil,Dante, Hunt, and Haydon. Having entered the company of great poets, Keatswas soaring, and he found the form to show it. DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNER HarvardUniversity This content downloaded from 149.160.204.202 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:01:25 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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