Keats and the charm of words: making sense of the Eve of St. Agnes.

Betz, Laura Wells

READERS OF KEATS'S POETRY HAVE LONG SPOKEN OF THE ENCHANTING power of his language, though not all have found this quality commendable. Early critics complained of the "charm" or "force" of the rhymes in Keats's first published volume, Poems (1817), because it seemed to replace the verse's intellectual content. So Josiah Conder argues in his review of this first collection for the Eclectic Review in September 1817:

 [P]oetry is that one class of written compositions, in which the
 business of expression seems often so completely to engross the
 Author's attention, as to suspend altogether that exercise of the
 rational faculties which we term thinking.... On what ground, then,
 does the notion rest, that poetry is a something so sublime, or
 that so inherent a charm resides in words and syllables arranged in
 the form of verse, that the value of the composition is in any
 degree independent of the meaning which links together the
 sentences? (1)

Similarly, John Wilson Croker, writing in the Quarterly Review in September 1818, admits being "perplexed and puzzled" at Keats's diction and versification in Endymion because it "wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of ideas but of sounds ... composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn" (CH 112). Conder and Croker see Keats's verse as problematic not only because it oversaturates readers in sound and thus sets an allegedly poor standard for poetry, but also because it seems to have affected Keats himself in the same way (" [rhymes] have forced themselves upon the author").

Reviewers also allege that Keats's verse enchants because its sound has a hypnotic or soporific effect. In the Eclectic Review article quoted above, for example, Conder calls Keats's Sleep and Poetry a "half-awake rhapsody" and declares rhyming a "dangerous fascination" for its implicit transfixing effects (CH 68). And, the soporific charge appears as the grand finale of John Gibson Lockhart's famous attack on Keats in August of 1818 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine: "back to the shop ... back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,' &c. But, for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry" (CH 110).

Like the critics of Keats's time, modern critics speak of enchantment or of being overpowered when they describe the effects of Keats's poetry, although usually not as a focused way of looking at the verse. Jack Stillinger suggests, for example, that there is a magical or mysterious quality to Keats's style, but that it ultimately cannot be explained: "[o]ne can count up and tabulate [rhythmical variations in Keats's poems, such as departures from the metrical norm and caesuras] but the results never explain, except in the bare fact of its existence, how or why such variation creates pleasure. There is, however, no denying the pleasure." (2) Stillinger has little space to elaborate these ideas, given the context of the introduction to an edition; but he still limits the possible ways one could discuss such subjects as the "sounds" of the words or the "concreteness" and "textural density" of the words and images by arguing that the effects of such devices cannot be precisely described or accounted for, and by stating simply that they create pleasure for the reader.

Though he speaks in more precise terms than Stillinger about the overpowering nature of Keats's style, Garrett Stewart also refrains from critically investigating what he characterizes as the musicality and immersive quality of Keats's verse. He observes, "[t]here is no way to approach Keats with mere close reading. Proximity breeds immersion." (3) Stewart seems to assume that while Keats himself is "in" language--absorbed in the powers of language, "listen[ing]," as Stewart puts it elsewhere, "in to the shape of words"--and while the reader's natural response to Keatsian language is absorption in it ("And we respond in kind"), it is inappropriate for a critic analyzing Keats to give in to this kind of "immersion" (135-36). Stewart thus seems to feel obliged to claim that the "silent music" of Keats's verse "rippl[es] with inference" (135), and to discuss how devices that exploit the visual and sonic qualities of words, such as internal rhyme, anagram, and liaison, create puns and secondary meanings. The premise is that there must be a link between the physical properties and effects of poetic language and conceptual sense.

Strikingly, readers both in Keats's day and in our own speak instinctively of enchantment and of being overpowered by the poet's verse, but few if any consider that the concept of the charm could serve as a useful analytical lens through which to view Keats's poetry, and specifically his style. The closest any critic has come to discussing Keats's work in such terms is Northrop Frye's passing comment that "charm poetry [is] shown at its subtlest in Keats and Tennyson and at its clearest in Poe and Swinburne." (4) Though the larger purpose of Frye's essay is to define the charm as a richly sonic, formulaic utterance rooted in magic, to define the riddle, and to show how techniques from these genres migrate into and inspire literary art, the poetry he sees as imitative of charm, with the exception of one passage, ironically comes from authors other than Keats, Tennyson, Poe, and Swinburne. The texts he discusses include actual charms, such as an Eskimo chant to summon good weather; anonymous lullabies, burial verses, and drinking songs, all often in Old or Middle English; and, as for literature, a short spell uttered in A Midsummer Night's Dream and some sonically rich passages from Spenser.

This essay will build upon Frye's undeveloped observation by taking up the case of Keats and arguing that he quite literally writes verse that works as a charm. Though other poems such as the early verses "Specimen of an Induction" and "Imitation of Spenser," the narrative fragment The Eve of St. Mark, and the odes "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn" could be discussed in terms of the charm, I will focus particularly on the paradigmatic case of The Eve of St. Agnes--a special poem as to the issue of enchantment in Keats because it is both about an ancient medieval charm at the level of narrative content, and it functions as a charm at the level of style. St. Agnes is also noteworthy within Keats's oeuvre because it engages in a metareflection on the problem of how charm and meaning relate. Through various devices St. Agnes contemplates its own style; specifically, it considers how the affective form of poetic meaning that charm poetry explores compares with the more conventional conceptual and mimetic forms that the poem at times invokes. As charm verse, however, St. Agnes ultimately defines poetic meaning as an action that words perform and as the readerly experience that results from it, rather than as an object that words somehow contain within themselves and that the reader must locate.

It is precisely this recasting of meaning that makes St. Agnes a stumbling block for critics looking to "make sense" of the poem from an ideational perspective. Indeed, in general one can observe a reserve in criticism about speaking too literally of charm in Keats's work, as well as a tendency to explain enchantment strictly in terms of poetic content and to connect the physical effects of the verse to some form of conceptual meaning. These critical procedures appear to be rooted in deep concerns that have existed since Keats's day, both within Keats himself and his readers, about the authenticity of the poet's work. When Byron described Keats's verse as "shabby-genteel," he alluded to the class implications of the poet's literary performance, to which Marjorie Levinson has so fully attended: to what extent does Keats, an ambitious, non-aristocratic, and self-educated poet with a tendency toward mimicry, deserve to "be among the English poets," as he himself put it?

