166-] English Literature
John Keats
Early
life and education, 1795–1810
John
Keats was born in Moorgate, London, on 31 October 1795, to Thomas and Frances
Keats (née Jennings). There is little evidence of his exact birthplace.
Although Keats and his family seem to have marked his birthday on 29 October,
baptism records give the date as the 31st. He was the eldest of four surviving
children; his younger siblings were George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818), and
Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889), who later married the Spanish
author Valentín Llanos Gutiérrez. Another son was lost in infancy. His father
first worked as an ostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn
owned by his father-in-law, John Jennings, an establishment he later managed,
and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed he was born
at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support
this. The Globe pub now occupies the site (2012), a few yards from modern
Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and
sent to a local dame school as a child.
His
parents wished to send their sons to Eton or Harrow, but the family decided
they could not afford the fees. In the summer of 1803, John was sent to board
at John Clarke's school in Enfield, close to his grandparents' house. The small
school had a liberal outlook and a progressive curriculum more modern than the
larger, more prestigious schools. In the family atmosphere at Clarke's, Keats
developed an interest in classics and history, which would stay with him
throughout his short life. The headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, also
became an important mentor and friend, introducing Keats to Renaissance
literature, including Tasso, Spenser, and Chapman's translations. The young
Keats was described by his friend Edward Holmes as a volatile character,
"always in extremes", given to indolence and fighting. However, at 13
he began focusing his energy on reading and study, winning his first academic
prize in midsummer 1809.
In
April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father died from a skull fracture after
falling from his horse while returning from a visit to Keats and his brother
George at school. Thomas Keats died intestate. Frances remarried two months
later, but left her new husband soon afterwards , and the four children went to
live with a grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.
In
March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving the
children in their grandmother's custody. She appointed two guardians, Richard
Abbey and John Sandell, for them. That autumn, Keats left Clarke's school to be
an apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary who was a neighbour
and the doctor of the Jennings family. Keats lodged in the attic above the
surgery, at 7 Church Street, until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who remained close to
Keats, called this period "the most placid time in Keats' life."
From
1814 Keats had two bequests, held in trust for him until his 21st birthday.
£800 was willed by his grandfather John Jennings. Also Keats's mother left a legacy
of £8000 to be equally divided among her living children. It seems he was not
told of the £800 and probably knew nothing of it as he never applied for it.
Historically, blame has often been laid on Abbey as legal guardian, but he may
also have been unaware of it. William Walton, solicitor for Keats's mother and
grandmother, definitely knew and had a duty of care to relay the information to
Keats. It seems he did not, though it would have made a critical difference to
the poet's expectations. Money was always a great concern and difficulty, as he
struggled to stay out of debt and make his way in the world independently.
Career
Medical
training and writing poetry
In
October 1815, having finished his five-year apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats
registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital (now part of King's College
London) and began studying there. Within a month, he was accepted as a dresser
at the hospital assisting surgeons during operations, the equivalent of a
junior house surgeon today. It was a significant promotion, that marked a
distinct aptitude for medicine; and it brought greater responsibility and a
heavier workload. Keats's long and expensive medical training with Hammond and
at Guy's Hospital led his family to assume he would pursue a lifelong career in
medicine, assuring financial security, and it seems that, at this point, Keats
had a genuine desire to become a doctor. He lodged near the hospital, at 28 St
Thomas's Street in Southwark, with other medical students, including Henry Stephens
who gained fame as an inventor and ink magnate.
Keats's
training took up increasing amounts of his writing time and he became
increasingly ambivalent about it. He felt he was facing a stark choice. He had
written his first extant poem, "An Imitation of Spenser", in 1814,
when he was 19. Now, strongly drawn by ambition, inspired by fellow poets such
as Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, and beleaguered by family financial crises, he
suffered periods of depression. His brother George wrote that John "feared
that he should never be a poet, & if he was not he would destroy
himself." In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which made him
eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician and surgeon, but before the
end of the year he had informed his guardian that he resolved to be a poet, not
a surgeon.
Publication
and literary circles
Although
he continued his work and training at Guy's, Keats devoted more and more time
to the study of literature, experimenting with verse forms, particularly the
sonnet. In May 1816, Leigh Hunt agreed to publish the sonnet "O
Solitude" in his magazine The Examiner, a leading liberal magazine of the
day. This was the first appearance of Keats's poetry in print; Charles Cowden
Clarke called it his friend's red letter day, first proof that Keats' ambitions
were valid. Among his poems of 1816 was To My Brothers. That summer, Keats went
with Clarke to the seaside town of Margate to write. There he began
"Calidore" and initiated an era of great letter writing. On returning
to London, he took lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, and braced himself to
study further for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons.
