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Keats and the Struggle-for-Existence Tradition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The verse-epistle comprising all but a few sentences of the letter which Keats wrote to John Hamilton Reynolds on March 25, 1818, is a mixture of half-morbid jocularity and half-cynical seriousness. In lines 67–85 Keats tries to explain his strange mood by declaring that he feels the obligation to “philosophize” in poetry, does not yet “dare” to do so, fears that he never will be able to do so, and does not really wish to do so because “It spoils the singing of the Nightingale.” This conflict between “sensation” and “thought” is an old story to students of Keats. It has never been sufficiently emphasized, however, that in the concluding verse-paragraph what really “spoils the singing of the Nightingale” turns out to be not moral philosophy, but natural philosophy of so pessimistic a kind that it forbids any hope of harmonizing the sensuous love of beauty with a helpfully benevolistic view of the universe.
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References
1 Poetical Works of Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford, 1939), pp. 483–486.
2 See for example The Letters of Keats, ed. M. B. Forman, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York, 1935), pp. 41–42. The third edition (1947) was not available when this article was written, but the second is fully adequate for our purposes.
3 In Byron's Cain, II, ii, 145 ff., there is a cloudy suggestion that war, as resulting from God's curse against Adam, has also been visited upon the lower animals. But apparently Lucifer means that men make war against beasts, not that beasts make war among themselves. From Shelley's weird poem, A Vision of the Sea, one might be ingenious enough to infer the struggle-for-existence idea, but it is not stated in anything like conceptual language.
4 The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1936), p. 32.
5 Ibid., pp. 406–411; Lionel Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets (Chicago, 1932), pp. 55–116 passim; J. M. Drachman, Studies in the Literature of Natural Science (New York, 1930), p. 121.
6 Poetical Works, p. 44. See also p. 52.
7 Endymion, I, 781.
8 Poetical Works, p. 2.
9 p. 30.
10 In preparing to write this section I received helpful advice from Professor Henry Guerlac, whose interests pertain to the history of science rather than to Keats.
11 There are of course many books on evolution and several on the history of ideas concerning animals and their relation to man, but rather diligent search has unearthed no separate study of this particular topic. There is nothing to the purpose in Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, The Place of Animals in Human Thought (New York, 1909). Other books to be mentioned later glance at the struggle-for-existence idea in relation to some larger frame of reference.
12 The following remarks must almost completely ignore the important relationships which link the struggle-for-existence idea with the “primitivism versus progress” theme and with evolutionary theory in general.
13 T. Lucreti Cari de Rerum Natura Libri Sex, ed. and tr. H. A. J. Munro (London, 1920), iii, 136. Cf. also pp. 121, 125.
14 Faerie Queene, vii, vii, 19. The scholarly debate as to the alleged Epicurean element in iii, vi, does not concern us, since the Garden of Adonis is exempt from the struggle for existence.
15 Respectively in A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), pp. 389–420; and in Boas, The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1933).
16 Timon of Athens, Eversley ed. (New York, 1903), i, vi, 105; iv, iii, 179–184 (see also 189); iv, iii, 329–349. There are no quotations from or allusions to the text of Timon in Keats's letters. But in November, 1816, he writes C. C. Clarke that Haydon will be unable to keep an appointment with them “for that he hath an order for the Orchestra to see Timon ye Misantrophas [sic]” (Letters, p. 9). According to Caroline Spurgeon, Keats's Shakespeare (Oxford, 1928), p. 51, neither this nor any other passage in Timon was marked by Keats. It is inconceivable, however, that so avid a reader of Shakespeare was not thoroughly familiar with the play.
17 Keats possessed Jonson's plays, and one can hardly question his familiarity with Volpone (Letters, pp. 347, 467, 513n.).
18 Letters, p. 143, gives the only reference to Gay—cursory and apparently unfavorable. There are no allusions to La Fontaine.
19 Epicurus in England (1650–1725) (privately printed, 1934).
20 Letters, p. 42, but the couplets of Lamia provide better evidence.
21 Poetical Works of Dryden (Boston and New York, 1909), p. 192.
22 Leviathan, Part i, Chaps. 13 and 17.
23 Poems, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1937), p. 651.
24 Letters, p. 107; Complete Works of Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto, 1930), v, 109–110. A little earlier in the same lecture, pp. 107–108, Hazlitt praises Gay's Fables and Beggar's Opera.
25 H. E. Briggs, “Swift and Keats”, PMLA, lxi (1946), 1101–08.
26 Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), i, 41–42.
27 The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), pp. 208–226.
28 Letters, p. 143 and n.
29 See Dix Harwood, Love for Animals and Bow it Developed in Great Britain (New York, 1928).
30 A much broader field is admirably treated by Hester Hastings in Man and Beast in French Thought of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1936). Only pp. 226–232 of this 297-page dissertation pertain to the struggle-for-existence theme. This small allowance of space may be proportionate to her larger subject, but the topic would probably reward separate and more intensive study.
31 Letters, pp. 39–40, 424, 471–472.
32 Ibid., pp. 216, 218, 339 (Ronsard), 107 (Rabelais), 120, 129 (Corneille), 352, 471–472.
33 Poetical Works, p. 484. Could the armor of Joan of Arc have provided the associative link?
34 Letters, p. 107. This is the lecture referred to above in connection with Swift's verse.
35 Ibid., pp. 334, 347 and n.
36 Another title, which I am unable to identify, is dimly alluded to (ibid., p. 311) where Keats writes of Sheil's tragedy Evadne: “The play was bad even in comparison with 1818, the Augustan age of drama, ‘comme on sait,‘ as Voltaire says.”
37 He would not have been likely to ignore a book which the admired Hazlitt, in the lecture already referred to, had called “a masterpiece of wit.” Complete Works of Hazlitt, v, 114.
38 Œuvres Complètes (Paris, 1877), ix, 474.
39 See Hastings, Man and Beast in French Thought of the Eighteenth Century, p. 229, for four similar utterances of Voltaire which Keats is much less likely to have read. She does not mention Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne.
40 Letters, p. 313. The only other reference to Buffon, p. 456, concerns an ugly woman: “I think I could find some of her relations in Buffon, or Captain Cook's voyages.”
41 Histoire naturelle, viii (Paris, 1781), Quadrupèdes, tome ii, “Les Animaux Carnassiers”, 166, 169.
42 The only reference is Letters, p. 3, where Keats, expressing his pleasure at the prospect of meeting Leigh Hunt, says that “it is no mean gratification to become acquainted with Men who in their admiration of Poetry do not jumble together Shakespeare and Darwin.”
43 Poetical Works (London, 1806), iii, 141–155.
44 Ibid., pp. 146–147.
45 Ibid., pp. 154–155; cf. pp. 148–154.
46 Ibid., pp. 171–174.
47 Malthus, whose Essay on Population appeared in 1798, was influenced by Darwin's prose work, Zoönomia (1794–96). The Temple of Nature and the greatly revised second edition of Malthus's Essay were both published in 1803. The Botanic Garden (1789–91) is of much scientific interest but does not directly pertain to our subject.
48 See C. D. Thorpe, “Keats and Hazlitt”, PMLA, lxii (1947), 487–502.
49 Essay on Population (London, 1941), ii, 13–16. The text is that of the seventh edition (1817), which differs only unimportantly from the second edition (1803).
50 The Epistle to Reynolds was first published in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains (1848). There is not the slightest evidence that the poem influenced Tennyson, but he might well have been struck by this expression of one of his own moods.
51 Darwin Among the Poets, p. 77.
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