EMILY SUN
Facing Keats with Winnicott:
On a New Therapeutics,
of Poetry
T IS REMARKABLE THAT, THROUGHOUT HIS BRIEF AND INCOMPARABLY IN-
tense writing career, Keats never ceased to insist upon the therapeutic
function of poetry. From his buoyant declaration in the 1816 "Sleep and
Poetry" that "the great end / Of poesy" is "that it should be a friend / To
sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" (245-47) to the anxious emphasis of the poet-narrator to Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion (1819) that
"sure a poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men" (I89-9o),
Keats
maintained this underlying therapeutic conception of art but found himself
having to renew the temis of his claims.' Such work of re-assessment suggests the degree to which Keats's poetry may be read as a history of ongoing self-critique, of self-reading, the most complex episodes of which I suggest take place in the Odes of Spring 1819 and in The Fall of Hyperion. An
examination of the transformation of his therapeutic conception of poetry
may shed light on the vexed and much debated relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Keats's work.
My present reading follows upon recent interventions by such critics as
Forest Pyle and Robert Kaufman, who have sought to challenge the influential New Historicist judgment of Keats as guilty of repressing the sociopolitical and economic conditions of poetic production, of escaping from
the world of human suffering into an idealized world of art, and fostering
such tendencies in complicitous readers. Paying close attention to the textual workings of the poems themselves, Pyle, from a combination of Marxist and deconstructionist perspectives, and Kaufman, from a MarxistAdornian perspective, both locate the critical force of Keats's poetry pre2
cisely in the way his poems unsettle their own stated positions and claims.
i. References to Keats's poetry are taken from Joium Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack
Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978) and are cited with line numbers.
2. See Pyle, "Keats's Materialism" SiR 33 (Spring 1994): 57-80, and Kaufiman, "Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde" CritSiR, 46 (Spring
57
2007)
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EMILY SUN
In this essay, I will examine "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and concentrate in them on the rhetorical device of apostrophe,
the figure of address-often taken to be constitutive of odic formwhereby the poetic speaker establishes I-thou relationships with inanimate
entities. Among the Spring Odes, "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn" stage
the speaker's encounters with a symbol or work of art in ways that serve
instructively as allegories of reading; they invite readers to ask how, on a
meta-poetic level, we are implicated by and in relation to Keats's poems
themselves. It is within the contexts established by apostrophe that Keats
raises his questions about art's function in relation to death and suffering. In
"Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," two possibilities assert themselves most
distinctly as articulations of art's function. In "Nightingale," the speaker
tries to locate art as the space of an "elsewhere" that transcends and offers
escape from the "here" of sickness and mortality; in "Grecian Urn," the
speaker associates the work of art with a transcendent realm of permanence
that offers consolation to transient generations of viewer-interpreters. Both
possibilities have been associated by critics as consistent with Keats's own
avowed "humanism" or "humanitarianism"-his idea that "a poet is a
sage; / A humanist, physician to all men"-but both possibilities, I contend, are superseded within the poems themselves. 3 In these odes, Keats
goes beyond thematizing death as a general condition which art has the capacity to transcend towards registering the impact of death as a decisive
event around which art formulates and reformulates itself, and around
which the poetic subject shapes and reshapes itself In so doing, Keats responds, I will argue, obliquely to the specific event of his brother Tom's
death in December I818.
My approach to Keatsian apostrophe will be informed by the psychoanalytic perspective of D. W. Winnicott, the British Object Relations psychoical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 354-84. The most influential New Historicist readings of
Keats remain Jerome McGann's "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism" in
The Beauty of Inflections: Literary InvestiQations in Historical Method & Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 9-65, and Marjorie Levinson's Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (New
York: Basil Blackwell, t988).
3. In his "Introduction to the Poetry ofJohn Keats," Paul de Man defines Keats's "humanitarian attitude" as an attentiveness to "the suffering of others" that is, however, "always
'of the world' and," probleniatically, "not his own": the "suffering referred to is so general
that it designates a universal human predicament" Critical Writings, 1953-1978, ed. Lindsay
Waters (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 179-97 (i 89-9o). Hermione de Almeida de-
fends such a humanistic stance virs-ý-vis the universality of suffering when she writes of how
"[i]n an age of warring and self-destructive ideologies when it is considered unfashionable to
speak of serving humanity ... [Keats] has kept his humanizing place among the greatest English poets . . ." "Introduction" to Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hennione de Almeida
(Boston: G. K. Hall, I99o) 8.
FACING
KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
59
analyst best known for his theory of the transitional object, the infant's first
"not-me" possession that helps it gradually to separate from its mother.
Winnicott links the infant's use of the transitional object with the very origins of creativity in human experience, and readers of both Keats and
Winnicott have already noted the striking resonances between the poet and
the psychoanalyst's conceptions of the creative process.4 It is my contention
that, insofar as the transitional object can be construed as a personification
dependent on yet separate from the external and actual mother, it has the
potential to shed light on the complex operations of personification in
Keats's lyric apostrophes. And it is my hope that the juxtaposition of poet
and psychoanalyst will further illuminate the shared stakes and claims of
their respective therapeutic projects.
