168- ] English Literature

168- ] English Literature

John Keats

 Literary Life , Career & Romanticism

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.

Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he saw as beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and exactly controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in English.

Keats was said to have been born in his maternal grandfather’s stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury Circus, but there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief that his family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the stable for his father-in-law and later owned it, providing the family an income comfortable enough for them to buy a home and send the older children, John and George (1797-1841), to the small village academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted teacher John Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) soon followed them. Although little is known of Keats’s early home life, it appears to have been happy, the family close-knit, the environment full of the exuberance and clamor of a big-city stable and inn yard. Frances Keats was devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely. Under Keats’s father the family business prospered, so that he hoped to send his son, John, to Harrow.

At the age of eight Keats entered Enfield Academy and became friends with young Charles Cowden Clarke, the fifteen-year-old son of the headmaster. He was not a shy, bookish child; Clarke remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and fought passionately in their defense: “He was not merely the ‘favorite of all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.” On the night of 15 April 1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident occurred that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The shock to the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within two months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live with another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken and ill; she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few months before) in March 1809. John became the oldest male in his family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and moving letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his brothers.

At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarke’s favorite pupils, reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests his last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest was a response to his loneliness after his mother’s death. But he had by then already won an essay contest and begun translating Latin and French. Keats’s love for literature, and his association of the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia, really began in Clarke’s school. It was modeled on the Dissenting academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical and modern languages, as well as history and modern science; discipline was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their own interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself was a friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph Priestley and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which Cowden Clarke said, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and religious liberty.”

ts’s sense of the power and romance of literature began as the Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels, travel stories; but the books “that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s ‘Classical Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn, and Spence’s ‘Polymetis.’ This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology.” On his own, Keats translated most of the Aeneid and continued learning French. Literature for him was more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was a domain for energetic exploration, “realms of gold,” as he later wrote, tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. All through his life his friends remarked on his industry and his generosity: literature for Keats was a career to be struggled with, fought for, and earned, for the sake of what the poet’s struggle could offer humankind in insight and beauty. This impression recurs often in accounts of Keats, this pugnacity of one who fought his way into literary circles, and this compassion for others that justifies the literary career.

Of course, at this point, when Keats was only fifteen or sixteen, a literary career was not a serious thought. In 1810 Alice Whalley Jennings, Keats’s grandmother, was seventy-five, and in charge of the four orphaned children, John, George (then thirteen), Tom (eleven), and Fanny (seven). She had inherited a considerable sum from her husband, John Jennings (who died in 1805), and in order to ensure the children’s financial future turned to Richard Abbey, a tea merchant who, on the advice of her attorney, she appointed to act as trustee. Most of Keats’s later financial misery can be traced to this decision. If Abbey was no villain, he was nevertheless narrow-minded and conventional, and, where money was concerned, tight-fisted and often deceitful. He dispensed the children’s money grudgingly and often lied or freely interpreted the terms of the bequest: it was not until 1833, years after Fanny Keats came of age, that she finally forced a legal settlement. It has been estimated that by the time of Keats’s death in 1821 either Abbey had withheld from him, or Keats had failed to discover, about £2,000, a considerable inheritance (in those days £50 per year was at least a living wage, and £100-200 would provide a comfortable existence). Keats left Enfield in 1811, and, perhaps at Abbey’s urging—though Clarke remembered it as Keats’s choice—he began to study for a career as a surgeon. He was apprenticed to a respected surgeon, Thomas Hammond, in a small town near Enfield, Edmonton, where his grandmother lived.

We know little of Keats’s life during these years 1811-1814, other than that Keats assisted Hammond and began the study of anatomy and physiology. Surgery would have been a respectable and reasonable profession for one of Keats’s means: unlike the profession of medicine, the job of surgeon in Keats’s day did not require a university degree. A surgeon, licensed by examination, was a general practitioner, setting bones, dressing wounds, giving vaccinations. Keats always maintained he was “ambitious of doing the world some good.” It is likely that he began his career with enthusiasm, but living in the small rooms over the surgery, Keats grew restless and lonely; he began to wander the woods and walk the four miles to Enfield to see the Clarkes. He completed his translation of the Aeneid, and, according to Cowden Clarke, he “devoured rather than read” books he borrowed: Ovid’s Metamorphosis , John Milton‘s Paradise Lost, Virgil’s Eclogues, and dozens of others. But the book that decisively awakened his love of poetry, indeed shocked him suddenly into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination, was Edmund Spenser‘s Faerie Queene.

