The Third Temple
The Burden of the Past & the English Poet | Pt. IV
This post is the fourth in a four part series on the W. Jackson Bate book The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. If you haven’t already, you can read the previous posts by clicking on Pt. I, Pt. II, & Pt. III.
Aside from the present volume, our esteemed guide through this series W. Jackson Bate also penned the gold-standard of John Keats biographies, aptly named: John Keats. In his fourth and final lecture, “The Third Temple,” he notes that Keats would reread King Lear before beginning any significant undertaking and always kept an engraving of Shakespeare close at hand.
Bate’s “Third Temple” refers to English Romanticism, which began to take root in the late 18th-century neoclassical soil before coming to bloom in the early 19th. Now, you’ll recall that Part III ended on a down note, with Bate pointing out that at the end of the 18th-century, the poet almost felt the need to apologize when he published his idiosyncratic “jottings.”
We’ve now heard repeatedly throughout these lectures, and it warrants the repetition, that the central problem the poet faced (and still faces if indeed he is willing to examine and rise to meet his own inheritance) was “his nakedness and embarrassment…before the amplitude of what two thousand years or more of an art had already been able to achieve.”
It’s not difficult to imagine why this problem has rarely been tackled head-on, at least publicly. What critics or public, however sympathetic, really wants to hear their poets advertising their own inadequacies?
The critic Archibald Alison, born in the latter half of the 18th-century, attributed the achievements of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in part to being free of the “petulant demand for originality.” They could, he said, look on “the mass of old plays” as “waste stock, in which any experiment could be tried.” Of course, as much as one agrees with Alison, one cannot simply make waste stock out of Shakespeare in good conscience.
Originality, Bate notes, had a particular social appeal connected to an individual’s “identity” (a word that today has taken on near theological import) at a time when organized society's dehumanizing aspects were becoming increasingly self-evident. Next to pile onto the artist’s burden was originality’s fraternal twin sister, sincerity (authenticity being the ghastly equivalent we must endure in our day). But our predecessors were the first to encounter not only the demand of originality, of proving one’s difference from the past, but the expectation that this “originality” be “sincere.” It was against these unsustainable demands that Oscar Wilde quipped that too much sincerity “is absolutely fatal.”
Bate next questions whether a modern audience, situated in such a complex world, couldn’t help but demand this originality and sincerity, along with the lyrical condensation that follows, due to taking its katharsis from imaginative literature as opposed to the distant past public’s more direct experience of nature and that cultural context of seeing a great tragedy, whereas we typically just read ours. This may very well be a factor, though regardless, it was a further burden taken up admirably by the Romantics and explored in a diverse manner, from Wordsworth’s sincere “sincerity” to Byron’s sincerely skeptical but winking “sincerity."
Jumping ahead to the 20th century for a moment, where poets remained loyal to lyrical condensation but eschewed what we now think of as the cliches of Romanticism like nature-induced reverie or romantic love, we see a desire from the most serious, or if you will “sincere” poets, to break away from the narrow scope of the lyric and return to the “greater genres” and “a comprehensive point of view.”
For example—and as a morbid aside one might keep in mind Wilde’s statement above about sincerity—T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (locked up his first wife in an asylum), Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (betrayed his country and ended up in an asylum), Hart Crane’s The Bridge (jumped off a boat: suicide), John Berryman’s Dream Songs (jumped off a bridge: suicide), were all attempts, many impressive if not entirely successful, to return narrative to poetry without sacrificing poetic intensity.
Bate points out the “open” quality of the Romantic movement, which made its way in some measure by examining new subject matter such as
Simple life…children, the poor and socially slighted; landscape and scenery; such inward experiences as reverie, dream, and mysticism; the whole concept of the “strange” either to awaken attention through difference in mode or phrase, to explore something really new, or to provide setting and focus for familiar nostalgia; the past itself in periods or ways not previously exploited by the traditional genres; the geographical remote or unusual…
Even with the mass-circulated novel taking the crown of the dominant literary form, Byron was the closest thing that the 19th-century had to a genuine celebrity as we would recognize today, and Longfellow’s Courtship of Myles Standish sold ten thousand copies in a single day in London alone. “Whatever else can be said of Romanticism,” said Bate, “it ushered in the most sustained effort of the last three centuries to secure a popular appeal for the serious arts.”
So how did the Romantics, the children of the 18th-century reconsideration, do this? Here Bate offers his antidote to the burden of the past.
Perhaps the greatest lesson the century learned from its long, scrupulous, and imaginatively thoughtful comparison of its own experience with the larger past was the value of boldness; not the soi-disant boldness of negativism, of grudgingly withholding assent as we seek to establish our identities, prate of our integrity, or reach into our pockets for our mite of “originality.” None of us, Goethe said, is really very “original” anyway; one gets most of what he attains in his short life from others. The boldness desired involves directly facing p to what we admire and then trying to be like it.
Keats was doing this when he reread King Lear; he was participating in what he called “the immortal freemasonry” of the past and using it for confidence and security while acknowledging that one cannot “go back” or write like Shakespeare or Milton.
Wait a second. After four lectures of sometimes convoluted, often repetitive explanations, this Bate character, after his whole crushing weight of the past shtick, comes up with the genius solution of just being bold and imitating great writers of the past?
Uh, yeah. That’s it.
I’m tempted to wrap this series up right here with a nice blue ribbon, but we can meet shortly for a brief reflection next week. Instead, I’ll leave you with John Keats’ poem Bright Star:
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.