Atkinson 1

Rosalind Atkinson

Heidi Thomson

ENGL 427

13 Sep 2013

“Lamia”

In Lamia, Keats presents what Susan Wolfson calls “a questioner attempting a

knowing, almost cynical, detachment from a point of sophisticated irony” (Questioning, 333).

A swift opening rewind through vying myth systems introduces us to the god Hermes, who

desires a nymph of the isle of Crete. Hermes’ pursuit is assisted by a serpent woman, Lamia,

who has been protecting the nymph but swaps her dependent’s freedom for the chance to

regain a “woman’s form” (1.120). She volcanically metamorphises and goes in search of her

object, “a youth of Corinth,” Lycius (1.119). Upon finding and captivating him, the besotted

lovers nest in a hidden palace in Corinth, ignoring the world. The “practiced disinteredness”

of the narrator warns us this is an inadvisable idea, yet probably appealling to our mawkish

readerly romanticism (Questioning 251). But Lycius is reminded of the world and tyrannises

Lamia into a garish wedding of conspicuous wealth, with her as the prime possession.

Amongst the vulgar “herd” (2.150) of guests is Lycius’s tutor, Apollonius, who recognises

Lamia as a serpent. Challenged and exposed, she vanishes, and Lycius dies of grief.

Lamia is a “new romance... ironizing, even satirising the illusions of ‘old romance’…

flaunting worldly knowledge” (Wolfson, Borderlines 211-12), woven from “a tissue of ironies

both blatant and devious” (Wolfson, Questioning 333). Lamia is also a narrative poem, evidence

of Keats’s desire to “cover [his] ground well” (Selected Letters, 350, hereafter SL), based on

a classical model: Nicholas Roe notes the “close association between classical civilisation

and modern radicalism” (Dissent 69). Jeffrey N. Cox suggests the poem presents Keats

“as a narrative poet on a literary scene dominated by popular writers of romances,” thus

“subject[ing] ‘old romance’... to modern critiques and new purposes” (53).

Stylistically, the poem combines a renovation of Dryden’s ”crisp, wordly couplets”

and neoclassical balance and antithesis (Walter Jackson Bate 546) with “the self-smoking

procedures of [Keats’s] distancing effects” (Cox 56), resulting in what Wolfson calls a narrative
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of “acid catastrophes” (Borderlines 210).

In Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed (March 1818), Keats wrote “Things cannot

to the will / Be settled, but they tease us out of thought” (Complete Poems, ed Jack Stillinger

[hereafter CP] 181), and his ideas about radical uncertainty were paradoxically becoming

more certain during his annus mirabilus, 1819. In the month he completed Lamia, he wrote

to George and Georgiana that “[t]he only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make

up ones mind about nothing – to let the mind be thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select

party” (24 Sep 1819, SL 380).

This dexterousness opens new perspectives onto the intersections of science,

philosophy, and poetry, which concerned both his age, and his circle. William Hazlitt’s lecture

in 1818 ‘On Poetry in General’, determined that “poetry … is neither science nor philosophy

… the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limit of

the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry” (Roe, 80). Keats’s Review ‘Mr Kean’ in the

Champion, 21 Dec 1817, wrote that “...the rainbow is robbed of its mystery,” and at Haydon’s

dinner party in 1817, “Keats and Lamb agreed that ‘[Newton] destroyed all the poetry of the

rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colours’” (Roe, Dissent 183). These ideas are played out,

complicated, and elaborated in Lamia, enmeshed with traces of more personal concerns.
On the 11th July 1819, Keats wrote to Reynold that he had “proceeded pretty well

with Lamia, finishing the first part which consists of about 400 lines” (SL 314). He was

living in Eglantine cottage, Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight with a sick Rice, and “in an

irritable a state of health” himself after getting drenched sitting outside on the stagecoach en

route (SL 315, 311). May had brought stress: George needing money and Brown renting out

Wentworth place over summer, meaning Keats had nowhere to live and would be seperated

from Fanny Brawne, whom by now was “a beautiful girl whom I love so much” (SL 308).