The relevance of a psychoanalytic account of the origins of address to the
rhetorical device of apostrophe has been underscored by Barbara Johnson,
perhaps the foremost thinker of the figure's centrality in lyric poetry. In her
pathbreaking 1986 essay, "Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion," Johnson
defines apostrophe as "the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate
being by a first-person speaker .... Apostrophe is ... both direct and indirect: based etymologically on the notion of turning aside, of digressing
from straight speech, it manipulates the I/thou structure of direct address in
an indirect, fictionalized way. The absent, dead, or inanimate entity addressed is thereby made present, animate, and anthropomorphic.'"` At the
end of her essay, Johnson suggests that "there may be a deeper link between motherhood and apostrophe than we have hitherto suspected." To
elaborate her point, she turns to the psychoanalytic perspective ofJacques
Lacan:
The verbal development of the infant, according to Lacan, begins as
a demand addressed to the mother, out of which the entire verbal
universe is spun. Yet the mother is somehow a personification, not a
person-a personification of presence or absence, of Otherness itself.
"Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it
calls for. It is demand of a presence or of an absence-which is what is
manifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with the
4. See Brooke Hopkins, "Keats's 'Ncgative Capability' and Winnicott's Creative Play"
American inagO 41 (Spring 1984): 85-ioo; Albert Hutter, "Poetry in Psychoanalysis: Hopkins,
Rossetti, Winnicott" in Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W'
Winnicott (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 63-88 (66-69); Adam Phillips, "Poetry and Psychoanalysis" in Promises, Promises (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 1-34.
5. A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 184-99 (185). References to
this essay will hereafter be indicated by page number.
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EMILY SUN
Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. . . . Insofar as
[man's] needs are subjected to demand, they return to him alienated.
This is not the effect of his real dependence . . . but rather the turning
into signifying form as such, from the fact that it is from the locus of
the Other that its message is emitted." If demand is the originary vocative, which assures life even as it inaugurates alienation, then it is not
surprising that questions of animation inhere in the rhetorical figure of
apostrophe. (198)
Johnson underlines here, with recourse to Lacan, that the act of address begins in the infant's relationship to the mother, in its translation of need into
signifying form.6 From this perspective, the history of lyric poetry "comes
to look like the fantastically intricate history of endless elaborations and displacements of the single cry, 'Mama!'" (199).
As a psychoanalyst, Lacan was concerned pre-ernnently with language
and with the constitutive displacement of desire as it passes through language as a system of differential relations. Winnicott, on the other hand,
was a psychoanalyst pre-eminently concerned with the use of objects, who
has sometimes been faulted for not paying sufficient attention to the alienating effects of language. His emphasis was rather on those transitional objects and phenomena that precede and prepare for the accession to language, objects and phenomena whose use arises only in the primordial
relation to the mother in the gradual and delicate process of her being per7
ceived as a separate entity.
To what extent, then, is it possible to conceive of apostrophe in terms of
pre-verbal Winnicottian transitional objects and phenomena? In what ways
does apostrophe resemble a teddy bear, a doll, or a smelly blanket?
In the Winnicottian account of human development, the transitional object emerges in early childhood as the infant's "original 'not-me' possession"; it helps the infant separate from the mother but can emerge only in
the context of "good-enough" maternal care.8 While the teddy bear may
stand for the breast, it varies from Melanie Klein's concept of the internal
object in that it is not a mental concept; it is neither internal nor external
but intermediate, neither a hallucination over which the infant exercises
6. Johnson quotes from Lacan's "The Signification of the Phallus" in Ecrits, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 281-91 (286).
7. Because of space constraints and the specific focus of my inquiry, I cannot make in this
essay more than a few punctual distinctions between Winnicott and Lacan. For a rich elaboration of crucial differences, and for a contextualization of Winnicott in relation also to
Freud, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, see Andr6 Green, "Potential Space in Psychoanalysis" in On Private Madness (London: Rebus P, 1972) 277-96.
8. See Donald Woods Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" in
Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1982) 1-25. Subsequent references to this book
will be indicated by the abbreviation PR and included in the text.
FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
61
omnipotent control nor part of a completely external reality but, rather, a
phenomenon in-between. 9 Transitional objects and transitional phenomena belong to the realm of non-hallucinatory illusion: they allow the infant
"the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant's
own capacity to create" (PR 12). Whether the object is created or found is
a question destined to remain unanswered, for the object "would not have
been created as such if it had not already been there" (PR 71). The baby
exercises an attenuated creative power in relation to a found object and
gains experience thereby of "a state between the illusion of the mother's
total adaptation to needs and reality's total indifference to them."',,
Although necessarily inaugurated in early childhood, the transitional object, according to Winnicott, has not only developmental but also synchronic structural significance, for the "intermediate area of experience
[thus initiated] constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience, and
throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the
arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific
work" (PR 14). The way the transitional object assumes an intermediate
position between inner and external reality underlies also other of Winnicott's theoretical insights. I turn now to one such key insight, which likewise needs to be thought of in tenis of the logic of intermediateness.
