University of Virginia Library

Line Indentation in Stillinger's The Poems of John Keats
by
David H. Jackson

In The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), Jack Stillinger makes ten kinds of "silent" (i.e., unrecorded) emendation to his copy-texts in order to "standardize the presentational features" of his edition (p. 683). Although most of these categories of emendation indeed concern only presentation, the fourth seems more significant: "Verse paragraphs are separated by line spaces, and all except the first in a series are indented; line spaces between parts of a sonnet are ignored, and indentions in sonnets and other stanzaic forms are regularized to conventional usage" (p. 683). Implicit in this statement is the questionable assumption that line indentation is no more essential a feature of lyric-poetic texts than, for example, typographical design. I would like to suggest that this underlying assumption makes silent emendation four the source of three weaknesses in Stillinger's commanding edition. First, this policy leads the edition away from Stillinger's fundamental editorial goal, fidelity to "final authorial intentions"

(which, he stresses, is manifest in the form of individual poems[1]). Second, it disturbs the reader's aesthetic and interpretive apprehension of at least several works. And third, it distorts the literary-historical record by rendering invisible the significant variety of Keats's texts.

Unable to collate Stillinger's edition with his copy-texts for all 148 poems in the corpus, I have restricted my discussion to the forty-five works from the three volumes that appeared during Keats's lifetime: Poems of 1817, Endymion (1818), and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).[2] For all forty-five works, Stillinger uses the first edition as copy-text, arguing convincingly that Keats experienced with his publishers a "spirit of collaboration" that represented his "final intentions."[3] This paper will begin by describing all of Stillinger's silent emendations of line indentation in these works. It will conclude by more fully presenting my reservations about this aspect of editorial policy.

1

Stillinger silently changes indentation in sixteen poems from the three original Keats volumes. Affected are eight 1817 poems in couplets (including "I stood tip-toe" and "Sleep and Poetry"), Endymion, three 1817 sonnets ("How many bards gild the lapses of time," "O Solitude," "To Kosciusko"), and four 1820 odes ("Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "To Autumn," "Ode on Melancholy"). Although the sonnets and odes are more strikingly affected by Stillinger's policy than the narrative and epistolary poems, I will present all the evidence so that readers may judge for themselves the aesthetic and interpretive implications of each emendation.

To insure that all verse paragraphs begin with indentions (a goal he articulates in his apparatus, see silent emendation four, above), Stillinger emends the following 1817 poems in couplets and Endymion: "I stood tiptoe"[4] (indenting ll. 29, 35, 47, 57, 61, 107, 163, 181, 193, 205, 211), "Specimen

of an Induction to a Poem" (l. 49), "Calidore" (ll. 19, 34, 38, 42, 46, 64, 73, 109, 134, 152), "Hadst thou liv'd in days of old" (l. 41), "To George Felton Matthew" (ll. 11, 31, 53, 72), "To My Brother George" (ll. 19, 53, 67), "To Charles Cowden Clarke" (l. 21), "Sleep and Poetry" (ll. 19, 41, 47, 85, 96, 122, 155, 181, 230, 270, 339, 381, 385, 389), Endymion (IV, 240 [Stillinger's IV, 238]). 1817 indents only one line in these eight poems, 248 of "Sleep and Poetry." Otherwise, verse paragraphs are not indented. The first edition of Endymion, on the other hand, makes a practice of indenting paragraphs, and the non-indention of IV, 240 is an exception.