This was a turning point. Certainly this close teacher-pupil friendship with Cowden Clarke, these evenings at the headmaster’s table, and the long late-night rambles discussing books borrowed from the library, were crucial in making John Keats a poet. His friend Charles Brown believed Keats first read Spenser when he was eighteen, in 1813 or 1814: “From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings? It was the ‘Fairy Queen’ that awakened his genius. In Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and became another being.” Soon, wrote Brown, he “was entirely absorbed in poetry.” (Brown subsequently struck out the word entirely.) Clarke recalled Keats’s exuberant joy, “he ramped through the scenes of that… purely poetical romance, like a young horse into a Spring meadow.” Some time in 1814 Keats wrote his first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser.” What is remarkable about this first poem is its vitality, its appropriation of the Spenserian rhyme scheme and richly compressed imagery to evoke a romantically voluptuous dream world. It is a youthful piece. But the poetic ear is acute, the natural description delights in itself, and the verse dares with naive persistence to draw attention to the power of poetic image to set a dreamy scene (“Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle / That in that fairest lake had been / I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile.” And of course he does attempt to tell).

But there was more than “pure poetry” involved in Keats’s turn, over the next year or two, to poetry as a vocation. Politics played a role as well—in fact, a decisive one. As early as 1812 Cowden Clarke had met the radical publisher of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt; in 1814 he was a regular visitor to Hunt’s prison cell (he had been imprisoned in 1813 for libeling the Prince Regent), and Keats must have been enthralled by another kind of romance than Spenser’s—the romance of the London circle of artists and intellectuals who supported progressive causes and democratic reform, and opposed the aristocratic counterrevolution then waging war on Napoleon. Indeed, in these liberal circles of the Regency bourgeoisie, Keats might even hope to attract attention, even as an outsider, on the strength of his political enthusiasm and poetic talent. His next poems are political: in April 1814 the kings of Europe had defeated Napoleon, but amid the general optimism in England, liberals, including Keats in “On Peace,” called on the victors to support reform. The sonnet, his first, is clumsy and shrill. But it does show how Keats meant to get attention. In February 1815, Hunt was released, and Keats offered a sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison,” through Cowden Clarke, whom he stopped on his way to meet Hunt: “when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet,” said Clarke, “... how clearly do I recall the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!” The publication of this sonnet in the Poems of 1817 would have been noted by the conservative reviewers who would later attack him as an associate of Hunt’s. To take a political stand so early in his career was a bold act: in those turbulent times political passions ran deep.

It may have been over political matters that Keats quarreled with Dr. Hammond. We know that he did and that for some reason he left his apprenticeship early. On 1 October 1815, Keats moved to London and registered at Guy’s Hospital for a six-month course of study required for him to become a licensed surgeon and apothecary. This move to the dreary neighborhood of the Borough, just south of London Bridge, was exciting for Keats. He could be near his family now: his grandmother had died in December 1814, and George and Tom moved to Abbey’s countinghouse where they were apprenticed (Fanny went to live with the Abbeys at Walthamstow). Before the move, Keats in 1815 seems to have been moody and at times deeply depressed. In the February 1815 poem “To Hope” he speaks of “hateful thoughts [that] enwrap my soul in gloom,” and “sad Despondency.” This was perhaps only a fashionable literary pose—he had recently written a sonnet in praise of Byron’s “sweetly sad” melody—and it takes a political turn, looking to “Hope” as a principle of social liberation. But his brother recalled this time as one of brooding uncertainty, his grandmother’s death no doubt having increased his anxiety to bring some stability to what remained of a family so shaken by death and dislocation. More pressing, perhaps, was his growing eagerness, in the exciting political climate of Napoleon’s brief return from March until the Battle of Waterloo in June, to make some contribution as a poet to the liberal cause. He was fully committed to a career as a surgeon but was still determined to find time to write verse.