Yet nothing presses the question of authenticity more urgently than the issue of enchantment--particularly the enchantment of Keats's style--for it raises the question of whether Keats's verse even qualifies as "poetry" if it so heavily uses the techniques of charm. This question can be seen as driving the more theme-, plot-, setting-, or character-oriented ways of discussing enchantment in Keats's work; readers who approach the subject in this way implicitly see themselves as redeeming an ostensibly low-art stylistic procedure like the charm either by talking only indirectly or generally about it, or by connecting it with poetic elements that seem to possess more "meaning," or to elevate "substance over style" rather than the other way round. (5)

Keats's charming style also establishes St. Agnes' relevance at the broader level of British culture. The poem's location of meaning in the realm of the senses--without necessary recourse to "ideas" and even, at times, in direct contravention of them--creates a model of poetry that is more about experiencing a text than about gaining information from it--in Horatian terms, more about delight (or the sublime, or some other form of sensory aesthetic experience) than about instruction. Such a move raises the general problem of poetry's relationship to the sensationalism and consumer culture that were increasingly defining British life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--a subject in the Romantic period perhaps most famously addressed by Wordsworth in the Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, when he condemns the culture's increasing "thirst after outrageous stimulation" and the slaking of such thirst through such literary fare as German dramas. (6)

Modern scholars have found Keats's verse to be complicit with the popular sensationalism and commercialism of the early nineteenth-century period. (7) Yet scant attention has been given to the connection between the powerful sensorial experience of Keatsian language on which readers have always commented and the bustling consumer culture in which it was produced. St. Agnes provides rich ground for making this connection: its self-reflexive charming style serves both as Keats's experiment with likening poetry to a good consumed primarily for the sensations it produces, and as his means of contemplating the implications of that experiment.

1

The charm is defined by both the nature and effects of its language. As Andrew Welsh notes, a charm may be generally characterized as language treated as a physical action upon the listener. (8) More specifically, the charm sets up a pattern of sound through various techniques based on repetition, such as refrain, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, pun, and antithesis, and its language also tends to have a formulaic quality (Frye 126). As Frye notes, the charm's thick sonic patterning is so complex and repetitive that it has a hypnotic, dissociative, and incantatory effect on the listener or reader, "short-circuit[ing]" his or her "ordinary processes of response" and "break[ing] down and confus[ing] the conscious will" (126). The charm, therefore, is oriented toward "reducing [the audience's] freedom of action, either by compelling a certain course of action or by stopping action altogether" (124).

These traits can be observed throughout The Eve of St. Agnes. From the poem's first stanza on, a subtle induction process works upon the reader, drawing him or her toward the descriptive passages--the casement set-piece and the feast scene--that, I will show, form the affective crux of the poem. Keats's repetitions control the pace and direction of the reader's absorption into the plot and physical experience of the verse, whether the material being repeated is archaic expressions, particular sounds, or certain set phrases and grammatical structures. The greatest compulsion of readerly experience and action, however, occurs in the casement set-piece and the feast scene. At these moments, Keats arrests plot-based reading through language that is so saturated in sonic and tactile effects, it obscures the reader's ability to visualize the object described and thus becomes more experiential than representational.

These passages, also, reveal another facet of St. Agnes' richness and depth as a charm poem: they are the verse's key site for evaluating its own stylistic explorations through the poet and reader figures it creates. As I will show, Madeline appears as an entranced reader who looks for romantic meaning in the ritual of St. Agnes's eve but finds only the crafty attempts of Porphyro, which represent Keats's stylistic activities in the poem. Porphyro seeks to overpower Madeline during the feast scene with sensory stimulation, and his "anguished" state over his "strategem" suggests Keats's conflicts about the amount of style relative to substance in his poetry--or, to put it in different terms, the amount of sensational appeal relative to intellectual or moral value.

The most repeated type of language in St. Agnes is the archaism. Keats's speaker uses this device only intermittently at first, skillfully mixing it with other devices to keep the reader focused on the world of the poem; as the poem moves toward its climactic descriptive moments, however, the archaisms occur in a denser pattern. The poem's opening stanzas use archaic language in order to hook the reader, as in the paradigmatic first two lines: "St. Agnes' Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was! / The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold" (1-2). These words saturate the reader in antiquated speech forms--the use of syntactical inversion in "bitter chill it was," and, more notably, the single expression, "a-cold"--and, as Cusac also suggests, they establish the mood of centuries-old oral storytelling with the utterance, "Ah!" (9) In subsequent lines, archaic verb forms such as "saith" and "riseth" are evenly spread across the stanzas before, in line 25, Keats's speaker abruptly changes to the past tense ("Another way he went") and moves on to the next, more lively subject of the "hurry to and fro" and "silver, snarling trumpets" of the banquet fanfare (30-31). The opening stanzas also keep the reader immersed in the poem through the repetition of exact wording.

There is one important break in this opening sense of movement and sonic continuity: the patch of participial forms ending in "d" in the lines, "The sculptur'd dead, on each side, seem to freeze, / Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails: / Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries" (14-16). Here the speaker captures the staid, stony objects of the Beadsman's sight, as well as the idea of the Beadsman's "emprisonment" in "purgatorial" asceticism, through physically affective style: the reader's experience of the thick, inertial "d" sounds. These first three stanzas' alternation between "th" and "d" phonemes may seem like the most minute, inconsequential of details at this early point in the poem, but this technique must be considered in terms of Keats's use of the same sounds later for similar affective purposes. Indeed, when viewed in the context of the entire poem's affective procedures, Keats's opening stanzas give the first hint of St. Agnes's formulaic use of sound--a key tenet of the style of the charm. (10)

As The Eve of St. Agnes progresses, the strategies by which the poem absorbs the reader only intensify. Archaic expressions run rampant in Angela's nervous, exclamatory speech, and they, together with the poem's skillful shifts of narrative focus, move the poem at a breathtaking clip toward the passages that form its affective crux. After the poem's initial plunge into archaic language and inductive use of repetitions, Keats's speaker keeps control through a manipulation of the reader's attention. The narrator effectively stops motion in one element of the poem and starts it in another, for example, when he introduces Porphyro, "So, purposing each moment to retire, / [Madeline] linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors, / Had come young Porphyro" (73-75). What is more, these last words feature a fresh saturation of sonic power in the form of assonance and internal rhyme, which are skillfully applied to help force the reader's attention in a new direction. The nesting of one rhyme pair between the elements of the other, "moors ... come young ... Porphyro," also formally performs the absorption of the reader in the mini-incantation.

