EMILY SUN

Facing Keats with Winnicott:On a New Therapeutics,of Poetry

T IS REMARKABLE THAT, THROUGHOUT HIS BRIEF AND INCOMPARABLY IN-

tense writing career, Keats never ceased to insist upon the therapeuticfunction of poetry. From his buoyant declaration in the 1816 "Sleep andPoetry" that "the great end / Of poesy" is "that it should be a friend / Tosooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" (245-47) to the anxious em-phasis of the poet-narrator to Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion (1819) that"sure a poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men" (I89-9o), Keatsmaintained this underlying therapeutic conception of art but found himselfhaving to renew the temis of his claims.' Such work of re-assessment sug-gests the degree to which Keats's poetry may be read as a history of ongo-ing self-critique, of self-reading, the most complex episodes of which I sug-gest take place in the Odes of Spring 1819 and in The Fall of Hyperion. Anexamination of the transformation of his therapeutic conception of poetrymay shed light on the vexed and much debated relationship between aes-thetics and ethics in Keats's work.

My present reading follows upon recent interventions by such critics asForest Pyle and Robert Kaufman, who have sought to challenge the influ-ential New Historicist judgment of Keats as guilty of repressing the socio-political and economic conditions of poetic production, of escaping fromthe world of human suffering into an idealized world of art, and fosteringsuch tendencies in complicitous readers. Paying close attention to the tex-tual workings of the poems themselves, Pyle, from a combination of Marx-ist and deconstructionist perspectives, and Kaufman, from a Marxist-Adornian perspective, both locate the critical force of Keats's poetry pre-cisely in the way his poems unsettle their own stated positions and claims. 2

i. References to Keats's poetry are taken from Joium Keats: Complete Poems, ed. JackStillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978) and are cited with line numbers.

2. See Pyle, "Keats's Materialism" SiR 33 (Spring 1994): 57-80, and Kaufiman, "Nega-tively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde" Crit-

SiR, 46 (Spring 2007)

57

In this essay, I will examine "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Gre-cian Urn" and concentrate in them on the rhetorical device of apostrophe,the figure of address-often taken to be constitutive of odic form-whereby the poetic speaker establishes I-thou relationships with inanimateentities. Among the Spring Odes, "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn" stagethe speaker's encounters with a symbol or work of art in ways that serveinstructively as allegories of reading; they invite readers to ask how, on ameta-poetic level, we are implicated by and in relation to Keats's poemsthemselves. It is within the contexts established by apostrophe that Keatsraises his questions about art's function in relation to death and suffering. In"Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," two possibilities assert themselves mostdistinctly as articulations of art's function. In "Nightingale," the speakertries to locate art as the space of an "elsewhere" that transcends and offersescape from the "here" of sickness and mortality; in "Grecian Urn," thespeaker associates the work of art with a transcendent realm of permanencethat offers consolation to transient generations of viewer-interpreters. Bothpossibilities have been associated by critics as consistent with Keats's ownavowed "humanism" or "humanitarianism"-his idea that "a poet is asage; / A humanist, physician to all men"-but both possibilities, I con-tend, are superseded within the poems themselves. 3 In these odes, Keatsgoes beyond thematizing death as a general condition which art has the ca-pacity to transcend towards registering the impact of death as a decisiveevent around which art formulates and reformulates itself, and aroundwhich the poetic subject shapes and reshapes itself In so doing, Keats re-sponds, I will argue, obliquely to the specific event of his brother Tom'sdeath in December I818.

My approach to Keatsian apostrophe will be informed by the psychoana-lytic perspective of D. W. Winnicott, the British Object Relations psycho-

ical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 354-84. The most influential New Historicist readings ofKeats remain Jerome McGann's "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism" inThe Beauty of Inflections: Literary InvestiQations in Historical Method & Theory (Oxford: Claren-don, 1988) 9-65, and Marjorie Levinson's Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (NewYork: Basil Blackwell, t988).

3. In his "Introduction to the Poetry ofJohn Keats," Paul de Man defines Keats's "hu-manitarian attitude" as an attentiveness to "the suffering of others" that is, however, "always'of the world' and," probleniatically, "not his own": the "suffering referred to is so generalthat it designates a universal human predicament" Critical Writings, 1953-1978, ed. LindsayWaters (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 179-97 (i 89-9o). Hermione de Almeida de-fends such a humanistic stance virs-ý-vis the universality of suffering when she writes of how"[i]n an age of warring and self-destructive ideologies when it is considered unfashionable tospeak of serving humanity ... [Keats] has kept his humanizing place among the greatest Eng-lish poets . . ." "Introduction" to Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hennione de Almeida(Boston: G. K. Hall, I99o) 8.

58 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

analyst best known for his theory of the transitional object, the infant's first"not-me" possession that helps it gradually to separate from its mother.Winnicott links the infant's use of the transitional object with the very ori-gins of creativity in human experience, and readers of both Keats andWinnicott have already noted the striking resonances between the poet andthe psychoanalyst's conceptions of the creative process.4 It is my contentionthat, insofar as the transitional object can be construed as a personificationdependent on yet separate from the external and actual mother, it has thepotential to shed light on the complex operations of personification inKeats's lyric apostrophes. And it is my hope that the juxtaposition of poetand psychoanalyst will further illuminate the shared stakes and claims oftheir respective therapeutic projects.