In a 1967 paper entitled "The Mirror-role of the Mother and Family in
Child Development," Winnicott responds to Lacan's 1949 essay on the
mirror stage in the formation of the ego by positing the mother's face as the
precursor of the mirror." In the hypothetical scenario Winnicott delineates,
... at some point the baby takes a look round. Perhaps the baby at the
breast does not look at the breast. Looking at the face is more likely to
be a feature. What does the baby see there? What does the baby see
when he or she looks at the mother's face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself In other words the
mother is looking at the baby and ivhat she looks like is related to iwhat she
sees there. (PR 1 12)
The baby's sense of himself or herself as separate is inaugurated in the specular two-way looking between mother and child. This has paradigmatic
importance for later human relationships, serving specifically as a model for
9. See Melanie Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States"
in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free P, 1987) 115-45.
i. Barbara Johnson, "Using People: Kant with Winnicott" in The Turni to Ethics, ed.
Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000)
47-64 (52).
i i. See Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" in Ecrits
1-7.
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that between analyst and analysand. "Psychotherapy is not making clever
and apt interpretations," Winnicott writes at the end of the essay, "by and
large it is a longer-term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It is
a complex derivative of the face that reflects back what is there to be seen"
(PR 117).12
Let us consider more closely the elements of this hypothetical moment.
What is reflected back to the baby is not a static image of body wholeness
like the image in Lacan's mirror. What is mirrored back in the potential
space between mother and child is an interaction that might be described
in terms of the transitional object as something that is both created and
found, that is neither internal nor external but intermediate. What emerges
in the specular situation is the mother's face/baby's sense of self as an illusory and malleable third between baby proper and mother proper. The
mother's face/baby's sense of self results from a transitional looking; it is
both created and found. As a facilitating condition, the mother or-as
Winnicott takes care to qualify' 3-nmother-figure
needs to provide her
availability and responsiveness so that the "mother's face" may be created/
found. The pre-Oedipal mother-infant specularity Winnicott describes is
not then a condition of dyadic symmetry, unity, and plenitude, but a potential space in which something new has happened, in which creativity
and interaction take place for the separating-out of the not-me from the
me, on the way towards language. In a Keatsian idiom, this space may be
called )a "chamber of maiden play."
Rhetorically, what is creatively generated as the mother's face can be
termed a personification, a personification beyond the world of reference
that is not the referential mother proper but that is contingent on her provision and participation. The mother's face as transitional object is a
personification, a creative illusion necessary for the development of the self,
that makes communication possible, and makes it possible for the baby to
12. In "Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self," Winnicott observes in a
footnote that "the sense of self comes on the basis of an unintegrated state which, however,
by definition, is not observed and remembered by the individual, and which is lost unless observed and mirrored back by someone who is trusted and who justifies the trust and meets
the dependence" (PR 61). Such formulations implying a specular transferential structure occur passii throughout his writings.
13. Even Winnicott's most sympathetic readers have rightly objected to his tendency to
re-affirm patriarchal gender roles and to endorse heterosexual familial ideology. See Claire
Kahane, "Gender and Voice in Transitional Phenomena" in Transitional Objects and Potential
Spaces 278--9i and Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother fromiDickens to Freud (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998), Chapter 2. He does systematically make allowances, however, for the
mother-figure being non-identical with the biological mother; that is to say, the role of the
mother can be assumed by the other parent, another member of the family, or a consistent
care-giver who is not a member of the family.
FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
63
experience the world. As transitional phenomena, both the teddy bear and
the mother's face are illusions that are not identical to the referential
mother proper but have to do, nonetheless, with the reality of the empirical
mother. They are personifications that are not detached, intact, and autonomous but involve interaction with the environment, focalized in the responsiveness and consistency of the mother-figure.
What happens when the mother is not available or responsive? In the
case of the baby looking at the mother's face, "[t]he mother's face is not
then a mirror. So perception takes the place of apperception, perception
takes the place of that which might have been the beginning of a significant
exchange with the world, a two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things" (PR
113). What happens for the baby learning to use the transitional object? For
the baby to use the object and then to move on to other objects, "there
must be the beginning of the setting up in the infant's mind or personal
psychic reality of an image of the object. But the mental representation in
the inner world is kept significant ... by the reinforcement given through
the availability of the external separated-off and actual mother" (PR 97).
The backdrop of external reinforcement, of environmental continuity, allows the baby to develop the ability to sustain an inner mental representation of the object-and thus the growing ability to deal with maternal absence. 14 The process is a precarious and perilous one. Premature maternal
failure results in trauma. "Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a
break in life's continuity, so that primitive defences now become organized
to defend against a repetition of 'unthinkable anxiety' or a return of the
acute confusional state that belongs to disintegration of nascent ego structure" (PR 97). What arises, then, in place of creative illusion that makes
communication possible and keeps inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated are defense organizations, illusions that block or impede the process of interrelating inner and outer reality-that block the self's conmmunication with and experience of the world. As a price for the protection
that defense organizations afford, betweenness disappears.
