 |
 |
TUGR HOME SHORT STORIES |
In a letter to John Reynolds of September 1817, John Keats copies verbatim a poem from Katherine Philips, a poet of the Interregnum of the seventeenth century. Philips, known as “the matchless Orinda,” is also known as the forceful personality behind the “Society of Friendship” that grew in Wales during the years of Parliament’s rule. Friends who entered this society either received or chose a literary nickname for themselves; and with Katherine Philips at the center, these friends, Patrick Thomas suggests, provided a solidarity for themselves that helped them weather the ebb and flow of Royalist and anti-Royalist opinion of the time. It is no wonder then that John Keats, living and writing with his friends in a time of similar turbulence, should admire her poetry, not only for its “feminine Modesty,” but also for the philosophy of friendship Philips delineates in poems written to her friends (Rollins I, 163). Although Keats does not discuss the theme of friendship specifically in his letter to Reynolds, intriguing similarities arise between Keats’s “secular sacrament” in the absence of metaphysical conviction as described by Ronald Sharp, and the “Religion in our Love” as set forth by Katherine Philips in her poetry. Such similarities show themselves in the everyday situations Keats discusses with his friends in his letters; they are also embodied, as Sharp suggests, in the philosophy of Keats’s poetry itself. The goal of this paper is to trace these similarities, as well as to point out the poets’ differences, and to aim toward a new articulation of Keats’s poetic philosophy of friendship.
Send Comments and Questions to: ©Copyright 2000 The University of
Tulsa Graduate Review, All Rights Reserved. |