The screeching halt of the poem's fast narrative motion at the opening line of stanza 24 is so drastic that it all but announces: "something important is about to occur." While, on the face of it, the kind of descriptive passage that follows would appear merely ornamental and ancillary in a narrative poem, it turns out to have central importance, both as a display of Keats's interest in the charming power of words and as a site for his contemplation of such power through the figure of Madeline.

Stanza 24 is the only one in Keats's poem that completely erases the presence of the poem's characters or overt evidence of the narrator's voice. Human beings are replaced by the things the stanza is describing--or, to be more precise, by the descriptive words themselves, which become physical things with physical effects.

 A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
 All garlanded with carven imag'ries
 Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
 And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
 Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
 As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
 And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
 And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
 A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

(208-16)

The stanza relentlessly applies sonic and tactile repetitions. As is so often the case in Keats's descriptive passages, streams of different vowel emphases flow down the lines, providing continuity. The last two lines are exemplary, featuring short "o" and particularly "on" sounds ("emblazonings," "scutcheon," "blush'd," "blood") that stream out, sonically mimicking the blood-gush they describe. Yet the vowels in the stanza play only a subtle role, as they are dominated by the thick consonants: the heavy pressure of "d" and "nd" as well as "n" sounds blatantly suggests an interest in overpowering the reader with the physical effects of words. These effects, furthermore, are not just aural but also tactile, since the greatest impact of the consonants is the thick, slow-motion, stopped sensation they produce in the reader's mouth as he or she enunciates them, or imagines enunciating them when reading silently. Recurring after a brief showcasing in the poem's early stanzas, this proliferation of "d" and "nd" sounds particularly produces the feeling that one's tongue--and thereby one's ability to form the words in the mind and in the mouth and thus to read--is paralyzed.

Yet paralysis of the reader--or, more accurately, entrapment in the physical texture of words created by stanza 24--seems to be precisely what Keats has in mind at this juncture in the poem, because he goes on to figure the very affective process he has just created in the next three stanzas' description of Madeline. Stanza 25, as Marjorie Levinson notes, places Madeline at the center of the "nested" frames described by stanza 24: the casement and the scutcheon. (11) She kneels by the bed and prays, the unaware and passive receptor of the "warm gules," with colors of "rose" and "amethyst," that fall upon her. Here the effects of the moonlit casement upon Madeline may be seen to represent the effects upon the reader of the stanza before, which describes the casement. But the casement frames Madeline primarily through visual means in stanza 25, and, though traditionally read as painting a clear picture in the mind like the language of the following stanza, the verbal effects of stanza 24 upon the external reader are so aural and tactile that they actually de-visualize what is being described. (12) How can a visual image of color falling upon Madeline represent the aural phenomenon of Keats's language acting upon the reader?

One must consider that the contrast between the aural and tactile in stanza 24 and the visual in stanza 25 expresses Keats's conflict about which affective methods to use. The visual image in stanza 25 of Madeline, kneeling by her bed with the casement's colors streaming down upon her, subscribes to the general philosophy of ut pictura poesis. Description exists to create a clear image in the reader's mind. But the effects of Keats's language in stanza 24 explore an entirely different model: description that exists not to represent something else but to embody a powerful sensory experience in itself, as illustrated by the fact that the dense sonic and tactile language obfuscates the visual picture of what is being described. Moments of visual imaging in Keats's verse, like stanza 25 of St. Agnes, thus appear as a kind of flickering of the idea of verisimilitude in a general context of charm poetry, which explores a more experiential or affective model of the text. This juxtaposition of different paradigms of meaning is an important part of the poem's metareflective apparatus, through which Keats contemplates the nature of meaning in charm verse. I will return to this problem shortly in more depth.

The portrayal, in the character of Madeline, of a readerly experience of Keats's descriptive language continues in stanzas 26 and 27. Stanza 26 reiterates the poem's earlier point that Madeline "dares not look behind," suggesting a "hoodwink'd" reader's passive receptiveness to the devices of the poem during the precise passage when so many of those devices have been brought to bear. Yet the onslaught of synonyms for "charmed" or "entranced," all of which describe Madeline in stanza 27, is the firmest suggestion that her character reflects the kind of reader whom Keats imagines for his poem. Madeline is described in hypnotic and soporific language: "[in a] wakeful swoon," "the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd / Her soothed limbs," and "[her] soul fatigued away; / Flown, like a thought." Also, like Bertha in The Eve of St. Mark, who has been enchanted by the physical beauties of the Middle English book she is reading, Madeline is described as "perplex'd" (236). This word's expression of both bewilderment and physical entanglement accurately names the condition of the reader who is under the influence of Keats's highly physical language. More adjectives that reflect the effects of Keats's words on the reader are "clasp'd" (240 and "blinded" (242), the latter word nicely capturing the de-visualizing tendencies of Keats's descriptions in stanza 24 and in the feast scene.

If the large section of the poem running from the descriptive embarkment at stanza 24 ("A casement high and triple-arch'd there was") to the ironic closure upon the lovers' union at the end of stanza 36 ("St. Agnes' moon hath set") is the poetic crux into which Keats is leading his reader, then this crux, and the two most important affective passages within it-the casement set-piece and the feast scene--repeat in miniature the inductive structure of the poem up to this point. The casement set-piece constitutes the first major plunge into dense sensory textures toward which the larger charming process of Keats's poem leads, even though it induces the reader largely through the visual means of framing after its sonically and tactilely rich first stanza.

