After his death at the tender age of twenty-five, the English poet John Keats left a legacy of hundreds of letters in addition to his published poems. These letters to family and friends feature some common recipients, including his brothers Tom and George, his sister Fanny, his late love Fanny Brawne, and his good friend Reynolds, among others. A notable feature of these letters is the inclusion of poetry in them. This poem is anything from complete pieces to simply fragmentary verses. The scholar Grant Scott writes, in his introduction to the Selected Poems of John Keats, "Perhaps what is most surprising and delightful about Keats's letters, especially alongside the refined, anthology-ready gems of his poetry, is their unpredictability. .. The closeness of the mundane and profound leads to another salient feature of Keats's letters: their seamless integration of everyday life with the life of the mind” [1]. The towering twentieth-century poet TS Eliot said, of the letters by Keats, “[they] are what letters should be; beautiful things come unexpectedly, neither presented nor shown, but between a trifle and a trifle”[2]. Why should violent video games not be banned"? Get an original essay The "perfect integration" recognized by Scott is a unique reconciliation that runs through, across multiple levels, all of Keats's poetry, but especially the poetry found in his letters. The incorporation of poetry into Keats's letters, written in prose, unconsciously brings together different layers of seemingly opposing forces. By inserting verse into his prose letters, Keats combines first stillness and movement, then individuality and otherness, and finally an understanding of art as both a personal pursuit and a public presentation. Keats's overall purposes for including poems in his letters are practical: he gives himself the opportunity to critique his own work, he shares his new and currently present ideas with his family and friends, and he finds an expressive outlet that works different from prose. Therefore, rather than examining the roles these poems were meant to play, it is now more interesting what roles these poems came to play. Looking at a work that uses a letter form within a poem or, depending on the perspective, a poetic form within a letter: the layered process of reconciling oppositions can be better understood. While all the answers to the questions of what roles the embedded lines came to play cannot be fully addressed by looking at a single poem, the insights this work lends will inevitably shed light on broader, connected answers regarding Keats's poetry in general. A poem that meets the above criteria is found in a letter to Keats's friend J. H. Reynolds, written on 25 March 1818.[3] Keats met Reynolds (1796-1852) in 1816 at the home of a mutual friend; the two quickly approached; “Of all the company Keats met at Hampstead, Reynolds seems to have had the most genuine poetic talent, the keenest critical power, and the greatest sympathy for the intellectual interests of his friend. Like Keats, he had been much influenced by Wordsworth…We are not surprised, therefore, to find that when Keats wishes to discuss the deeper problems of life and art his letters are generally addressed to Reynolds”[4]. This poem contained in the letter of March 25, 1818 deals precisely with such a broad and abstract problem: “If substantiality is the criterion of value, what value can be assigned to mental perceptions?...This question receives a special intensity in the verses of Keats's epistle to Reynolds... what thewhat troubled [Keats] most was the inability of the human will to regulate events, and events were unpredictable, cruel and inescapable... The idea is expressed through a series of images in the verse epistle to Reynolds, as a declaration of the poet's internal crisis, the poem deserves more in-depth critical attention than it has received so far”[5]. The scholar Chatterjee presents a series of paraphrased interpretations of other scholars who have analyzed this poem-epistle so far[6]. Amy Lowell “considers the poem 'unrelated' and thinks that Keats's aim was to make a film solely to amuse his sick friend. (Reynolds suffered from rheumatic fever.)” Albert Gerard, after analyzing the poem in great detail, believes that “a fundamental aesthetic problem underlies the epistle,” which has to do with explaining the “unpleasants” in products of the imagination, in dreams, in art and in poetry”. Mary Visick argues that poetry calls for “the need to reconcile complex imaginative values ​​with natural or moral philosophy; the poet ultimately abandons the whole dilemma and seeks refuge in a 'new romanticism'.” Walter Evert says that poetry is on the whole “concerned with the unhappy vagaries of the imagination.” All three of these in-depth analyzes highlight the tension of unreconciled opposites within the poem. However, scholar W.J. Bates thinks that "it would have disturbed rather than flattered Keats that, long after his death, these lines, like much of his improvised verse, had been recovered, printed as 'poetry' and then addressed with formal expectations that are absolutely irrelevant. Therefore, rather than performing any kind of in-depth analysis of poetry, the ways in which its formal qualities contribute to its macro-role in contemplating presentations of art will instead be considered, in accordance with the purpose of this article. While Chatterjee recognizes that “the clash between the internal and external world undoubtedly constitutes the theme of this troubled poem; the ramifications of this theme require careful