His brother George, to ease John’s troubled moods, introduced him to his friends Caroline and Anne Mathew and their cousin, would-be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats’s friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a conventional literary friendship, addressing to them some stilted anapests (“To Some Ladies,” “On Receiving a Curious Shell ...,” “O Come, dearest Emma!”) in the style of the popular Regency poet Thomas Moore. The friendship with George Mathew, though, buoyed his spirits and encouraged him in his poetic purpose. Here at last was a poet, who—initially at least—seemed to share his literary tastes and encouraged his verse writing. If his brother remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing to Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton Milnes more than thirty years later, remembered that Keats “enjoyed good health—a fine flow of animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in himself.” Mathew was reserved, rather conservative, and earnestly religious; the friendship soon cooled. But in November 1815 Keats addressed to him his longest poem yet, “To George Felton Mathew,” in heroic couplets modeled on the Elizabethan verse epistle. Despite the stiffness of the verse, the style, colloquial yet descriptively lush, is becoming recognizably Keats’s own though clearly developed from his reading of Hunt and Wordsworth; and, most interestingly, the themes would become characteristic, though here they are only suggested: that poets associate in a “brotherhood” of the “genius—loving heart”; that they represent, as much as political figures, fighters for “the cause of freedom”; and that poets bring “healing” to a suffering world, often hostile to their genius, by evoking a world of escape and timeless myth.

Few English authors have ever, in fact, had as much direct observation and experience of suffering as John Keats. Until the early summer of 1816 he studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, and he did so well he was promoted to “dresser” unusually quickly. His duties involved dressing wounds daily to prevent or minimize infection, setting bones, and assisting with surgery. He took to the work well, lodging with two older students at 28 St. Thomas Street, attending lectures by the foremost surgeon of the day, Astley Cooper, as well as courses in anatomy and physiology, botany, chemistry, and medical practice. Yet by the spring of 1816 he was clearly becoming restless, even defensive, about poetry. He was increasingly excited by the new modern poetry of Wordsworth (whose 1815 Poems Keats had obtained just as he entered Guy’s), its naturalism and direct appeal to the secular imagination so different from Spenser’s romance. And, once again, there was the influence of Hunt, whose homey poetic diction with its colloquial informality, seemed daring to the twenty-year-old Keats, who would have associated Hunt’s 1816 poems in The Examiner with a politically antiauthoritarian movement of which modern poetry was a part. He began to speak about poetry, and little else, to his fellow students, with a kind of insecure arrogance. “Medical knowledge was beneath his attention,” said his fellow student and roommate, Henry Stephens, “no—Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his Aspirations—The only thing worthy the attention of superior minds.... The greatest men in the world were the Poets, and to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition.... This feeling was accompanied with a good deal of Pride and some conceit; and that amongst mere Medical students, he would walk & talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do, when mingling with mortals.” We need not, perhaps, take this memory too seriously, but clearly Keats wanted to think of himself as a man of literature. Flushed with enthusiasm for Hunt’s poetry, he sent to The Examiner in March a sonnet that he had written the previous autumn, “Solitude.” It was published 5 May 1816. Stephens recalled, “he was exceedingly gratified.”

However lofty his conception of the poet in 1816, Keats chose an unfortunate model in Leigh Hunt . The typical Hunt idiom was a highly mannered luxuriance, characterized by an abundance of -y and -ly modifiers, adjectives made from nouns and verbs (“bosomy,” “scattery,” “tremblingly”), as well as a jaunty colloquialism. Surely we can hear this Huntian influence in the little verses Keats scribbled on the cover of Stephens’s lecture notebook: “Give me women, wine and snuff, / Until I cry out ‘hold, enough!’”; or in some verses he began in the style of Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1815), “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem”: “Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry; / For while I muse, the lance points slantingly / Athwart the morning air: some lady sweet ... Hails it with tears.” The reader notes in this poem the frequent enjambment for which Hunt himself had argued, against the masculine (strong-syllable) rhymed, end-stopped couplets of Alexander Pope; Hunt also disliked median caesurae, arguing for the fluidity of lines that paused later, after “weak” syllables. This argument (however arcane it may appear now) had political resonance for Hunt, since it promised to break the “aristocratic” sound of the heroic couplet so pleasing to conservative tastemakers. (Lord Byron, who objected to Hunt’s theories, never completely forgave Keats for his attack on Pope in “Sleep and Poetry.”)