The relevance of a psychoanalytic account of the origins of address to therhetorical device of apostrophe has been underscored by Barbara Johnson,perhaps the foremost thinker of the figure's centrality in lyric poetry. In herpathbreaking 1986 essay, "Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion," Johnsondefines apostrophe as "the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimatebeing by a first-person speaker .... Apostrophe is ... both direct and indi-rect: based etymologically on the notion of turning aside, of digressingfrom straight speech, it manipulates the I/thou structure of direct address inan indirect, fictionalized way. The absent, dead, or inanimate entity ad-dressed is thereby made present, animate, and anthropomorphic.'"` At theend of her essay, Johnson suggests that "there may be a deeper link be-tween motherhood and apostrophe than we have hitherto suspected." Toelaborate her point, she turns to the psychoanalytic perspective ofJacquesLacan:

The verbal development of the infant, according to Lacan, begins asa demand addressed to the mother, out of which the entire verbaluniverse is spun. Yet the mother is somehow a personification, not aperson-a personification of presence or absence, of Otherness itself."Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions itcalls for. It is demand of a presence or of an absence-which is what ismanifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with the

4. See Brooke Hopkins, "Keats's 'Ncgative Capability' and Winnicott's Creative Play"American inagO 41 (Spring 1984): 85-ioo; Albert Hutter, "Poetry in Psychoanalysis: Hopkins,Rossetti, Winnicott" in Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W'Winnicott (New York: Columbia UP, 1993) 63-88 (66-69); Adam Phillips, "Poetry and Psy-

choanalysis" in Promises, Promises (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 1-34.5. A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 184-99 (185). References to

this essay will hereafter be indicated by page number.

59

Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. . . . Insofar as[man's] needs are subjected to demand, they return to him alienated.This is not the effect of his real dependence . . . but rather the turninginto signifying form as such, from the fact that it is from the locus ofthe Other that its message is emitted." If demand is the originary voc-ative, which assures life even as it inaugurates alienation, then it is notsurprising that questions of animation inhere in the rhetorical figure ofapostrophe. (198)

Johnson underlines here, with recourse to Lacan, that the act of address be-gins in the infant's relationship to the mother, in its translation of need intosignifying form.6 From this perspective, the history of lyric poetry "comesto look like the fantastically intricate history of endless elaborations and dis-placements of the single cry, 'Mama!'" (199).

As a psychoanalyst, Lacan was concerned pre-ernnently with languageand with the constitutive displacement of desire as it passes through lan-guage as a system of differential relations. Winnicott, on the other hand,was a psychoanalyst pre-eminently concerned with the use of objects, whohas sometimes been faulted for not paying sufficient attention to the alien-ating effects of language. His emphasis was rather on those transitional ob-jects and phenomena that precede and prepare for the accession to lan-guage, objects and phenomena whose use arises only in the primordialrelation to the mother in the gradual and delicate process of her being per-ceived as a separate entity.7

To what extent, then, is it possible to conceive of apostrophe in terms ofpre-verbal Winnicottian transitional objects and phenomena? In what waysdoes apostrophe resemble a teddy bear, a doll, or a smelly blanket?

In the Winnicottian account of human development, the transitional ob-ject emerges in early childhood as the infant's "original 'not-me' posses-sion"; it helps the infant separate from the mother but can emerge only inthe context of "good-enough" maternal care.8 While the teddy bear maystand for the breast, it varies from Melanie Klein's concept of the internalobject in that it is not a mental concept; it is neither internal nor externalbut intermediate, neither a hallucination over which the infant exercises

6. Johnson quotes from Lacan's "The Signification of the Phallus" in Ecrits, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 281-91 (286).7. Because of space constraints and the specific focus of my inquiry, I cannot make in this

essay more than a few punctual distinctions between Winnicott and Lacan. For a rich elabo-

ration of crucial differences, and for a contextualization of Winnicott in relation also toFreud, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, see Andr6 Green, "Potential Space in Psychoanaly-

sis" in On Private Madness (London: Rebus P, 1972) 277-96.8. See Donald Woods Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" in

Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1982) 1-25. Subsequent references to this book

will be indicated by the abbreviation PR and included in the text.

60 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

omnipotent control nor part of a completely external reality but, rather, aphenomenon in-between. 9 Transitional objects and transitional phenom-ena belong to the realm of non-hallucinatory illusion: they allow the infant"the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant'sown capacity to create" (PR 12). Whether the object is created or found isa question destined to remain unanswered, for the object "would not havebeen created as such if it had not already been there" (PR 71). The babyexercises an attenuated creative power in relation to a found object andgains experience thereby of "a state between the illusion of the mother'stotal adaptation to needs and reality's total indifference to them."',,

Although necessarily inaugurated in early childhood, the transitional ob-ject, according to Winnicott, has not only developmental but also syn-chronic structural significance, for the "intermediate area of experience[thus initiated] constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience, andthroughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to thearts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientificwork" (PR 14). The way the transitional object assumes an intermediateposition between inner and external reality underlies also other of Winni-cott's theoretical insights. I turn now to one such key insight, which like-wise needs to be thought of in tenis of the logic of intermediateness.

