“His letters are not simply a wonderful adjunct to his poems, but a vital and valuable part of them: they often serve as testing grounds for his theories and ideas, and always blend spontaneity and calculation in a way which allows us to see him in the round.”

There are many reasons why poets take up other forms of writing. Not the least is a practical aspect. John Ashbery once pointed out that he, like most poets, can only write poetry for an hour or so per day–and so what to do with the rest of the hours in a day? Poets often write prose simply for the love of writing.

Baudelaire instructs us to “Always be a poet, even in prose.” Writing prose can be for some poets what it is for a specialized athlete to visit the gym–a way to stay limber and fit. But there are other, deeper needs fulfilled by supplementing poetry with prose. Keats’s letter writing is analogous to the modern phenomenon of poet-bloggers. And clearly, there are some timeless impulses held in common between the two.

One is the need for directness. Andrew Motion points out that “in his poems Keats cultivates a language which is carefully distanced from normal discourse. In his letters he writes with brilliant directness.” The gap has closed in most modern poetry between the diction of poetry and the diction of direct address (and now some poets even experiment with Tweets or, like Paul Muldoon, craft poems in the form of text messages). Yet despite the plainspoken nature of contemporary poetry, the art of poem craft differs considerably from impromptu direct address. Poetry is inherently self-conscious in that it is word-conscious and form-conscious–even in free verse.

By contrast, a letter from John Keats would contain, according to Motion, “freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash–a headlong charge in which jokes, anecdotes, ‘little bits of news’, snatches of bawdy, imitations of comic Shakespearian garrulity, mockery and gossip are swirled together with poetic ‘axioms’ and subtle deliberations.” This sounds a lot like blogging to me.

Another need the epistle (be it letter or blog) fulfills is the motivation of audience. Poetry can be a lonely art. Modern audiences represent a fraction of the general populace, and even communities of fellow poets have divided into thin aesthetic slivers within this already small pie. Don Marquis is credited with saying that “publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon, and waiting for the echo.” Writing a letter, or publishing a blog, is far more certain to draw an audible response.

And so, many poets fulfill their deeper needs for directness, engagement, and a sense of audience through epistolary communication–be it sealed in an envelope, rolled in a bottle, tied to a pigeon toe, or uploaded–like this!–to a blog.

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John Keats, Book Vandal

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.”

In my life, my writing, and my appreciation of literature, I strive for awareness and understanding. I have done so in my life through the disciplines of theology and philosophy, in my writing through the tutelage of other writers, and in my appreciation of literature through the study of literary criticism. I have engaged each discipline, formally and informally, throughout my life. And so, I am myself one common denominator among these fields.

That said, I also recognize a dynamic interrelationship: my life influences my writing, and my writing influences my appreciation of the written word; conversely, my appreciation of the written word influences my writing, and my writing influences my life. With this interconnection in mind, I am also beginning to discover, and attempt to articulate, an important principle held in common among the three.

It stems from a phrase coined by an eighteenth-century English poet named John Keats, who said:

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Keats was referring to the act of writing. I have found that my own ability to remain in the uncomfortable company of “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” while writing poems puts me in contact with the creative power of the unconscious mind. Poets have been practicing this art of creative contact, and explaining the process, in various ways for quite some time.

A recent modern example is the American poet William Stafford, who said:

…receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses.

He goes on, in the brief essay “A Way of Writing” from his collection of essays Writing the Australian Crawl, to describe in simple, colloquial terms, his own cultivation of Negative Capability in the writing process.

I discovered, too, that resisting “irritable reaching after fact & reason” also opened up a deeper understanding of literature to me. On the first day of my junior seminar in poetry with Stephen Booth, we read William Blake’s “The Tiger”. Professor Booth asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand timidly, and said that while the lines, “When the stars threw down their spears,/ And watered heaven with their tears” were my favorite part of the poem, I did not feel that I fully understood their literal meaning.

He proceeded, rather than chastening me for my lack of knowledge, to expand upon the significance of my statement–that one can find profound aesthetic enjoyment in something one does not totally literally understand. He then asked me if I understood why I did not understand. When I said no, he proceeded to demonstrate his theory of “precious nonsense” using these lines–showing that often what attract us aesthetically to a literary work are the ways in which its elements simultaneously do and do not make sense.

The highest aim of a literary critic, he pointed out, is to simply explain why a poem affects us as it does. In this way he taught me to become a participant-observer in the process of reading, basing my criticism on experience rather than simply layering on abstract theories. There is a particular quality of attention, that requires both abiding and actively observing the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” within oneself as prompted by the piece, that I have found essential to my relationship to literature on both sides of the pen.

But it is applying the principles of “negative capability” and embracing the “precious nonsense” of everyday living that has proved my greatest challenge. And here the stakes are not a term-paper grade or poetry prize, but my very happiness. In a world fraught with contradiction, my mind wants to compartmentalize its elements, to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from, for example, perceiving so-called “good” people doing so-called “bad” things (and the other way around). Yet it is by cultivating an ability to abide uncertainty, to admit, as I did to Prof. Booth, that I so often simply do not know–that I have been able to free myself, moment-to-moment, from the intellectual anguish of trying to parse the world, like a chess board, into squares of black and white.

This fundamental capability–to embrace seeming paradox, cultivate subtlety, and dwell more comfortably in the vast unknown–seems to me one of the greatest gifts art can bestow. Because for me art makes life liveable, I have often referred to poetry as a survival skill. Now I am beginning to understand that it is a transferable skill in that it cultivates negative capability. It has helped me to come to terms with, and even synthesize, seemingly disparate elements in business, relationships, and life. Perhaps most counter-intuitively, this power begins in the humble act of embracing that I do not know.

“Bright Star” is visually stunning. But beyond this, the immediacy of the acting, the intensity of commitment in each moment, and, of course, the respectful treatment of poetry, make this a movie that stayed with me long after the final recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale” over the simple scrolling credits. This is a romance with no sex, and no happily ever after. In fact, after witnessing the scene in which Fanny learns of John’s death, if your heart isn’t smashed into glittering pieces, you probably don’t have one.

I memorized “Bright Star” as a teenager, shortly after memorizing Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star”–and was led from one to the other by Frost’s mention of “Keats’ Eremite.” This film brought back the magnificence of adolescent angst, that deepest yearning for some ineffable ideal–the very essence of romance. It is a fitting tribute to the man himself–who died young after a life marked by external suffering, and great inner beauty. If you love poetry, and especially the Romantics, do yourself a favor–along with your cheapskate bag of microwave popcorn, sneak your own inner romantic in to the darkened theater, and witness the fleeting brilliance of this portrayal one of literature’s bright falling stars.

What a strange and comforting thought. What would those generations of poets stretching back into antiquity think of those of us still practicing the art in the era of iPhones and micro-blogging? I think they might be proud. The prospects for wealth and recognition are certainly far greater in other disciplines, and always have been. And yet, in that moment, it occurred to me that the ghosts of poetry past might somehow be rooting for us, now more than ever, as we ply an art that must seem, to some, anachronistic.

Still, the poets of yesteryear probably had the same combination of wild inventiveness and ferocious discipline that attracts us contemporary poets to the page. Had we all met, therefore, we might have got along–and perhaps one day in the poetic afterlife, we will find, despite our factions and fracases, that we were all on the same side all along.

For those of you interested in hearing the whole song, here it is: