Owing to Psyche

Abstract

“Owing to Psyche” examines Keats’s well‐known ode to address the long‐standing debate concerning poetry’s justice. Poetry alternately is said to have an important moral function in telling us truths about ourselves, to be harmful because it misrepresents truths otherwise accessible, or to function as mere pleasurable entertainment. In particular, Keats exemplifies a familiar portrayal of Romantic poets and, by extension, Romanticism proper, as maturing from an early, naïve faith in the just ends of poetry to a later demystification that culminates in an ostensibly more modern, truer conception of “art for art’s sake,” or mere poetry. Keats’s Psyche, however, undermines the progressive schemes on which this understanding of Romanticism and literary history relies. Rendering the choice between early and late, like that between just and mere poetry, inoperative, my reading of Keats’s ode collapses the delimitation of “Romanticism” as a particular moment within a progressive literary history, and therewith an oversimplification of the social operations of what I call just poetry.

Notes

[1] This article is part of a larger manuscript, “Political Bodies, In/Humanities,” in which I expand on the implications of what I call “just poetry” in bodies politic, corporal punishment, definitions of human rights, and determinations of national identity.

[2] See Elisabeth Bumiller’s article, “The First Lady Builds a Literary Room of Her Own.”

[3] Cynthia Chase’s introduction to her Romanticism, which neatly summarizes typical Romantic criticism, is a kind of fulcrum for my argument. According to Hartman’s characterization of Romanticism “the traditional scheme of Eden, Fall, and redemption merges with the new triad of nature, self‐consciousness, imagination” (49–50).

[4] In the background, too, is Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp, which describes a progressive change in theories and practices of art, from mimetic to pragmatic, through expressive, and so on. Ellen Burt’s chapter titled “Hallucinatory History” is instructive here regarding theses “that the referent of modern poems could be precisely the historical event of a change in the way that poets think about language and poetry, the event of the establishment of a new and more modern understanding of literature and literariness” (161).

[5] According to Hartman, “it is the Romantics who first explore the dangerous passageways of maturation” (Chase 44–45).

[6] See de Man’s “Introduction to the Poetry of John Keats.”

[7] Other indications include, for example, de Man’s quotation marks around “late” in “ ‘late’ Keats”, and comments that “late” elements occur in “early” poems, and vice versa (“Introduction,” 191, 184, 189). On “historicizing” de Man, or, for that matter Keats or Romanticism, see Warminski’s “Ending Up,” especially 35n8.

[8] I italicize the ode’s title throughout in order to distinguish it from other uses I make of “psyche.” For consistency, I also use italics when referring to other odes by Keats.

[9] “Everything that appears on the left must reappear, in mirror image, on the right; or, in terms of the aesthetic of the ode, whatever has existed in ‘life’ must be, and can be, restored in art” (Vendler 44–49). For Vendler’s Keats, “the later odes demonstrate how unsatisfactory, on further reflection, Keats found this reduplicative mirror‐image conception of art—art as a wholly internalized, mimetic, imaginative activity.” By the time of To Autumn, he’ll have given up such naivety, so that he “fully accepts the separation of nature and art” (48, 58).

[10] My parentheses in “(re)presentation” are indicative of a problematic as to whether Keats’s art would progress from presentation to representation or vice versa. Both possibilities are congruent with Vendler’s rendition. As will become clear, the choice makes no difference. Despite a provocative ambiguity, Vendler’s overall schema is in keeping with a typical rendering of Romanticism as a transition from Just poetry to a just Poetry, which, nevertheless, is redeemable. Not surprisingly, Vendler recuperates a certain justice for the later Keats. Despite demystification, he still sees “poetry as socially productive”; art “ benefits the world, and delights in its own creation” (284–285).

[11] See Warminski’s working through of Keats’s “or’s” in his “Allegories of Symbol.” My rendition of Psyche also is indebted to Warminski’s analysis of chiasmus in his Readings in Interpretation.

[12] See de Man’s reading of Proust on metaphor as a product of mere contiguity or syntax ( Allegories 15–16). Notably Psyche highlights relations of contiguity, as do Vendler’s reiterations of “juxtaposition.” For example, Psyche and Cupid are “side by side” in a would‐be consummation of sorts: “Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,/As if disjoined.”

[13] Psyche, per Brown, can be said to complete Hyperion, which, based on the myth of the Grand March of Intellect, is “at once a parody and a substitute myth for his own poetry, if not for his age,” and “the final, cultural transformation of poetry.” The familiar myth “is not only the myth of the child in the eyes of the adult but also the myth of romanticism about its relations with the classical age” (55, 51).

