Keats's way of salvation.

Barth, J. Robert

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.--Leon Bloy (1)

KEATS WAS AN INVETERATE SEARCHER AFTER TRUTH RATHER THAN ONE who ever felt he had a firm grasp of it. As he wrote to Benjamin Bailey, "I have not one Idea of the truth of any of my speculations." (2) He lived, if any poet ever did, in "Negative Capability"--in "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (Letters 1: 193). For all this, though, he never stopped searching; just weeks after his remark to Bailey he wrote to his publisher: "I find I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge" (Letters I: 271). As Dennis Haskell writes, "like all poets he was implicitly concerned with questions of truth. Unlike most poets he was also often explicitly concerned with the question of truth." (3)

It is curious, then, that the critical view of Keats that has reigned virtually unchallenged through much of the twentieth century, at least since the 1940s, sees him as a kind of modern skeptic, fully in tune with the values of a "post-Christian era." The work of Hoxie Neale Fairchild and Edward Bostetter may be cited as symptomatic, and Ronald Sharp's important study, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty, articulates the case fully and impressively. (4) It was not until the publication of Robert Ryan's Keats: The Religious Sense in 1976 that this orthodoxy came to be seriously questioned. (5) Since then, however, there has been relatively little study of religious issues in Keats. As Robert Prescott wrote in a splendidly wide-ranging review of this question, "perhaps because Ryan's work is so thorough, critics have made little more of the religious nature of Keats's more private thought." (6)

When Ryan published Keats: The Religious Sense, over twenty-five years ago, my review in the Keats-Shelley Journal noted that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that it hadn't been written before. And yet it was perhaps only after it was written that one realized how much it had been needed. We do not, after all, commonly think of Keats as a "religious poet." And yet Ryan's book made a convincing case that religion and religious speculation played a far greater role in Keats's life, and in the forming of his imagination, than we had allowed ourselves to believe.

Keats: The Religious Sense is not a study of Keats's poetry. Ryan chose rather to focus on his life--and especially his letters--as a means of determining the shape and evolution of Keats's "personal creed." Because he finds the religious elements of Keats's poetry to be in large measure untraditional, Ryan suggests that it is helpful first to come to some understanding of Keats's basic theological point of view outside the poetry. He offers his study, therefore, as "a sort of prolegomenon or preface to any further examination of the religious aspects of Keats's verse," as well as to the study of his most important pronouncements on the nature of poetry (6). The purpose of this essay is to apply Ryan's reading of Keats's life to the poet's great letter of spring 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats--notably the "vale of soul-making" passage--and to the poems most intimately linked with it: the "Ode to Psyche" and The Fall of Hyperion.

In approaching religious dimensions of Keats's poetry, I suggest that a middle path may be taken between, on the one hand, a thoroughgoing skeptical and secularizing view and, on the other, a view that would baptize Keats into something approaching Christian orthodoxy. As Prescott justly observes, we must pay serious attention to the "deep religious ambivalence evident in Keats's letters" (22), and sedulously avoid the error of militantly secularist critics in "their imposition of a subtle exclusion principle: the idea that since the poems and letters voice in places a skeptical secularism, that the religious content of the same letters should therefore be ignored or devalued" (23). Robert Ryan's book does, I believe, follow this middle course, taking very much into account both Keats's innate skepticism and suspicion of institutional Christianity, and his unceasing search for a broader religious meaning in his life and in his poetry. For this reason, Ryan's book is a useful entry into my more limited study of the "system of salvation" which Keats adumbrates in his letters and (as I shall argue) dramatizes in some of his poetry.

One of Ryan's most signal achievements is in creating a sense of the context in which Keats was thinking and feeling. It is almost as if Ryan were painting a picture--like Keats's friend Benjamin Haydon's Christ's Entry into Jerusalem--full of life, of vividly drawn faces, of energy and individuality. There is the complex figure of Leigh Hunt, benevolent deist and sometime Christian-baiter; Haydon himself, pugnaciously Christian; the gentle and scholarly Benjamin Bailey, more assured and more tolerant in his Christianity; the devout and devoted Joseph Severn; as well as the skeptical Hazlitt, Wordsworth the religious teacher, and a host of others. And there, in the midst of all these disparate influences--responding actively to all of them--is Keats. Achieving a sense, as Ryan gives us, of the complexity of the religious milieu in which Keats lived, we can better understand what he was thinking and feeling when he wrote or spoke to one of his friends.

