Poetic Reflections: Sean Wojtczak on Keats's 'When I have Fears'

Poetic Reflections is a new K-SAA blog series which focuses on the ways in which we interpret Romantic poetry. We welcome contributions, so please do get in touch if you'd like to get involved and share your ideas with us and our members. In our inaugural article, Sean Wojtczak reflects upon Keats's 'When I have Fears'.Once more, I find myself retreating from the offices of my profession to search for that harbor in which I will write. I pass my afternoon breaks in this way, pursuing both inspiration and a secluded place to eat. Most importantly, however, I seek the space in which to fill my page and dream of the day when I am known. Here, in this cozy college town, with its ebbs and flows in population, this search for solace grows more and more herculean with the start of every fall semester. Where once I strolled down empty lanes to feel the summer breeze, I now pass a multitude of undergraduate faces, each etched with that intoxicating blend of anticipation and dread. Seeing these raw emotions now, just four months after my graduation, is enough to conjure inside me something like nostalgia, and perhaps also something like envy.During the autumn months of my final undergraduate year, I exhausted my days in the labors of completing my MFA applications. Hours were spent worrying over minutiae, and even more were spent envisioning a future writing in programs like whetstones for the mind. When the spring semester finally arrived, however, I was greeted by nothing but rejection letters.I am no longer ashamed to admit that these rejections hurt. My passions led me to believe that I was destined for an MFA program, and that there I would produce a great body of work. In this hubris (encouraged by my collegiate environment) I simply did not calculate for this bend in the road, and as a result, I crumbled. Without the steady affirmations of an already established career, I was left stripped of any confidence, and soon developed a limp in my writing. It seemed that the start of every project was accompanied by the same nagging question: if no one will ever read this work, what is the point in creating it? I found the answer to this question in John Keats.How often have I, in moods indecisive between the lethargy of melancholy and the fretting of anxiety, turned to John Keats’s 1818 sonnet, “When I Have Fears,” and found an ambrosiac comfort in his lines? What precisely is it about this poem that brings such solace and resonates so perfectly with the anxieties of a young, aspirational writer, 201 years after it was written?Before I delve into the warmth of this sonnet, I want to make it clear that these comforts have never been as simple as “Keats thought his name was writ in water, therefore my work must also just be misunderstood and underappreciated in its time.” The self-gratification of this interpretation is not only a hindrance to the creation of art, but also serves as a direct contradiction to Keats’s idea that one should never become so entwined in the “egotistical sublime.” I also want to resist against the suggestion that the ending of this poem should be read as entirely ironic and that it serves as nothing more than a warning that the Enlightenment’s sponsorship of thought and reason can reduce love and fame to nothing. I’ve always felt that there is something so inherently human in Keats’s admission of his own finite nature that I refuse to read this vulnerable moment as ironic. And yet, this does leave the poem’s resolution as rather nihilistic and hopeless. According to this reading of the poem, one should admit that, due to the finite nature of our lives, it is entirely possible that we may never reach the peaks of our writing careers, never produce the finest work of which we are capable, never receive recognition for our labors, and never truly find the fulfillment to our purest loves and desires. Furthermore, it follows that, even if we were to achieve all of these marvels, it wouldn’t really matter once we passed from this earth. So where does one without a career find solace in this poem?For me, the comfort of this poem has always been in the observation that, despite the aforementioned nihilistic reflections, John Keats never surrenders Poetry or the act of writing. He may grow weary of his own ambitions, may acknowledge that there is a certain futility in attempting to create a perfect work, and he may even abandon higher ideas like Love and Fame, but never does he relinquish his belief in Poetry. We are told this even by the first word of the poem, for it begins “when I have fears,” not “once I had fears.” The usage of “when” reveals that, for Keats, these fears are recurring and his resolution to these fears must be found time and time again. And yet, despite all of this, Keats never ceases to write, and never ceases to love the craft.There is something so beautiful about the idea of acknowledging that Love and Fame may never reach us in our hour, that we may never complete our volumes or produce our finest work, that we may even sacrifice our few remaining hours of life to craft, and still, despite all of this, choosing to write.  Whether we write for entertainment, expression, resolution, reflection, information, confrontation or in a search for understanding and empathy, we write because we believe that there is something inherently valuable in what we create, and that it has the potential to better humanity. I still dream of future days when someone might find what I have written and feel a warming sense of resonance, but through Keats I have learned that, ultimately, it won’t  matter how many might find or appreciate my work once I am gone. What will matter is whether or not I chose to spend my time creating something I believed was worth being found. It is here that I find a glimpse of that Romantic, transcendent form of love for humanity; one which seeks to offer, not despite of rejection, but in full acceptance of its possibility. I know that I have not reached this plane of selfless love, but still I sit at this park bench, I feel that dread which reminds me of my fading time, and I write.Sean Wojtczak recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor's degree in English and creative writing. There, he produced an honors thesis on the poetry of William Wordsworth and his methods of memory recollection. His work has been published in multiple journals including Cleaver Magazine, 1966, and Typehouse Literary Magazine under the pen name "Robert Henway." He currently resides in Iowa City where he works as a paralegal and medical records specialist.