14. See Reni6 Roussillon, "Paradoxe et continuit6 chez Winnicott: Les d6fenses
paradoxales" Bulletin de Psychlogie xxxiv, no. 350 (April 1, 198o): 503-9. "La continuit6
int6rieure/ext6rieure, dont laxe est le paradoxe, d&pend elle-mýrne d'une autre continuit&,
purement externe celle-l, celle de l'existence maternelle.... Faute de cette continuitY,
(externe/intemne) se d6veloppe une faille dans le continuum de l'enfant, celui-ci devra
d6velopper tine 'd6fense primaire' pour compenser cette carence et continuier d prot6ger luim,nýe d'une menace d'annihilation" (505). ["Internal/external continuity, which turns on
paradox, depends itself on another continuity that is entirely external to it, that of maternal
presence .... Without this continuity (external/internal) there develops a breach in the continuum of the infant, who must develop a primary defense to compensate for the gap and to
continue to protect itself from the threat of annihilation"; iny translation.]
EMILY SUN
64
"Fear of Breakdown"
Winnicott discusses one specific defense organization he has observed in
his clinical experiences in "Fear of Breakdown," an essay published posthumously in 1974 but possibly written as early as 1963. "Breakdown," he acknowledges, is a rather "vague" term that encompasses a variety of phenomena, but he uses it here to designate "the failure of a defence
organization."' 5 Fear of breakdown, then, symptomatizes a defense that
masks a radically "unthinkable state ... a breakdown of the establishment
of the unit self. . . . The ego organises defences against breakdown of the
ego-organisation, and it is the ego-organisation that is threatened" (PE 88).
When a patient manifests a fear of breakdown, it is "thefear of a breakdown
that has already been experienced"; "the patient must go on looking for the
past detail which is not yet experienced. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future" (PE 9o). The patient continues in, as it
were, compulsively repetitive behavior, to look for a mnissed, inaccessible
aspect of experience. In the clinical setting, "[t]he patient needs to 'remember' . . . but it is not possible to remember something that has not yet happened, and this thing of the past has not happened yet because the patient
was not here for it to happen to. The only way to 'remember' . . . is for the
patient to experience this past thing for the first time in the present, that is
to say, in the transference" (PE 92).
Winnicott is recognizably formulating here ideas on trauma that build on
Freud's theory of traumatic neurosis as elaborated in, among other texts,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. His remarks deal specifically with an early infantile origin, hypothesize a primal scene of trauma that occurred when the
ego was not yet organized, when the continuity necessary for the establishment of the "unit self" was interrupted such that the developing ego organizes itself defensively around the traumatic event.16
He turns in the essay to discussing "fear of death"-"perhaps a more
common fear"-in terms of his general thesis of fear of breakdown. In the
case of a patient with "a compulsion to look for death . . . it is the death
that happened but was not experienced that is sought" (PE 93). For an example Winnicott turns to Keats rather than to one of his clinical cases:
"When Keats was 'half in love with easeful death' he was, according to my
idea that I am putting forward here, longing for the ease that would come
15.
Psycliaoialytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, Madeleine Davis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 87-95 (88). Subsequent references to this volume will
be indicated by the abbreviation PE and cited by page number within the text.
16. See Max Hernandez, "Winnicott's 'Fear of Breakdown': On and Beyond Trauma"
Diacritics 28.4 (1998): 134-43.
65
FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
if he could 'remember' having died; but to remember he must experience
death now" (PE 93).
The quote embedded here occurs in stanza 6 of "Nightingale":
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die.
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
(51-56)
These haunting, melodious verses have long tantalized interpreters, and the
wish for death they contain constitutes one of several dramatic turns in the
poem. The first three lines point to the speaker's pattern of recurrent fascination with death, a fascination expressed specifically in the medium of
poetry--"[c]all'd him soft names in many a mus&d rhyme," while line 55
instantiates the wish for death in the present tense-"Now more than ever
seems it rich to die." Curiously, the words Keats chooses as temporal markers here-"For many a time," "in many a mused rhyme"-suggest repetitive seriality and discreteness rather than the continuous duration of one
who has, say, for a long time been "half in love with easeful Death." Why
does Keats place this accent on discreteness?
Drawing on Winnicott, we may speculate that "for many a time" the
unit of the individual poem served Keats as the site of a compulsion-a
compulsion to look for death, no less. We may also infer, drawing on
Winnicott, that the poem serves somewhat like the scene of a transference.
It is possible thus to think of the Odes not just as a generically and formally
determined series with general thematic continuity, but as sites of a compulsion to repeat where Keats is searching, on an autobiographical level, for
a missed detail.
2
Keats composed the Odes of Spring in quick succession during a few
weeks towards the end of April and the beginning of May 1819. Each of
the Odes features what Jack Stillinger calls the general "cosmography" of
Keats's poems: "a literally spatial conception of two realms in opposition
and a mythlike set of actions involving characters shuttling back and forth
between them."' 7 A catalogue of terms that characterizes this opposition
between realms includes: "earth and heaven, mortality and immortality,
17. "Introduction" in John Keats: Complete Poems xiii-xxviii. Further references to this
text will be indicated by page number within the essay.