In
October 1816 Clarke introduced Keats to the influential Leigh Hunt, a close
friend of Byron and Shelley. Five months later came the publication of Poems,
the first volume of Keats's verse, which included "I stood tiptoe"
and "Sleep and Poetry", both strongly influenced by Hunt. The book
was a critical failure, arousing little interest, although Reynolds reviewed it
favourably in The Champion. Clarke commented that the book "might have
emerged in Timbuctoo." Keats's publishers, Charles and James Ollier, felt
ashamed of it. Keats immediately changed publishers to Taylor and Hessey in
Fleet Street. Unlike the Olliers, Keats's new publishers were enthusiastic
about his work. Within a month of the publication of Poems they were planning a
new Keats volume and had paid him an advance. Hessey became a steady friend to
Keats and made the company's rooms available for young writers to meet. Their
publishing lists came to include Coleridge, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Carlyle and
Charles Lamb.
Through
Taylor and Hessey, Keats met their Eton-educated lawyer, Richard Woodhouse, who
advised them on literary as well as legal matters and was deeply impressed by
Poems. Although he noted that Keats could be "wayward, trembling, easily
daunted," Woodhouse was convinced of Keats's genius, a poet to support as
he became one of England's greatest writers. Soon after they met, the two
became close friends, and Woodhouse started to collect Keatsiana, documenting
as much as he could about the poetry. This archive survives as one of the main
sources of information on Keats's work. Andrew Motion represents him as Boswell
to Keats's Johnson, ceaselessly promoting his work, fighting his corner and
spurring his poetry to greater heights. In later years, Woodhouse was one of
the few to accompany Keats to Gravesend, Kent, to embark on his final trip to
Rome.
Despite
the bad reviews of Poems, Hunt published the essay "Three Young
Poets" (Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds) and the sonnet "On First
Looking into Chapman's Homer", foreseeing great things to come. He
introduced Keats to many prominent men in his circle, including the editor of
The Times, Thomas Barnes; the writer Charles Lamb; the conductor Vincent
Novello; and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds, who would become a close friend.
Keats also met regularly with William Hazlitt, a powerful literary figure of
the day. It was a turning point for Keats, establishing him in the public eye
as a figure in what Hunt termed "a new school of poetry". At this
time Keats wrote to his friend Bailey, "I am certain of nothing but the
holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What
imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth."] This passage would
eventually be transmuted into the concluding lines of "Ode on a Grecian
Urn": "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know". In early December 1816, under the heady
influence of his artistic friends, Keats told Abbey he had decided to give up
medicine in favour of poetry, to Abbey's fury. Keats had spent a great deal on
his medical training, and despite his state of financial hardship and
indebtedness, made large loans to friends such as the painter Benjamin Haydon.
Keats would go on to lend £700 to his brother George. By lending so much, Keats
could no longer cover the interest of his own debts.
Personal
crisis
In
the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of
northern England) and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, and his exposure
and overexertions on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the
tuberculosis of which he was to die. On his return to London a brutal criticism
of his early poems appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, followed by a similar
attack on Endymion in the Quarterly Review. Contrary to later assertions, Keats
met these reviews with a calm assertion of his own talents, and he went on
steadily writing poetry. But there were family troubles. Keats’s brother Tom
had been suffering from tuberculosis for some time, and in the autumn of 1818
the poet nursed him through his last illness. About the same time, he met Fanny
Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and
tragically in love. The relation with Fanny had a decisive effect on Keats’s
development. She seems to have been an unexceptional young woman, of firm and
generous character, and kindly disposed toward Keats. But he expected more,
perhaps more than anyone could give, as is evident from his overwrought
letters. Both his uncertain material situation and his failing health in any
case made it impossible for their relationship to run a normal course. After
Tom’s death (George had already gone to America), Keats moved into Wentworth
Place with Brown, and in April 1819 Brawne and her mother became his next-door
neighbours . About October 1819 Keats became engaged to Fanny.