The feast scene at stanzas 28-30 is an even more intense plunge into highly physical language than the casement passage; the sheer density of the sounds is so overdetermined that Keats's verse announces itself as a study in the charm. Stanzas 28-30 foster a much deeper physical experience of language because they more openly treat words as matter, stimulating the sense of touch, or the tactile feel of the words in the mouth, far more than the "higher" senses of sight or hearing. By placing the feast scene after the casement set-piece, Keats thus leads the reader both farther down into the physical experience of language at the core of this poem, and farther down into the body itself, from the eyes and ears down to the mouth and to the organ of touch, the skin. This passage down the body is actually broken into three distinct phases by the stanzas. Stanza 28 is visual, with Porphyro's gaze upon Madeline's empty dress, and stanza 29 is both visual and aural, with the flash of the colorful cloth that Porphyro lays down and the musical noises that "affray" Porphyro's ear.

Finally, the most physically affective of all the stanzas, stanza 30, is largely tactile in its effects, though it is replete with soundplay.

 And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
 In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,
 While he from forth the closet brought a heap
 Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
 With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
 And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
 Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
 From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
 From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

(262-70)

We see again the thick stoppages of the tongue in the repetition of "d" sounds across the stanza. But the real intensity comes in the stanza's other sensations: the mouth-filling plumpness of the "p"s and "I"s ("apple," "plum," "jellies," "syrops") and the open "ui" "u," "ou," "oo," and "o" vowel sounds ("quince," "plum," "gourd," "soother," "curd," "syrops," "cinnamon"); the sharper interjections of "c" and "t" in "creamy curd" and "lucent," "tinct," "dates," and "dainties," which lead the reader almost to taste the sourness of clotted cream or the spice of cinnamon syrup; and, the sticky pour of the "s" sounds oozing all around the other words ("quince," "jellies," "soother," "lucent," "syrops," "cinnamon," "dates," "Fez," "spiced," "silken Samarcand," "cedar'd"). Though such imaginative sensations, produced in the mouth when these words are read, accomplish at moments a vague gustatory verisimilitude, the language itself, and not the objects being described or the sensations of eating them, is what the reader experiences.

Every charm, once laid, must also be taken away, and the latter happens with breathtaking speed in the charm called The Eve of St. Agnes. After the lovers' union in stanza 36, the crux of the poem closes with the setting of St. Agnes' moon just as it began with the shining of that moon through the casement. The same fast motions that brought us into the poem shuttle us out: the rapid exchanges of dialogue, this time between Madeline and Porphyro, which are interspersed with the frenzied pattering of "flawblown sleet" against the windows. When Porphyro declares the "elfin-storm" to be "of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed," surely it is Keats's voice ironically suggesting, as occurs earlier, the very device that will accomplish something for him--in this case, the end of the poem. (13) And, as Madeline "hurrie[s] at [Porphyro's] words," we hurry too, moved along by another of the forces, repetition, that brought us in ("Arise--arise!"; "Awake! arise!"; "They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; / Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; / By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide"). The rupture of the poem's spell is finally achieved in the last stanza, which crudely narrates that Angela dies "palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform" and that the Beadsman is left asleep "among his ashes cold" (376, 378). That these words are meant exactly to jolt the reader out of a charmed state is suggested by Keats himself in the comments recorded by Richard Woodhouse in a letter to Charles Taylor: "[Keats] has altered the last 3 lines to leave on the reader a sense of pettish disgust, by bringing old Angela in (only) dead stiff & ugly.--He says he likes that the poem should leave off with this Change of Sentiment--it was what he aimed at" (Stillinger 454).

2

The power of the language in St. Agnes' last descriptive movement to apply and then abruptly dissolve the charm is only its first level of significance. The language of stanzas 28-30, particularly, together with certain moments in those that follow, is all the richer in that Keats uses it as a second-order reflection on the charm poetry of St. Agnes. This occurs through the actions and thoughts of Porphyro, as well as through the details that surround his portrayal, which appear not to have a clear purpose until treated as a figurative reading of Keats's own poetic activities. Consider Porphyro's "strategem": to overpower Madeline so greatly with the sensory effects of his various devices--the cloth he lays upon the table, the foods he brings from the closet, and the lute he plays, as well as he himself--that she believes they are not devices but actually part of her dream, and thus of the ultimate reality that she will marry Porphyro. This action, as it happens, is suspiciously like the poem's stylistic attempt to overpower the reader so greatly with the sensory effects of Keats's words that he or she fails to see that they are devices and is absorbed--"perplex'd"--by the spell of the poem.

What is more, one can see a conflict in Porphyro, and by extension Keats, about how to execute his charms and about the fact that he is executing them at all. Since Stillinger's ground-breaking reading, which portrays Porphyro as the ultra-conniving trickster of the "hoodwinked" Madeline, critics have perhaps been more likely to emphasize the unsavory elements of Porphyro's "strategem" and less likely to notice the poem's repeated suggestions of his anxiety. Yet consider the language and events of stanza 29: Porphyro is described as "half-anguish'd" when he throws down the colored cloth upon the table; as Porphyro does this, a voice calls out for reinforcement, "O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!" (255-57); and, just after this cry, the narrator describes for no apparent purpose how the sounds of musical instruments outside "affray" Porphyro's ears. In the phrase "half-anguish'd" and the disturbing wish for an amulet (a charm designed to protect against evil or injury--in this case ostensibly that of Porphyro's actions), we find Porphyro's anxiety about his trickery of Madeline, and, one might conclude, Keats's uneasiness about the honor of his own hoodwinking of the reader through a poetic charm. In the colored tablecloth and the intruding sounds of the musical instruments, there is a hint of Keats's conflict as to whether to use visual, purely sonic (i.e. musical), or, as in the next stanza, tactile methods to charm the reader; it is as if the affective possibilities flash into Keats's mind at this crucial moment just before stanza 30, when he is about to exercise the most physical language of the poem.

