FATE OF PLEASURE
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Keats, then, may be thought of as the poet who made the boldest
affirmation of the principle of pleasure and also as the poet who
brought the principle of pleasure into the greatest and
sincerest
doubt.
He therefore has for us a peculiar cultural interest, for
it
would seem
to be true that at some point in modern history the principle of
pleasure came to be regarded with just such ambivalence.
This divided state of feeling may be expressed in terms of a
breach between politics and art. Modern societies seek to fulfill
themselves in affluence, which of course implies the possibility of
pleasure. Our political morality is more than acquiescent to this
intention. Its simple and on the whole efficient criterion is the
extent to which affluence is distributed among individuals and
nations. But another morality, that which we may describe as being
associated with art, regards with a stern and even minatory gaze
all that is implied by affluence, and it takes a dim or at best a very
complicated view of the principle of pleasure.
If
we speak not only
of the two different modes of morality, the political and the artistic,
but also of the people who are responsive to them, we can say that
it is quite within the bounds of possibility, if not of consistency,
for the same person to respond, and intensely, to both of the two
moral modes: it is by no means uncommon for an educated person
to base his judgment of politics on a simple affirmation of the
principle of pleasure, and to base his judgment of art, and also his
judgment of personal existence, on a complex antagonism to that
principle. This dichotomy makes one of the most significant cir–
cumstances of our cultural situation.
A way of testing what I have said about the modern artistic
attitude to pleasure is afforded by the conception of poetry which
Keats formulates in
Sleep and Poetry.
This poem does not express
everything that Keats thought about the nature and function of
poetry, but what it does express is undeniably central to his thought,
and for the modern sensibility it is inadmissible and even repulsive.
It tells us that poetry is gentle, soothing, cheerful, healthful, serene,
smooth, regal; that the poet, in the natural course of his develop–
ment, will first devote his art to the representation of the pleasures
of appetite, of things that can be bitten and tasted, such as apples,
strawberries, and the white shoulders of nymphs, and that he
will
give his attention to the details of erotic enticement amid grateful