His circumstances were “desperately straightened” (Roe, 311). Bate describes Keats as

experiencing an “sense of helplessness” from enforced “dependence on others,” driving him to

momentarily resolve to seek work as a ship’s surgeon (525-7). Keats’ anxiety is evident in his

disjointed letters to Miss Jeffrey at the time, as he investigates shifting to somewhere cheap
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in Teignmouth for a last attempt at making money through “a fevrous life alone with Poetry”

(SL 302). On the 9th he writes to his sister Fanny about having been in “so unsettled a mind

about what I am do,” but he “cannot resolve to give up” poetry so is retreating to Shanklin (SL

305). He wrote (unsuccessfully) to Haydon asking for his loans to be repaid and asked Abbey

for money, whereupon he learned “the pleasant information that [his Aunt] was about to file

a Bill in Chancery against us” (cited in Roe, 327). Brown lent him some funds, and convinced

him to stick with poetry, proposing a collaborative tragedy, Otho the Great (308). “O, for an age

so shelter’d from annoy,” he had written recently in Ode on Indolence (CP 285), and the stresses

of the world and the increasing desire for refuge play out in the tensions of Lamia. His

determination to turn poetry to practical ends can be heard in the letter to Reynolds of the

11th July, where he concludes that “the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only

took to ripening yesterday, is for the market. So, why should I be delicate?” (SL 314)

“Keats’s Crete was the Isle of Wight,” writes Nicholas Roe, (340) but it was not idyllic:

there were “crowds of tourists ‘hunting after the picturesque like beagles’” (330). Ensconced, he

worked on Lamia first, “devoting his spare and more fatigued hours to Otho the Great” (Bate

536). Similtaneously, he wrote to Fanny Brawne, occasioning Roe’s stale claim that “Keats’s

narrative in Lamia was a further approach to his Gordian knot theme of a lover ensnared and

betrayed by a woman” (335).

removing to Winchester “for the purpose of being near a tolerable library,” arriving by the

14th August (SL 322-23, 330). Three weeks later, he had finished Lamia’s second half, and was

still driven to awkwardly apply to Taylor and others for money (Bate 535). His anxiety was

exacerbated by George’s financial crisis in America and further explicit request for help (SL

327, 332-339). “Things won’t leave me alone,” he lamented to Woodhouse (SL 351).

The pressure to earn money may have forced Keats to try and please the public more

than he wanted to. “It is possible to write fine things which cannot be laugh’d at in any way,”

he wrote, concerned that Isabella was too “smokeable” or open to be ridicule, as Endymion had

been (SL 351). His dual concerns can be heard when he writes that “in my dramatic capacity

I enter fully into the feeling, but in Propia Persona I should be apt to quiz it in myself. There
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is no objection of this kind to Lamia” (SL 352). This worldly defensivenss gives Lamia a

detached, wry tone, at times almost Byronic (eg 2.1-10). “I make use of my judgement,” Keats

wrote to Reynolds (SL 314), and as a result “the poem was unlike anything he had written

before — unsentimental, forceful, powerfully visual” (Roe 341). Simultaneously, he began The

Fall of Hyperion, exploring the difference between “The poet and the dreamer” (199) and the

connections between science, philosophy, and the imagination implied by “sure a poet is a

sage; / A humanist, physician to all men (189-90). This concurrence should alert us to “how

permeable were the boundaries between medicine, poetics, and politics” when reading Lamia

(Anne Janowitz, review of Roe’s John Keats and the Culture of Dissent) .

Roe concludes that Lamia’s ambiguities are in no small part due to the “conflicting

impulses” Keats was experiencing in his life, and that “[r]ather than proposing a single
definitive reading, Lamia, like the Grecian urn, offers to ‘tease us out of thought’ with

alternative possibilities” (341).

Lamia was first published in the 1820 volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes,

and Other Poems, the third and final volume of Keats’s poetry published during his lifetime.

Sections of Keat’s holograph survives, along with his complete fair copy, upon which Taylor’s

amendments can be seen in pencil (all observations from images at [Link]). Further
evidence of the process leading to this fair copy is the passage from part two Keats crossed

a letter to Taylor with (5th Sep 1819, SL 336). Amongst the passages that do not appear in

the final 1820 volume are several of interest: a rowdy passage on “the Glutton” paints a more

grotesque picture of the wedding guests: “Another whispers ‘Poo!’ saith Glutton “Mum!” /