Nor is it just a sense of Keats's own circle of friends and acquaintances that Ryan gives us, but a sense of the period itself--an age of religious controversy and turmoil, in which the attitudes towards Christianity were enormously varied and complex. Within this context Ryan discusses tellingly the kind of religious training Keats most likely received at school in Enfield, the pragmatic methodology he learned in his medical studies at Guy's Hospital--linked persuasively with Keats's notion of "Negative Capability"--the influence of Voltaire, and even the startlingly orthodox catechesis of Christian doctrine Keats offered his sister Fanny on the occasion of her Confirmation in 1819. (7)

At Enfield, Ryan sees "a double significance for the development of Keats's religious attitudes. On the one hand, the academy provided him with much of his formal grounding in Christian doctrine and his familiarity with the Bible. On the other, the liberal atmosphere of the school provided a matrix for his initial questioning of his religious heritage" (44-45). His reading of Voltaire, under the tutelage of his mentor at Enfield, Charles Cowden Clarke, put Keats in touch with what Ryan calls Voltaire's "cool, quizzical skepticism about almost everything having to do with religion" (51). Then, Ryan goes on, "the London medical schools harbored a strain of skepticism more radical than any he could have found in the writings of Voltaire" (53). (8)

However, Ryan argues, Keats "never went quite so far as some contemporary scientists in questioning the basic premises of religion," and thus "he never abandoned the belief that a Supreme Intelligence governed the universe and, though shaken by doubts, he ardently desired to believe in a spiritual principle that would survive the death of the body" (67). For, if he was influenced by the cool skepticism of Voltaire, he was also deeply touched by the goodness of Leigh Hunt, who though he rejected Christianity believed in a benevolent Creator, and by the "probity and disinterestedness" (to use Keats's phrase for him) of his admired friend Bailey, whose goodness was obviously deeply rooted in his Christianity.

It was partly under the influence of Bailey that Keats began to explore the problem of evil and suffering, which was to be "a major intellectual concern" (117) for the last years of his life. Rejecting as he did the doctrine of the Atonement, Keats was left to grapple in his own terms with this central mystery of human life--a mystery he was to experience so profoundly in his own life. It is significant that one of the two letters that are most important in expressing Keats's struggle with this mystery is written to Benjamin Bailey: the much-glossed letter of November 22, 1817--the letter on "the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of imagination" (Letters I: 183-87). Taking into account the recipient of the letter, his background and Keats's relationship with him, Ryan reads this letter in an entirely new light: "I believe that to read the letter primarily as a treatise in aesthetics or literary theory is to miss the central point" (129). It is rather a detailed and pointed response to Bailey's doubts about a theological question: the reliability of imagination "when dealing with death and its mysteries" (131).

It is clear from his other writings that Bailey was well aware of the role of the affections and imagination in one's religious life. Bailey is emphatic that there is a dimension of religious knowledge that is hidden from the understanding and can be attained only by the heart. His doubt about the scope of imagination seems to have been about "its ability to conceive the nature of post-mortal existence" (Ryan 135). Hence Keats's preoccupation in his letter to Bailey with the nature of the after-life--"what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone" (Letters I: 185). If Bailey had doubts about the reliability of the imagination when looking beyond death, Keats--at least at this stage--seems to have had none." In this letter, Keats can see beyond pain and suffering not only to the joys of the present moment--"the setting sun will always set me to rights" (1: 186)--but to happiness hereafter "repeated in a finer tone."

Later on, however, this conviction would be sorely tested, as Keats nursed his brother Tom through his long final illness and then had to face his own declining health and the inevitability of his own death. During the months following Tom's death in December 1818, Keats wrote his long journal-letter to his brother George and his wife Georgiana, finally posted to them in America at the beginning of May (2: 58-109). It is full of wonders--sadness and joy, poetry and playfulness, gossip and philosophy, a cricket game and the famous encounter with Coleridge on his leisurely walk towards Highgate. But the most important section, in itself and for our present purpose, is the reflection (April 21st) on "the vale of Soul-making" (2: 100-104).

Keats begins by reflecting on the European experience of the New World where, instead of the pristine innocence one might have expected in a land untainted by what we call "civilization," settlers and visitors from Europe have found the same ailments and misfortunes, the same human suffering. "The whole appears to resolve into this," he writes, "that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts--at each stage, at each accent [ascent?] there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the preserving endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy--I can imagine such Happiness carried to an extreme--but what must it end in?--Death--and who could in such a case bear with death" (2: 101).