The same kinds of methodological uncertainty appear in Porphyro's sensory stimulations of Madeline: what Sperry calls the "frenetic" nature of Porphyro's activities in the feast scene (215), as well as his "tumultuous" (read "anxious") recourse to lute music in stanza 33 after his appeals with the foods have not caused Madeline to open her eyes and see him. When Madeline finally does open her eyes, furthermore, the contrast between her description of Porphyro in the dream and his real actions further suggests Keats's rumination, through his respective reader and author figures, upon the benefits and drawbacks of writing charm poetry. Madeline tells Porphyro, "but even now / Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear / Made tuneable with every sweetest vow; / And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear.... Give me that voice again, my Porphyro" (307-10, 312). Here, what is in reality mere sound (the playing of a lute), Madeline experiences in her dream as "meaning": Porphyro's voice uttering earnest "vows" and his human face with "eyes" that are "spiritual and clear."

A parallel is thus established between the problems the poem creates through its content and those it creates through its style. At the level of narrative, the verse sets up a tension between Madeline's romantic indulgence in the magical ritual of St. Agnes' eve, which she trusts will reveal her future husband to her in a vision, and Porphyro's demystification of this ritual's romance through his plan to enter Madeline's room, which when viewed skeptically is nothing other than an elaborate ruse to sleep with Madeline. The poem creates this tension by loading its language with ambiguity. For example, the narrator takes care to refer to Porphyro's "strategem," suggesting a conniving aspect to his character, while also having him call himself an "eremite" who is devoted to Madeline in a state of spiritual worship. Keats's poem, then, is a romance that contains the seeds of its own demystification: the dictional and tonal hints throughout that are allowed to infect the poem with a skeptical attitude about the romantic vision of love implied by the St. Agnes' eve ritual, and about the broader issue in Keats's poetry of the contrast between dreams and reality.

The poem reproduces these aspects of its content at the level of its affective language and its reflection on that language, since it executes a charming style upon the reader and then posits within the poem the seeds of that style's demystification, or its exposure as a charm. Keats, that is, reflects his own poem's charm status by symbolically representing it in the description of Porphyro's ruse, but his ambivalence is suggested in Madeline's dream, where Porphyro is heard as a human voice uttering that most truthful of statements, the "vow." Through Madeline's hearing of vows in the mere sound of Porphyro's lute playing, Keats considers the contrast between his own verse's absorbing sensory appeal and an imagined higher ideal of the poet speaking truths in a clear, personal voice. In the contrast between the spiritual nature of Madeline's dream of Porphyro and the sensuous nature of the reality, Keats implies that the charm of The Eve of St. Agnes upon its reader is mere poetic trickery or mechanism, which pales in dignity compared to a more humanistic model such as Wordsworth's definition of the poet as "a man speaking to men."

And trickery or mechanism for what purpose, at that? A charm like the Eskimo chant which Frye discusses is uttered with the belief that certain special, formulaic combinations of words and sounds will achieve the practical result of good weather. Keats's poem clearly exercises the central techniques of the charm: repetition, heavy sonic devices such as alliteration and assonance, formulaic uses of certain language (in Keats's case, for example, phonemes such as "th" or the terminal "d"). And, the casement set-piece and feast scene paradigmatically illustrate the general principle that charm is language treated as a physical action upon the listener or reader. Like all charms, the poem uses this physical language for the purpose of manipulation--to control the reader's attention and to command a certain sensory experience. Indeed, St. Agnes is "concerned with evoking and transmitting power" (Welsh 183). But the question that haunts the poem and drives its self-evaluation is what a charm poem, as opposed to a charm per se, is designed to do. What is St. Agnes's purpose? Is it enough that it partakes in the general purpose of charms to use words as physical power, or should that power be exercised for some end beyond itself when used in the context of a poem?

3

The idea that St. Agnes is a charm poem, and that the latter is a special genre with certain assumed requirements for meaning, is everywhere implied in criticism on the poem but nowhere stated. When the critics whom I discussed earlier use a vocabulary of enchantment to describe St. Agnes or its effects on the reader, they unconsciously assent to the charming nature of the verse. But when they ascribe those enchanting qualities to elements such as thematic meaning, character, setting, plot, or the personality of the narrator, they emphasize the literary aspects of St. Agnes that make it a poem. As I have suggested, though, the physical effects of Keats's words themselves make the text a charm as well as a poem, and here, in St. Agnes' hybrid status, lies its threat to any pure, elevated notion of poetry that we would wish to ascribe to it. Consider again, for example, Cusac's argument that the narrator, as representative of Keats, serves as an enchanter in the poem, specifically through certain moments that demonstrate his "presence as maker." Despite appearing to do the opposite, this reading emphasizes the verse's status as a poem rather than as an enchantment, for it stresses the poet more than the effects of the poem's language, thus implying the high-art status of St. Agnes by reference to the implicitly fine craftsmanship of its "maker." While it is important to acknowledge, of course, that Keats himself creates every word that has a charming effect in St. Agnes, one must not fail to attend to the fact that the words in this poem have a certain independent affective life that places "the poet" in the background of our attention and "language" in the foreground.

Marjorie Levinson makes a similar observation when she finds that criticism on St. Agnes tends to break down into two categories: that emphasizing the "meaning" of the poem, and that emphasizing its "discourse." Criticism of the former type, she suggests, regards the sensuous language of Keats's verse as something that must be redeemed or explained in terms of some unifying conceptual or thematic meaning. (14) But Levinson classes her own reading as emphasizing the discourse and "verbal surface" of the poem. Specifically, she argues for the poem's "verbal materialism," which Keats uses to subvert the basic plot of St. Agnes as a romance and to display his verbal virtuosity; this is the poet's method for setting himself apart from and yet also attaining his own special mastery over the conventions of the privileged, canonical romance-writing tradition. Keats's verbal materialism, Levinson contends, consists in such features of St. Agnes as the "word-frieze," a verbal grouping that is shaped by homonyms, such as "freeze" (line 14) and "frees" (line 227), which occur at either end (105-6). Although the homonyms Levinson identifies seem too far apart to have the effect for which she argues, she suggests that Keats uses such techniques as the word-frieze as an "enabling estrangement from expressive, mimetic, and received discursive imperatives": the words, spread upon the "plane" of the text, lose their "natural" or mimetic meanings and become simply "surfaced" items (113, 105). (15)

Levinson's criticism pays astute and much-needed attention to the materiality of Keats's language, and helpfully highlights the tension between materiality and meaning that St. Agnes presents and that is important to my reading of the poem as charm. Furthermore, Levinson usefully deconstructs the surface-depth binary that many critics, in her view, assume to be operating in St. Agnes. Where these critics read the poem's rich language as having some ultimately deeper "meaning," such as reflecting Keats's fine mimetic craftsmanship, fostering a healthy, human sensory pleasure, or representing a stage in a process of spiritual development which the poem maps, Levinson argues that Keats's verbal materialism, by "surfacing" words, destabilizes a surface-depth paradigm (i.e. words are a surface, under which lies meaning) (105). Viewing language and meaning in St. Agnes in terms of this binary, Levinson rightly observes, generates a critical prejudice against what is taken to be the "shallowness" of paying too much attention to the verbal surface of St. Agnes without an immediate recourse to the meaning that must, the assumption goes, be intimately connected with that surface (104). And, when we work to "redeem" the sensuous effects of Keats's words by searching for their conceptual significance, we are "shielded" from seeing their verbal materialism (101).

But the witty, pun-replete form of verbal materialism for which Levinson argues is not the only form to be found, and not the only form to which criticism has been blind because of the surface-depth binary. Verbal materialism is an exploitation of words as matter, or as physical things or effects, and to see St. Agnes as a charm poem is to identify another, quite different form of it at play--one that establishes a quite different form of tension between word and meaning. To reiterate the earlier example, the action of what Levinson calls Keats's "word-friezes" makes "freeze" and "frees" word-objects on a plane of other word-objects, and thus destabilizes or problematizes the normal meanings of these words. This reading of Keats's language assumes that a conceptual paradigm of meaning is operating in the poem. Though Levinson reads the verse's materialism as subverting such meaning through its destabilizing action, to subvert is still to work within.

When St. Agnes is read as a metareflective charm poem, however, its negotiation with the problem of meaning appears in its full complexity: rather than working with one paradigm of meaning, the poem explores several at once--either theoretically, through its affective style, or both. As far as conceptual meaning goes, the poem seems at times almost to prompt critics who want to read it under a thematic scheme. To take again the famous example of Wasserman's account of the poem, St. Agnes' doorways, archways, and winding halls, all leading to Madeline's inner bed chamber, should be seen as Porphyro's spiritual journey toward the "Chamber of Maiden Thought," or what Keats regarded as the most sophisticated union between sensory experience and the intellect in the process of "soul making." Such a reading is conceptually oriented because it sees the driving idea of the poem as soul-making, or perhaps, more generally, as spiritual journey. Yet at the same time, the poem's self-reflexive elements, particularly the exchange between Porphyro and Madeline after she awakens, suggest that to read a neat, spiritual meaning into this poem's sensory stimulations--to see lute music as "vows," as it were--is really simply to fulfill a desire to see such singular significance.

Readings like those of Bush and Gittings, which focus more intently on the sensory descriptions in the poem, still read such language in terms of its reflection of an idea: if not a theme that is seen to be organizing the poem, then the idea that corresponds to the thing that description mimetically represents. These readings focus on the pictures or scenes that the poem at moments "paints," but evade the other even more prominent moments that overturn verisimilitude through an indulgence in physically affective language. They, along with Levinson's account, do not acknowledge the poem's continual representation of mimesis as a verse model in stanzas z4 and 25 and in later passages, even as it pursues the alternative model of charm poetry; nor do they acknowledge the verse's metareflective consideration of mimetic poetry, charm poetry, and the humanistic idea of the poet as "a man speaking to men," which is suggested by Madeline's desire for Porphyro to utter "vows."

Seen in this way, the poem does not simply push away from "expressive, mimetic, and received discursive imperatives," to quote Levinson's phrase once again. It also goes a step further by ranging these ways of conceiving poetry next to each other for consideration and especially evaluating how they relate to the charm--the dominant paradigm for the verse's style and the source of an affective or performative order of meaning that is radically unlike representational forms. Furthermore, the poem's second-order reflection on its charming style suggests that in a use of words as physical power, the meaning of the poem is not an ideational object that words carry beneath or within them and that the critic must identify, but rather an action that the words perform, and the experience in the reader that such action generates. In the final analysis, then, St. Agnes' "meaning" is not just its exertion of the physical power of language upon the reader, but also, more theoretically, its very definition of a verse model wherein meaning is a verbal action rather than a represented idea or object(s), its contemplation of different kinds of poetic meaning, and thus its casting into sharp relief the affective nature of charm verse.

4

Yet St. Agnes' metareflection on its own style has even farther-reaching implications. I have already discussed how the charming character of stanza 30--as the central moment of the feast scene, and the most physically affective language of the poem--is exposed by the poem's treatment of Porphyro as a poet figure. From this perspective the overpowering language of stanza 30 is pure spell, and the surrounding stanzas perform a second-order reflection on that spell. But from the perspective of the larger relevance of St. Agnes for British culture, stanza 30 fully executes its charm while at the same time engaging in a different form of metareflection from what we have already seen. Through key words at the end of this stanza, Keats considers his poem's relationship to the world of mercantilism.

As I discussed earlier, a great deal of the stanza's affective power comes from the relentless thick consonants and musical vowels in the list of Porphyro's banquet foods. By the time the reader reaches the conclusion of this list in the lines, "in argosy transferr'd / From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, / From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon" (268-70), he or she is so enfolded in the language's physical power as hardly to notice that the manna, dates, and spiced dainties are not simply named, but described in terms of their geographic origins and the shipping through which they arrive in Europe. One might offer several different interpretations of why Keats includes these details. Perhaps he was simply looking to increase the sense of decadence and exoticism associated with Porphyro's banquet, and thus he chose to narrate that some of the foods came from faraway places. Or perhaps sound is the key to it all: perhaps Keats wrote "from Fez" to continue the "f" and "s" or "z" sounds in "transferr'd," and the remainder of the passage to play upon "s," as well as the terminal "d" in "transferr'd" and the "ar" sound in "argosy."