In a 1967 paper entitled "The Mirror-role of the Mother and Family inChild Development," Winnicott responds to Lacan's 1949 essay on themirror stage in the formation of the ego by positing the mother's face as theprecursor of the mirror." In the hypothetical scenario Winnicott delin-eates,

... at some point the baby takes a look round. Perhaps the baby at thebreast does not look at the breast. Looking at the face is more likely tobe a feature. What does the baby see there? What does the baby seewhen he or she looks at the mother's face? I am suggesting that, ordi-narily, what the baby sees is himself or herself In other words themother is looking at the baby and ivhat she looks like is related to iwhat shesees there. (PR 1 12)

The baby's sense of himself or herself as separate is inaugurated in the spec-ular two-way looking between mother and child. This has paradigmaticimportance for later human relationships, serving specifically as a model for

9. See Melanie Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States"in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free P, 1987) 115-45.

i. Barbara Johnson, "Using People: Kant with Winnicott" in The Turni to Ethics, ed.Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000)

47-64 (52).i i. See Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" in Ecrits

1-7.

61

that between analyst and analysand. "Psychotherapy is not making cleverand apt interpretations," Winnicott writes at the end of the essay, "by andlarge it is a longer-term giving the patient back what the patient brings. It isa complex derivative of the face that reflects back what is there to be seen"(PR 117).12

Let us consider more closely the elements of this hypothetical moment.What is reflected back to the baby is not a static image of body wholenesslike the image in Lacan's mirror. What is mirrored back in the potentialspace between mother and child is an interaction that might be describedin terms of the transitional object as something that is both created andfound, that is neither internal nor external but intermediate. What emergesin the specular situation is the mother's face/baby's sense of self as an illu-sory and malleable third between baby proper and mother proper. Themother's face/baby's sense of self results from a transitional looking; it isboth created and found. As a facilitating condition, the mother or-asWinnicott takes care to qualify' 3-nmother-figure needs to provide heravailability and responsiveness so that the "mother's face" may be created/found. The pre-Oedipal mother-infant specularity Winnicott describes isnot then a condition of dyadic symmetry, unity, and plenitude, but a po-tential space in which something new has happened, in which creativityand interaction take place for the separating-out of the not-me from theme, on the way towards language. In a Keatsian idiom, this space may becalled )a "chamber of maiden play."

Rhetorically, what is creatively generated as the mother's face can betermed a personification, a personification beyond the world of referencethat is not the referential mother proper but that is contingent on her pro-vision and participation. The mother's face as transitional object is apersonification, a creative illusion necessary for the development of the self,that makes communication possible, and makes it possible for the baby to

12. In "Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self," Winnicott observes in afootnote that "the sense of self comes on the basis of an unintegrated state which, however,by definition, is not observed and remembered by the individual, and which is lost unless ob-served and mirrored back by someone who is trusted and who justifies the trust and meetsthe dependence" (PR 61). Such formulations implying a specular transferential structure oc-cur passii throughout his writings.

13. Even Winnicott's most sympathetic readers have rightly objected to his tendency tore-affirm patriarchal gender roles and to endorse heterosexual familial ideology. See ClaireKahane, "Gender and Voice in Transitional Phenomena" in Transitional Objects and PotentialSpaces 278--9i and Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother fromi Dickens to Freud (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1998), Chapter 2. He does systematically make allowances, however, for themother-figure being non-identical with the biological mother; that is to say, the role of themother can be assumed by the other parent, another member of the family, or a consistentcare-giver who is not a member of the family.

62 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

experience the world. As transitional phenomena, both the teddy bear andthe mother's face are illusions that are not identical to the referentialmother proper but have to do, nonetheless, with the reality of the empiricalmother. They are personifications that are not detached, intact, and auton-omous but involve interaction with the environment, focalized in the re-sponsiveness and consistency of the mother-figure.

What happens when the mother is not available or responsive? In thecase of the baby looking at the mother's face, "[t]he mother's face is notthen a mirror. So perception takes the place of apperception, perceptiontakes the place of that which might have been the beginning of a significantexchange with the world, a two-way process in which self-enrichment al-ternates with the discovery of meaning in the world of seen things" (PR1 13). What happens for the baby learning to use the transitional object? Forthe baby to use the object and then to move on to other objects, "theremust be the beginning of the setting up in the infant's mind or personalpsychic reality of an image of the object. But the mental representation inthe inner world is kept significant ... by the reinforcement given throughthe availability of the external separated-off and actual mother" (PR 97).The backdrop of external reinforcement, of environmental continuity, al-lows the baby to develop the ability to sustain an inner mental representa-tion of the object-and thus the growing ability to deal with maternal ab-sence. 14 The process is a precarious and perilous one. Premature maternalfailure results in trauma. "Trauma implies that the baby has experienced abreak in life's continuity, so that primitive defences now become organizedto defend against a repetition of 'unthinkable anxiety' or a return of theacute confusional state that belongs to disintegration of nascent ego struc-ture" (PR 97). What arises, then, in place of creative illusion that makescommunication possible and keeps inner and outer reality separate yet in-terrelated are defense organizations, illusions that block or impede the pro-cess of interrelating inner and outer reality-that block the self's conmmu-nication with and experience of the world. As a price for the protectionthat defense organizations afford, betweenness disappears.