In this view, humankind is in no better state than the animal creation. Attempts at escape from our mortal condition are mere philosophizing and wishful thinking. "Let the fish," Keats says, "philosophize the ice away from the rivers in wintertime and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes--Let man exterminate them and I will say they may arrive at earthly happiness." Human beings are in no better state than the rose, Keats goes on: "It blooms on a beautiful morning it enjoys itself--but there comes cold wind, a hot sun--and it can not escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native to the world as itself" (2: 101). Thus the conclusion, even from ancient times, that we are in a "vale of tears," (9) and to this the Christian response is that from it (in Keats's words) "we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven--What a little circumscribed straightened notion!" (2: 101-22). (10)

It is in light of these reflections that Keats goes on to enunciate his own "system of salvation"--a system "which does not affront our reason and humanity" (2: 103). "Call the world if you Please," he begins, "the vale of Soul-making.... I say 'Soul making' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence--There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls <the> till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself." How is this "identity" to be achieved? "How," he says, "but by the medium of a world like this?" It is only in the world we all inhabit that one can work out one's "salvation." Keats's "grander system of salvation" is "effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years"--the intelligence, the human heart, and "the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other." The world is therefore "a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read," and the human heart is "the horn Book used in that School." But Keats's homely metaphor of the school and the horn book--seemingly innocent--quite suddenly turns dark: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!" Clearly, there is no "soul making" without suffering.

James Engell has argued persuasively that Keats may have become increasingly interested in the idea of the soul from (among other things) his reading of Wordsworth. (11) Keats's celebrated passage on the nature of Wordsworth's genius was written less than a year before (May 1818), and Wordsworth was in his mind perhaps almost as frequently as Milton. (12) It is Wordsworth, after all, who explores the "dark passages" beyond the "Chamber of Maiden-Thought" not only more deeply than Keats himself but even more deeply than Milton: "Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton.... He did not think into the human heart, as Wordsworth has done" (Letters 1: 281-82). The passage into the "Chamber of Maiden Thought" has the effect of "sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of Man--of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression--whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken'd and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages" (1: 281). Is it perhaps significant that for the word "heart" in this passage Keats had first written "head"? This may be, I suggest, a foreshadowing of his reflection a year later that both the intelligence and the heart--together with "the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other"--are necessary for the soul "to possess the sense of Identity." And it is this misery, heartbreak and pain of this "World or Elemental space" that acts as a catalyst for the "proper action of Mind and Heart on each other" (2: 102-3).

But it is crucial, for Keats as for Wordsworth, that "soul making" is a process, that the soul not only comes into being through the coming together of "three grand materials"--mind and heart and the world of human suffering--but that the process continues in the ongoing growth of the soul. This is, Engell argues, what Keats learned from Wordsworth: "With an emphasis on the soul as growing and being in process, Keats also echoed Wordsworth's sense of the soul undergoing birth and change. Thus, in 'Tintern Abbey,' we strive with our minds to understand the 'unintelligible world,' but it is only when the heart, 'the affections lead us on' that 'we are laid asleep / in body, and become a living soul'" (Engell 8). And, I would add, it is only when we feel "the burden of the Mystery" that we may begin to explore the "dark passages."

Given Keats's preoccupation with "soul" in his long letter to George and Georgiana, it should come as no surprise that he copied into it his "Ode to Psyche," on which he had been working during the same weeks of April i819. (13) For "Psyche" is, in effect, a continuation of his reflection on the nature of the soul. At the beginning of the poem Psyche, for all she is a goddess--indeed the "loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!" (24-25)--is without the conventional trappings of divinity: "... temple thou hast none ... No shrine, no grove, no oracle" (28, 34). It is the poet who will give her the worship due to her: "Yes, I will be thy priest" (50).

Far more important, though, is the way in which the poet will serve in her temple and at her altar: he will build her temple "In some untrodden region of my mind" (51). As W.J. Bate insists, this is "the essential part" of the poem, for it is here that Keats continues the commitment he had made earlier in the letter to George and Georgiana Keats to explore the "dark Passages" Wordsworth had opened up to him, passages expressed here as the "untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind" (51-53). (14) As Bate points out, however, "the 'fane,' in this new region he now hopes to explore, is not there to be discovered. It has to be built." And it will be built only by following out the "branched thoughts" into what Bate calls a "growth in awareness," which will bring "new pain as well as pleasure." (15) The "branched thoughts" will lead to the "dark passages."

