BOOKS
KEATS IN HIS LETTERS
THE SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS. Edited by Lionel Trilling.
Forror, Strous ond Young. $3 .50.
This volume is a model example of what the Great Letters
series should be. All the important letters are included and without cuts;
following the Maurice Buxton Forman edition of 1931, the letters are
printed in their original spelling and punctuation, which is more im–
portant than one might think, for normalization of such matters ruins
Keats's peculiar epistolary style; the footnotes are helpful and modest,
and Professor Trilling's introduction is, for its length, one of the best
essays on Keats that I have read. Against certain of the Romantic
writers the charges of moral wooliness and self-idolatry brought by
Irving Babbitt and others are, I believe, legitimate, but I fully share
Professor Trilling's conviction that Keats is not among them.
The distinction which Keats drew between the poet who is
unpoetical because he has no identity of his own and poetical things
like the sun, the moon, and men and women who are creatures of im–
pulse and action, is applicable to people's letters, including his own.
There are two kinds of letters, those in which the writer
is
in con–
trol of his situation-what he writes about it is what he chooses to
write-and those in which the situation dictates what he writes. The
terms personal and impersonal are here ambiguous; the first kind of
letter
is
impersonal in so far as the writer is looking at himself in the
WIOrld as if he were a third person but personal in so far as it is his
personal act so to look-the signature to the letter is really his and he
is responsible for its contents;
vice
versa, the second kind is personal
in
that the writer is identical with what he writes, but impersonal in
that it is the situation not he which enforces that identity.
The second kind are what journalists call 'human documents' and
most of the letters written by Keats after his first serious hemorrhage
belong to it. I am not sorry that they have been published but I am
sorry that they were not published anonymously, for in them Keats has,
as it were, ceased to
be
a poet and become a poetic subject, human
nature in an extreme existential situation of suffering and despair.
Phrases like "You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you"
or "You may have altered-if you have not-if you still behave in