The
year 1819
Keats
had written “Isabella,” an adaptation of the story of the Pot of Basil in
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, in 1817–18, soon after the completion of
Endymion, and again he was dissatisfied with his work. It was during the year
1819 that all his greatest poetry was written—“Lamia,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,”
the great odes (“On Indolence,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Psyche,” “To a
Nightingale,” “On Melancholy,” and “To Autumn”), and the two versions of
Hyperion. This poetry was composed under the strain of illness and his growing
love for Brawne, and it is an astonishing body of work, marked by careful and
considered development, technical, emotional, and intellectual. “Isabella,”
which Keats himself called “a weak-sided poem,” contains some of the emotional
weaknesses of Endymion, but “The Eve of St. Agnes” may be considered the
perfect culmination of Keats’s earlier poetic style. Written in the first flush
of his meeting with Brawne, it conveys an atmosphere of passion and excitement
in its description of the elopement of a pair of youthful lovers. Written in
Spenserian stanzas, the poem presents its theme with unrivaled delicacy but
displays no marked intellectual advance over Keats’s earlier efforts. “Lamia”
is another narrative poem and is a deliberate attempt to reform some of the
technical weaknesses of Endymion. Keats makes use in this poem of a far tighter
and more disciplined couplet, a firmer tone, and more controlled description.
The
odes are Keats’s most distinctive poetic achievement. They are essentially
lyrical meditations on some object or quality that prompts the poet to confront
the conflicting impulses of his inner being and to reflect upon his own
longings and their relations to the wider world around him. All the odes were
composed between March and June 1819 except “To Autumn,” which is from
September. The internal debates in the odes centre on the dichotomy of eternal,
transcendent ideals and the transience and change of the physical world. This
subject was forced upon Keats by the painful death of his brother and his own
failing health, and the odes highlight his struggle for self-awareness and
certainty through the liberating powers of his imagination. In the “Ode to a
Nightingale” a visionary happiness in communing with the nightingale and its
song is contrasted with the dead weight of human grief and sickness, and the
transience of youth and beauty—strongly brought home to Keats in recent months
by his brother’s death. The song of the nightingale is seen as a symbol of art
that outlasts the individual’s mortal life. This theme is taken up more
distinctly in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The figures of the lovers depicted on
the Greek urn become for him the symbol of an enduring but unconsummated
passion that subtly belies the poem’s celebrated conclusion, “Beauty is truth,
truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The “Ode
on Melancholy” recognizes that sadness is the inevitable concomitant of human
passion and happiness and that the transience of joy and desire is an
inevitable aspect of the natural process. But the rich, slow movement of this
and the other odes suggests an enjoyment of such intensity and depth that it
makes the moment eternal. “To Autumn” is essentially the record of such an
experience. Autumn is seen not as a time of decay but as a season of complete
ripeness and fulfillment, a pause in time when everything has reached fruition ,
and the question of transience is hardly raised. These poems, with their rich
and exquisitely sensuous detail and their meditative depth, are among the
greatest achievements of Romantic poetry. With them should be mentioned the
ballad “La Belle Dame sans merci,” of about the same time, which reveals the
obverse and destructive side of the idyllic love seen in “The Eve of St.
Agnes.”
Keats’s
fragmentary poetic epic, Hyperion, exists in two versions, the second being a
revision of the first with the addition of a long prologue in a new style,
which makes it into a different poem. Hyperion was begun in the autumn of 1818,
and all that there is of the first version was finished by April 1819. In
September Keats wrote to Reynolds that he had given up Hyperion, but he appears
to have continued working on the revised edition, The Fall of Hyperion, during
the autumn of 1819. The two versions of Hyperion cover the period of Keats’s
most intense experience, both poetical and personal. The poem is his last
attempt, in the face of increasing illness and frustrated love, to come to
terms with the conflict between absolute value and mortal decay that appears in
other forms in his earlier poetry. The epic’s subject is the supersession of
the earlier Greek gods, the Titans, by the later Olympian gods. Keats’s desire
to write something unlike the luxuriant wandering of Endymion is clear, and he
thus consciously attempts to emulate the epic loftiness of John Milton’s
Paradise Lost. The poem opens with the Titans already fallen, like Milton’s
fallen angels, and Hyperion, the sun god, is their one hope of further
resistance, like Milton’s Satan. There are numerous Miltonisms of style, but
these are subdued in the revised version, as Keats felt unhappy with them, and
the basis of the writing is revealed after all as a more austere and
disciplined version of Keats’s own manner. There is not enough of the narrative
to make its ultimate direction clear, but it seems that the poem’s hero was to
be the young Apollo, the god of poetry. So, as Endymion was an allegory of the
fate of the lover of beauty in the world, Hyperion was perhaps to be an
allegory of the poet as creator. Certainly this theme is taken up explicitly in
the new prologue to the second version.