Then makes his shiny mouth a napkin for his thumb” (SL 338); a deleted passage leading

into line 85 in the second part speaks more explicitly of delusion and reality: “Spells are

but made to break whisper’d the youth”; and the passage that appears abbreviated at 1.57-58

initially appeared between 2.141-42, describing how “Soft ligh[t]ing on her head a brilliant

crown / Wreath’d turban-wise of tender wannish fire.” The effect is to add to the wreathed

and knotted imagery and connect the wreaths of 2.221-229 with the earlier patterns of

entanglement. Additionally, Keats’s letter to Taylor reveals a more extensive condemnation of

Lycius at 2.147-48: “O senseless Lycius! Dolt! Fool! Madman! Lout! / Why would you murder

happiness like yours” and an interesting echo of 2.29 at 2.50 where guests are said to enter

“with buzzy brain” rather than the “busy brain” of the final version.

These alterations give glimpses into the overlap of the critical and creative process

within the poem Keats told Reynolds gave him “great hopes of success” (SL 314). He

described it to George and Georgiana as having “a sort of fire in it which must take hold of

people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation. What they want is

a sensation of some sort” (SL 363). Richard Woodhouse, who was both a friend of Keats’s,

a conscientious chronicler of anything to do with him, and an advisor to his publishers,

recorded his response to the poem: Keats “read to [him] Lamia, which he ha[d] half fair
Copied” on Sunday the 19th of September, 1819, while he was in town in response to George’s

most recent letter (SL 339-44). Woodhouse wrote to Taylor saying he was “much pleased with

it,” summarising the plot, and describing Lamia’s transformation as “quite Ovidian, but better”

(SL 342). His interspersed comments from Keats have interesting cross-pollination with the

poem: “says K, ‘Women love to be forced to do a thing, by a fine fellow’” (SL 342) complicates

the passage in Lamia, 2.81 where Keats writes “She burnt, she lov’d the tyranny.” Woodhouse

cheerily describes Apollonius– “He is a Magician” –and goes on to note how “K[eats] has a
fine feeling when and where he may use poetical licences with effect,” referring to the use of

“Drydenic heroic with many triplets and many alexandrines” (SL 343).

Upon publication, the 1820 volume sold better, and garnered more praise than Keat’s

previous two books. Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt wrote positive reviews in The New Times

and The Indicator, comparing Keats to Coleridge, Chaucer, Dante, and Milton; and numerous

other magazines praised the poems (Roe, 374). Compared to the vitriole that met Endymion, it

was a definite success. Yet Roe notes in John Keats and the Culture of Dissent that “the response

to his 1820 collection was divided according to political party,” a circumstance that leads

me to interrogate why Keats has often been portrayed as intrinsically unpolitical (251). Cox

identifies the volume’s stylistic links with the Cockney School, and notes that although we

tend to think of Hunt’s school as evident in “Keats’s language of disenchantment” (56), but at
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the time, they were recognised for their experimental and modern language. Monthly Review

describes a “laboriously obscure” style, full of “strange intricacies of thought, and peculiarities

of expression,” and Edinburgh Magazine thought Lamia’s Cockney humour “risks a sensuality

that often embarasses” (Cox 56).

More recent criticism of Lamia, not “content with half knowledge,” tends to enact

the same “irritable reaching after fact and reason” that the poem seems explicitly to tease and

thwart the urge for (SL 60). In 1968, Robert Gittings wrote that “Lamia on the whole has

been the critics’ puzzle” (cited in Stevenson 241), and the poems’s ambiguities have made it a

feeding ground for critics wishing to tease it out of thought. The Victorians tended to make

the poem “crude allegory in which Poetry and Beauty or Young Love get their comeuppance

at the hands of ‘cold philosophy’” (Stevenson 241) or assume purely evil Lamia represents

an ensnaring Fanny Brawne (Bate 547). Bate outlines other contortions which have sought

to directly locate biographical figures from Keats’ life, or work out with finality who we

ought to feel sympathy for (547). These approaches caused what Stevenson called the “critical

impasse” (241). His recognition that “Apollonius may be destructive, but what he destroys

in this instance is a snare and a delusion” (251) and Bate’s argument that Keats’s sympathies

are not just with a fixed character but also with “the course of the story itself ” (557) open up
possibilities, as does Jack Stillinger observation that Keats’ poems “debate the pros and cons

of... hypothetical... transcendence” rather than enacting this project themselves (100). Yet

Susan Wolfson notes in 1986 that the accepted view of Lamia was too often still that “the

narrator’s confusion reflects Keats’s own,” the approach of Miriam Allott (Questioning 343n6).

