Keats Symposium: Ann Rowland on Keats, America, and Author Love

Ann Rowland delivered a paper for the Keats's Afterlives Roundtable on “Not Reading Keats in Nineteenth-Century Boston” at the Keats Symposium, hosted by Fordham University on October 7, 2017. In our follow-up interview with Rowland, she talks about the importance of Keats to American readers and the complexities of studying “author love” without studying the writing.

According to your presentation, American interest in Keats was especially biographical. Is there something about Keats’s life that speaks to an American identity, more so than, for instance, Wordsworth, Austen, or the Shelleys? 

I think that before we go to the particulars of American interest and American identity with respect to Keats, we need to remind ourselves of the larger nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture of publishing, personalization and literary tourism, all of which helped shape literary interests along biographical lines. Deidre Lynch has written the history of the nineteenth-century’s “personalization” of literature, describing how books came to be understood and experienced as “surrogate selves” and companions, literature treated as a person and not a thing. Andrew Piper and Jonah Siegel have both exposed the biographical framing of nineteenth-century literature. Piper points to the emergence of the “collected edition” as a nineteenth-century literary genre which reinforced the growing notion of literature as an “index of personality” and which modeled the increasingly dominant assumption that to understand a literary text one must have knowledge of the author’s life. Siegel tracks the growing popularity of biographies of writers and artists, suggesting a sort of Foucauldian “author function” to the extent that the biographical figure of the author/artist helped readers “to come to terms with a steadily accruing amount of information and objects.” Finally, the work of Nicola Watson has described the period’s “continuing desire to situate canonical literary texts in equally canonical landscapes,” landscapes marked by the important dates and places of authors’ biographies. In the rise of transatlantic literary and heritage tourism and the cultural phenomenon of “author love” that propelled people down its various beaten tracks, Americans played an outsized role, making their pilgrimages to the birthplaces and graves of beloved English authors and thereby contributing to the invention and consolidation of transatlantic “English,” as Paul Westover and I have presented in Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century.  All of this work helps us to understand why nineteenth-century interest in any author was “especially biographical.” Interestingly, Siegel’s focus on the category of the author also helps us get to the particularities of Keats’s nineteenth-century reception, as he points to the opening lines of Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of Keats (1848) as exemplifying the period’s “complete identification of work and life.” The publication of Milnes’s volume was important for Keats’s reception on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, it brought Keats back into print after more than twenty years, and in America, where Keats had been continuously and enthusiastically read in Eastern cities and university circles thanks to an unauthorized French edition, it acknowledged and paid tribute to America’s precocious “youth” who had identified Keats’s genius and established his fame long before their more hidebound British “fathers.” The fact that so many on both sides of the Atlantic first read many of Keats’s poems as “literary remains” interspersed between letters and “life” must have particularly shaped the period’s biographical interest in Keats. But Milnes – and Severn later in the century – also gives Keats’s American fans (self-styled “Keats-lovers”) a special role to play as his defenders in the face of “Old English” neglect and class prejudice. A special connection between Keats, the young poet, and Americans, the youth of the New World, was repeatedly asserted and claimed by the Boston Keats collectors that I’ve studied; they understood their various projects of memorialization and tribute to be done as a response to England’s cruel rejection of Keats while living and shameful disregard of Keats after his death. In this way, they used details of Keats’s biography to work out the contradictions and complexities of their own class and national identities, championing Keats the Cockney poet even as they used him as a figure of elite Anglophile aesthetic culture to condemn crass American commercialism, proving their devotion to Keats in gestures aimed simultaneously at defying the English literary establishment and gaining entrance to its hallowed halls. (I discuss these issues of American and transatlantic English identity further in “John Keats, English Poet (Made in America)” which appears in the 2016 issue of the Keats-Shelley Journal.)  

You concluded your talk with a question about how we might study “author love” without privileging the reading of the author. Would you like to elaborate on what you meant by that question and offer a hypothesis in response? 

What I meant to ask at the end of the talk was how we might understand “author love” without privileging the writing of the author and the reading of that writing. I meant to suggest that we must resist the impulse to assign and connect all the various manifestations of an author’s “afterlife” to his work and writing or to his life and biography, as if everything we could ever do with his texts is somehow anticipated, modelled and prompted by the writing itself. This is something we especially tend to do when the author has heightened canonical value and “genius,” a way of thinking about authorship and reception that is still with us when it comes to Keats, and even, perhaps, a way we have of extending his tragically foreshortened life. Thus, when considering the shaping of literary history and culture, I meant to emphasize the importance of readers, acts of reading, and the sites of reception, over other influences such as writers, craft, and the sites of production.  But, even as I emphasize reading over writing, I run into trouble, because, ironically, many of the activities and interactions pursued by these Boston Keats fans under the banner of “Keats-love” seem to have little to do with reading (and even less to do with the particulars of his writing). Their extra-textual practices of poetical dinners, costumes and literary pageants, household shrines and public memorials, scrapbooking and timelines, relic collections and exchanges seem more like elaborate acts of nonreading, that is, ways of engaging with Keats and expressing their shared devotion to him in any way other than by reading his poetry. Many of these projects are material and testify to the full range of, in Nicola Watson’s words, “how literature is consumed, experienced and projected” within a particular culture or of what Ann Rigney has termed “the social life of literature.” And I think we fall back on connecting the dots between, for example, the poetical dinners of these Keats collectors and Keats’s own social experience of poetry, between the Keats memorial these Bostonians erected on English soil and Keats’s own promise to “be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind,” because we don’t fully know how to read, value and assess the insignificance of an obscure Keats bust in a Hampstead parish church or the 1500 pieces of scrap-paper cut and pasted together to “illustrate” the life of Keats and now sitting relatively untouched in a rare book library.  In the cases where these Keats fans produced material artifacts such as busts and scrapbooks, we at least have physical evidence of their reading and engagement with Keats; if Holman’s illustrative collection has no real value as an archive, it at least functions as a repertoire of his reading practices (to use Diana Taylor’s useful distinction – see my essay on Holman’s illustrative Keats collection in Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century for more discussion of these issues). The trickier thing to grapple with are the experiences of author love that are merely felt, the immaterial and affective relationships enabled through reading and organized as literary experience. To suggest this range of experiences, I began my talk with Helen Deutsch’s definition of author love as “a kind of secular religion based on the necessary insufficiency and self-transcending power of the printed text,” a definition I like because it gets at the extent to which this felt devotion to an author – this imagined intimacy with him or her as a friend and beloved companion – is inspired by the reading experience, but also always leading beyond reading into other extra-textual acts, imagined experiences or felt presences. Here I find Deidre Lynch’s work historicizing the emotional practices of literature – writing the history of how we feel and come to expect to feel “the sense of a passionate human presence” animating our books – particularly insightful.