Oct 30, 2008
A Twisted Affinity: Byron and Keats
No more Keats, I entreat, flay him alive; if some
of you don’t, I must skin him myself. There is no
bearing the drivelling idiotism of the manikin.—Byron
Byron’s virulent hatred of the young “Johnny Keats,” as he derisively styled him, may have been (as some have claimed) inexcusable, but it is certainly understandable. The problem is obviously one of class; but class alone is not enough to account for the phenomenon. Unless the aristocrat felt the upstart poet a threat, his hatred seems misplaced—after all, Keats garnered more than enough negative criticism from his other reviewers. Keeping in mind the uneven ground of class, then, let us consider the poets on their common—and I use the term with deliberation—territory: poetry.
What the aristocratic and witty author of Don Juan shares with the sensitive young lyricist is, perhaps surprisingly, a commitment to luxury. For each, it is luxury on different terms, but, crucially, their ends converge in the realm of art and, to an even more uncomfortable extent, that of life.
Byron’s luxury is the obvious one. It is that of the bored aristocrat idling in his indulgence; it is that of the poetic maker who makes because his class entitles him to do so. In its self-sufficient obviousness, such luxuriance paradoxically borders on vulgarity and so threatens its own collapse into low self-caricature. The thinking aristocrat is the endangered one; and if Byron found in his own nearly-novelistic life fit matter for the poetic and trystic escapades of his Don Juan, he surely realized the extent to which the eminently literary passion, when it is, in fact, real, teeters on the precipice between the lyric and the merely lurid. But the life of the aristocrat requires such luxury, as well as a calm confidence in its insuperability. Byron’s life—and his debt—attest to both the power of this concept and its potential for destruction.
From Keats, however, we may draw more than the expected arguments about lower-class aspirations to bourgeois luxury. His luxury, rightly told, is that of aesthetic excess, the wild extravagance that is the hallmark of his lyric.1 Insofar as it is classed, it denies—and revels in its denial of—the easy and assumed luxury of the aristocratic state. Further, it usurps that state’s authority to define art by life, choosing instead to invert the formula and rewrite life (socially, economically, politically) in its own aesthetic terms. This is insufferable arrogance and institutionally-directed violence intolerable to the aristocrats who set the terms of art. Keatsian vulgarity (a common enough concept), then, has at once everything and nothing to do with class: as a common man, he would have been innocuous enough; but as a poet, and—what’s infinitely worse—one attempting to turn the hierarchy of poetic production on its head, he is a terrible threat that must be exhumed from the house of literature with as much force and speed as possible.
The twisted affinity of Byron and Keats knits up around the central problem of aesthetics, and the tangled, mutually-involved cords of this bitter, perversely intimate relationship are those of luxury and vulgarity. That each should be involved in the other’s definitive problem—that Keats should luxuriate, or Byron flirt with vulgarity—indicates the deep instability that art creates at the heart of the socioeconomic order. Art, and the production of art, will always be a matter of class, just as it will never escape debates about worth. But art will only submit to one master for so long, and it is in that betrayal that it achieves its full potential.
***
1. For prompting a consideration of Keatsian excess and, hence, this article, I am indebted to Chris Rovee’s “Trashing Keats” (forthcoming).