Enshrinings: Public Memorials and Keatsian Poetics

Abstract

Right now, preparing to begin this section, I am reading with avidity Janet Malcolm’s new book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; it speaks to my Keats enterprise. Aside from the difference between suicide and death-by-consumption (a big difference, to be sure) the two lives resonate with each other: the early deaths and late, brief flowering of ‘great’ poems, the myth of death at the hand of malicious persons (the critics, Ted Hughes) and the preoccupations with finding, rooting out, and inveighing against the evil forces, the way that each poet remains, over time, stuck in youth and youthful thinking (of course) while everyone else — relatives, friends, citics, the world — grows older, how both poets think in rather jejune ways, being in fact young and excitable and in love with images, and yet one tends to honor them with maturity of insight. And then this disturbing sentence from Plath (quoted by Malcolm) that easily could apply to Keats because it points to his similar absorption in an inertia of affect (or an affect of such inertia): ‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’