The sonic argument makes sense given that stanza 30 is such a crucial moment in the poem's charming process, which depends upon a hypnotic continuity of sound for its effects upon the reader. But from the perspective that St. Agnes is a self-reflexive poem at its most important moments, the verse's reference to the processes that supply the banquet foods is more revealing. To have Porphyro lay a table that includes foods from the Middle East and Africa (especially "dainties," or luxury foods, which are by definition consumed for the exceptional sensory experience they produce) is to refer indirectly to an entire network of commercial relations--and one more characteristic of early nineteenth-century English life than of the medieval period in which Keats's poem is set: consumers who desire and buy goods from abroad; the transportation system put into place to get the consumers their goods; and, more generally, the culture that creates demand for luxury, novelty, and ever more scintillating sensory experiences. What is more, Keats makes such a reference in the context of the most physically powerful stanza of a charm poem--the one moment in which the analogy between poem and commodity that St. Agnes explores is most present.

St. Agnes' charming style, and all the forms of metareflection it brings to that style, thus express Keats's special brand of ambivalence about the relationship between poetry and consumerism: he is willing to explore the fault line between the poem and the good, and yet is self-conscious enough about this endeavor to announce it continually through his poem's self-reflexive apparatus. The question that The Eve of St. Agnes ultimately asks is whether in a culture increasingly characterized by a bustling market for commercial goods, sensationalist entertainments, and other sensory stimuli, poetry can still be conceived humanistically, as the means by which the poet speaks to the audience in a discernible voice, or whether it must to some degree be treated mechanistically, as one enchantment among many. What is more, within the larger context of Keats's oeuvre, St. Agnes explores the notion of literature as a consumer good in a general, ruminative way, before financial troubles later in 1819 forced the poet to cater more pragmatically to that idea. Such catering is suggested by Keats's comment on Lamia, written in the late summer of 1819 ("I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation. What they want is a sensation of some sort"), and his statement that he hoped to sell "to a good advantage" the manuscript of Otho the Great, written in the same period. (16) Indeed, as a narrative poem that seems to evade a moral or a clear point, takes the charm as the paradigm for its style, and self-reflexively considers the relationship between the charm and meaning, St. Agnes contemplates age-old aesthetic problems that had attained a special urgency in the culture of Keats's day: the potential occlusion of instruction by delight, and of the idea by sensation.

Loyola College

(1.) Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge, 1971) 64. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CH.

(2.) Jack Stillinger, Introduction, John Keats: Complete Poems (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1982) xxv. All quotations of Keats's poetry come from this edition.

(3.) "Keats and Language," The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 135.

(4.) Northrop Frye, "Charms and Riddles," Spiritus Mundi (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976) 142.

(5.) Stuart Sperry's comments on The Eve of St. Agnes exemplify the way that critics tend to identify the enchanting effects of Keats's verse but ascribe them to aspects other than the poet's language itself:

 Keats's contemporaries and the Victorians ... in one way or another
 came under [the poem's] spell.... Of course we are seduced, along
 with Madeline, each time we return to the work, as we submit to its
 suggestions of mystery, the rapture of young love, and its high
 romantic spell.... The poem, that is, achieves its magic, but only
 in such a way as to dramatize the particular tensions that oppose
 it.... [I]t is the way we are taken into the world of the poem,
 what happens to us there, and the way we are let out again, that
 matters most.... For Keats's narrative, even while enrapturing us,
 progressively reveals the kinds of dislocation toward which
 romance, by its very nature, tends. (my emphasis)

Sperry's awareness that some of the "magical" qualities of St. Agnes could be considered a device, not a coincidence, makes his language here more self-conscious than that of some contemporary reviewers who wrote in praise of Keats. And yet he argues that an enchantment effect is caused mainly by the poem's love plot, characters such as Angela, the Beadsman, Hildebrand, and Lord Maurice, and fixtures such as the castle and its galleries, arched ways, and chambers, and not the agency of Keatsian verbiage. See Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973) 198-220 passim.

Marian Hollingsworth Cusac ascribes any magical quality in St. Agnes more to the personality and speech of the narrator, who in her view serves as an "enchanter." Suggesting that St. Agnes is a series of concentric circles or narrative layers, Cusac contends that Keats, in the person of the narrator, "demonstrates his presence as maker" of the poem at each entry into a new layer, through specific words and brief phrases such as "Ah!" and "Lo!", direct statements to a character or the reader, and the prominent use of figurative language such as the simile. Thus the narrator "enchants" the reader by developing a rapport with him or her and displaying his creativity and control over the story. For Cusac, the poem's richest, most sensuous language, and any given specific words or phrases, serve mainly to help the reader willingly to suspend disbelief and to keep his or her attention as the narrative moves toward the climax of Madeline's and Porphyro's union. St. Agnes, in this view, is a plot-driven poem, with the narrator's personality designed to control the reader's exposure to that plot. See "Keats as Enchanter: An Organizing Principle of The Eve of St. Agnes," Keats-Shelley Journal 17 (1968): 114 and 117.

(6.) Neil McKendrick has shown that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England was the setting for the world's first major consumer society. In this setting, manufacturers and shopkeepers, aided by the increased circulation of new china, clothing, and other goods due to improved trade routes and transportation, hoped that the sensory appeal of these objects would override reason and persuade people to buy aggressively. Though consumerism was developing by 1700, McKendrick shows that its full emergence in English society had not occurred until 1800. See "The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England," The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982) 9-33.