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time and eternity, materiality and spirituality, the known and the unknown, the finite and the infinite, realism and romance, the natural and the
supernatural" (xvii). Broadly put, these describe the opposition between
"the realm of mortals . . . associated with mutability, natural process,
and
death" and a transcendert realm "associated most significantly with permanence" (xvii). Speakers and characters within both Keats's lyric and narrative poems tend to engage in a shuttle movement of excursion between
worlds, a passage that each individual composition renews. 18 In the Spring
Odes, this movement between worlds is mediated specifically by the rhetorical device of apostrophe. In "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," the addressed entity figures in each case as the synecdoche of a realm alternative
to the one where the speaker finds himself at the outset of the poem: the
Nightingale represents a mythical forest world associated with the tradition
of romance; and the Urn is supposed to be a relic from ancient Greece. By
addressing Nightingale and Urn, the speaker establishes a contrast with the
world "where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," and "where
old age shall this generation waste."
Strikingly, the speakers' shuttle movement within the Odes parallels and
repeats closely the terms of Keats's own shuttling back and forth between
his writing and his brother Tom's sickbed over half a year ago. Tom Keats
died in December 1818 after a protracted struggle with tuberculosis, the
disease which Keats himself was also to die of in t821, putatively after having contracted it from his brother. During Tom's last months, Keats, who
was trained as an apothecary, attended to his brother, moving back to his
writing for relief from the sight of his brother's suffering. On September
21, i818, he writes to his friend Dilke: "[Tom's] identity presses upon me
so all day that I am obliged to go out-and although I intended to have
given some time to study alone I am obliged to write, and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance his voice and feebleness-so
that I live now in a continual fever ... if I think of fame of poetry it seems
a crime to me, and yet I must do so or suffer."'19 Tom's countenance . . .
voice and feebleness" reproduce themselves infectiously in Keats's "contin18. To mention cursorily a few earlier examples, the poet-speaker in "On First Looking
into Chapman's Homer" writes of a reading experience that initiates and exposes him to an
epic universe, an open, uncharted territory likened progressively in the sestet to the skies, the
Pacific, the New World. In the sonnets on seeing the Elgin Marbles, the speaker likewise situates his speaking relation to a classical world glimpsed through his encounter with the
sculptures. In Endymioui, the eponymous hero yearns to be united with his mysterious lover
Cynthia, who belongs as a goddess to an ontologically higher sphere. And we come across
Apollo in Hyperion addressing Mnemosyne in an encounter that will make him immortal.
i9. The Letters ofjohn Keats, ed. Hyder E. R.ollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1958) 1: 369. References to this edition will be cited by volume and page number within the
essay.
FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
67
ual fever." The next day, a propos the first Hyperion, abandoned shortly before the composition of the Spring Odes, he remarks to his friend
Reynolds: "this morning Poetry has conquered-I have relapsed into those
abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a new strange and
threatening sorrow.-And I am thankful for it-There is an awful warmth
about my heart like a load of Immortality" (1: 370). Poetry is here assigned
the role of abstract, disinterested refuge from a world of death and sorrow.
This is the role Keats would like to attribute to the Grecian Urn as representative work of art, claiming in stanza 5 that "[w]hen old age shall this
generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours,
a friend to man" (46-48).
What the parallels between the letters and the poems suggest is that, encoded within the Odes are Keats's attempts to reckon with a "missed detail" in regard to his brother's death. Both the "Nightingale" and "Grecian
Urn" Odes continue the shuttle pattern of the speaker's escape into "abstractions which are my only life," but they deliberate this repetition in
ways that reveal the inadequacy of this understanding of poetry and open
up a new poetic path.
I turn now to how, in both "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," Keats's poetic speakers raise questions about the function of art in relation to suffering
and mortality via apostrophes to the Nightingale and the Urn. "Nightingale" positions the work of art in relation to death by establishing art's
space as an "elsewhere" that provides escape for "hungry generations"
from the "here" of suffering and death. Yet, the "here" and "elsewhere"
thus established undergo several destabilizing instantiations within the
poem, revealing the precariousness of the apostrophaic operation. The
speaker of "Grecian Urn" valorizes the silence of the Urn to associate the
work of art with a condition of permanence that makes art a stable and
consolatory reference point for changing generations. In opposition to this
first connotation of silence within the Ode, there occurs in stanza 4 an alternative "falling silent" that threatens to undo the first connotation. In
both poems, death emerges as an event that interrupts its figuration as a
condition for which art can provide escape or consolation.
Such latter figurations I term, with a twist on the traditional generic category, Keats's "defenses of poetry." The tensions within Keats's poems can
be understood in terms of the tension between the use of personification as
a communication that keeps inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated, opening the self to the world, and the use of personification as a defensive illusion that blocks the process of interrelation. It is through discovering and undoing the limits and limitations of such defenses, I will argue,
that Keats moves towards a new therapeutics of art, one that resonates
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powerfully with Winnicott's definition of clinical success as to "enable the
patient to abandon invulnerabilityand to become a sufferer., If we succeed life becomes precarious to one who was beginning to know a kind of stability
and a freedom from pain, even if this meant non-participation in life" (PE
199; italics original).