14. See Reni6 Roussillon, "Paradoxe et continuit6 chez Winnicott: Les d6fensesparadoxales" Bulletin de Psychlogie xxxiv, no. 350 (April 1, 198o): 503-9. "La continuit6int6rieure/ext6rieure, dont laxe est le paradoxe, d&pend elle-mýrne d'une autre continuit&,purement externe celle-l, celle de l'existence maternelle.... Faute de cette continuitY,(externe/intemne) se d6veloppe une faille dans le continuum de l'enfant, celui-ci devrad6velopper tine 'd6fense primaire' pour compenser cette carence et continuier d prot6ger lui-m,nýe d'une menace d'annihilation" (505). ["Internal/external continuity, which turns onparadox, depends itself on another continuity that is entirely external to it, that of maternalpresence .... Without this continuity (external/internal) there develops a breach in the con-tinuum of the infant, who must develop a primary defense to compensate for the gap and tocontinue to protect itself from the threat of annihilation"; iny translation.]

63

"Fear of Breakdown"

Winnicott discusses one specific defense organization he has observed inhis clinical experiences in "Fear of Breakdown," an essay published posthu-mously in 1974 but possibly written as early as 1963. "Breakdown," he ac-knowledges, is a rather "vague" term that encompasses a variety of phe-nomena, but he uses it here to designate "the failure of a defenceorganization."'5 Fear of breakdown, then, symptomatizes a defense thatmasks a radically "unthinkable state ... a breakdown of the establishmentof the unit self. . . . The ego organises defences against breakdown of theego-organisation, and it is the ego-organisation that is threatened" (PE 88).When a patient manifests a fear of breakdown, it is "thefear of a breakdownthat has already been experienced"; "the patient must go on looking for thepast detail which is not yet experienced. This search takes the form of a look-ing for this detail in the future" (PE 9o). The patient continues in, as itwere, compulsively repetitive behavior, to look for a mnissed, inaccessibleaspect of experience. In the clinical setting, "[t]he patient needs to 'remem-ber' . . . but it is not possible to remember something that has not yet hap-pened, and this thing of the past has not happened yet because the patientwas not here for it to happen to. The only way to 'remember' . . . is for thepatient to experience this past thing for the first time in the present, that isto say, in the transference" (PE 92).

Winnicott is recognizably formulating here ideas on trauma that build onFreud's theory of traumatic neurosis as elaborated in, among other texts,Beyond the Pleasure Principle. His remarks deal specifically with an early in-fantile origin, hypothesize a primal scene of trauma that occurred when theego was not yet organized, when the continuity necessary for the establish-ment of the "unit self" was interrupted such that the developing ego orga-nizes itself defensively around the traumatic event.16

He turns in the essay to discussing "fear of death"-"perhaps a morecommon fear"-in terms of his general thesis of fear of breakdown. In thecase of a patient with "a compulsion to look for death . . . it is the deaththat happened but was not experienced that is sought" (PE 93). For an ex-ample Winnicott turns to Keats rather than to one of his clinical cases:"When Keats was 'half in love with easeful death' he was, according to myidea that I am putting forward here, longing for the ease that would come

15. Psycliaoialytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, Madeleine Davis

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 87-95 (88). Subsequent references to this volume willbe indicated by the abbreviation PE and cited by page number within the text.

16. See Max Hernandez, "Winnicott's 'Fear of Breakdown': On and Beyond Trauma"Diacritics 28.4 (1998): 134-43.

EMILY SUN64

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

if he could 'remember' having died; but to remember he must experiencedeath now" (PE 93).

The quote embedded here occurs in stanza 6 of "Nightingale":

Darkling I listen; and, for many a timeI have been half in love with easeful Death,Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,To take into the air my quiet breath;Now more than ever seems it rich to die.To cease upon the midnight with no pain

(51-56)

These haunting, melodious verses have long tantalized interpreters, and thewish for death they contain constitutes one of several dramatic turns in thepoem. The first three lines point to the speaker's pattern of recurrent fasci-nation with death, a fascination expressed specifically in the medium ofpoetry--"[c]all'd him soft names in many a mus&d rhyme," while line 55instantiates the wish for death in the present tense-"Now more than everseems it rich to die." Curiously, the words Keats chooses as temporal mark-ers here-"For many a time," "in many a mused rhyme"-suggest repeti-tive seriality and discreteness rather than the continuous duration of onewho has, say, for a long time been "half in love with easeful Death." Whydoes Keats place this accent on discreteness?

Drawing on Winnicott, we may speculate that "for many a time" theunit of the individual poem served Keats as the site of a compulsion-acompulsion to look for death, no less. We may also infer, drawing onWinnicott, that the poem serves somewhat like the scene of a transference.It is possible thus to think of the Odes not just as a generically and formallydetermined series with general thematic continuity, but as sites of a com-pulsion to repeat where Keats is searching, on an autobiographical level, fora missed detail.

2

Keats composed the Odes of Spring in quick succession during a fewweeks towards the end of April and the beginning of May 1819. Each ofthe Odes features what Jack Stillinger calls the general "cosmography" ofKeats's poems: "a literally spatial conception of two realms in oppositionand a mythlike set of actions involving characters shuttling back and forthbetween them."' 7 A catalogue of terms that characterizes this oppositionbetween realms includes: "earth and heaven, mortality and immortality,

17. "Introduction" in John Keats: Complete Poems xiii-xxviii. Further references to thistext will be indicated by page number within the essay.