As to sensationalism, Gillen D'Arcy Wood has recently shown that the visual culture of spectacle that thrived in England in this period included immensely popular entertainments such as Giovanni Belzoni's display of tombs, statues, sarcophagi, and other objects in his London Museum exhibit, the exhibit of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum, panoramas, as well as subtler forms of sensationalism such as book illustrations and prints. Wood particularly discusses the panoramas at Leicester Square and the Strand and their life-like recreation of famous sights and scenes on the canvas, noting the apprehension of Wordsworth about the "mimic sights" offered by the panorama and Coleridge's "shock" and "disgust" over its "simulations of nature." See The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture: 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 6-7. In another important treatment of visual spectatorship in this period, Richard Altick shows how the presentation of art and cultural artifacts in museums, in our modern sense of the "high art" exhibit, was not fully disentwined from more popular, sensationalized exhibitions until the second half of the nineteenth century. See The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1978).

(7.) For example, Elizabeth Jones argues that the subjects of the odes were chosen according to popular tastes in her "Writing for the Market: Keats's Odes as Commodities," SiR 34.3 (Fall 1995): 343-64, and Orrin Wang contends that Lamia engages the increased visual spectatorship of early nineteenth-century London culture, particularly through its representation of the character of Lamia in a style that can be described as pre-cinematic. See "Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation," SiR 42.4 (Winter 2003): 461-501.

(8.) Andrew Welsh, "Charm," The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 183.

(9.) Cusac writes: "With the 'Ah,' the story-teller gathers us, as it were, around his knee to begin his tale. The word not only intensifies the bitter chill but also serves the purpose of the ritualistic 'Once upon a time': the narrator signals that he is getting his story under way" (114).

(10.) Keats's interest in exact repetitions as an absorbing device is also suggested in a canceled stanza from a draft of St. Agnes, which appears in one of Woodhouse's transcripts of the poem that is based on the now lost fair copy holograph. The stanza would have been the fourth of the poem, following stanza three's closing scene of the Beadsman "griev[ing] for sinners' sake" and featuring the narrator's guiding voice:

 But there are ears that may hear sweet melodies,
 And there are eyes to brighten festivals,
 And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies,
 And many a lip that for the red wine calls.--
 Follow, then follow to the illumined halls,
 Follow me youth--and leave the Eremite--
 Give him a tear--then trophied banneral,
 And many a brilliant tasseling of light,
 Shall droop from arched ways this high Baronial night.

See The Woodhouse Poetry Transcripts at Harvard, Volume 6, ed. Jack Stillinger (New York: Garland, 1998) 199. Keats's apparent intention was that this stanza be left out of the final version of The Eve of St. Agnes, although we will never be sure, given that the fair copy of the poem is lost and that Keats's editors took it upon themselves to change some of the poet's preferences according to their own standards of propriety, particularly in the controversial passage on Madeline's and Porphyro's union. Nevertheless, the lines feature inductive, almost hypnotic repetitions in the regular appearance at line beginnings of "[a]nd there are" as well as the repeated imperative to the reader, "follow." The repetition of "follow," though canceled along with the rest of this stanza, resurfaces at a later point in St. Agnes--apparently intentionally since the usage appears in Woodhouse's and George Keats's transcripts, both based on the lost fair copy, and in the 1820 final version. In this later appearance, Angela orders Porphyro to fall in behind her so that he can tell her his desires for Madeline: "'in this arm-chair sit, / And tell me how--Good Saints! not here, not here; / Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier.' / He follow'd, through a lowly arched way" (106-9).

(11.) Levinson also notes the outermost frames of Porphyro's view from the closet and of the entire scene of Madeline's room. From here, stanza 24 establishes the frames of the casement itself and the scutcheon within the casement. See Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 162. All further citations of Levinson come from this work and are given parenthetically.

(12.) Andrew Bennett suggests the same when, in arguing for the figuration of reading in St. Agnes as "ocular fixation," he at the same time acknowledges that "the reader's ability to 'see' the events of the narrative is precluded by the rich intensity of poetic language," and that, paradoxically, "[in some descriptive passages] the more the language approaches precise specification of concrete detail, the further it moves from verisimilitude." See Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 97, 102-3.

(13.) This earlier moment is the entrance of Angela into the poem. The narrator declares that "not one breast affords / [Porphyro] any mercy, in that mansion foul, / Save one old beldame, weak in body and in soul" (88-90), then declares ironically in the next stanza "Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came, / Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand" (91-92).

(14.) Levinson cites Douglas Bush and Robert Gittings as examples of critics who emphasize the poem's "rich textual surface" (100), or its discourse, when they read the poem as a beautiful medieval tapestry of pictures, but who take care to make the qualification that the poem is in no way "merely pictorial" and that its beauty ultimately "comprehends passion and sorrow" and reflects Keats's genius of negative capability and of recreating an object or sensation in words (98). Other critics--Earl Wasserman is a paradigmatic case-seek to find a deeper "meaning" in St. Agnes by, as Levinson puts it, "push[ing] through [the] intricate surface to the place of meaning, an austere, philosophic place that is humanized by the clouds of sensuous glory we trail behind us, vestiges of our passage through the painted veil" (100).

Wasserman's spiritualized account of the feast scene, which features the most sonically overwhelming language of the poem, confirms Levinson's argument. Wasserman writes, "[Keats creates a] series of increasing intensities of the pleasure thermometer that he understood to be the necessary means of spiritual elevation before one may enter the dynamically static heaven Madeline and Porphyro are about to create for themselves." See Earl Wasserman, "The Eve of St. Agnes," Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Eve of St. Agnes, ed. Allen Danzig (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971) 25.

(15.) Levinson argues that Keats's verbal materialism also inheres in the "jokiness" of his writing, which displays the poet's wit. An example is the description "wide wilderness." Levinson argues that Keats constructs this as "a self-consciously written phrase" in which he "wants us to see that 'wide' is graphically contained by and textually derived from the word 'wilderness' ... [and] extends [the word] in time and space," thus demonstrating that "writing writes." Through this kind of technique, Levinson contends, Keats "poke[s] fun at the high, serious, and deep constructions we put on literature, and particularly on such forms as romance and ode" (111-13).

(16.) The Letters of John Keats, Volume 2, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958) 189, 185.