"Ode to a Nightingale"
Instead of a direct invocation of the addressed entity-akin to "0 Goddess!
hear these tuneless numbers, wrung" or "Thou still unravish'd bride of
quietness"--"Ode to a Nightingale" begins with an elliptical approach to
the Nightingale. The speaker concentrates in the opening quatrain on the
effects the unlocatable bird's song elicits in him:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
(i-4)
While the Grecian Urn is represented as a concrete, visible presence, the
Nightingale figures as an unseen, ephemeral entity. The imagery and
rhythm here suggest a simulative descent into the underworld, with the
deathly connotations of the passage further enhanced by the pun on "plot"
in the eventual, oblique address to the Nightingale, made via a grammatically indeterminate segue into the sestet:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,That, thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
(5-io)
The grammatical ellipsis that connects the figure of the speaker with the
figure of the Nightingale renders the contours of their relationship obscure
and enigmatic. The speaker displays throughout the ode a problem of
"placing" as he tries to create, again and again, an opposition between
a
"here" and an "elsewhere."
Stanza 3 emphasizes by counterpoint the difference between the world
of the "here" and the "forest dim" into which the speaker would "fade
away." The world of the "here" is one of sorrow, disease, and death:
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FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
(24-30)
To line 26 most editors append a footnote explaining Tom Keats's recent
death. 20 Keats rehearses in this stanza the idea of art as a refuge from a
world of mortality and mutability. I say "art" here because of the Nightingale's multiple and protean associations with literary tradition. The addressed entity belongs, of course, to a species of bird not uncommon in literature, significant antecedents of which include, to name a few, Ovid's
Philomela, Milton's "wakeful bird" that "sings darkling" in Paradise Lost,
Book 3, and the Nightingale of Coleridge's eponymous conversation poem
of 1798. Keats's Nightingale is further associated with the forest world of
romance, to which the speaker begs access first through libations metaphorical of poetic inspiration, then upon the "viewless wings of Poesy."
The developments that follow, however, complicate this simple opposition between worlds set up by the structure of apostrophe. There has been
much critical debate over what transpires in stanzas 4 through 7, between
the line "Already with thee! tender is the night" in the middle of stanza 4
to the repetition of "forlorn" across stanzas 7 and 8. The sequence is rife
with ambiguity. Does the speaker romantically embrace transcendent, visionary transport? If so, then the "here" of line 38-"But here there is no
light"-would be the elsewhere of the "here" of line 24-"Here, where
men sit and hear each other groan." The renewed apostrophe to the
Nightingale as "immortal Bird!" in stanza 7 would then seem to praise and
re-affirm the capacity of an enchanted realm of art to remain a consolatory
"friend to man" when "old age shall this generation waste" as it has previous "hungry generations." Alternatively, does the speaker reject visionariness? In which case stanza 7 would take on an accusatory tone, with
the "immortal Bird" figured as indifferent to the mortal plight evoked in
stanza 3. Advocates of the latter possibility tend to read the "here" of line
38 as continuous with the "here" of line 24. Stanzas 5 and 6 would then be
read as descriptive of a sensorily available natural world, with the speaker's
20. See, for instance, Romantic Poetry and Prose, eds. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973) 539; and English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967) 1184.
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wish for death in stanza 6 expressing a desire for "oneness" or union with
that natural world. For such critics, the apostrophaic structure of the poem
facilitates a return to the "poetry of earth," "to the significant earth whence
all sign-constructions take their origin.'"21
Yet, a further development within the ode problematizes the parameters
of this debate. The passage between stanzas 7 and 8 is mediated by the
word "forlorn" that functions onomatopoetically like a bell to toll the
speaker back to his "sole self." "Forlorn" is a parabasis that interrupts the
apostrophe. What is peculiar to this textual moment, according to Paul de
Man in a famous exchange with Murray Krieger, is that it "occurs as an actual present in the only material present of the ode, the actual moment of
its inscription when Keats writes the word 'forlorn' and interrupts himself
to reflect on its arbitrary sound. "22 This moment is the only here-and-now
of writing in the poem, as it is the only here-and-now in the practice of
reading that tries to meet it. "Forlorn" thus renders questionable the
"here"s of lines 24 and 38 and their function as indicative tokens of actuality. What follows the "here" of line 24 is a series of emblematic tableaux
vivants-"men [who] sit and hear each other groan," "palsy [that] shakes a
few, sad, last gray hairs," "youth [that] grows pale, and spectre-thin, and
dies"-that reveals deixis to be a masquerade. What follows the "here" of
line 38, be it visionarily imagined or sensorily described, likewise fails to
uphold its promise of actuality. Advocates of visionariness and advocates of
the "poetry of earth" seem to have taken sides in a spuriously constructed
opposition. The entire structure erected by apostrophe is thereby undermined.
Or is it? The closing couplet asks: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? /
Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?" These questions interrogate the
very status of the apostrophe upon which the poem depends. But the shift
within the couplet from the past tense to the present suggests that perhaps
there is no resting point outside of apostrophe, that there is only passage
from one apostrophe to another, and that it is in such passages that the
readerly exposure to Keats's singularity and actuality takes place.
21.
