Friendship in the Early Letters of Keats

Abstract

Keats's treatment of friendship takes shape even in his early letters strictly within bounds of his profound skepticism and his intense awareness of human limitations, sorrow, and death. The late letters are filled with wonderfully moving gestures and declarations of friendship in face of death, and brilliant formulations about particular nuances of friendship. But just as Keats proclaims in Sleep and Poetry (1816), noblest poetry is not that Flora, and old Pan (102) but rather of the agonies, strife / Of human hearts (124-25), his early letters present unequivocal testimony that he understands friendship not as an escape from painful world (though does occasionally serve as a temporary refuge, as do certain kinds of art) but as one important way of coming terms with it. Like poetry or any other form of beauty, including love, friendship is shaped by transience and suffering and generates values that make possible accept those realities and even discover in them a paradoxical wellspring of consolation and hope, what in Hyperion he calls a sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self' (1.36). Keats's conception of friendship is modeled on same principle that structures his general view of human situation, namely, a deep acceptance of limitations together with a capacious sense of possibilities within those boundaries. One can see this characteristic combination of realism and idealism, or tough-mindedness and tender-heartedness, even early in 1818. Writing his friend Benjamin and contemplating woes of a particular unfortunate Family, Keats wonders how they survived and rejects sort of otherworldly and overly idealistic remedies that he associates with skyey knight errantry of enthralled Endymion of Book I, which Keats had completed only a week before. In precisely this context of hard-headed facing up suffering, Keats proceeds in very next sentence both thank and praise for sparing Keats some of his own pain: tearing, my dear friend, a spiritless and gloomy letter up rewrite me is what shall never forget--it was me a thing (L, 1.209). This is consistent with Aristotelian observation that while it is perhaps Fitting for a man go unasked and eagerly a friend in misfortune, we should reluctant ask our friend share our misfortunes (270). Although Keats is clearly expressing gratitude for Bailey's not burdening him with his sorrow, crucial point is that Keats's appreciates his friend's tact in direct proportion his own sense of pervasiveness of misfortune and suffering that he has just been addressing. Virtually every time Keats uses word real in this way in his letters there is an association with friendship. He tells Reynolds sisters, for example, that to you my dear friends Marrianne and Jane shall ever feel grateful for having made known me so a fellow as Bailey (L, 1. 160). He tells Reynolds himself that I have been getting more and more close you eve day and that I have felt pleasure of loving a sister in Law.... Things like these, and they are real, have made me resolve have a care of my health--you must be as careful (L, 1.325). And finally, in one of Keats's most important letters about friendship, he rounds off his earlier discussion of of Maiden-Thought by telling Reynolds: Moore's present Hazlitt is real--I like that Moore and am glad saw him at Theatre just before left Town. Tom has spit a leetle blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper--but know--the truth is there is something in World. Your third Chamber of Life shall be a lucky and a gentle one--stored with wine of love--and Bread of Friendship (L, 1.282-83). In Keats's letters word real usually has force of something that is both an undeniably concrete human actuality and a quality that binds us earth, in much same way that, in vale of Soul-making letter, suffering paradoxically does. …