65

time and eternity, materiality and spirituality, the known and the un-known, the finite and the infinite, realism and romance, the natural and thesupernatural" (xvii). Broadly put, these describe the opposition between"the realm of mortals . . . associated with mutability, natural process, anddeath" and a transcendert realm "associated most significantly with perma-nence" (xvii). Speakers and characters within both Keats's lyric and narra-tive poems tend to engage in a shuttle movement of excursion betweenworlds, a passage that each individual composition renews. 18 In the SpringOdes, this movement between worlds is mediated specifically by the rhe-torical device of apostrophe. In "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," the ad-dressed entity figures in each case as the synecdoche of a realm alternativeto the one where the speaker finds himself at the outset of the poem: theNightingale represents a mythical forest world associated with the traditionof romance; and the Urn is supposed to be a relic from ancient Greece. Byaddressing Nightingale and Urn, the speaker establishes a contrast with theworld "where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies," and "whereold age shall this generation waste."

Strikingly, the speakers' shuttle movement within the Odes parallels andrepeats closely the terms of Keats's own shuttling back and forth betweenhis writing and his brother Tom's sickbed over half a year ago. Tom Keatsdied in December 1818 after a protracted struggle with tuberculosis, thedisease which Keats himself was also to die of in t821, putatively after hav-ing contracted it from his brother. During Tom's last months, Keats, whowas trained as an apothecary, attended to his brother, moving back to hiswriting for relief from the sight of his brother's suffering. On September21, i818, he writes to his friend Dilke: "[Tom's] identity presses upon meso all day that I am obliged to go out-and although I intended to havegiven some time to study alone I am obliged to write, and plunge into ab-stract images to ease myself of his countenance his voice and feebleness-sothat I live now in a continual fever ... if I think of fame of poetry it seemsa crime to me, and yet I must do so or suffer."'19 Tom's countenance . . .voice and feebleness" reproduce themselves infectiously in Keats's "contin-

18. To mention cursorily a few earlier examples, the poet-speaker in "On First Lookinginto Chapman's Homer" writes of a reading experience that initiates and exposes him to anepic universe, an open, uncharted territory likened progressively in the sestet to the skies, thePacific, the New World. In the sonnets on seeing the Elgin Marbles, the speaker likewise sit-uates his speaking relation to a classical world glimpsed through his encounter with thesculptures. In Endymioui, the eponymous hero yearns to be united with his mysterious loverCynthia, who belongs as a goddess to an ontologically higher sphere. And we come acrossApollo in Hyperion addressing Mnemosyne in an encounter that will make him immortal.

i9. The Letters ofjohn Keats, ed. Hyder E. R.ollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,1958) 1: 369. References to this edition will be cited by volume and page number within theessay.

66 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

ual fever." The next day, a propos the first Hyperion, abandoned shortly be-

fore the composition of the Spring Odes, he remarks to his friend

Reynolds: "this morning Poetry has conquered-I have relapsed into those

abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a new strange and

threatening sorrow.-And I am thankful for it-There is an awful warmth

about my heart like a load of Immortality" (1: 370). Poetry is here assigned

the role of abstract, disinterested refuge from a world of death and sorrow.

This is the role Keats would like to attribute to the Grecian Urn as repre-

sentative work of art, claiming in stanza 5 that "[w]hen old age shall this

generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours,

a friend to man" (46-48).

What the parallels between the letters and the poems suggest is that, en-

coded within the Odes are Keats's attempts to reckon with a "missed de-

tail" in regard to his brother's death. Both the "Nightingale" and "Grecian

Urn" Odes continue the shuttle pattern of the speaker's escape into "ab-

stractions which are my only life," but they deliberate this repetition in

ways that reveal the inadequacy of this understanding of poetry and open

up a new poetic path.

I turn now to how, in both "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," Keats's po-

etic speakers raise questions about the function of art in relation to suffering

and mortality via apostrophes to the Nightingale and the Urn. "Nightin-

gale" positions the work of art in relation to death by establishing art's

space as an "elsewhere" that provides escape for "hungry generations"

from the "here" of suffering and death. Yet, the "here" and "elsewhere"

thus established undergo several destabilizing instantiations within the

poem, revealing the precariousness of the apostrophaic operation. The

speaker of "Grecian Urn" valorizes the silence of the Urn to associate the

work of art with a condition of permanence that makes art a stable and

consolatory reference point for changing generations. In opposition to this

first connotation of silence within the Ode, there occurs in stanza 4 an al-

ternative "falling silent" that threatens to undo the first connotation. In

both poems, death emerges as an event that interrupts its figuration as a

condition for which art can provide escape or consolation.

Such latter figurations I term, with a twist on the traditional generic cat-

egory, Keats's "defenses of poetry." The tensions within Keats's poems can

be understood in terms of the tension between the use of personification as

a communication that keeps inner and outer reality separate yet interre-

lated, opening the self to the world, and the use of personification as a de-

fensive illusion that blocks the process of interrelation. It is through discov-

ering and undoing the limits and limitations of such defenses, I will argue,

that Keats moves towards a new therapeutics of art, one that resonates

67

powerfully with Winnicott's definition of clinical success as to "enable thepatient to abandon invulnerability and to become a sufferer., If we succeed life be-comes precarious to one who was beginning to know a kind of stabilityand a freedom from pain, even if this meant non-participation in life" (PE199; italics original).

