English poet John Keats (1795-1821) first met artist and writer William Hazlitt in 1818, when Hazlitt was lecturing at the Surrey Institution. Over his few remaining years, Keats would seek out the older writer for advice and conversation and would read and reflect on many of Hazlitt’s works, sometimes presenting them alongside his own in letters to family and supporters.
David Bromwich, in his book Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York, Oxford University Press, 1983), observes that Hazlitt passed on his veneration of Shakespeare to the young poet, and that this was reflected in Keats’ richness of language and love of drama. Bromwich also notes in Keats some of Hazlitt's pace of movement, “the variable speed of uncommon thoughts, hurried along [with] each shift of thought…”
The two came to have similar views on issues such as identity and the nature of experience. Keats’ desire “for a life of Sensation rather than thoughts” (from an 1817 letter, quoted in a Brooklyn College introduction to Keats) seems to reflect Hazlitt’s style of literary criticism, which focused more on what a work could evoke in a reader than on its concepts.
The Disinterested Mind and the Imagination
Bromwich argues that much of Keats’ work, including Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, were influenced by Hazlitt’s writings on the imagination.
In his Essay on Human Action, Hazlitt argues against the idea of a personal identity. He considered the mind as not “selfish” but “disinterested”, and did not believe that an identity was necessary for a person to, for example, feel sympathy for someone else. Human beings draw on present and past experience and use their imagination to anticipate the future. As Bromwich relates, “the imagination surpervises the work of the reason, which compares ideas, and of the memory, which transforms past impressions into ideas.
In Keats’ nature tribute Ode to a Nightingale, the question is asked: Do I wake or sleep?” In sleep, as our ideas and experience get muddled, we can lose the notion of self. This Ode, along with the Ode on a Grecian Urn written at about the same time, are said to test Keat’s new understanding of the interplay between identity, experience and imagination. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (in the poet’s musings on the urn) relates to the nature of experience and its expression in art.
The Brooklyn College essay on Keats observes that the poet advocated living "the ripest, fullest experience that one is capable of," and that he believed that what determines truth is experience.
According to Bromwich, Keats found the idea of separating poetry from a personal identity, from the self, useful. Certainly Keats strived to be free of the kind of moralizing associated with the idea of selfishness as a motivator for people. In a letter to Reynolds in 1818, the poet wrote: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pockets.”
While he admired creative genius, it is unlikely that, Hazlitt, weighed down by the need to earn a living and not held in high esteem by his peers, considered himself one. Even Keats was not revered until after his death. But Hazlitt wrote that genius appears in “unconscious exertions of power”; and Keats aspired to poetry written as naturally as “leaves to a tree”. In the outpouring of work of both these artists, there must surely be some elements that would approach genius.
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