But if these elements in Hunt’s poetry seemed declassé to his and Keats’s critics, today one cannot say that Hunt’s influence on Keats was in any simple sense bad. For one thing Hunt was not Keats’s only model. Spenser was a more serious and enduring influence, as were Browne, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, and later, Shakespeare. Most twenty-year-old poets need a model of some sort, and there were certainly more banal models in his day from which to choose. On the other hand (as Walter Jackson Bate suggests), to attempt to have written like a greater and more popular poet, like Byron, would not have had the energizing effect on Keats’s verse that Hunt had. Hunt enabled Keats to write and, eventually, to surpass him. For a young middle-class liberal with no university training, a healthy dislike of Pope and an enthusiasm for Hunt and Wordsworth provided an enabling sense of identity. Finally, Keats was by no means, even in 1815-1816, a slavish imitator. His works have a troubled sense of self-consciousness completely absent from Hunt’s. Keats’s are also poems of escape to nature, and in these tropes we can sense as much Keats’s very shrewd (and early) understanding of Wordsworth’s poetic project as of Hunt’s. In poems such as the fine sonnet “How many bards gild the lapses of time!” or the “Ode to Apollo,” or the lovely (summer 1816) sonnet “Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve,” one finds an important Keatsian trope: the poem about the poet’s own sense of himself as a modern, preparing to write from his experience a new poetry to match that of England’s great writers.

On 25 July 1816 Keats took, and passed, the examinations that allowed him to practice surgery, and left London for the fashionable seaside resort of Margate. It had been a trying year (and a difficult exam: Stephens flunked), and Keats needed to escape the hot, dirty streets of the Borough to collect his thoughts. Here, for the first time really, he confronted, in a long poem of generally self-assured verse, his own struggle to become a poet, in the Epistle to My Brother George, inspired by verse epistles Hunt published in The Examiner but interesting in its own right. For here Keats explored what it would mean to him “to strive to think divinely,” to have a poet’s imaginative vision while absorbing the sights and sounds of nature in a kind of Wordsworthian “wise passiveness.” As so often in Romantic poetry, a poet’s complaint at being unable to have a vision itself becomes a vision of what he might see if he were a true poet. After fifty lines or so of such inspiration, though, Keats breaks off—”And should I ever see [visions], I will tell you / Such tales as must with amazement spell you”—in favor of a long, discursive speech by a dying poet who celebrates the joy he has brought the world. Despite the sketchiness of the effort, and Keats’s obvious frustration with himself, this poem and the other Margate epistle, “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” are remarkable for their brave and serious tone of self-exploration. Keats, confronting his indebtedness to other poets and his hopes for himself, had found a theme that would launch his career.

He returned to London in late September and took rooms near Guy’s Hospital, 9 Dean Street, and amid the gloomy little alleys began again his work as a dresser until he could formally assume the duties of a surgeon on his twenty-first birthday in October. Dreary as this beginning must have seemed, the month would be fateful for the young poet.

Cowden Clarke had been living in London, and this warmhearted schoolmaster was excited to receive the long epistle from Keats. One night in early October, Clarke invited Keats to his rooms in Clerkenwell. He especially wanted to show Keats a volume that was being shown around Hunt’s circle, a 1616 folio edition of George Chapman‘s translation of Homer. The two friends pored over the volume until six in the morning, and when Keats reached home he sat down immediately to compose a sonnet, titled in manuscript “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” With obvious pride and excitement he sent it to Clarke by a post that reached him at ten that morning. Surely Keats felt, as critics today would agree, that this was the most perfect poem, the most beautifully written and sustained verse, he had yet written.

