A Preview for the K-SAA of Susan J. Wolfson’s A Greeting of the Spirit

Adapted from the Introduction of Susan J. Wolfson’s A Greeting of the Spirit

Defining “Gusto,” William Hazlitt described it as “imagination” taking “a double relish

of its objects, an inveterate attachment to the things [it] describes, and to the words describing

them.” This is Keats’s energy. With an “instinct for fine words,” he “rediscovered the delight and

wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary,” said J. R. Lowell.Keats’s own enchanted

wordworks live in memorable circulation:

“Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold”

“negative capability”

“the ardour of pursuit”

“diligent indolence”

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”

“camelion Poet”

“tender is the night”

“Beauty is truth, truth Beauty”

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”

“Fanatics have their dreams”

“I am leading a posthumous existence”

“I always made an awkward bow”

Some of these phrasings are so well known that we may not realize that their melodies were

unheard before John Keats. Charles Lamb praised Keats’s talent for “prodigal phrases . . . each a

poem in a word.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, this was “Keats”: “the power of concentrating all

the far-reaching resources of language on one point, so that a single and apparently effortless

expression rejoices the æsthetic imagination at the moment when it is most expectant and

exacting, and at the same time astonishes the intellect with a new aspect of truth,” said Robert

Bridges, deeming him Shakespeare’s equal. Bridges would become Poet Laureate, and he had

been a doctor, in synch with Keats’s medical training; he could appreciate this visceral fiber in

Keats’s poetic genius. When, in 1928, Herbert Read argued that word-power is poetry’s very

definition, he gave Keats automatic honors. “In Poetry the words are born or re-born in the act of

thinking.” How notable is Keats’s legibility in his list of unmarked examples of an “affair of one

word, like Shakespeare’s ‘incarnadine’, or of two or three words, like ‘shady sadness’, ‘incense-

breathing Morn’, ‘a peak in Darien’, ‘soft Lydian airs’, ‘Mount Abora’, ‘star-inwrought’.” Like

Shakespeare, Keats also invented words as he needed them (see my index, which lists dozens).

No wonder Keats is often called “a poet’s poet”: he writes with an extraordinary

sensitivity to the emotional, psychological, and intellectual resonances of verse, achieved

through exquisite technical skill. And so my title, A Greeting of the Spirit. I’ve drawn this phrase

from Keats’s surmise that “every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the

pursuer — being in itself a nothing.” This is imagination’s span, “a greeting of the Spirit” that

makes things, including words, “wholly exist” to the appetitive mind. A greeting: a great call to

poetic imagination and our invitation for reading Keats. Ever immersed in words, as a means for

thinking, as sounds with surprises, and as lettered figures, Keats is a poet for everyone ready to

be caught by writing that is challenging and heartbreaking, funny and stimulating, formal and

intimate, satisfying in the intelligent pleasures of concentrated analysis and revelatory in wider

vibrations.