examination”: this article will focus on the important unreconciled opposites outside of the poem itself. This epistle-poem consists of 113 verses told in 56 sets of heroic couplets. (The only exceptional line is line 105, where the final word "moods" doesn't rhyme with anything and doesn't have a paired line at all.) The poem is long enough for anything to be included in one letter; in many other letters Keats would write most of his content in prose, before inserting, here and there, sections of verse (usually much shorter than 113 lines). This strangeness is mitigated by the fact that the poem is essentially the letter. He absorbs the letter's greeting in its opening line, thus: "Dear Reynolds, As I lay in bed last night, / That usual thread came before my eyes." The quality of the poem, that is, its use of language, has been criticized as having “some obvious deficiencies of taste, [such as] the nonsensical whimsy of the opening paragraph with the needless banality of line 11 and the vulgar pronunciation of perhaps as p'raps in line 14, all due in some measure to the rapidity of its production, [but this epistle poem still] marks a great advance in style and treatment of subject matter over the earlier epistles. The heroic couplet is well controlled in all its parts, the enjambement is used sparingly and effectively, and there are no double endings in the verses”[6]. This speed of production is the same reason Bates cites for the unnecessary close readings of this epistle-poem and other similar epistle-poems. Yet, despite the validity of that statement, reading poetry as a minus productsignificant of its most significant context has value to the extent that it reflects the fleeting and momentary mentality of its author. The rapidity of the production of this poem is all the more astonishing when the content is considered. The epistle-poem dedicates several lines to considering a painting. The conclusion of the letter, written in prose, will be discussed in more detail later in this article; for now it is sufficient only to remember that, in it, Keats directs the attention of his addressee, thus: "You know, I am sure, Claude's Enchanted Castle and I hope you will be satisfied with my memory of it", he writes in prose after his epistle-poem. The Enchanted Castle (1664) is an oil painting by the English Baroque painter Claude Lorrain, illustrating the story of Princess Psyche and her love affair with the god Cupid. Although Psyche is the main and only human subject of the painting, she is dwarfed by the rest of the image, which contains a lush, mystical landscape. , there is a “tendency…towards an imagery of immobility or rest [which] has been the subject of frequent critical commentary”[7]. Scholars have stated that "Keats's images are characterized by a 'sense of momentarily limited power, of massive repose, yet promising decisive action'"; that there is not simply "absence of motion, 'but of things poised on the brink of action, their motion briefly arrested and ready to continue.'" Bate argues that Keats's ideal in poetry is "the dynamic caught in momentary rest". In this epistle-poem, in the memory of The Enchanted Castle, Keats does not paint a picture with his words per se, at least not in the way he explicitly does in works such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819). Rather, Keats is performing a kind of ekphrasis, a linguistic illustration of a work of art. However, the literal anchoring of this poem-epistle to the memory of a single static painting is a precise way for Keats to express this quality of stillness that permeates his corpus. “His images give silence a certain being of its own. It is not a simple denial of sound or noise, but a presence to be felt, and almost to be listened to. Keats conveys experience in complex and paradoxical personifications,” writes Swaminathan in The Still Image in Keats's Poetry[8], in a return to the paradoxical or opposite nature of the elements in Keats's works. The Enchanted Castle inspired the complete poem "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), one of Keats's most beloved, acclaimed and studied poems, but these related lines in a single letter also contain references to this painting and offer a different meaning . Letters are something that inherently implies movement and transition – and, one might even say – lack of stillness. The fact that this letter will be transported from Keats to his friend, and will be removed by its author or creator, goes against the tendency towards quietness found in its verse content. Yet it is the content of this poem-epistle, and the content of the life of its author who created it, that makes this immobility necessary. Points of immense gravity are found in Keats's life during the composition of this letter. His dear brother Tom is deathly ill with tuberculosis, which weighs heavily on Keats' heart, especially after nursing his mother on her deathbed during his adolescence. In line 110 of the epistle-poem, he explicitly mentions his daily worries for his brother: "If you get health - and Tom the same - I will dance, / And from the moods detested in the new novel / Refugees." Furthermore, by inserting a few lines of still images into this dynamic poem, and then into this letter, which is a vehicle of movement – ​​an element of delivery and communication – Keats instills in his personal letters a reverencewhich extends beyond the simple presence of verses in these correspondences. Starting from the conciliation between immobility and movement is the way in which this epistle-poem finds a balance between the