Keats and Me

Jack Stillinger

Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, Volume 3, Number

1, Spring 2008, pp. 12-21 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

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 Keats and Me
Jack Stillinger

Abstract
Starting from Speed Hill’s whimsical and ahistorical notion that authors and editors intui-
tively choose one another, this brief essay traces Keats’s and my interactions over the past six
decades in Austin, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Urbana, Illinois. For me, it is a
story of old-fashioned biographical approach to literary study succeeded by New Critical slow
reading that is then sophisticated (perhaps also muddled) by the addition of several types of lit-
erary theory. For Keats (who once, in a marginal scrawl, posed the question whether criticism
is “a true thing”), it is a story of increasing semantic and textual complexity with, all along, a
detached twinkle at the prospect of large numbers of English professors proclaiming definitive
interpretations of his poems.

Some fourteen months ago, in January 2006, Speed Hill phoned to ask if I
would take part in a session on the special connections that can exist between
an editor and the writer being edited—“psychic links” (I think he called
them), connections transcending the usual relationship of scholar to his or
her material and possibly representing a dangerous subjectivity undermining
cool scholarly objectivity. It is still not perfectly clear to me what Speed had in
mind, but I shall forge ahead as if there were no question about the matter.
It is now forty-nine years since I finished my Ph.D. While I have produced
scholarly editions of several other writers, and the Romantics section of the
last four editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, my principal
textual and editorial work over the half century has focused on the poems of
John Keats. It is the possible psychic links between Keats and me that I shall
discuss in my paper this afternoon. Walter Jackson Bate, in the opening pages
of his masterful biography (1963), likens Keats to Abraham Lincoln as a per-
son of great achievement rising out of humble beginnings. Part of the story of
my relationship with Keats is, in effect, how we grew up together in Texas.
Keats has several obvious qualities that would make him an attractive
writer to connect with. There is the line-by-line richness of his poetry. At
the time Keats wrote, no one had created such palpable, finely detailed pic-
tures in poetry since Spenser and Shakespeare, and it can be argued that no
one has done it so well again since Keats. There is Keats’s clear-headed
thinking on some basic problems of human life—his acceptance and even
 Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me  |  13

championing of the pleasure-pain complexity of mortal existence; his un-

derstanding of death as another stage of life; his skepticism concerning ro-
mantic fantasies about the possibility of escaping the consequences of
mortality. Add to these Keats’s character or personality in his life, letters,
and poems. He was one of the least egotistical successful writers in the his-
tory of all the literatures of the world, and in a letter to his brothers he
coined the term “Negative Capability” to make a theory out of it. And there
is Keats’s sense of humor. Possibly he does not rate a superlative in this cate-
gory, and his poetry is usually pretty serious. But in his life and letters he was
constantly relishing the humorous content of his and other people’s experi-
ences. None of these qualities, however, explains why I (in particular) con-
nected with Keats—at least not in the beginning.
The real story of how Keats and I got together is a series of circumstances
in which I was mainly a lucky participant rather than an active cause of ef-
fects. And it has to do more with pieces of paper than with any of Keats’s qual-
ities that I just mentioned. I’ve been increasingly appreciating those qualities
over the years, but the earliest stage of our relationship involved manuscripts.
I did grow up in Texas, where my dad was in the chain-link fence busi-
ness. I worked on and off at the company from about the age of fourteen,
and it was always understood that I would follow him in the business. So
when I went to the University of Texas I had no obligation to learn a trade,
therefore became an English major, and just by chance Keats was practically
the first author I studied in my beginning semester of college literature
courses. I read whatever I wanted as an undergraduate and, with the excep-
tion of Shakespeare, hardly anything earlier than the Romantics. In my se-
nior year one of my professors suggested that I apply for a Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship to go to graduate school and become a teacher (graduate school—
What is that? I wondered). I did apply, and was selected as one of the year’s
hundred recipients (two from each state of the Union).
During that senior year, a friend who worked for the University of Texas
alumni association gave me a scholarly publication that had been gathering
dust in her office, Hyder Rollins’s The Keats Circle, a two-volume collection of
letters and memoirs by people who had known Keats personally. (Rollins was
a Texas alumnus, and Harvard Press had sent a review copy when the work
came out a few years earlier, in 1948.) I read into the volumes, then started
thinking about what was involved in collecting and presenting such docu-
ments, and gradually conceived an idea for my future upon graduating from
Texas: I wanted to go to Harvard and work on Keats with Hyder Rollins.
On my Woodrow Wilson application I put down Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton as my three top choices for graduate school, but because most of
14  |  Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008)

