Inspiration, Accident, Genius

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 21 · 30 October 1997

From Christopher Small

‘How,’ asks Helen Vendler (LRB, 16 October), in a thorough demolition job on Andrew Motion’s new biography of Keats (and with reference to the ‘Ode to Autumn’), ‘can Motion have been persuaded to think of the bees as exploited and overworked labourers? Can a poet so misread another poet? And if so, why?’ The answer to these questions seems to be simple. Surely he was ‘persuaded’ by yet another poet’s ‘Song to the Men of England’, also written in the year of Peterloo, and evidently with direct reference to the massacre:

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that this rousing proto-Marxist agitprop should stick in Andrew Motion’s mind, as in many others.

Christopher Small
Edinburgh

Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997

From Jon Cook

There is a strange and weary anger in Helen Vendler’s review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats (LRB, 16 October). She has decided that his book is seriously limited by its acceptance of current academic literary criticism, most notably in its preoccupation with the unholy trinity of class, race and gender. The effect is to inhibit the kind of sympathy between author and subject necessary to good biography and to prevent Motion writing about Keats with the understanding that one poet might be expected to have for another.

This argument can only be sustained by something close to a wilful caricature of the book’s method, purpose and achievement. It also involves Vendler in a distorting use of selective quotation. For example, she finds Motion’s reading of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ limited by a concern with gender politics. He is taken to task for his interpretation of the verses about Madeline and Porphyro’s love-making, where he is said to ‘hint’ that the poem veers into fantasies about rape or masturbation. But Motion is not hinting at all. He is asking a series of pertinent and thoughtful questions about this central scene in the poem. There is an eerie voyeuristic charm about the episode, a curious combination of perverse and tender impulses. On Motion’s judgment about the poem as a whole, Vendler does not comment. He sees it as a distinctive triumph of Keats’s art, as ‘deeply concerned with the resources and responsibilities of the imagination as it is with the pleasures and perils of love’. This seems very far from suggesting that Keats is unconsciously writing out of a rape fantasy.

Vendler may be justified in her dislike of current academic literary criticism. She may be right about the limitations of materialist criticism in relation to poetry. But her impatience with contemporary criticism presses too hard on her judgment of Motion’s biography. The book provides new information on and a wealth of new insight into Keats’s childhood, his education and his medical training. It has the virtue of good historical criticism in the information it gives about what the language of Keats’s poems might have meant to his early readers. It provides a detailed and nuanced account of Keats’s intellectual and cultural milieu. Its argument, supported by abundant evidence, is that Keats had serious political commitments and that he wanted his poetry to engage with these in ways that were both direct and subtle. All these things and more are addressed by Motion’s biography, but they are only grudgingly conceded, if at all, in Vendler’s review.

Jon Cook
Norwich