value of the individual and the value of the other. The importance of reconciliation is not entirely new to theoretical work on Keats; scholar Robert Gittings describes Keats's letters as constituting the body of a "spiritual diary", and that they were not to others specific as much as they were to the "synthesis"[9]. Despite this immediate gravitation towards synthesis, Keats's letters give due importance to the individuality of the recipient. His letters to different members of his family and to his different friends vary in tone and style, and perhaps most significantly in the poetry they contain. For example, his poems to his brother George and his wife Georgiana contain some of the longest, most brilliant, and most complete lines of his letters; even his tone there is more colloquial. His tone with friends varies from person to person, whether he is "ambitious with Haydon" or "thoughtful and philosophical with Bailey and Reynolds" or "fatherly with his sister Fanny"[10]. Furthermore, the poem-epistle of 25 March 1818 was composed only for Reynolds: Keats specifies, at the end of his verse, that he hopes to have cheered up the ailing Reynolds, and he chose the subject of The Magic Castle because he thought Reynolds would appreciate it. The differentiation, as well as the juxtaposition, of the individual and the other, inevitably raises the question of personal consumption versus public consumption. This is especially worrying for artists. In another letter to Reynolds, written on 10 April 1818, Keats rails that he "never wrote a single line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought"[11]. This is clearly false to some extent, as the young poet was praised by others for his poetic talent and sought publication, as poetry became his professional career. The “public thought” that Keats is unhappy with has to do with the opinions of some critics. Around this time, just a couple of years before his death which no one at the time had predicted, Keats's poetry was harshly criticized by professional literary critics. This criticism only exacerbated his uncertainties about the purpose and value of art. “The poem,” he once wrote to his friend Benjamin Bailey on March 13, 1818, “might be a mere Jack-a-lanthern to amuse any who may be struck by its brilliance. The artist should be a friend of man – a doctor to all men – but how can an artist work for mortal good and alleviate the gigantic agony of the world?”[12]. This, at the very least, shows that Keats clearly kept public opinion in mind as he composed poems, for he viewed, even if he occasionally doubts this view, the consumption of art by others as a way of healing. the fragility of humanity. Even Reynolds, the recipient of the 1818 epistle poem, seems to agree with Keats's belief in sharing poetry with the world. In response to the Quarterly Review's unpleasant review of Keats's Endymion, Reynolds writes that: “Keats's genius is peculiarly classical; and, with the exception of a few faults, which are the natural followers of youth, his imagination and his language have a spirit and intensity which we should look for in vain in half the popular poets of the age... Poetry is a thing of generality – a wanderer between people and things – not one who stops at a thing, or with a person”[13]. Reynolds' use of the terms “pauser” and his phrase “on a thing, or with a person,” recall the unique function of poetry contained in letters, which are sent to other people. The poetry contained in the lettersof Keats does exactly what Reynolds proposes as the mission of the poetic arts, that is, to wander from person to person and from thing to thing. Not only does the epistle-poem blur the lines between the individuality of the creator and the recipient, but it also forms a bridge between the personal mission of creating poetry and the public goal of receiving, consuming, and appreciating the works. Just as poetry is an immensely personal process, so is it an immensely public presentation. Because of the artist's goal of alleviating “the great agony of the world,” these processes are now one and the same. In this same protest to the Quarterly Review Reynolds writes: “The ways of the world, the fictions and wonders of other worlds are its subjects [the mind of poets]; not the pleasures of hope, nor the pleasures of memory. The true poet does not limit his imagination to anything: this soul is an invisible hymn to the passions”[14]. The role of the poet's mind is to understand as much of the universe as possible, and the poet's role is to make sense of these realities in understandable works. “Keats undoubtedly regarded poetry as his vocation in the religious sense of the term,” writes Baker in John Keats and Symbolism[15]. and so “his understanding of the nature of art is organically connected to his understanding of broader issues.” But, as seen above, Keats's understanding of the nature of art falters. It valorizes and devalues ​​it apparently alternately. In his letters he often uses prose around his verse to criticize his own work. After the poem in the epistle-poem he writes to Reynolds: My dear Reynolds, in the hope of cheering you up for a minute or two I was determined, nor will he, nor will he, to send you a few verses, so you will excuse me for the unrelated topic and imprudent verse. You know, I am sure, Claude's Enchanted Castle and I hope you will be happy with my memory. The rain came again. I think Devonshire have very little chance with me. I'll damn him up hill and dale if he keeps the average of 6 good days in three weeks. Let me have better news about you. Your