the other ninety-nine winners had also listed those same three as their top
choices I was offered several other institutions to choose from instead. The
one that appealed most was Northwestern, because they had, for their M.A.
in English, a comprehensive exam on what was then considered the proper
subject matter of English and American literature—that is, seven centuries
of English and at least three of American, making ten centuries in all (in ef-
fect, what would become, when they were published a few decades later, the
complete contents of the Norton English and American anthologies—
amounting, in the latest editions, to some eleven thousand pages—plus a
sizable selection of novels and plays). I had at that point read sketchily in
maybe the last century and a half of English and a handful of writers, not
even making up an identifiable period, in American.
At Northwestern I read all the rest of what counted then as English and
American literature and did pass the M.A. exam. During the year I had ap-
plied to Harvard, wanting to continue my plan to work on Keats with
Hyder Rollins, and in the spring they offered me a fellowship to come join
their Ph.D. program.
I was wonderfully treated by Rollins. When after a few weeks into the first
semester I showed up at his office his initial greeting was, “What took you so
long to come around?” We hit it off beautifully in every respect. Rollins was
then working on his edition of Keats’s letters (1958), and I took his seminar in
the editing of Keats’s letters. Then I became Rollins’s research assistant. My
principal training at Harvard was working day after day in the Keats Collec-
tion with manuscripts of the letters and discussing with Rollins the various
problems of textual representation, ordering, annotating, and the rest. I was
trained, that is, as a letter editor, and I just incidentally, in my spare time, edited
the letters of Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown for my Ph.D. dissertation.
One of the things I especially profited from was helping Rollins put to-
gether the elaborate chronology of “Events in the Life of Keats” that, in
highly abbreviated form, occupies some thirty-plus pages of the introductory
material in his 1958 edition. This includes every fact, no matter how trivial,
that could be gleaned from the letters, poetry manuscripts, and other bio-
graphical and textual sources. The result of such a compilation is that Keats
scholars frequently, for any given day and time during his life, know exactly
where Keats was, what he was doing, what he was wearing, whether he was
sitting, standing, or walking around, what he was eating and drinking, what
he was reading and writing, even (at least sometimes) what he was thinking.
As a scholar, and as a role model for me, Rollins put a high value on the fac-
tual reality behind a writer’s writing. It was the single most important thing
that I learned from him.
 Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me  |  15

With Ph.D. in hand, I got my first real job, in the University of Illinois Eng-
lish department, and I have lived in Champaign-Urbana ever since, for most
of the time within walking distance of one of the greatest research libraries in
the world. An early benefit of coming to Illinois was discovering, in the Rare
Books Library, some twenty volumes of photostats of manuscripts that had
been assembled by a Keats scholar on the Illinois English faculty named
Claude Lee Finney during the 1930s and 1940s.1 I had thought, on leaving
Harvard, which had more than three-fourths of the Keats manuscripts then
known to exist, that I was leaving the manuscripts behind forever. Instead,
the Finney collection of photostats had pictures of all the manuscripts at Har-
vard plus pictures of those at the Keats House in Hampstead, the British Mu-
seum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Huntington Library in California,
the University of Texas, and numerous other collections, including even out-
of-the-way places like the public library in Buffalo, New York.
In my early years at Illinois I did both critical and textual work on Keats and
the other Romantics. In the critical line, I was especially interested in the real-
istic elements of Romantic poetry (this in opposition to the old New Humanist
attack on Romanticism as a literature of escape). In an essay titled “The Hood-
winking of Madeline” (1961)—which was well known for awhile as the dirty-
minded reading of The Eve of St. Agnes—I argued for a view of Keats as skeptical
of the imagination’s ability to transcend problems inherent in human mortal-
ity; and in the introduction and commentary of a 1965 edition of Wordsworth
in Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside series I aligned Keats and Wordsworth as the
two Romantics most concerned with things of the real world (as opposed to
transcendental and pantheistic schemes favoring a higher reality somewhere
else). I proposed that this common focus made them the two earliest moderns
among the major English poets (Stillinger 1971, 120–49).
In the textual line, with the twenty volumes of photostats in the Illinois
Rare Books Library I was set up in the best possible way to work more sys-
tematically on some problems in Keats’s texts that had been worrying me
since graduate school. I was dimly aware that for many of Keats’s best poems
there existed, in manuscripts and alternative printings, two and sometimes
three or more different textual versions, and yet the standard editions al-
ways chose the same single text, frequently without even hinting at the exis-
tence of competing versions. On the basis of the photostats I began to
inquire more seriously into our sources of Keats’s poems—such basic matters
as which texts were more “authoritative” (in whatever sense) than which
others, who copied what from whom, how the poems first got into print, and

