John Keats and Mimicry

I.

In my essay “In Defense of Mimicry” I explore how exchanging the economic model of “equivalence” in favor of the more bodily model of “mimicry” opens up translation to transformations. I argue that while “equivalence” is bound up with an idealization of mastery - which comes out of an anxiety about the other, the foreign - mimicry allows for noise and movement:

“When I translate, I imitate a foreign text in English. This act of mimicry is volatile. It makes doubles. It makes me double. I do not extract a “spirit”; I cross boundaries, with my body. In this crossing, I take a foreign language into my mouth, into my brain. Like a contagion, the text and the language enter my body and my computer. Like a child playing on a swing—“I am the Phoenix!”—I am transformed.”

II.

John Keats, a poet now considered a “great original” was once considered a parasite of English poetry, a tasteless mimic. It may seem counterintuitive to discuss a translation aesthetic as an antidote to greatness by invoking one of the most famous lyric poets of the English language, but I will argue that translation is a key framework for understanding Keats – and his reception.

In difference to most English poets up until the early 19^th century, Keats came from a lower middle class background and education. He did not know Greek and had to read the classics in translation. This is perhaps the reason why one of his most famous poems, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” is a poem about translation, about the experience of reading a particularly good translation of Homer:

On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Before reading Chapman’s translation of Homer, the poet has seen “many goodly states and kingdoms,” but when he reads Chapman’s Homer, he actually “breathes its pure serene.” It appears unmediated to him - as if not translated at all. While before he has “travelled in the realms of gold” – suggesting there are in fact many golden originals in translation - but reading Chapman’s translation transports him like a conquistador is transported to Latin America to the original text, as if he can now master/conquer the classic as if it were a landscape - strangely uninhabited - that’s been there all along. This greatness is also equated to a great scientific discovery. The poem invokes gold, firstness, value, authenticity to alleviate anxieties about translations. By arguing that translation has the capacity to bring you in direct contact with the original – the “gold” standard of originality, purity, value – Keats may be said to argue that Chapman’s translation can be seen as (nearly) original.

III.

If this rhetoric seems unnecessarily anxious of him, we need only look at the contemporary reactions to his own writing. Contemporary reviews tend to dismiss him as an uneducated and tasteless poet, a poet of excess. He couldn’t control the effects and techniques of poetry, he had not earned mastery. In a review of Endymion from 1818, John Wilson Croker dismisses Keats as an “uncouth” and “unintelligible” member of the “Cockney School,” and argues that his poetry “has no meaning.” Croker even doubts that Keats is his real name and dismisses him as “a copyist.” In Edinburgh Magazine, John Gibson Lockhart called Keats an “unsettled, ignorant pretender” and concluded: “It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.” But even here there’s the sense that Keats is not a “real poet,” but an apothecary in disguise. In other words, Keats is a fake, a mimic. Importantly, to be a mimic implies not just a fairness but also someone bodily and a trafficker of nonsense. Mimics do not have access to the true meaning, it makes them susceptible to bodily corruption and non-meaning, unintelligibility. Or, to bring back the Benjamin essay “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Keats writes with too many sonic devices, a murmur of sonics, onomatopoeia, play.

IV.

If the sonnet tries to defend himself against charges of mimicry and lack of education, I would now like to turn to a piece of writing allows himself to be completely enthralled and excessively mimetic. Not surprisingly piece of writing comes from a text that was not meant to be published, a letter to Reynolds (1818):

I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you. I’ll make a lodgment on your glacis by a row of Pines, and storm your covered way with bramble Bushes. I’ll have at you with hip and haw small-shot, and cannonade you with Shingles—I’ll be witty upon salt-fish, and impede your cavalry with clotted cream.

Footnotes in critical editions tend to suggest that this is a “parody” of Gothic novels, the trashy literature of the day, as if to put brackets around it, as if to say that this is not really the true Keats. Why is this so important to all critics? Why the brackets?

What is parody but a profound act of mimicry? In his piece of writing he picks up on the technique of turning a noun into a verb, and this idea infects him, causing him to repeat it over and over. We might say that “sensuously” mimics the “skin” of gothic language, generating an excess that overtakes proper language, the language of mastery and rules.

Like this parody of the gothic, Keats’ sonnet to Chapman is also kind of imitation, ekphrasis or parody – though it doesn’t describe Chapman’s translation so much as the effect of the poem. Rather than a failed replications of poems, I would like to link translation with parody – and ekphrasis, versionings – as engaged in aesthetics of mimicry. The parody – much like a translation – overtakes the norms through play, allowing Keats to “become something else” (Benjamin), a poet of great intensity, a poet of – in Michel Serres’s words – fluctuation, excitement, parasitism.