"Ode to a Nightingale"

Instead of a direct invocation of the addressed entity-akin to "0 Goddess!hear these tuneless numbers, wrung" or "Thou still unravish'd bride ofquietness"--"Ode to a Nightingale" begins with an elliptical approach tothe Nightingale. The speaker concentrates in the opening quatrain on theeffects the unlocatable bird's song elicits in him:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness painsMy sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,Or emptied some dull opiate to the drainsOne minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

(i-4)

While the Grecian Urn is represented as a concrete, visible presence, theNightingale figures as an unseen, ephemeral entity. The imagery andrhythm here suggest a simulative descent into the underworld, with thedeathly connotations of the passage further enhanced by the pun on "plot"in the eventual, oblique address to the Nightingale, made via a grammati-cally indeterminate segue into the sestet:

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,But being too happy in thine happiness,-That, thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,In some melodious plotOf beechen green, and shadows numberless,Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (5-io)

The grammatical ellipsis that connects the figure of the speaker with thefigure of the Nightingale renders the contours of their relationship obscureand enigmatic. The speaker displays throughout the ode a problem of"placing" as he tries to create, again and again, an opposition between a"here" and an "elsewhere."

Stanza 3 emphasizes by counterpoint the difference between the worldof the "here" and the "forest dim" into which the speaker would "fadeaway." The world of the "here" is one of sorrow, disease, and death:

68 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;Where but to think is to be full of sorrowAnd leaden-eyed despairs,Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

(24-30)

To line 26 most editors append a footnote explaining Tom Keats's recentdeath.20 Keats rehearses in this stanza the idea of art as a refuge from a

world of mortality and mutability. I say "art" here because of the Nightin-gale's multiple and protean associations with literary tradition. The ad-dressed entity belongs, of course, to a species of bird not uncommon in lit-erature, significant antecedents of which include, to name a few, Ovid'sPhilomela, Milton's "wakeful bird" that "sings darkling" in Paradise Lost,

Book 3, and the Nightingale of Coleridge's eponymous conversation poemof 1798. Keats's Nightingale is further associated with the forest world ofromance, to which the speaker begs access first through libations meta-phorical of poetic inspiration, then upon the "viewless wings of Poesy."

The developments that follow, however, complicate this simple opposi-tion between worlds set up by the structure of apostrophe. There has beenmuch critical debate over what transpires in stanzas 4 through 7, betweenthe line "Already with thee! tender is the night" in the middle of stanza 4to the repetition of "forlorn" across stanzas 7 and 8. The sequence is rifewith ambiguity. Does the speaker romantically embrace transcendent, vi-sionary transport? If so, then the "here" of line 38-"But here there is nolight"-would be the elsewhere of the "here" of line 24-"Here, wheremen sit and hear each other groan." The renewed apostrophe to theNightingale as "immortal Bird!" in stanza 7 would then seem to praise andre-affirm the capacity of an enchanted realm of art to remain a consolatory"friend to man" when "old age shall this generation waste" as it has pre-vious "hungry generations." Alternatively, does the speaker reject vision-ariness? In which case stanza 7 would take on an accusatory tone, withthe "immortal Bird" figured as indifferent to the mortal plight evoked instanza 3. Advocates of the latter possibility tend to read the "here" of line38 as continuous with the "here" of line 24. Stanzas 5 and 6 would then be

read as descriptive of a sensorily available natural world, with the speaker's

20. See, for instance, Romantic Poetry and Prose, eds. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling

(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973) 539; and English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967) 1184.

69

wish for death in stanza 6 expressing a desire for "oneness" or union withthat natural world. For such critics, the apostrophaic structure of the poemfacilitates a return to the "poetry of earth," "to the significant earth whenceall sign-constructions take their origin.'"21

Yet, a further development within the ode problematizes the parametersof this debate. The passage between stanzas 7 and 8 is mediated by theword "forlorn" that functions onomatopoetically like a bell to toll thespeaker back to his "sole self." "Forlorn" is a parabasis that interrupts theapostrophe. What is peculiar to this textual moment, according to Paul deMan in a famous exchange with Murray Krieger, is that it "occurs as an ac-tual present in the only material present of the ode, the actual moment ofits inscription when Keats writes the word 'forlorn' and interrupts himselfto reflect on its arbitrary sound. "22 This moment is the only here-and-nowof writing in the poem, as it is the only here-and-now in the practice ofreading that tries to meet it. "Forlorn" thus renders questionable the"here"s of lines 24 and 38 and their function as indicative tokens of actual-ity. What follows the "here" of line 24 is a series of emblematic tableauxvivants-"men [who] sit and hear each other groan," "palsy [that] shakes afew, sad, last gray hairs," "youth [that] grows pale, and spectre-thin, anddies"-that reveals deixis to be a masquerade. What follows the "here" ofline 38, be it visionarily imagined or sensorily described, likewise fails touphold its promise of actuality. Advocates of visionariness and advocates ofthe "poetry of earth" seem to have taken sides in a spuriously constructedopposition. The entire structure erected by apostrophe is thereby under-mined.

Or is it? The closing couplet asks: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? /Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?" These questions interrogate thevery status of the apostrophe upon which the poem depends. But the shiftwithin the couplet from the past tense to the present suggests that perhapsthere is no resting point outside of apostrophe, that there is only passagefrom one apostrophe to another, and that it is in such passages that thereaderly exposure to Keats's singularity and actuality takes place.

