KEATS'S METAPHORS FOR THE POETIC IMAGINATION.
_ „ Mario L.D'Avanzo '53. Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1967. 232 pp. $7.50.
In The Mirror and the Lamp, his major work on the criticism of the Augustan and romantic periods, N. H. Abrams maintained that the images "mirror" and "lamp" were not simply ornamental in literary criticism, but were actually a part of the concepts they were meant to communicate: The Augustan critics saw poetry as a mirror which reflected nature, while romantic critics saw the poet himself as a lamp, projecting into his poetry a light of his own. The present book deals generally with the introspective tendency of the romantic mind, and particularly with Keats's use of certain metaphors to define the workings of his own imagination. "Keats's life," writes the author, "was his poetry, and each individual poem an 'allegory' of the imagination. . . ."
Keats's poems are frequently about the making of poetry. For this reason the book considers not only Keats's letters, which contain his more deliberate and explicit statements about the imagination, but also his poetry, which is profound and suggestive if it is also vague and elusive. From the letters and the poetry the author culls a variety of metaphors, and these he collates, compares, and traces through the poetry to reveal their significance. Among other things, he considers Keats's use of flight as a metaphor for the spontaneous soaring of the imagination; of the bower and weaving as metaphors for organicism in poetic creation; and of the fane and palace of poetry as metaphors for structural order, balance, and planned intricacy. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of "Ode to Psyche,' which the author describes as "Keats's prayer in worship of the imagination." He finds in this poem thirteen metaphors for poetry and the imaginative process, and he sees in the coalescence of these metaphors, many of them recurring from other poems, one of the most eloquent statements Keats has made about the nature of poetry.
. By his own admission, the author is trying to construct Keats's critical attitudes from somewhat intangible materials from met- aphor rather than direct statement, from the vagueness of poetry rather than the precision of poetry. But he rightly insists that Keats's letters are not the only source of his views on the creative process. Indeed, by its careful study of the metaphorical language in which Keats thought as well as wrote, the book demonstrates that Keats's poetry is "profoundly revealing of the character and function of art."
B.A. Georgetown 1960, Ph.D. Princeton1964, his dissertation: Wordsworth on Imagination, The Anatomy of a Poetic. Mr.Heffernan is Assistant Professor of Englishat Dartmouth.