In the 1817 sonnets, Stillinger emends the sestets of three poems, apparently to match rhyming lines. (He agrees with 1817 in identing ll. 2-3, 6-7 of the octave.) To be specific, 1817 indents 10, 12, 14 of "How many bards" and "O Solitude," while Stillinger indents 10, 11, 13. As both poems have a CDDCDC rhyme scheme in the sestet, juxtaposition of Stillinger's and 1817's versions of the sestet from "O Solitude" will visualize Stillinger's emendation of the two sonnets:

In "To Kosciusko," whose sestet employs the more classic Petrarchan rhyme of CDEDCE, 1817 indents 10, 11, 14. Stillinger, on the other hand, indents 10, 12 and double-indents 11, 14:

As in the octave of the 1817 sonnets, Stillinger's indenting of the 1820 odes agrees with copy-text in the opening of each stanza. Like 1820, he indents ll. 2, 4 of all stanzas, presenting these first four lines as, in Miriam

Allcott's words, "one quatrain from a Shakespearian sonnet."[5] There are, however, emendations to the latter portions of several stanzas. In particular, in stanza six of "Ode to a Nightingale," 1820 indents 56, 59, double-indents 54, and indents 57 (the "short" line) by six spaces, while Stillinger indents 55, 58, and double-indents 56, 59 (also indenting 57 by six spaces):[6]

In his edition of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Stillinger silently emends indentation in the final three lines of stanzas two and five. Whereas 1820 indents 19 and double-indents 20, Stillinger indents 20 and double-indents 19. And 1820 leaves 41 unindented, indenting 49 and double-indenting 50, while Stillinger leaves 49 unindented, indenting 48 and double-indenting 50:

Finally, Stillinger differs from 1820 in stanza one of "To Autumn": although 1820 leaves 8 unindented and indents 9, 10, Stillinger indents 8 and leaves 9, 10 unindented. And in stanza three of "Ode on Melancholy," 1820 indents 29 and double-indents 30, whereas Stillinger indents 28, leaves 29 unindented, and double-indents 30.

2

In his "Introduction," Stillinger makes a cogent case for selecting 1817, 1818, and 1820 as copy-text for the forty-five poems in these volumes. He argues that the first editions reflect Keats's final intentions more fully than holograph drafts or early transcripts. Adducing documentary evidence that the poet shared with his publishers a "spirit of collaboration" (see fn. 3 above), Stillinger concludes that "it would be a violation of Keats's intentions to prefer MSS to printed versions as copy-text for any of the poems in the three original volumes" (p. 13). In light of this position, Stillinger's decision silently to emend indentation in at least sixteen copy-texts is puzzling. If his edition aims to "represent, for each poem, as exactly as can be determined, the form Keats himself would have preferred above all others" (p. 1)—and if the first editions contain these "forms"—then emendation of indentation in "sonnets and other stanzaic forms" seems, in an editorial sense, self-defeating.

In addition, Stillinger's silent emendation alters the reader's aesthetic and interpretive apprehension of at least several poems. The sonnets "How many bards" and "O Solitude," for example, in Stillinger's edition lose the appearance of Petrarchan, and take on that of Shakespearian sonnets. (Indenting 10-11 as well as 2-3 and 6-7 makes 9-12 resemble a third quatrain rather than part of the sestet.) And there is an interpretive as well as formalistic argument for reading these poems as Petrarchan sonnets.[7] But even if this were not so, Stillinger's editing would still have altered the subtle interplay of syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic form that contributes to poetic meaning.

Finally, this aspect of Stillinger's landmark edition is ahistorical.[8] Precisely

because Keats wrote at a time of great stanzaic experimentation, his textual inconsistencies are an important part of the literary-historical record. The editorial impulse to regularize seems, in relation to his texts, anachronistic: clearly remote from his distinctly irregular age.

An implicit explanation of Stillinger's policy of silently emending indentation may be found in his apparatus: by classing indentation with such features of the text as "typographical peculiarities of titles" and the use of dots rather than asterisks to separate stanzas (p. 683), he invites his reader to conclude that indentation has only presentational significance. But one need not be a hard-line formalist to find this faulty reasoning and poor literary theory. Surely, as critics like Wellek and Warren have pointed out,[9] patterns of line indentation affect poetic meaning, and not only in the cases of shaped or concrete poetry. It therefore seems incumbent upon editors of scholarly texts to retain copy-text indentation unless there is a compelling, historical reason to alter it. Indeed, copy-text indentation merits the respect due a significant manifestation of authorial intention.

Notes