The cambridge companion to british roman 288

andrew bennett

of what it means to be a poet, to have poetic sensibility, to be or to have
the strangeness of genius (“Genius is so strange,” Ian Crichton Smith opines
of Keats in “For Keats” [1972]12 ), and crucially to suffer critical neglect or
even scorn in one’s lifetime before going to an early grave. Tom Clark makes
a similar point in a prefatory note to his “poetic novel” or “biography in
verse” on Keats’s life, Junkets on a Sad Planet (1994), when he remarks
on the way that Keats’s “conceptual proposals of the figurative aspects of
a poet’s life” – proposals which emphasize “the problem of suffering” as a
theme both “within and without the work” – present “a unique readout of
the experience and meaning of being a modern poet.”13
Recent poetic responses to Keats also tend to suggest that the division of
poet and poetry is itself something of a fragile and unstable fiction: loving the
“incorruptible purity” of Keats’s words, loving his language – however we
construe or describe it – is, in a sense, loving Keats, since Keats (like any other
dead poet, indeed) just is language. Three notable poetic sequences – Amy
Clampitt’s “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,”14 Andrew Motion’s prose
and poem sequence “Sailing to Italy,”15 Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet –
suggestively explore the inescapable imbrications of life with language, of
suffering and genius with writing, emphasizing the fact that what we have
of Keats, what remains of him, is only language, only the words he wrote
in letters to friends and the words he wrote as poems. Concerned as these
collections are to question or deconstruct the oppositions between history
and fiction, the present and the past, life and writing, original and copy,
performance and authenticity, self and other, they seem to produce a kind
of linguistic resuscitation: Clampitt, Clark, and Motion incorporate the language of Keats’s letters and his poems into their own modern texts, making
new poetry out of a dead poet’s words.
Perhaps the most striking of these evocations is that of Amy Clampitt. In
“Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,” the twentieth-century poet’s response
to Keats’s life is mediated by the words of his poetry and letters – as in the

final two stanzas of the second poem, “Teignmouth,” for example, which
describe
an annus mirabilis of odes before the season
of the oozing of the cider press, the harvest done,
wheatfields blood-spattered once with poppies gone
to stubble now, the swallows fretting to begin
their windborne flight toward a Mediterranean
that turned to marble as the mists closed in
on the imagination’s yet untrodden region –
the coal-damps, the foul winter dark of London.16

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