The "Ode to Psyche" affirms forcefully, as Aileen Ward puts it, that "the sacred region was now, as Wordsworth had seen, the mind of man, and the poet its self-appointed priest." (16) But for all its protestations, the rest of the poem does not in fact explore the "dark passages." The most Psyche's new priest can promise here is that ... there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm Love in!

(64-67)

Of the "three grand materials" for the formation of the soul, only two are dramatized here--the mind and the heart. It is left for another, greater poem to bring to light the pain and suffering hidden in the "dark passages." It has sometimes been said that Keats stopped work on his great unfinished masterpiece Hyperion, and took it up again as The Fall of Hyperion, for aesthetic reasons: the diction of Hyperion was too close to Milton's, its structure echoed too much that of Paradise Lost, and it failed to enunciate with sufficient clarity the role of the poet. All of this is no doubt true, but there may be an additional reason for making a new beginning with The Fall of Hyperion. Keats may have abandoned Hyperion not only for formal reasons, but because it did not sufficiently address his religious reflections and longings. Begun just two or three months after the "Vale of Soul-Making" letter (and the "Ode to Psyche"), The Fall of Hyperion may be--whatever else it is--Keats's attempt to dramatize his new system of salvation.

W. J. Bate is surely correct when he says of The Fall of Hyperion that in it "the interest that takes precedence over every other is the self as it tries to come to terms with reality" (587). In a central irony, as Bate points out, "the poem--which was to include a bitter attack on the whole conception of poetry as dream, retreat, or escape--is itself frankly cast as a dream vision" (588). But the vision within the poet's dream is his attempt to shape his own identity, to transform his intelligence and heart into a soul. If the dream at the opening of the poem is of the primeval garden, the Garden of Paradise, it is a garden whose inhabitants have left; for all its beauties, it is now empty. On the other hand, the "sanctuary" in which the poet finds himself awakening after his dream is--for all its grandeur--a fallen world, where humankind must work out its salvation in fear and trembling, through toil and suffering. One may well call it, in Keats's terms, "the vale of Soul-making."

As the poet moves into the sanctuary, urged on by the shadowy "priestess," he is awed by his surroundings. As Bate points out, "Now for the first time in any of his longer poems, the imagery and tone begin to move directly toward the religious and sacramental" (590. Here is (as he calls it in the "vale of Soul-making" letter) the "World or Elemental space" where he must work out his salvation, or else (in the words of the poem) "rot on the pavement" (153). The height he must climb to the altar is not, I suggest, only for those who aspire to be poets, but for all who wish to be fully human, to form their Intelligence and Heart into a "Soul." It is for all those "to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest" (149-50). Those with no such longings are those "who find a haven in the world, / Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days" (150-51). The "thoughtless" ones are those who refuse to read--in the words of his April 21 St letter of just two or three months earlier--" the Minds Bible," the "teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity" (Letters 2: 103). As the poet says in the same letter: "There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities" (2: 102). And they cannot do so unless they willingly encounter with their minds and hearts the pain of the human experience. As we see the poet mount painfully the steps of the altar and glean the "high tragedy / In the dark secret Chambers" of Moneta's skull (277-78), we might recall Keats's words in the April letter: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!" (2: 102).

But Keats is a poet as well, and his schooling must go beyond that of others. His vision must embrace as well, if he is to carry on the poetic tradition, the ancient sufferings and the ancient myths. At the moment he realizes that the shadowy priestess is Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, his knowledge of human suffering begins to deepen even further, as he is granted a vision of the sufferings of the fallen gods of old: I sat myself Upon an eagle's watch, that I might see And seeing ne'er forget.

(1: 308-10)

And what he sees is a vision of "the fallen Divinity" (1: 316): Along the margin sand large footmarks went No farther than to where old Saturn's feet Had rested, and there slept, how long a sleep! Degraded, cold, upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred, and his realmless eyes were clos'd; While his bow'd head seem'd listening to the Earth, His antient mother, for some comfort yet.