Leslie Brisman, Romanic Orngins (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978) 83. See also Harold
Bloom's reading of the stanzas in terms of what he calls Keats's "naturalistic humanism" in
The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971) 407-12. Stillinger also adheres to such a
view in his "Introduction" to the Complete Poems. See also Cynthia Chase's compelling discussion of the problem of continuity between perception and cognition in "Viewless Wings"
in Lyric Poetry: Beyond Nen Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1985) 208-25.
22. "Murray Krieger: A Commentary (i98i)" in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism,
eds. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1983) i81-87 (t86).
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FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
In the opening quatrain of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats uses a classic instance of apostrophe that foregrounds the addressed entity's implicit
attribute of muteness. In triple apposition, the speaker stresses the theme of
silence:
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
(1-4)
The object's enigmatic inexpressiveness serves as the very point of departure for the poem, eliciting the speaker's act of address. In what follows, I
will pay particular attention to this theme of silence and trace how a counter-movement within the poem puts it into question.
The ensuing sestet develops the speaker's relationship to the Urn in the
interrogative mode with a series of questions that ekphrastically reveal the
images represented on the Urn's surface:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
(5-io)
Syntactical fragmentation contributes to the mounting tempo of urgency
and haste with which the speaker-interpreter tries to construct a coherent
narrative out of the depicted images, themselves increasing in urgency and
haste. What emerges seems to be a scene of pastoral ravishing, undertaken
by men or gods, in contrast to the Urn's own chaste intactness, even if
"still" in line i is read adverbially as an ominous "not yet." Already in
stanza I a tension gets dramatized between the quality of pristine silence attributed to the Urn as aesthetic object and the possible story it silently tells.
Stanza 2 begins with the praise of inaudible sound as the ideal, the absolute principle, of soundHeard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
(11I-14)
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These lines allude to an eternal, transcendental essence of sound as silence
that links with the later apostrophe to the Urn in stanza 5: "Thou, silent
form, dost tease us out of Thought / As doth eternity" (44). Stanzas 2 and 3
present paratactic images of arrested movement, as the speaker addresses individual figures frozen in an eternal present. Silence is here associated with
timelessness and immortality, with the condition of deathlessness. The imimutability of the figures on the Urn is further enhanced by counterpoint
with the vulnerable mortal body anatomized at the end of stanza 3:
a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
(29-30)
The symptoms enumerated here recall the feverish condition of Tom
Keats-"his countenance his voice and feebleness"-that Keats reports to
his friend Dilke and that he himself feels infected with-"I live now in a
continual fever." For relief Keats "plunge[s] into abstract images . . . if I
think of faire of poetry it seems a crime to me, and yet I must do so or
suffer" (1: 369).
Such a conception of poetry as abstract, disinterested refuge gets undercut in stanza 4, which resumes the interrogative mode of the first stanza as
well as enlarges the tension already intimated earlier there. Puzzled over a
scene, the speaker-interpreter asks:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, 0 mysterious priest,
Leads't thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
(31-34)
Scanning the surface of the Urn, he answers his first question by raising
another:
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this fold, this pious morn?
(35-37)
The repeated deictic "this" emphasizes the specificity of what the speaker
infers he sees, in contrast to the universality of much of the poem's
ekphrastic language. Finally, ceasing to describe the surface of the Urn, he
reflects:
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FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
"Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
(38-40)
The theme of silence here seems to undergo a significantly different
inflection. Silence here is not the condition or attribute of the beautiful object of contemplation but, rather, the aftermath of an event hinted at by the
heifer's sacrifice. Whereas silence in the former case is associated with eternity and immortality, silence in the latter is linked to the event of mortality.
The Urn, prized for its aesthetic attributes of permanence and deathlessness, gives oblique testimony here to an event for which there are no more
witnesses. From object of disinterested contemplation, a witness to the
realm of eternity that affords consolation to mortals, the Urn becomes a
historian, though of a very different kind than the "sylvan historian" of line
3, for it is not impartial but part of history, its very participation in history
activated in the interpretive relationship established with the speaker.
In his powerful reading of the ode, Kenneth Burke reminds us that
"[t]he Urn itself, as with the scene upon it, is not merely an immortal act in
our present mortal scene; it was originally an immortal act in a mortal
scene quite different. The imagery of sacrifice, piety, silence, desolation, is
23
that of communication with the immortal or the dead." If the scene depicted in stanza 4 is one of communication with the dead, it can be said to
function as a sort of primal scene within a mise-en-abyne structure of repetitions. The townspeople are engaged in a symbolic transaction that aims at
communication with the dead; just as the poet-speaker is engaged in an interpretive transaction that involves an unexpected encounter with the mortality of the townspeople; just as we are engaged in a reading practice that
makes us witnesses to Keats's singular historical existence.
The ode does not, of course, end with stanza 4. In the final stanza, the
speaker returns to the general apostrophe to the Urn after he has addressed
individual images on its surface. This final stanza has often been faulted for
rushing closure or resolution with its re-affirmation of the Urn's status as a
"silent form" that "[doth] tease us out of thought / As doth eternity," an
entity that gives solace to mortal generations. This strain culminates with
the notoriously dogmatic utterance, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," the
24
Urn's prosopopoetic reply to the speaker's apostrophe. The sentiments
23.
"Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats" in a Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: U of Cali-
fornia P, 1969) 447-64 (456).
24. Prosopopoeia may be regarded as the companion figure of apostrophe. The fiction
prosopopoeia implies but reverses apostrophe insofar as it is the inanimate and voiceless ad-
74
EMILY 'SUN
expressed here closely link up with formiulations in Keats's earlier work:
"things cannot to the will / Be settled, but they tease
us out of thought"
("Epistle to Reynolds" 76-77), "the great end / Of poesy, that it should be
a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" ("Sleep and Poetry" 245-47). These sentiments reinforce a theme which the poem's preceding performance seems, however, to call into question, demonstrating a
conception of art's therapeutic function that is in need of renewal.
If Winnicott defines psycho-therapeutic success as "to enable the patient to
abandon invulnerability and to become a sufferer," how might Keats be
seen to accomplish in these odes such a movement? And how is the reader
implicated in this dynamic?
Winnicott's startling invocation of Keats in "Fear of Breakdown" allows
for a consideration of the odes as scenes of transference, sites where a compulsion to look for death gets curiously enacted. To recapitulate, "fear of
death," according to the essay, is a defense organization that has arisen in
relation to an early traumatic event and masks a radically "unthinkable state
...a breakdown of the establishment of the unit self" (PE 88). The idea of
"self" or "ego-organization" here designates the capacity
to develop and
sustain illusions of continuity, illusions that are constitutively transitional
and intermediate in character (in contrast with the ego as false image of
unity and wholeness that emerges in Lacan's mirror stage). Clinically, for
the patient to be able to move past the "fear of death," a version of the
original "failure" that had occasioned the defense needs to take place: "if
the patient is ready for some kind of acceptance of this queer kind of truth,
that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in the past, then
the way is open for the agony to be experienced in the transference, in reaction to the analyst's failures and mistakes . . . the patient can [then] account for each technical failure of the analyst as countertransference" (PE
9o-91). Insofar as for Winnicott psychotherapy derives from the maternal
face that "reflects back what is there to be seen," its efficacy will depend in
cases on the precarious reflection precisely of maternal failure, of the traumatic breaks in life's continuity that, as Adam Phillips succinctly puts it,
"were formative by virtue of their eluding the self "'25
It is the sense of complexity with which the tropes of face and mirror appear in Winnicott that I would like to bring to bear upon the speakeraddressee relationships established apostrophaically in "Nightingale" and
"Grecian Urn." The speakers' gestures of address in the odes carry with
dressed entity that suddenly acquires the power of speech. See Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures
du discours (Paris: Flarninarion, 1993).
25.
Winnicoft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 3.
FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT
75
them the initial expectation of transcending, via apostrophe, the mortal
worlds in which they are situated to enter a condition of oneness with the
addressed entity, associated with an immortal, immutable world. Such
would be the relief of art. Instead, what is dramatized by the discrepancies
between theme and performance in both odes is the failure of the
apostrophaic gesture. While the Urn and the Nightingale ostensibly fail to
reflect back what the speakers wish for, the poems can be said to reflect
back what the speakers bring: a gap or discontinuity that, on the level
of aesthetics, bespeaks the process of a critical self-revision and, in the
implicit, underlying dimension of autobiography, bespeaks a personalhistorical trauma.
On the autobiographical level, there is discernible within the apostrophes to the Urn and the Nightingale, the contours of a submerged address
to the dead brother. And, here, I may add that the myth of Philomela underlying "Nightingale" involves precisely the address of a sibling taken for
dead to another who is alive and capable of speech. When Keats was "half
in love with easeful death," he was attempting to reckon with the event of
his brother's death in excess of the Ode's emblematic thematization of that
death in the image of "when youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies."
And, it is in this very attempt to reckon with the death of another that the
poet comes to speak of the eventuality of his own death: "Now more than
ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
In "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," Keats moves from an aestheticoethical, position proceeding from humanistic generalizations about death
and suffering towards one defined and oriented by death as an event. The
former may be termed a "defense of poetry," an illusion that protects the
self as the price of its comimunication with and experience of the world, at
the expense of its interrelating inner and outer reality. It is this defensive
disposition that Keats displays in seeing poetry as a shield against Tom's
"countenance his voice and feebleness," against the "here" he tries variously to localize in "Nightingale," against the silence of the townspeople in
"Grecian Urn." What is abandoned in the defense is "betweenness" of
personification, what is destabilized in the undoing of this defense is the
"humanist physician"'s stance of invulnerability. Keats may be seen in these
poems to become a sufferer who participates in the suffering of othersand who calls upon the reader to do the same. The poet, emerging as a
new kind of "physician to all men," is one who will ask his reader in the
Prologue to The Fall of Hyperion to judge "[w]hether the dream now purposed to rehearse / Be poet's or fanatic's ... / When this warm scribe my
hand is in the grave" (i.16-18).
Colgate University
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TITLE: Facing Keats with Winnicott: On a New Therapeutics of
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SOURCE: Stud Romanticism 46 no1 Spr 2007
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