1. Finney (1936) used these materials in his monumental study The Evolution of
Keats’s Poetry.
16  |  Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008)

so on—leading to my 1974 book called The Texts of Keats’s Poems, a study of

the history and transmission of all of Keats’s poetic texts. And then this tex-
tual study led to my editing of Keats’s complete poems, in an elaborate
scholarly presentation published by Harvard in 1978, followed by a modest
reading edition based on the textual edition four years later, in 1982.
In working with Keats’s texts I became so involved in the physical char-
acter of the manuscripts that I sometimes felt as if I had written them myself
(the manuscripts, that is, not the poems!), and I occasionally had almost su-
pernatural experiences with them, as a couple of times when I was talking
on the phone to rare-books librarians in California and Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, and amazed them by telling them correctly, without the manu-
script in hand, what would be on the verso side of a certain leaf if they
would just turn it over to take a look. This kind of textual work, like the
critical work, had a center in Hyder Rollins’s valuing of factual reality. Keats
himself—at least one part of the very complex character that Keats was—
also acknowledged the value of factual reality (as in the lines of “Ode to a
Nightingale” where the speaker laments being cut off from the bird in the
forest: “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet [. . .] the fancy cannot cheat
so well”). I think the essence of the psychic connection between Keats and
me has to lie somewhere in this valuing of factual reality.
I would apply this even to the rather antiquated principles on which I ed-
ited Keats’s poems in the 1970s. The basic idea there, following Walter Greg
and Fredson Bowers, was choice of copy-text and editorial treatment of that
text according to what one could recover of the author’s considered inten-
tions.2 Now the factual reality of Keats’s intentions in particular is no deep se-
cret. Above all, Keats wanted to be, as he predicted he would be in a letter to
his brother and sister-in-law in America, “among the English Poets” (Rollins
1958, 1: 394). What being “among the English Poets” meant in Keats’s day was
the kind of scholarly presentation that Spenser and Milton were getting—
elaborate biographical, critical, and textual introductions with apparatuses of
explanatory notes and textual variants—and the kind of popular presentation
typified by multivolume editions that had been appearing since the 1770s, a
couple of decades before Keats was born, with titles such as The British Poets,
The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, The Works of the
English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper, and so on.3 In other words, what Keats
really wanted, in the long run, was my elaborate textual editing for Harvard

2. For simplified explanations of Greg-Bowers principles, see Stillinger 1978, 5–14,

and Stillinger 1991, 194–200.
3. On these multivolume editions and the formation of a national canon, see Still-
inger 1999, 115–120.
 Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me  |  17

Press and substantial inclusion in the Norton Anthology of English Literature

(Abrams 1986, 1993, 2000, 2006). The factual reality of Keats’s intentions plus
my editorial principles is unimpeachable! (And I can include reconciliation of
Greg-Bowers copy-text theory with Jerome McGann’s social theory of literary
texts [1986] as just one more benefit of the factual-reality scheme.)
Now, in spite of what I’ve just said about the importance of factual reality
(with implications for its superiority to the instability of critical opinion and
the abstractness of literary theory), I have, in the last couple of decades,
turned theorist myself—a theorist of multiples in the three basic compo-
nents of a literary transaction: Author, Text, and Reader. That is, I’ve be-
come interested in (and published books about) the multiple authorship of
works that we routinely assume to have been written by the single author
named on the title page; the multiple textual versions of famous works that
we almost always study in isolated single texts, unaware of the competing
versions that exist; and the multiple interpretations of those famous works
everywhere one turns—in the critical literature (by the most sophisticated
of readers) and in the classroom (by the most naïve).4
Keats had helpers contributing to the wording and lesser textual features of
all his most admired poems. Friends, relatives, publishers, printers, and editors
altered Keats’s texts in large and small ways from the beginning to the end of
his short career; and almost always he was grateful for the help and indeed de-
pended on it. In the matter of texts, virtually all of Keats’s poems exist in mul-
tiple versions, some of them drastically different from some of the others. And
for multiple interpretations, there have been hundreds of thousand of readers
of Keats’s poems over the nearly two centuries since he died, and I’ve argued
repeatedly and at length that each reader sees something in the text a little
differently from each of the other readers. The fifty-nine ways of reading that
I’ve proposed in recent books for The Eve of St. Agnes and Ode on a Grecian
Urn are just token representations, standing for fifty-nine hundred or even
fifty-nine thousand different ways of reading those poems.5
But these theories of multiple authorship, multiple texts, and multiple read-
ings are by no means objectionably abstract in the way that calling them the-
ories might suggest. The presence of Keats’s helpers, entering into the
authorship of some of the most distinguished pieces in all of English poetry, is
a matter of biographical and textual reality. The existence of the multiple ver-
sions—of Endymion, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, the odes—is again
demonstrable fact. And the existence of multiple readings is the easiest of all
to prove. Theory and factual reality are one hundred percent compatible in all