[14] “Keats’s poem celebrates the renewal and deification of the ‘heathan’ goddess Psyche, the human mind or soul, placing Christianity in turn in a long line of outworn, ‘faded’ superstitions efficacious only in providing the forms for the new worship. That is to say, what is being deified is the literary itself, poetry, and Christianity has become another ‘mythological’ stage, a metaphor in a long line of complex metaleptic substitutions” (Brown 54).

[15] “Far from being a question of Hegelian conversion, the modernist project is exposed as a play of substitutions, … the substitution of one metaphoric meaning for another metaphoric meaning, in an almost endless succession of figures” (Brown 55, 52). Similar possibilities run through Vendler’s account; elements of her “late” Keats will turn out to have been there from the start: “To say, for instance, that the gardener Fancy, the nightingale, and the dead sculptor of the urn are all metamorphoses of a single element (the creative artist) … helps in understanding the way Keats’s imagination went to work. Each ode is generated out of previous odes in part by image‐transformations of this sort” (Vendler 10).

[16] “The diction of the fane is … allegorical, as the original diction of Psyche’s bower is not. … Keats had thought of following the line ‘Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same’ with the line ‘So bower’d Goddess will I worship thee,’ but he deleted it, realizing that his goddess was no longer in a bower but in a fane, that bower language is not fane language, that nature is not architectural artifact” (Vendler 68).

[17] In Brown’s terms, the poem’s “self reading” and its reading of the textuality of literary history tell us that “the processes of substitution and supplementation involved in metaphor, its usurious additive and wearing away effects, will allow for an ultimate and originating referent to be located neither in the poetic power of the mind nor in the capacity of things for suggesting resemblances. … No repetition is ever the same, but neither is the Fancy ever free, neither is there ever anything totally new” (Brown 55).

[18] See the title essay of de Man’s Resistance to Theory on similar mistakes.

[19] The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics names Psyche as a “complete modern instance of [the Homeric] structure” (Preminger 855–856).

[20] At the end of her itinerary Vendler provocatively claims that the governing trope of the odes as a whole is apostrophe (Vendler 292–293).

[21] This contrasts with the late Vendlerian Keats whose last ode is “prompted by no debt,” but is “sufficient to itself” (Vendler 261).

[22] Apuleius’s version begins: “There was sometime a certain king … who had to wife a noble dame, by whom he had three daughters exceeding fair … but the singular passing beauty and maidenly majesty of the youngest daughter was so far excellent, that no earthly tongue could by any means sufficiently express or set out the same; by reason whereof the citizens and strangers there … did no less worship reverence her … as if she were Lady Venus indeed. … By occasion whereof such a contempt grew toward the goddess Venus, that … liturgies were left out, her temples defaced, her couches contemned [ sic], her ceremonies neglected. … For why, every person honoured and worshipped this maiden instead of Venus, calling upon the divinity of that great goddess in a human form, … called her by the name of Venus which was not Venus indeed, and in her honour, as she walked in the streets, presented flowers and garlands in most reverent fashion …” (95–96; my emphasis).

[23] On catachresis see in particular Derrida’s “White Mythology” and Warminski’s Readings. See also Burt’s discussion of prosopopoeia and catachresis concerning what Hugo’s poem, La Révolution, says “about the pressures in language toward reference and signification,” and “their historicity” (especially 174).

[24] In my work in progress on “Political Bodies, In/Humanities,” I expand on the problematic of naming “human” via Heidegger. See also Barbara Johnson on de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope”: “[Anthropomorphism] is not the name of a pure rhetorical structure, but the name of a comparison one of whose terms is treated as a given (as epistemologically resolved). To use an anthropomorphism is to treat as known what the properties of the human are” (207).

[25] See Deborah Esch’s essay on de Man and Shelley: “Shelleyan legislation—‘the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man’ (S[helley’s] P[rose] 282)—is readable above all as an institution of and in language, as an exercise of positional ‘power’ (SP 293, 296–297). The law ( Gesetz) functions as such by virtue of position ( Setzung), of an act whose arbitrariness Shelley emphasizes in the Defence: ‘For language is arbitrarily produced …’ (SP 279). Poetic language thus comprises both figure and force, … it is to be read as substitution on the one hand, and as institution on the other” (71).

[26] I am borrowing the phrase from Patricia Parker’s Shakespeare from the Margins. “Constitutive metaphors” recalls both Vendler on Keats’s odes and Abrams on literary history.