Mid-century criticism tended to emphasise transcendence and abstraction, such

as Clarence D. Thorpe writing that “[i]n the presence of natural objects of unusual beauty

or significance, the poet becomes oblivious of the present world. He loses himself in

contemplation, becomes detached from his surroundings” (cited in Sperry, 268). In analogous

detachment, critics sought to reveal meaning from within the environment of the poem,

focussing on theme, repetition, symbolism, imagery, rhythm and tone. Assumptions about

gender often warped readings, such as Bate’s reference to Hermes’ “miniature love idyl” (553).
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Stuart Sperry sought to bring Keats’s scientific bent back into the mix, observing

in 1970 that “The description [of Lamia’s transformation] resembles nothing so much as

the effects of a violent chemical reaction” (275). In similar fashion, New Historicist and

Marxist scholars such as Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson, Daniel Watkins, and Terence

Hoagwood sought to enagage “practical criticism founded on social-historical theory,” arguing

that Lamia had become divorced from social context in a way that obscured how this was

potentially a politically conservative, yet invisible, critical methodology (Hoagwood 675).

But within this paradigm, a binary figure of Keats as escapist dreamer persisted, as

when McGann called the Lamia volume a “great and (politically) reactionary book,” whose

aim is “to dissolve social and political conflicts in the mediations of art and beauty” (cited in

Cox 53).

Elinor Shaffer, in her review of Noel Jackson’s Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry,

mentions the “Scylla of those who embrace the Romantics as antiscientific and the Charybdis

of the... “historical materialists” who trounce them for it” and praises Jackson for “assert[ing]

their relevance to the development of science and their ability to hold their own in a new

era amidst a plethora of what at that time—and since—have often appeared as antipoetic

forces and doctrines” (236). The two equally trenchant approaches evokes the contrast between

Lycius’ dreamy escapism, and the narrowly Apollonian focus on “knotty problem[s]” (2.160),
suggesting how critical enterprises might reflect one or other of these attitudes.

The critical net has continued to widen, with Nicholas Roe’s research into Keats’s

experience at Guy’s hospital, and how Lamia’s poetics reflect the wider “culture of dissent,”

(the name of Roe’s 1997 book); research into the gender markings of negative capability and

Keats’s wider project (Wolfson, Borderlines); post-colonial approaches such as Debbie Lee

exploring Lamia’s relationship to slavery, imperialism and Africa travel narratives (“Poetic

Voodoo in Lamia”); and continued exploration of the politics of the print and literary

cultures Keats lived and worked within (Cox, Roe).Yet the historical materialist impulse

seems sometimes stretched to the point where there is a surfeit of interesting information,

but its function to enrich a reading of the poem is obscure or questionable. Examples are

Porscha Fermanis’ doggedly literal and authorial intention-bound study of wealth in “Political
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Economy: Commerce, Civic Tradition and the Luxury Debate in ‘Isabella’ and ‘Lamia’,” and

Denise Gigante’s “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life.”

Although Cox’s assertion that “Keatsian romance rejects the quest for the immortal in

order to endorse a romance of reality” is the kind of anti-binary critical move that promises to

bridge critical divides (61), we still find ourselves caught in troublingly clean-cut binaries, such

as Roe claiming that “Lamia gave Keats scope to dramatise the rival claims of passion and

philosophy” (328). Evidently the propensities Keats seeks to envision are still at work.

Becoming friendly with the ambiguities of Lamia has been part of what Susan

J. Wolfson calls “Keat’s gradual, then confirmed twentieth-century honours as a hero of

receptivity and indeterminacy” (207).

Criticism has often centered around two concerns: the relationship of the opening

scenes to the rest of the poem, and the question of who the protaganist(s) are supposed to be.

Within this context, and with what we know about Hermes as god of theft, trickery,

transitions, the underworld, and the patron of commerce and profit, trade, and the market,

I believe it is possible to formulate a response to these two questions, following some leads

from Watkins.

The opening scene appears disjointed from the rest of the poem, which has led critics
to conclude that it is a contrasting prelude, suggesting Gods can achieve an ideal while

attempts in the mortal world are doomed to failure. But the dynamics of this scene has been

read relatively uncritically: I don’t think it’s imposing modern notions about consent upon the

text to read more closely into how this section is presented.