4. See Stillinger 1991, 1994, and 1999.

5. See Stillinger 1999, 35–77, and Stillinger 2006, 201–7, 240.
18  |  Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008)

these matters. Keats and I stand together before you—guiltless of any incon-
sistency or logical contradiction that we didn’t plan in the first place.
Through all this critical and textual study, Keats and I have enjoyed
amazingly pleasant and friendly feelings toward one another. Some years
ago I wrote and published a poem about this under the title “Keats and Me”
(the same title as this paper), which I’d like to read to you here.6 The poem
is set in the fourth-floor office that I’ve had in the University of Illinois Li-
brary for nearly half a century. I picture myself at work at my desk, with the
plaster life mask of Keats on a bookcase behind me, positioned so that the
poet can look over my shoulder to watch what I write about him. (This life
mask is a copy that Hyder Rollins gave me when I finished my dissertation,
which he said had belonged to Amy Lowell, who besides being a major
American Imagist poet was the best biographer of Keats up until the 1960s.)
In the situation of the poem, I had stuck a child’s costume pirate hat on top
of the life mask—appropriately so because Keats’s birthday is October thirty-
first, the same date as Halloween in this country.
Here’s the poem.
Keats and Me
In my lofty library study
a plaster life-mask of John Keats
(the copy owned by Amy Lowell,
propped on the bookcase behind me)
looks over my shoulder
while I write my explications.

Wearing a pirate’s hat cocked

at a jaunty angle (relic of
a child’s Halloween costume),
he seems quite at home
in this place, and we
have established good rapport.

“So it’s true”, I says,

picking up where I’d left off,
“that Madeline was only
faking her dream, knowing
all the while that Porphyro
was hiding in the closet?”

6. The poem first appeared, with the heading “Epilogue”, in Stillinger 1971,
179–80.
 Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me  |  19

Here Keats tips me the wink,

Signifying agreement. “And that
at the end of his tale
Endymion really went off
into the old oak forest
with the Indian maiden?”

Again the affable confirmation.

“What about that wretched
knight-at-arms?” “Stoned”,
he says, “the sedge
withered by his breath—and
no sedge, no birds, obviously!”

“And the philosopher Apollonius?”

“A pederast”, he says, grinning,
“which explains why he was
so grumpy at Lycius’ wedding,
and made the tender-personed
Lamia melt into a shade”.

I turn around to my desk

to write furiously for an hour,
Keats over my shoulder
occasionally snorting, once
or twice guffawing out loud,
but not really interfering.

When I get to a hard place

he says, in friendly wise,
“Leave off this foolishness awhile”.
So I go out to play tennis
with a graduate student,
whom I beat 6–2, 6–3, 6–1.

Then I return to my study,

give Keats the usual nod,
and he says, plainly
glad to see me again
and renew our conversation,
“Well, Jack, did you win?”
20  |  Textual Cultures 3.1 (2008)

Early on in my teaching I invented a simple Keats Map to explain a basic

structure common to both the narrative poems and the odes. I drew a hori-
zontal line across the blackboard and assigned various elements of the poems
to positions above and below the line—heaven, immortality, the supernatu-
ral, timelessness, and so on above the line and earth, mortality, the natural,
time, and so on below (in short, magic above the line and reality below). In
The Eve of St. Agnes, Madeline’s bedroom dream was above the line, while
Porphyro, physical love, the rest of the castle, and the storm outside were
below. La Belle Dame’s magical grot was above the line, while the knight’s
cold hillside of reality was below. The Nightingale’s forest was above, while
“here”, the world of “hungry generations”, was below. And so on.
More recently, in connection with my thinking about the interpretive
inexhaustibility of Keats’s good poems, I have been pondering the problem
of how to put Keats himself on the Keats Map, and in my most recent essay
I answered the question by imagining the negatively capable Keats himself
standing outside the text of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, looking on with his
readers and wondering, with each successive reading, how the various con-
flicts will get resolved, with the possibility (for Keats and readers alike) that
they will be resolved a different way each time (Stillinger 2006, 207). In my
essay I suggested that this—the idea of Keats being on the reader’s side, tak-
ing pleasure in each fresh reading—was a better basis for approaching the
poem than a fifty-minute lecture in which the professor tells the student—in
effect, dictates for the student to write down in his or her class notes—what
the poem really “means”.
In the same spirit I’ll suggest to you, in friendly wise, that Keats may be in
the audience this afternoon listening to this paper.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Works Cited
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University Press.
McGann, Jerome J. 1983. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. 1948. The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816–1878. 2 vols.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 Jack Stillinger: Keats and Me  |  21

———, ed. 1958. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
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Stillinger, Jack. 1961. “The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St.
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———, ed. 1965. William Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces. Riverside Edition.
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———. 1971. The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems. Urbana:
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———. 1974. The Texts of Keats’s Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———, ed. 1978. The Poems of John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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———. 1994. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems.
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———. 1999. Reading “The Eve of St. Agnes”: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transac-
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———. 2003. “Fifty-nine Ways of Reading ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”. In “Ode on a Gre-
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———. 2006. Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Urbana: Univer-
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