21. Leslie Brisman, Romanic Orngins (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978) 83. See also HaroldBloom's reading of the stanzas in terms of what he calls Keats's "naturalistic humanism" inThe Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971) 407-12. Stillinger also adheres to such aview in his "Introduction" to the Complete Poems. See also Cynthia Chase's compelling dis-cussion of the problem of continuity between perception and cognition in "Viewless Wings"in Lyric Poetry: Beyond Nen Criticism, eds. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: CornellUP, 1985) 208-25.

22. "Murray Krieger: A Commentary (i98i)" in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism,eds. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1983) i81-87 (t86).

70 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

"Ode on a Grecian Urn"

In the opening quatrain of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats uses a clas-sic instance of apostrophe that foregrounds the addressed entity's implicitattribute of muteness. In triple apposition, the speaker stresses the theme ofsilence:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,Sylvan historian, who canst thus expressA flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

(1-4)

The object's enigmatic inexpressiveness serves as the very point of depar-ture for the poem, eliciting the speaker's act of address. In what follows, Iwill pay particular attention to this theme of silence and trace how a coun-ter-movement within the poem puts it into question.

The ensuing sestet develops the speaker's relationship to the Urn in theinterrogative mode with a series of questions that ekphrastically reveal theimages represented on the Urn's surface:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shapeOf deities or mortals, or of both,In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

(5-io)

Syntactical fragmentation contributes to the mounting tempo of urgencyand haste with which the speaker-interpreter tries to construct a coherentnarrative out of the depicted images, themselves increasing in urgency andhaste. What emerges seems to be a scene of pastoral ravishing, undertakenby men or gods, in contrast to the Urn's own chaste intactness, even if"still" in line i is read adverbially as an ominous "not yet." Already instanza I a tension gets dramatized between the quality of pristine silence at-tributed to the Urn as aesthetic object and the possible story it silently tells.

Stanza 2 begins with the praise of inaudible sound as the ideal, the abso-lute principle, of sound-

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes, play on;Not to the sensual ear, but more endear'd,Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

(11I-14)

71

These lines allude to an eternal, transcendental essence of sound as silencethat links with the later apostrophe to the Urn in stanza 5: "Thou, silentform, dost tease us out of Thought / As doth eternity" (44). Stanzas 2 and 3present paratactic images of arrested movement, as the speaker addresses in-dividual figures frozen in an eternal present. Silence is here associated withtimelessness and immortality, with the condition of deathlessness. The imi-mutability of the figures on the Urn is further enhanced by counterpointwith the vulnerable mortal body anatomized at the end of stanza 3:

a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

(29-30)

The symptoms enumerated here recall the feverish condition of TomKeats-"his countenance his voice and feebleness"-that Keats reports tohis friend Dilke and that he himself feels infected with-"I live now in acontinual fever." For relief Keats "plunge[s] into abstract images . . . if Ithink of faire of poetry it seems a crime to me, and yet I must do so orsuffer" (1: 369).

Such a conception of poetry as abstract, disinterested refuge gets under-cut in stanza 4, which resumes the interrogative mode of the first stanza aswell as enlarges the tension already intimated earlier there. Puzzled over ascene, the speaker-interpreter asks:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?To what green altar, 0 mysterious priest,Leads't thou that heifer lowing at the skies,And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

(31-34)

Scanning the surface of the Urn, he answers his first question by raisinganother:

What little town by river or sea shore,Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,Is emptied of this fold, this pious morn?

(35-37)

The repeated deictic "this" emphasizes the specificity of what the speakerinfers he sees, in contrast to the universality of much of the poem'sekphrastic language. Finally, ceasing to describe the surface of the Urn, hereflects:

72 EMILY SUN

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

"Will silent be; and not a soul to tellWhy thou art desolate, can e'er return.

(38-40)

The theme of silence here seems to undergo a significantly different

inflection. Silence here is not the condition or attribute of the beautiful ob-

ject of contemplation but, rather, the aftermath of an event hinted at by the

heifer's sacrifice. Whereas silence in the former case is associated with eter-

nity and immortality, silence in the latter is linked to the event of mortality.

The Urn, prized for its aesthetic attributes of permanence and deathless-

ness, gives oblique testimony here to an event for which there are no more

witnesses. From object of disinterested contemplation, a witness to the

realm of eternity that affords consolation to mortals, the Urn becomes a

historian, though of a very different kind than the "sylvan historian" of line

3, for it is not impartial but part of history, its very participation in history

activated in the interpretive relationship established with the speaker.

In his powerful reading of the ode, Kenneth Burke reminds us that

"[t]he Urn itself, as with the scene upon it, is not merely an immortal act in

our present mortal scene; it was originally an immortal act in a mortal

scene quite different. The imagery of sacrifice, piety, silence, desolation, is

that of communication with the immortal or the dead." 23 If the scene de-

picted in stanza 4 is one of communication with the dead, it can be said to

function as a sort of primal scene within a mise-en-abyne structure of repeti-

tions. The townspeople are engaged in a symbolic transaction that aims at

communication with the dead; just as the poet-speaker is engaged in an in-

terpretive transaction that involves an unexpected encounter with the mor-

tality of the townspeople; just as we are engaged in a reading practice that

makes us witnesses to Keats's singular historical existence.

The ode does not, of course, end with stanza 4. In the final stanza, the

speaker returns to the general apostrophe to the Urn after he has addressed

individual images on its surface. This final stanza has often been faulted for

rushing closure or resolution with its re-affirmation of the Urn's status as a"silent form" that "[doth] tease us out of thought / As doth eternity," an

entity that gives solace to mortal generations. This strain culminates with

the notoriously dogmatic utterance, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," the

Urn's prosopopoetic reply to the speaker's apostrophe. 24 The sentiments

23. "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats" in a Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: U of Cali-fornia P, 1969) 447-64 (456).

