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: