Fit {x3}
Reading Richard Woodhouse’s draft letter to John Taylor, a response to Keats’s letter of October 27, 1818 which details Keats’s rejection of Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime, I am struck by three uses of the word “fit.”
First, Keats positions his response regarding artistic “identity” as dual indices of the motives of an artist, of the “whole pro and con, about genius, and views of the achievements and ambition and the coetera.” He fits himself into a place that is “everything and nothing”—where an artist has no individual identity. However, he also grants that he has ambition of “doing the world some good” which requires that he have some concept of identity. Keats wonders if this position is merely a role that he plays from time to time that is distant from any normal concept of self—“But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself; but from some character in whose soul I now live.”
The difficulty of “fitting” between the non-identity-fied space of artistic creation and the real world of identity-fied space is characterized by Woodhouse as a fit of a different sort. Woodhouse identifies poets of several kinds. First, there is the poet who is “purely descriptive confining himself to external objects.” Second, there is the poet who further describes “the effects of thoughts of which he is conscious & which others are affected by.” I would suspect that he would place Wordsworth in this second category. A third kind “will soar so far into the regions of imagination as to conceive of beings & substances in situations different from what he has ever seen.” I suspect Coleridge’s responsibilities in Lyrical Ballads fit there. Others reason through poetry, and others will be witty—perhaps Pope fits in these kinds. “Another will throw himself into various characters & make them speak as the passions would naturally incite them to do.” Browning and Tennyson, after Woodhouse’s time, would certainly fit there. But to speak in tongues is a completely different sort of fit:
The highest order of Poet will not only posses all the above powers but will have as high an imagination that he will be able to throw his own soul into any object he sees or imagines, so as to see feel be sensible of & express, all that the object itself would see feel be sensible of and express—& he will speak out of that object—so that his own self will with the Exception of the Mechanical part be “annihilated,”—and it is the excess of this power that I suppose Keats to speaks, when he says he has no identity—As a poet, and when the fit is upon him, this is true. . .
The loss of identity is created, according to Woodhouse, created by a different sort of “fitness”—that of exercise:
If then his imagination has such power: and he is continually cultivating it, & giving it play. It will acquire strength by the Indulgence & exercise. This in excess is the Case of mad persons. And this may be carried to that extent that he may lose sight of his identity so far as to give him a habit of speaking generally in an assumed character—so that What he says shall be tinged with the Sentiments proper to the Character which at the time has possessed itself of his Imagination.
To a certain extent, we all speak in tongues. We speak publicly of one side of ourselves, and privately of another. To give a voice to anything is to adopt an identity for the moment with a shadowy line between reacting to the effects of the world and creating our own affects by the extension of our perceived character. If there is a connection between writing and madness, it seems to me that it hinges on our particular notion of the “fit.”
Discourse embraces three types of fit.
Discourse is “fitted” to the world, made “fit” by exercise and practice, and taken to the extreme it drives us to “fits” where identity is perhaps lost in the moment of utterance.
February 18, 2005 12:57 PM
Nice riff!