(1: 319-26)

Now the poet must take upon himself not only the weight of human suffering--as we all must do if we are to make the spark of divinity in us into a "soul"--but also the poet's "burden of the past," the poetic tradition itself that bears in a special way the weight of human suffering and sorrow: Without stay or prop, But my own weak mortality I bore The load of this eternal quietude.... Oftentimes I pray'd Intense, that Death would take me from the vale And all its burthens--Gasping with despair Of change, hour after hour I curs'd myself; Until old Saturn rais'd his faded eyes, And looked around, and saw his kingdom gone, And all the gloom and sorrow of the place ...

(1: 388-90, 396-402)

This "vale" with "all its burthens" is surely the "vale of Soul-making," and the poet is in a struggle not only for his vocation as a poet but for his essential humanity--the shaping of his very soul.

It would no doubt have been comforting had Keats completed the poem, rounding it to perfection as he shaped his soul toward happiness. But we can say it neither of the poem nor of the poet himself. The poem remains, perhaps a bit like the fallen gods, incomplete, short of its destined glory, but glorious still even in its imperfection. As Canto I closes, Saturn is still fallen, the poet--at least for the moment--can go no further in exploring these dark passages: And she spake on As yet may read who can unwearied pass Onward from the Antechamber of this dream, Where even at the open doors awhile I must delay, and glean nay memory Of her high praise:--perhaps no further dare.

(1: 463-68)

In the fragment that remains of Canto 2, we see a glimpse of the new divinity, "the bright Hyperion," but it is only a glimpse of what might be--not an accomplished reality, either for the poet or for the reader.

It would surely be claiming too much to suggest that Keats's "system of salvation" came to full fruition, either in The Fall of Hyperion or in his life, but its exercise in both was noble and in many ways glorious. Less than a year after finally abandoning The Fall of Hyperion, Keats was in Rome with Severn--in the flat above the Piazza di Spagna, just below the Church of Trinita dei Monti--beginning his own last days. Like Saturn, he lay in fallen glory. But in a sense, his "Soul-making" continued right to the end. He had written to George and Georgiana at the end of the "Soul-making" letter: "If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will put you in the place where I began in this series of thoughts--I mean, I began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances--and what are circumstances?--but touchstones of his heart--? and what are touchstones?--but proovings of his heart?--and what are proovings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? and what is his altered nature but his soul?" (Letters 2: 103).

And surely in those last weeks Keats underwent a "proving of the heart" by circumstances. Wracked with pain, he could not take comfort in a sure and steady faith, though his belief in a Supreme Being seems to have stayed with him to the end. What he lacked was, as Robert Ryan says--based on the testimony of Severn and of Keats's physician in Rome, Dr. James Clark--"a confident belief in an afterlife--a 'kind hope' that would enable him to see his sufferings in an eternal perspective" (Religious Sense 212). According to the account Severn wrote years later, however, Severn (at Keats's request) read to him each day during the last weeks from Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. Severn records that "he gained strength of mind from day to day just in proportion as his poor body grew weaker and weaker. At last I had the consolation of seeing him calm, trusting, and more prepared for his end than I was." (17) Perhaps at the end it was his "Negative Capability"--surely a vital part of his "system of salvation"--that allowed him to live with uncertainty and doubt, and to face the final mystery.

Keats's request to be read to from Jeremy Taylor, which is verified from other sources, may perhaps be seen to bear out what Severn had written to William Haslam a few weeks before the poet's death, that Keats had "no religion to support him--yet with all the most knawing [sic] desire for it--yet without the possibility of receiving it" (Letters 2: 368). Although he never came to a settled belief in an after-life, Keats's desire for such faith seems never to have left him. As for Severn's later recollection that Keats was calm, trusting, and more prepared for his end than I was," Severn had written on February 22nd, the day before Keats died--again to Haslam--that "he opens his eyes in great horror and doubt--but when they fall upon me--they close gently and open and close until he falls into another sleep" (2: 376). And just after Keats's body was laid to rest, Severn recorded (in a letter to Charles Brown), that Keats's last moments were peaceful even amid his pain: "He is gone--he died with the most perfect ease--he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy--don't be frightened--be firm, and thank God it has come!'" (18) There was no doubt an element of wishful thinking in Severn's later suggestion that he "died a Christian," (19) but one thing seems certain, that even in the extremity of his final suffering the love of a friend could sustain and comfort him. At the end of the "dark passages" he found love.