The first we hear of Hermes is that he is “ever-smitten” (1.7), a phrase that suggests

constant lack, insatiability, and desire as an unresolvable state of wanting. Our opinion of

his quest for the nymph is shaped in terms of possession: “theft”, and “stolen” (1.8-9) create

not-wholly positive connotations, and “escape” and “retreat” suggest avoidance or lack of

reality (I.10-11). Hermes’ desire for her is shown to hinge solely on how much other admirers

want her, rather than his own independent valuations – “Ah, what a world of love was at her

feet! / So Hermes thought...” (1.21-22) and is thus filled with physical “jealous” (1.26) sexual
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desire. He is explicitly predatory “Like a stoop’d falcon ere he takes his prey” (1.67), and

possessive – “my nymph” (1.86). Lamia is happy to pimp out the nymph she was protecting

to this nymphomaniac for her own personal gain in a scene that is both transactional and

sexual: Lamia is “Warm, tremulous.../ Ravish’d” and “blush’d a live damask” in response to

Hermes’ words (1.114-15, 1.116). But it seems like the most obvious sign that Keats doesn’t

mean us to accept the scene as a unambiguously delightful woodland frolic is the nymph’s

response: she “Faded before him, cower’d, nor could restrain / Her fearful sobs” (137-38). She

subsequently “Bloom’d” (1.143), but this does not negate the scene’s disturbing implications

and undercurrents of domination and procurement. The nymph is described as at “liberty”

(1.109) rather than any words that imply concealment as a dissembling or negative state.

In one sense the poem enacts a shift from a timeless, idyllic sphere into the commerce
oriented city of reality. Daniel Watkins describes the Cretian ideal as overcome within the

poem (and history) by “a world of getting and spending, where art and imagination were

active but mediated by gain and profit, that is, by the god Hermes” (141). This could be why

the poem dissociates riches from poetry in the opening section: the wealth of the nymphs’

suitors is “unknown to any Muse” (1.19).

Thus Hermes’ “passion new” (1.28) is analogous to a changing world driven by new,

different priorities, and if we note the displacement of the “Nymph and Satyr” from the
“prosperous woods,” (1.2) locating us in a world where one mythology gives way to another

(a recurrent concern for Keats), it appears Hermes could be ushering in a change in priorities

and belief systems (Watkins 142).

This reading would answer the second question, elucidating how noone is

unimplicated in the ensuing scenes. “[P]erverse” Lycius is deluded, and can be cruel

and aggressive (2.62, 2.70, 2.72-77), Lamia selfishly sold out her dependent nymph, and

manipulates Lycius (I.286-87, II.39), and Apollonius’ “cold philosophy” is “cruel, perceant,

stinging” diminishing the rainbow to “the dull catalogue of common things” and making

“tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade” (2.230-33, 2.301). Yet all have moments when they

are portrayed sympathetically: showing how they are variously compromised under Hermes’

“ever-smitten” new world order (1.7).

All represent a self-seeking desire to “unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain” (1.192):

Lamia attempts to transcend suffering –“Nothing but pain and ugliness were left” behind

her (1.164); Apollonius denies Lamia’s body and sees only an abstract “knotty problem, which

causes him to “laugh[...]” (2.159-60); Lycius “never thought to know” Lamia’a contradictions,

seeking to live “in a dream”, without thought (1.349-50). Asceticism and indulgence are

flipsides of the same escapist, objectifying coin.

We need not mangle the poem by relating everything back to economics – which

Watkins does too zealously – but we can turn this inside out and say that economic

concerns are an expression of the ideas of desire, objectification, possession, escapism and

self-involvement that the poem explores. “Real are the dreams of Gods” (1.127) is the key

evidence for a ‘gods can achieve an ideal, humans can’t’ reading. This doesn’t need negating:
it can imply that tangible effects come from holding certain gods or mythologies. Hermes’

dream is harmless in an abstract, ideal world, but when he dominates as a god, his dream is

implemented as the commercial world of Corinth and the transactional, selfish objectification

of its ambiguous inhabitants.

By revisioning the opening mythology from cute forest dalliance to predatory,

self-involved exploitation we move into an interpretive world where objectification is

unexceptional and dominance is the norm: Hermes’ world. After all “[w]hat shocks the
virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion poet” (SL 195).
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