Thank God for my pen! It’s only drawing the nib over the paper that scores through this curd of inertia. My God! It seems I’m Sisyphus pushing away at that damn rock! But it’s always been this way with me - living on the page - though now even the will to write seems to have gone. These last few days have been the worst, almost unbearable. Just how much can we bear?

Of course he’s gone now: no changing that. Even though I would do anything - Christ! forgive everything. He's gone. For good. I don’t blame him now, though. I’ve wept away the anger. Now I’m just a shell for dreaming in.

And last night I had the strangest dream - so surreal - yet beautiful in its way. I dreamt that he called round and I left with him. Yes, I left myself and went with him. We walked away together, laughing and happy like the old days. Leaving that other me - the damaged Sylvia - spitting at the walls like Medusa; raging at daddy; clinging like bindweed to everything loved and cherished and strangling it all; loathing and condemning herself and for what? Who knows? For not being perfect perhaps?

In the dream we were at Howarth - our Cathy and Heathcliff and afternoon - running on the moors. Then we were in the low field, the time I stood on the gate and declaimed Chaucer to the cows! God how he laughed! How I loved him. How I love him…

And that time sketching the market in Benidorm: all day he sat beside me writing, happy that we were both happy - as if it would all go on forever. It seemed that we had conquered all categories of time; sitting in the sun-filled square, with the square watching us watching it...

Something vital has left me recently. With all my last poems something went - was released. I was so pleased with them though; as if some point of definition had been reached; as if I’d exorcised some fury - some heat; as though something had been burnt off from within. Yes! a burnt offering. (God! If you’re going to pun, make sure it’s calamitous!!)

Perhaps pain is the source of art. Or, at least, my art? I only know that now the fierce images have left me - my mind’s a blank. I’m more surprised at this state of affairs than alarmed; yet if I’m not to write, what am I to do? How am I to live?

It’s not the challenges of handling everything on my own that’s the hardest thing, but the increasing inability to initiate action - to summon the will to go on. And the days have been so fiercely cold of late. So very, very cold...

John Keats to John Ashbery.

Dear Ashbery,

How fortunate we are to enjoy this special correspondence through the timeless and magical linkage of poetry! And, I trust, that this letter finds you in robust health and working productively.

I confess to being utterly absorbed by your last letter, which, my trembling hand could barely hold, my mind scarcely contain the wondrous nightmare that you describe as your time.

I sat all the night long in the dance of firelight, wondering whether I had indeed lost my mind (a possibility often feared), as I grappled to comprehend the full import of your revelations. It is only with the utmost marshalling of will that I recount a recent experience in thought (though for us poets are not thought and reality one and the same?), which seems increasingly significant in the light of your letter and bears, perhaps, some relation to, not only our common concern of poetry, but your own work and time also.

I therefore unpick and lay before you this particular strand of thought that my brain has weaved. It concerns the mystery that ultimate puzzle of being that absorbs and perplexes us all. (Should we not be considered as clams in the murk of the ocean depths if we did not question thus?)

Accepting, then, our lineage and fellowship in this sublime adventure of discovery, should we not address realistically the scale of the enterprise? Surely, in our attempts to record the mystery the enigma of existence we humans can only glimpse the great reality, can only fleetingly know and comprehend our lives. How then, in this humble knowledge, can we expect to possess anything like a comprehensive view of the great riddle? No! We must always be in a state of negative capability happy in recording the partial revelation and grateful in, and for, our doubts and uncertainties.

Indeed, what is certainty? what can we be certain of? Not only this, but would we really wish for full comprehension as our minds flicker away in the short span of our time here on earth? (Happy are those who are never visited with intimations of mortality. It seems that I have lived with them always!) Surely, our very existence is this constant movement of intellect this butterfly flight through experience. Indeed, my argument should hold especially true for us poets; we who labour to transmit in verse the passage of our lives, catching (when fortunate!) some moments to record, which the muse has blessed with authenticity. (I often liken the poet to the cave dweller - those artists of old - who would paint the rock with their images. I see them earnestly working in the flickering light, like the poet at night in his study, labouring by his candle.)

How, then, can the poet be anything other than a questioner of existence? His mind must be concerned with enquiry regarding the mystery as opposed to demanding answers of it we shall leave such didactic delusions to Newton and his apostates! No. Let us present our ideas with a sense of beauty as our only yardstick, and be satisfied in the knowledge that, that is enough.

