"Greater Love": Wilfred Owen, Keats, and a Tradition of Desire - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by James Najarian

It is plain with respect to one of our appetites, I mean the sexual, where the gratification of the same passion in another is the means of gratifying our own, that our physical sensibility stimulates our sympathy with the desires of the other sex, and on the other hand this feeling of mutual sympathy increases the physical desire of both. (1: 44-45)

This passage provides a source for Keats's own adulation of a physical affection that engenders sympathy. The valorization derives from Hazlitt's sense that sex "stimulates" sympathy. Keats revises Hazlitt by questioning how sex arouses sympathy. As Leon Waldoff writes, Keats thought of desire as a "progressive movement through time and space, leading to a transfigurative fulfillment" (44). For Keats, sensuous love imperceptibly merges into friendship and into sympathy; bonds of love and friendship are made out of the same material. Sensuous love effectively provides the loss of self that Keats thinks is necessary for affective bonds to be formed:

... there are

Richer entanglements, enthralments far

More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,

To the chief intensity: the crown of these

Is made of love and friendship, and sits high

Upon the forehead of humanity.

All its more ponderous and bulky worth

Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth

A steady splendour; but at the tip-top,

There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop

Of light, and that is love: its influence,

Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense,

At which we start and fret; till in the end,

Melting into its radiance, we blend,

Mingle, and so become a part of it... (Poems 83-84)

The apex of Keats's pleasure thermometer is simply "love," which is made up of friendship and sensuous love. Keats's generic "love" is not a separate entity from friendship and from other bonds. It "issues forth" from friendship. Implicitly, too, Keats questions Hazlitt's stationing of the sexes' opposite and matching desires. For Keats, "love" and its attendant bonds have little to with the sexes of the participants. Sensuous love is involved in all affective bonds, including bonds between members of the same sex. In Endymion, Keats expands the notion of what sensuous love is, and he opens the possibility that love includes same-sex desires. In order to emphasize Endymion's desirability, for example, Keats compares Endymion's physical beauty to that of other mortals who also attracted divine attention, including men who attracted (male) gods. For Keats, Endymion's precursor is Ganymede, the youth whom Zeus swept up to be his cupbearer: "His youth was fully blown / Shewing like Ganymede to man-hood grown" (69 ). Endymion, of course, will attract the attention of a goddess. Comparing Endymion's physical beauty to Ganymede's in effect equates the types of desire that the beautiful man elicits from the man or the woman, the god or the goddess. The gesture suggests that same- and opposite-sex attraction merely exemplify the same desire.

Owen notices how immaterial the sex of the object of desire is in Keats's scheme. This flexibility gives Owen a chance to establish a social and a poetic status for his prohibited desire. He will state what Keats only suggests: that same-sex desire produces sympathy. De Man remarks that the love between Cynthia and Endymion is redistributed among others as sympathy. I will argue that Owen explores the ways in which same-sex desire can engender sympathy, and he uses the poetic tradition in order to examine the relationship between desire and sympathy.