This same spirit was reflected beautifully in a letter to Severn from Leigh Hunt during the last weeks of Keats's life. As one who was blessed with a wealth of friends and who cherished friendship, Keats must have been touched by this message, especially coming as it did from such a dear and devoted friend as Hunt. In graceful and moving words Hunt wrote: "Tell him that, Christian or Infidel, the most skeptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads to think all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the road, as he was in everything else." (20)

Keats's "system of salvation" may not have been in the mainstream of religious thought, and it certainly lacked both doctrinal orthodoxy and theological clarity, but it may be said ultimately to have served him well, even as it gave birth to a poetry that has given hope and joy to generations after him. Keats's "vale of Soul-making"--and The Fall of Hyperion, written in its wake--bear out beautifully the truth and wisdom of Leon Bloy's words: "Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order they may have existence." Perhaps it is precisely because the world is a "vale of tears" that it can also be a "vale of Soul-making."

Boston College

J. ROBERT BARTH, S.J.

(1.) Used by Graham Greene as the epigraph of The End of the Affair (London: Heinemann, 1951).

(2.) The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958) 1: 243; hereafter referred to as Letters.

(3.) "Keats and the Notion of Truth," The Challenge of Keats: Bicentenary Essays, 1795-1995, ed. Allan C. Christensen, Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, Giuseppe Galigani, and Anthony L. Johnson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) 27.

(4.) Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York: Columbia UP, 1939-) 3: 1780-1830: Romantic Faith (1949); Edward E. Bostetter, "The Eagle and the Truth: Keats and the Problem of Belief," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 18 (1958): 362-72; Ronald A. Sharp, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1979).

(5.) Robert M. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976).

(6.) "Teaching the Religious in Keats: The Challenge of the New Intentionalism," Literature and Belief 13 (1993): 1-29..

(7.) Nicholas Roe, in John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), writes helpfully about Keats's schooling at Enfield (7-50) and at Guy's Hospital (160-81).

(8.) In his later book, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), Ryan makes a persuasive case that Keats had read and been influenced by Tom Paine's The Age of Reason. The "vale of Soul-making" letter, Ryan writes, "resembles Paine's thinking in its dismissal of Christianity as another species of mythology, another surrender to the polytheistic impulse, one more corruption of pure theism by those who, whether ancient oracles or modern priests, would interpose palpable mediators between divinity and humanity" (169).

(9.) Hyder Rollins suggests (Letters 2: 101n.) that Keats may have been thinking of "This dim vast vale of tears" from Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (line 17), but the phrase is an ancient and familiar one from Christian prayer and hymnody.

(10.) The word "vale" is heavily freighted for Keats. As Jonathan Bate has argued convincingly, "it was Milton who showed Keats how to use this word 'vale' with resonance." Bate suggests, for example, that the opening line of Hyperion--"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale"--carries not only the echoes of Miltonic diction but also, "with its simultaneous suggestion of enclosure and a veil of mourning," evokes an ambiguous mood suggestive of Milton, for there are "vales" not only in heaven but in hell. See "Keats's Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton," Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 322-23. Thus one should perhaps not be surprised to find Keats using the word not only of the "vale of tears" spoken of by the "misguided and superstitious," but also of his own "vale of Soul-making."

(11.) "The Soul, Highest Cast of Consciousness," The Cast of Consciousness: Concepts of the Mind in British and American Romanticism, ed. Beverly Taylor and Robert Bain (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987) 8.

(12.) For Keats's letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (3 May 1818), see Letters 1: 275-83.

(13.) The text of Keats's poetry is taken from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1978), referred to hereafter as Poems. For the dating of the "Ode to Psyche," see Poems 647.

(14.) These "branched thoughts" may well be an echo of a passage earlier in the "Mansion of Many Apartments" letter to Reynolds (3 May 1818): "You seem by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute zest the same labyrinth that I have--I have come to the same conclusion thus far. My Branchings out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is the consideration of Wordsworth's genius and as a help ... how he differs from Milton" (1: 278).

(15.) See Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1963) 493.

(16.) John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking, 1963) 279.

(17.) Quoted by Ryan (215) from an Atlantic Monthly article of 1863.

(18.) The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816-1878, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1948) 2: 166.

(19.) "In all then he breathed a simple Christian spirit; indeed I always think he died a Christian, that 'Mercy' was trembling on his dying lips and that his tortured soul was received by those Blessed Hands which alone could welcome it"; quoted by Ryan (215) from the 1863 Atlantic Monthly article cited above.

(20.) Quoted by William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Seven (New York: Scribner, 1892) 87; see Ryan 212-13.