Houghton Hosts Keats Conference

Would you like the chance to view the original handwriting and corrections on famous works marked by one of the greatest poets in English literature?

About 250 teachers, scholars and enthusiasts of John Keats attended an exhibition and three-day international conference at Houghton Library last week to do just that.

The conference, which ended last weekend, celebrated the bicentennial of Keats' birth. The exhibition, however, is still showing.

"This was a historic conference," said Dennis C. Marnon, administrative officer of Houghton Library. "The first of its kind ever devoted exclusively to the study of John Keats, this was also the first time that Houghton Library had sponsored a conference of this size devoted exclusively to the study of one author's work."

The conference featured panels, poetry readings, paper presentations and discussions of Keats and his legacy.

"We had so many famous names representing the last quarter century of Keats studies that the audience was enraptured by all of the presentations, particularly lively discussions that followed the presentation in which poet laureate Robert Hass spoke," Marnon said.

Staff members of Houghton Library said the sessions were well attended and popular, especially a session on "Keats and the Art of Poetry."

Leslie A. Morris, the curator of manuscripts at Houghton, described the session as "poets talking about poetry."

She said Hass spoke in that panel about how most of Keats' later poems were never equalled by later artists, so it is "therefore intimidating to poets who cannot call themselves Keatsian without believing that they will fail to measure up to his standard."

A Harvard professor who chaired a panel called "The Art of Teaching Keats" said she found it valuable to listen to the papers of other scholars.

"You never come away from the exposure to the views of others with-out having your own mind stimulated and sometimes changed," said University Professor Helen H. Vendler, who teaches Keats as part of English 10, a required survey class on British literature.

"[As a result of the conference] I was brought to think more about Keats' political and aesthetic principles and also about his constant echoing of Shakespeare," she said. "I think it's always important to remind ourselves why poets like Keats remain perpetual objects of studies for so many centuries, and the conference does just that."

The keynote speech by Jack Stillinger, the editor of a standard critical edition of Keats' poetry and a well-respected Keats scholar, was entitled "Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats."

According to Marnon, Stillinger "gave a very close reading of a long Keats poem. The Eve of St. Agnes' in which he found multiple readings, multiple readers and in fact, multiple authors."

The conference was organized by Robert Ryan of Rutgers University and Ronald Sharp of Kenyon College. It was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, the Pforzheimer Foundation, the Acriel Foundation and Houghton Library.

"The [Houghton Library] collection contains more than three quarters of Keats' surviving poetry manuscripts and about half of his surviving letters," Morris said. "Harvard has also comprehensively collected editions of Keats and has multiple copies of the books that appeared in Keats' own lifetime as well as all subsequent printings of Keats."

Morris said most of the Keats collection came to Harvard through the generosity of two collectors--President A. Lawrence Lowell's sister Amy, who wrote a biography of Keats and who bequeathed her collection to Harvard in 1925, and Arthur A. Houghton Jr., after whom the library was named, who gave his collection over a number of years between 1940 and 1979.

Exhibitions

Beginning on Thursday, Harvard opened two exhibitions on Keats that will continue to run for at least a month.

One exhibit at Houghton Library, entitled "John Keats and the Exaltation of Genius," includes original manuscripts in Keats' handwriting, such as the manuscripts for "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "To Autumn," along with letters written by Keats.

It also features first editions and a plaster life mask of the poet done when he was 19 by painter Benjamin Haydon.

A second exhibition, housed in the Widener Library rotunda, is titled "John Keats: Bright Star." It contains contemporary artwork by Irish artist Ross Wilson.

The Widener Library exhibit runs through October 14, and the Houghton Library exhibit runs through October 28.