affectionate friend, Memories of John Keats Tom to you. Rim. us all – He asks to be apologized for the “disjointed subject” of his poem and the “negligent verse”. Keats's understanding of broader issues does not necessarily further his understanding of the nature of art, although Baker is right that the two are closely tied together. For example, the broader issues of pain in the world and human physical incapacity are reasons for faltering in Keats's ever-developing understanding of the value of art. Writing to George on 19 March 1819, after Tom's death, Keats reveals his painful state of mind: “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any vigilance as they pass me by: they seem rather three figures on a Greek vase: a man and two women whom no one alone could have distinguished in their disguise”[16]. Hints of this melancholy can also be found in the poem-epistle of 1818, in which an optimistic attitude is maintained, but streaks of fatalism still shine through; it seems that "beauty itself, whether natural or artistic, seems no more valid than the enchanted castle which is only a delightful illusion"[17]. The value of Keats's art, or his own art, depends on the larger factors at play in his life, and his “sensibility was [deeply] moved by reality. It is true, of course, that in some of his early poems he proposes a vision of escapist poetry... Yet, even in his abortive tales of chivalry (Calidore, Specimen of an Induction), the understanding of reality is clearly intended to provide the substance of poetry, and is not an accidental and unwelcome intrusion into a pleasant daydream”[18]. TheHow Keats chooses to grasp his reality determines how he produces his poems, even as he comments on these poems over and over again, and reshapes them into more complete pieces than the epistle poems found in his letters. Many of Keats's letters themselves foreshadow important and comprehensive poems to come, as these letters reflect the poet's current mindset and his most recent worldview. The letters also show "no embarrassment in mixing serious ideas with fragments of idle gossip, light-hearted jokes, comments on women and the weather"[19], even though they include poems both of Keats's own creation and that of others. poems are not isolated aesthetic events…so much as natural extensions of his [Keats's] ordinary existence. Some of Keats's most flexible and original sonnets arise organically from specific contexts, reflecting both the patterns of his thinking at the time of writing. both the interest of individual correspondents", writes the scholar Grant Scott, "The happy marriage between poetry and prose in the world the letters tell us that for Keats poetry was not a job or a career but a necessity, like breathing". marriage between poetry and prose is not the only union that occurs. Like generations, further reconciliations take place involving the movement of letters as elements of correspondence and the natural functions of letter writing; the self-assessment evident in Keats's epistolary poems and his general reflections on the value of art are also brought to the surface. In combining prose with poetry, regular correspondences with verse; in combining the artificial profession with organic breathing; Keats finds the ultimate solution by uniting life with writing about life. NOTES (References)[1] Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), xxii.[2] Eliot, T.S. The use of poetry and the use of criticism: studies in the relation between criticism and poetry in England. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 100.[3] Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 107.[4] Keats, John, John Gilmer Speed ​​​​and Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton. The letters and poems of John Keats. vol. 1. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1883), 537.[5] Chatterjee, Bhabatosh. John Keats: His Mind and His Work. (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1971), 284.[6] Keats, John, John Gilmer Speed ​​​​and Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton. The letters and poems of John Keats. vol. 1. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1883), 537.[7] Swaminathan, S. R. The still image in Keats's poetry. (Salzburg, Austria: Institut Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1981), iii.[8] Swaminathan, S. R. The still image in Keats's poetry. (Salzburg, Austria: Institut Fur Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1981), 44.[9] Gitting, Robert. John Keats: The Living Year, 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819. (London: Heinemann, 1954), 121.[10] Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats. Edited by Grant F. Scott. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), xxxi.[11] Keats, John, John Gilmer Speed ​​​​and Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton. The letters and poems of John Keats. vol. 1. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1883), 77.[12] Baker, Jeffrey. John Keats and symbolism. (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986), 183.[13] Schwartz, Lewis M. Keats reviewed by his contemporaries: a collection of notices for the years 1816-1821. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973), 144.[14] Schartz, Lewis M., Keats reviewed by his contemporaries, 144.[15] Baker, Jeffrey. John Keats and symbolism. (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986), 4.[16] Sinson, Janice C. John Keats and the Anatomy of Melancholy. (London: Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1971), 17[17] Chatterjee,, 1972.