geoffrey hill
Goethe, and of the poetry he returned to after his seven-year silence, is alien to this
portrayalof his dying. It is also alien to the description of his deathbed published
by his sister-in-law.^64 This ‘wheezing red-nosed ghost’—compacting in one phrase
the offices of valetudinarian and clown—is an invention much in excess, not only
of the official hagiography, but also of Schiller’s own philosophy and poetic aura.
Joy is waylaid and slain. It was my joy
They murdered on the Rhenish roads, and left
A wheezing red-nosed ghost to end the journey.
My joy is murdered, tumbled in the ditch
With Rousseau and Wallenstein, a black blood-welter.
Joy, my Adonis, rise; now I can meet you
Unmasked in all your violence, dry blood
Hanging about your eyes, your beauty punished.^65Schiller’s political aesthetic, whether we read that as ‘joy’ or ‘freedom’, has been
pitched into the ‘black blood-welter’ of EuropeanRealpolitik;heisasmuchadriftas
is that other major figure in Keyes’s political iconography, the dispossessed peasant
of the enclosures acts.^66 Keyes’s view of Schiller’s work and influence (changed here
to catarrhal effluence) anticipates to some degree the critical attitude, expressed
‘not so long after the Second World War’, by the historian Erich Heller:
Friedrich Schiller is the name of a poetical disaster in the history of German literature,
a disaster, however, of great splendour. His work—a lifework of considerable genius,
moving single-mindedness, and great moral integrity—is a striking instance of a European
catastrophe of the spirit: the invasion and partial disruption of the aesthetic faculty by
unemployed religious impulses.^67
It is not that writing about politics makes a poet significant; but when a poet as
significant as Keyes chooses as his recurrent theme public and private dispossession,
a new light is directed on to and against certain features of European Romanticism.
He is confronting the idea of poetry as the home of the ‘Tellable’ by the European
reality of the domain of the Unspeakable. Keyes knew about Dachau as early
as May 1941.^68 In his article commissioned for the symposiumThe Future of
Faithhis argument is less than perfectly clear, but he appears to be saying that
a reader who supposes the ‘prime purpose’ of the artist is ‘primarily to give
information about the world’ is narrow-minded or short-sighted. In 1942, of
course, information was deemed essential to the national well-being (for example,
‘Ministry of Information’). But for Keyes the ‘true artist’ ‘enlarges the experience
(^64) Friedrich Schiller,Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for Our Time, with an Account of his Life and
Work by Frederick Ungar(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1959), 179–84.
(^65) Keyes, ‘Schiller Dying’, inCollected Poems, 49.
(^66) Keyes, ‘Ploughman’, ‘A Garland for John Clare’, ‘Death and the Ploughman’, ibid. 23, 24–6,
90–2. 67
Heller,Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays, 47.
(^68) See Keyes, ‘Europe’s Prisoners’, stanza 5, inCollected Poems,21–2.