Why on earth am I writing about Keats and Zen? I’m afraid that’s a long story. And it’s not just because I was reading about Buddhism recently. That’d be too easy.
It all begins with me moaning into my journal that my poems have dried up. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that when I’m fishing for a poem and bait the hook with an idea or a promising phrase that has popped into my head, I drop it into my mind’s fast flowing currents but recently no poems at all have bitten on my line. Not even a sardine sonnet to be seen anywhere. My poems seem to be an endangered species, on the verge of extinction.
I should be regularly posting new poems these days, but almost none of my many specks of grit have made the magical transformation into a pearl of a poem – as of now anyway.
I thought I’d share this instead to explain the situation and buy myself a bit more time.
Hints from my Dreaming Mind
So, I go to bed one night recently and ask my dreaming mind to come up with something that might help. (This is the second time within a matter of weeks that I’ve done this on different issues. For the first equally intriguing occasion see link.)
I drift off to sleep. I find myself rushing late into a meeting in someone’s house. An elderly man in a robe is on the sofa. In response to my apology he says I need to share a poem after the prayers. I’m in a panic because I have no book of poems with me. What am I going to say when my turn comes? Then I remember. I still know at least one whole poem off by heart. I can say it and to my astonishment I do.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled Books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain –
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of Chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting Love; then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think,
Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink. –
(When I checked later I found I had only got one word wrong – I said ‘full garners.’) I woke in the middle of the night with the words of the poem ringing round my brain. I tried saying it again to see if I could. I missed ‘alone’ out that time, but apart from that was almost word perfect again.
Weird! I haven’t read any Keats for years. In fact, in my twenties I rather came to dismiss him as one of the immature Romantics (he died tragically young after all – the same age as me when I decided he wasn’t up to scratch) and exalted Wordsworth and Coleridge instead in my imagination. There may be reasons, as we will see, for not rating Wordsworth as highly – spiritually at least.
I shared my astonishment with my journal as soon as I could find time.
I realized my request for a response from my dreaming mind had been answered, and answered pretty fully. I wrote three pages of notes to record my waking mind’s immediate responses to a slow re-reading of the sonnet. I won’t bore you with them all as they are not relevant to my theme today.
The reactions that are relevant read as follows:
His sense of mutability behind his attraction to mortal love carries the deeper implications of a different kind of love, even though he may not himself have been aware of the Buddhist implications of the final line and the sense, which I am seeking to cultivate, that my persona is not who I really am, and that the real world can be experienced when we step out of the prison of our lower self and risk the void we fear to find the Reality we crave.
Keats also wrote about the ‘negative capability’ which makes him an emblem, albeit indirectly, of my commitment to meditation-mindfulness.
It then occurred to me to check my annotated edition of Keats to see if I could find any evidence that he was aware at all of Buddhist teachings. There was only one reference I could find to Buddhism and it had nothing to do with its teachings.
The Fruits of a Long Shot
I thought, ‘Why not try the web?’
At first I drew a blank. And then I found Keats and Zen. This is a paper written in 1966 by Richard P. Benton in a philosophy journal – not my usual kind of grazing ground but irresistible this time (Philosophy East and West V. 16 No. 1/2 (1966) pp. 33-47 Copyright 1966 by University of Hawaii Press Hawaii, USA).
Apparently Keats knew nothing of Buddhism but his thought and experience maps closely onto that of Zen Buddhism in the view of Benton at least (see above for overall page references):
Keats did succeed in achieving a genuine loss of self-identity. He uncovered his universal Self or Buddha nature in a manner closely resembling Zen awakening, or satori. His conception of his experience closely parallels that of Zen Buddhism. Although I am aware that Keats’s notions of the loss of self-identity and of the empathetic quality of the imagination were derived from well-known Western sources, especially from Hazlitt, his position in these matters can best be appreciated by drawing a parallel between it and that of Zen.
I was amazed again. And not just by the improbability of this statement in itself, but also that I should have tracked it down by following hints that resulted from a prompting by my dreaming mind.
But there was more:
Keats’s metaphysical quest and his conception of it parallel Zen experience and thinking. His theory of knowledge, his idea of spiritual development by means of a “Pleasure Thermometer,” and his view that the writing of poetry ought to be spontaneous and its effect natural — all these views are consonant with Zen attitudes. His metaphysical quest was successful — he achieved a genuine loss of self-identity and reached the ideal Zen state of being — “transcendence of the dichotomy between the self and the not-self.” Evidence of his successful quest is to be found in his letters and his poetry.
Benton is not claiming that Keats was completely consistent in this correlation with Zen but that at times he achieved something indistinguishable from the Zen perspective in Benton’s view. I am simplifying a fairly complex argument here but the bottom line of his understanding of Keats is summarized when he writes:
Our task, then, according to Keats, is to refine our sensations and to cultivate our feelings to the point where we can rise imaginatively to the level of consciousness that is necessary for us to perceive that the many are actually one. Keats’s idea that the process leading to this illumination is a gradual one is expressed in his conception which he himself labels the ‘Pleasure Thermometer.’ He expresses this conception in his early poem Endymion (Canto I: lines 777-811 – I have edited out some lines describing intermediate steps):
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven! Fold
A rose leaf round thy finger’s taperness,
And soothe thy lips: . . . . .
. . . . . that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit’s. But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.
All its more ponderous and bulky worth
Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth
A steady splendour; but at the tip-top,
There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop
Of light, and that is love: its influence,
Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense,
At which we start and fret; till in the end,
Melting into its radiance, we blend,
Mingle, and so become a part of it, —
That I should be thrown as well into a Keatsian version of levels of consciousness after the pattern of Ken Wilber and Jenny Wade was frankly mind-boggling.
So what exactly is this ‘pleasure thermometer’ Benton claims to have found in Endymion.
Even till the very last and most brilliantly productive years of his short life, Keats continued to consider this development, whatever it was exactly, as a process that unfolded in stages. This is attested by a letter, not quoted by Benton. It was written in May 1818 to his good friend the writer and critic John Hamilton Reynolds, as Keats struggled to come to terms with his younger brother, Tom’s imminent death from tuberculosis (John Keats: a critical edition of the major works, edited by Elizabeth Cook: page 397):
I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me – The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think – we remain there a long while . . . . . . but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle – within us – we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, then we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere . . . . . and think of delaying there for ever in delight . . . . This Chamber of Maiden-Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open . . .
But it is slightly more complicated than this, as we will see in next week’s post.
Always liked Keats—not so much Wordsworth and Coleridge…
My favorite poet is Emily Dickinson.
I’ve found the following stats everso intriguing:
She composed 51 poems in 1858, 93 in 1859, 63 in 1860, 85 in 1861, 366 in 1862, 140 in 1863, 172 in 1864, and 84 in 1865…
These were her most prolific years…
Did she sense Baha’u’llah?
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I often wonder this about 19th century writers.
She is also one of my favourite poets. I don’t know whether you have read two fascinatingly contrasting accounts of her background – Richard Sewall’s The Life of Emily Dickinson and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds. Sewall followed the Mabel Loomis Todd version of the Dickinson family: Gordon did not. Also Gordon looks at the possibility of epilepsy as a factor in Emily’s life.
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I have The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, published by Little, Brown and Company—a worthy effort to bring her poems to the public in a form as close as possible to how she wrote them…
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