My apologies Ashbery for the laborious telling of my idea, yet I know that as a fellow poet you will appreciate my passions. After all, do we not only live when engaged poetically? And when not absorbed in such a fashion, are we not already lying beneath the sod, instead of walking however ponderously - upon it?

Your affectionate friend,

John Keats.

John Ashbery to John Keats

Dear Keats,

Thank you so much for your letter which I will treasure and hoard with the others. I shall possess them with the zeal of a lover!

Your idea of negative capability seems to me, not only visionary and prophetic, but utterly relevant to my time too. And that you should see time and experience in terms of flickers and butterfly flight gives me such a feeling of solidarity as I perceive the mystery in this light also.

I do hope that the revelations of my time, that you refer to in your letter, did not disturb you too greatly. Perhaps you would be heartened, or amused to know, that the pendulum of poetic fashion has been swinging, back and forth, between the poles of imagination and reason steadily from your time to mine.

As you know, my own poetic practice is to work against any fixed and rigid interpretation of experience, preferring to record the opposite view, which is to highlight the movement between moments of reality; that life is more sea than stone thought swims to register meaning , as opposed to chipping away at, or adding to, some block of previously determined experience.

It is my conviction that this latter realist or mimetic practice, in recording and interpreting life, leads ultimately to artistic and ideological tyranny, and must, therefore, be challenged and deconstructed ceaselessly. (Well, if I were to be pressed into giving a definition of my style that would be it I guess.) Actually, I am often hounded into explaining my method of writing and its meaning by people and find it intensely tiring and annoying. Cannot the work stand alone and explain itself? What answers can we give when our poems themselves are questions? It seems to me that poetry is seen by many as a separate enterprise, divorced in some definite way from life and living. Of course I, like yourself, do not hold this view, and feel that poetry is indistinguishable from life: certainly it is art, yet that fact increases its value (being the richest form of verbal expression); it does not devalue it. And it is because I could find a correlation between my ideas, and the one you told me of in your letter, that I feel so encouraged.

I would like to send you a copy of a poem that I have been working on. It is called Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. In the poem, words are only speculation that cannot find the meaning of the music. We can see only postures of the dream. Love is mentioned, and though we know it to be mysteriously present, we know also that it cannot be sandwiched between two adjacent moments. Life as mosaic is illusory.

These instances, I hope, share in the character of your negative capability I would greatly appreciate your views on this and whether you also see any similarity in this area.

It seems that we are in paradox whichever way we turn in our role as poet: we use the particular (whatever subject matter or form), to illustrate our provisional place on life's graph. Our dilemma is that in describing (necessarily) moments of time from the weave of experience in our poems, we are always in danger of presenting the illusion of a fixed and somewhat static notion of events, thus blinding ourselves (and possibly others) to the ever changing dynamic of existence: words can trap us.

How, then, is the fact of a mutable existence authentically evoked? It seems that we need the mosaic but should be wary of its pieces! That is the charge and challenge of poetry for me: and how to do it well is indeed the question!

You would find the poetic situation of my time fascinating, I'm sure. On the one hand, we have the postmodern and avante garde poetic, rejecting and resisting any notions of absolute truth, which have manifested themselves upon us through time in political, religious and class based moralities; often leading to repressive ideological situations which always, through its production of the idealized, means the existence of the marginalized. Of course you are no stranger to these matters I write of them only in a descriptive context referring to the poetic climate of the late 20th century. There is no metaphysical reliance or reaching here, language itself is the poetry. Form prevails over content and the meaning of one poem is another. There is no foregrounding of any truths, as these are refuted or deeply suspected.

Then, at the opposite point of the poetic pendulum, we have a mainstream poetic. This broadly generalized grouping contains the traditional poetry, being more faithful to standard forms and accepted notions of thought. Of course, all this is nothing new. In every branch of art and life we have opposing views forming creative tensions poetry is no different.

And, so Keats; we all become categorized! I have been described as a leading light of postmodernism, although I certainly haven't aligned myself to any movement or school. Oh yes, Keats. You are a Romantic, along with Blake, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth; and your collective poetic content should be seen as a reaction to Augustan poetic form and sensibility you may like to know! (I shall write more about this in my next letter.)

Well, Keats, however we define poetry and its poets (or are defined), I would always wish to be alongside you in your cave: fire-lit, and painting our visions together on the wall.

Yours devotedly,

John Ashbery