24. Prosopopoeia may be regarded as the companion figure of apostrophe. The fictionprosopopoeia implies but reverses apostrophe insofar as it is the inanimate and voiceless ad-

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expressed here closely link up with formiulations in Keats's earlier work:"things cannot to the will / Be settled, but they tease us out of thought"("Epistle to Reynolds" 76-77), "the great end / Of poesy, that it should bea friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man" ("Sleep and Po-etry" 245-47). These sentiments reinforce a theme which the poem's pre-ceding performance seems, however, to call into question, demonstrating aconception of art's therapeutic function that is in need of renewal.

If Winnicott defines psycho-therapeutic success as "to enable the patient toabandon invulnerability and to become a sufferer," how might Keats beseen to accomplish in these odes such a movement? And how is the readerimplicated in this dynamic?

Winnicott's startling invocation of Keats in "Fear of Breakdown" allowsfor a consideration of the odes as scenes of transference, sites where a com-pulsion to look for death gets curiously enacted. To recapitulate, "fear ofdeath," according to the essay, is a defense organization that has arisen inrelation to an early traumatic event and masks a radically "unthinkable state... a breakdown of the establishment of the unit self" (PE 88). The idea of

"self" or "ego-organization" here designates the capacity to develop andsustain illusions of continuity, illusions that are constitutively transitionaland intermediate in character (in contrast with the ego as false image ofunity and wholeness that emerges in Lacan's mirror stage). Clinically, forthe patient to be able to move past the "fear of death," a version of theoriginal "failure" that had occasioned the defense needs to take place: "ifthe patient is ready for some kind of acceptance of this queer kind of truth,that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in the past, thenthe way is open for the agony to be experienced in the transference, in re-action to the analyst's failures and mistakes . . . the patient can [then] ac-count for each technical failure of the analyst as countertransference" (PE9o-91). Insofar as for Winnicott psychotherapy derives from the maternalface that "reflects back what is there to be seen," its efficacy will depend incases on the precarious reflection precisely of maternal failure, of the trau-matic breaks in life's continuity that, as Adam Phillips succinctly puts it,"were formative by virtue of their eluding the self "'25

It is the sense of complexity with which the tropes of face and mirror ap-pear in Winnicott that I would like to bring to bear upon the speaker-addressee relationships established apostrophaically in "Nightingale" and"Grecian Urn." The speakers' gestures of address in the odes carry with

dressed entity that suddenly acquires the power of speech. See Pierre Fontanier, Les Figuresdu discours (Paris: Flarninarion, 1993).

25. Winnicoft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988) 3.

EMILY 'SUN74

FACING KEATS WITH WINNICOTT

them the initial expectation of transcending, via apostrophe, the mortal

worlds in which they are situated to enter a condition of oneness with the

addressed entity, associated with an immortal, immutable world. Such

would be the relief of art. Instead, what is dramatized by the discrepancies

between theme and performance in both odes is the failure of the

apostrophaic gesture. While the Urn and the Nightingale ostensibly fail to

reflect back what the speakers wish for, the poems can be said to reflect

back what the speakers bring: a gap or discontinuity that, on the level

of aesthetics, bespeaks the process of a critical self-revision and, in the

implicit, underlying dimension of autobiography, bespeaks a personal-

historical trauma.

On the autobiographical level, there is discernible within the apostro-

phes to the Urn and the Nightingale, the contours of a submerged address

to the dead brother. And, here, I may add that the myth of Philomela un-

derlying "Nightingale" involves precisely the address of a sibling taken for

dead to another who is alive and capable of speech. When Keats was "half

in love with easeful death," he was attempting to reckon with the event of

his brother's death in excess of the Ode's emblematic thematization of that

death in the image of "when youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies."

And, it is in this very attempt to reckon with the death of another that the

poet comes to speak of the eventuality of his own death: "Now more than

ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain."

In "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," Keats moves from an aesthetico-

ethical, position proceeding from humanistic generalizations about death

and suffering towards one defined and oriented by death as an event. The

former may be termed a "defense of poetry," an illusion that protects the

self as the price of its comimunication with and experience of the world, at

the expense of its interrelating inner and outer reality. It is this defensive

disposition that Keats displays in seeing poetry as a shield against Tom's"countenance his voice and feebleness," against the "here" he tries vari-

ously to localize in "Nightingale," against the silence of the townspeople in

"Grecian Urn." What is abandoned in the defense is "betweenness" of

personification, what is destabilized in the undoing of this defense is the

"humanist physician"'s stance of invulnerability. Keats may be seen in these

poems to become a sufferer who participates in the suffering of others-

and who calls upon the reader to do the same. The poet, emerging as a

new kind of "physician to all men," is one who will ask his reader in the

Prologue to The Fall of Hyperion to judge "[w]hether the dream now pur-

posed to rehearse / Be poet's or fanatic's ... / When this warm scribe my

hand is in the grave" (i.16-18).

Colgate University

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TITLE: Facing Keats with Winnicott: On a New Therapeutics ofPoetry

SOURCE: Stud Romanticism 46 no1 Spr 2007

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