The
second version of Hyperion is one of the most remarkable pieces of writing in
Keats’s work; the blank verse has a new energy and rapidity, and the vision is
presented with a spare grandeur, rising to its height in the epiphany of the
goddess Moneta, who reveals to the dreamer the function of the poet in the
world. It is his duty to separate himself from the mere dreamer and to share in
the sufferings of humankind. The theme is not new to Keats—it appears in his earliest
poetry—but it is here realized far more intensely. Yet with the threat of
approaching death upon him, Keats could not advance any further in the
direction that he foresaw as the right one, and the poem remains a fragment.
Travelling
and ill health
Having
left his training at the hospital, suffering from a succession of colds, and
unhappy with living in damp rooms in London, Keats moved with his brothers into
rooms at 1 Well Walk in the village of Hampstead in April 1817. There John and
George nursed their tubercular brother Tom. The house was close to Hunt and
others of his circle in Hampstead, and to Coleridge, respected elder of the
first wave of Romantic poets, then living in Highgate. On 11 April 1818, Keats
reported that he and Coleridge had taken a long walk on Hampstead Heath. In a
letter to his brother George, he wrote that they had talked about "a
thousand things , ... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation,
metaphysics." Around this time he was introduced to Charles Wentworth
Dilke and James Rice.
In
June 1818, Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the Lake
District with Charles Armitage Brown. Keats's brother George and his wife
Georgiana accompanied them to Lancaster and then continued to Liverpool, from
where they migrated to America, living in Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, until
1841, when George's investments failed. Like Keats's other brother, they both
died penniless and racked by tuberculosis, for which there was no effective
treatment until the next century. In July, while on the Isle of Mull, Keats
caught a bad cold and "was too thin and fevered to proceed on the
journey." After returning south in August, Keats continued to nurse Tom,
so exposing himself to infection. Some have suggested this was when tuberculosis,
his "family disease", took hold. "Consumption" was not
identified as a disease with a single infectious origin until 1820. There was
considerable stigma attached to it, as it was often tied with weakness,
repressed sexual passion or masturbation. Keats "refuses to give it a
name" in his letters. Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818.
Wentworth
Place: annus mirabilis
John
Keats moved to the newly built Wentworth Place, owned by his friend Charles
Armitage Brown. It was on the edge of Hampstead Heath, ten minutes' walk south
of his old home in Well Walk. The winter of 1818–19, though a difficult period
for the poet, marked the beginning of his annus mirabilis in which he wrote his
most mature work. He had been inspired by a series of recent lectures by
Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and had also met Wordsworth. Keats
may have seemed to his friends to be living on comfortable means, but in
reality he was borrowing regularly from Abbey and his friends.
He
composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place in April and May and,
although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to
Psyche" opened the published series. According to Brown, "Ode to a
Nightingale" was composed under a plum tree in the garden. Brown wrote, "In
the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a
tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from
the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two
or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of
paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On
inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic
feelings on the song of our nightingale." Dilke, co-owner of the house,
strenuously denied the story, printed in Richard Monckton Milnes' 1848
biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'.
"Ode
on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by
sonnet forms and probably written after "Ode to a Nightingale".Keats's
new and progressive publishers Taylor and Hessey issued Endymion, which Keats
dedicated to Thomas Chatterton, a work that he termed "a trial of my
Powers of Imagination". It was damned by the critics, giving rise to
Byron's quip that Keats was ultimately "snuffed out by an article",
suggesting that he never truly got over it. A particularly harsh review by John
Wilson Croker appeared in the April 1818 edition of the Quarterly Review. John
Gibson Lockhart writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as
"imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart
advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than
a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and
ointment boxes." It was Lockhart at Blackwoods who coined the defamatory
term "the Cockney School" for Hunt and his circle, which included
both Hazlitt and Keats. The dismissal was as much political as literary, aimed
at upstart young writers deemed uncouth for their lack of education, non-formal
rhyming and "low diction". They had not attended Eton, Harrow or
Oxbridge and they were not from the upper classes.
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment