I have been told—on more than one occasion—that I’ve too much the bleary-eyed Romantic in me, and that I fall, too quickly and too often, for the heavèd exhortation:

…. Ah dismal soul’d!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d
Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. (Sleep and Poetry 187-89)

Despite my having been warned against these tendencies, (and by the sound judgment of my very sensible friends), a man arrived recently—out of an alarming (and so disarming) proximity—to tease these regions of my heart. And I confess, for some weeks now I have been involved with the poems of John Keats.

As I have introduced the intent of “this ’ere log,” it might now seem appropriate (following these introductory remarks) to move into a detailed discussion of Keat’s poems, and together attempt to discern what we can as to the merits of the Romantic sensibility—moral and artistic. Pray, the Nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness –
That though, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

I am not opposed to this approach, if this is where we want to wander naturally, and I certainly will do nothing prevent the affair. Yet for myself, for now, I cannot but admit that I am too much in awe of the man to speak upon his poems, and would—as in the haste of recent bliss—as quickly leave them as they lie, imposing, in the background of what follows.

What follows is the Letters and the true subject of my consideration tonight this morning. Professor Kim Townsend (The Moral Essay; Keats and Wordsworth) has called the Collected Letters of John Keats the best letters ever written by a literary figure. Whether this is, in fact, an accurate claim I cannot say—I simply haven’t read enough—yet from what I do know, it does not seem to me an unreasonable assessment. There is at least a great deal of interest in the letters: the oft-spoken of theory of Negative Capability, the metaphor of the “chamber of maiden thought,” Keat’s take on “soul-making,” and his letters to love Fanny Brawne–e.g:

“. . . . You absorb me in spite of myself–you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call’d being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares–yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.” (3 May 1819)

Now, that has all been very tidily put, and I apologize for this, but I feel that I must once more step over my intent. For as worthwhile as the Letters are for their own sake, and for as urgently as I can recommend them, I have not spoken of them today for that sake, but rather for our own, and for what I worry it might mean for us to have come about in a world in which the vessel of focused intimacy traditionally expressed in epistolary discourse has no obvious analogue: We do not write each other letters.

I might, on dark days, even go so far as to say that we do not think each other letters. That for the convenience of our everyday discourse we, in fact, say very little to each other—ever—and that in this way, we are robbed of two things:

First, the intensity of bonafide human intercourse. There is a strange tendency for conversation these days to develop in one of two very particular ways. For the sake of simplicity, I will call them–”shooting the sh**”, and therapy. “Intensity” in our exchange has come to mean (roughly) a display of much head nodding and rude emotional disclosure. We seem to think that our emotions are intense, and do not themselves need refining, or rather, that the purpose of disclosure is merely display and certainly not criticism (read: empathy) and the possibility of growth.

Second, we miss the experience of getting to know someone as they piece together their own thoughts. That is, as they are. Recently, a movie was made about our College’s unfortunate “hookup culture.” Unfortunately, I was unable to make the film, but after it came out, I have thought once or twice about the connection “hookup culture” has with our decayed discourse. At first the causation seemed to run thus—people just want to get drunk and touch each other, thus, we learn very little about each other in “unnecessary” conversation. Yet part of me is coming to suspect that the arrow actually runs the other way. That the culture is so pervasive precisely because alternatives are not obvious, and that people (including, of course, myself) really don’t know what they want—

—unfortunately, my class began five minutes ago, and I am going to have to leave this thought—rough as it is—even vulnerable to criticism of incompleteness. Forgive the generalization in these last two paragraphs; they are of course in need of a great deal of qualifying and backtalk. Yet weigh the ducks against your own, and see if we cannot begin some worthwhile exchange.