As he would so often, Keats wrote the “Homer” sonnet in response to the power and imaginative vision of another poet. And again, that power is perceived as an absence, a gap between Keats’s small voice—or the concrete experience of any individual—and the sublime limitlessness of a great and distant imagination (this tension reappears in the more complex relation of the poet to the Grecian urn and the nightingale). Unlike his first sonnets, inspired by the natural charm of Hunt’s sonnets, this sonnet is based on a structural principle that he would later bring to perhaps its greatest fulfillment in English poetry in his odes, the expression of the irresolvable contrarieties of experience in the interplay of verse elements—quatrain, octave and sestet, rhymes, words, and even sounds. In this sonnet, the energy and excitement of literary discovery—Keats, in reading Homer, feels not bookish pleasure but the awe of a conquistador reaching the edge of an uncharted sea—is presented as direct emotion, not, as it had been in the epistles, a disabling and self-conscious pose. The emotion is, for the first time, sustained and controlled throughout the verse, with a sureness of diction, and even sound, that never falters: for example, the sense of openness to a vast sea of wonder is suggested by long vowels (“wild,” “surmise,” “silent”), tapering off to hushed awe in the weak syllables of the final word, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” As published (with line 7 altered, in The Examiner , 1 December 1816), the sonnet takes its place with Wordsworth’s and some of Keats’s own, as among the finest of the nineteenth century.

Keats carefully copied out this sonnet, along with some other poems including the sonnet “How many bards,” and gave them to Clarke to take to Hunt at his Hampstead cottage. Hunt, of course, had published a Keats sonnet, but now was anxious to meet the man himself. Keats responded to Clarke, in a letter of 9 October, “‘t will be an Era in my existence.” It proved to be.

Some time that month he met not only Hunt, but also men who were to be close friends and supporters all his life: John Hamilton Reynolds and Benjamin Haydon. Within a few weeks he would meet Shelley‘s publisher Charles Ollier, who would bring out Keats’s first volume. Hunt recalled of this first meeting “the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart as warm as his imagination.” It was, said Clarke, “`a red-letter day’ in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts… Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.” This was so to the last months of his life, when the ill poet made his way back to the Hunts’ even though by then Keats had come to judge him egotistical and manipulative and had long since rejected his poetical influence on his career.

However trying Keats may have found Hunt, throughout his life he could think of Hampstead as a refuge, Hunt’s pleasant domesticity in his beautiful surroundings harmonizing with the easy urbanity of high Regency culture, of books, paintings, music, liberal politics, and literary conversation with the great talents of the age. Keats himself had moved, in November, to lodgings at 76 Cheapside, with his brothers, George and Tom. Until Tom’s death two years later broke it up, this would be the happiest household Keats would know. He traveled often to Hunt’s in these months, his friendship growing with the witty young Reynolds and the crotchety, energetic egomaniac Haydon. Reynolds, about Keats’s age, was a not too successful poet and essayist, but had a quick mind and literary polish; in the next few weeks he would introduce Keats to John Taylor and James Hessey, who became his publishers after Ollier dropped him; to Charles (Armitage) Brown, the rugged, worldly businessman who was one of Keats’s most loyal friends, traveling with him through Scotland in the summer of 1818, and sharing rooms with him at his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead (now the Keats House and Museum), from December 1818 until May 1820; Charles and Maria Dilke, who built the double house in Hampstead with Brown; and Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford student with whom Keats stayed the following fall. Haydon’s vast canvases and blustering (later in life, sadly manic), often pugnacious self-assurance impressed Keats with his notion that modern artists could produce great works of epic dimensions; he introduced Keats to William Hazlitt, whose notions of poetic energy, “gusto,” and of imagination as an intensification of sensory experience enabling us to transcend self, were to begin Keats’s own meditations on aesthetics.

When Keats stayed at the Hunts’, a cot was set up in the library for him, and it was here, in November and December 1816, he planned his two long poems “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry.” Though the diction of these rhymed couplets is often adolescent, and the syntax turgid, these were the first serious long poems Keats intended for publication, and their themes introduce enduring concerns. Clearly, by November, Hunt had begun to plan a volume of his new protégés verse, with the Olliers as publishers. “I stood tip-toe” was filled out for this purpose, Keats having begun it sometime in the summer as a treatment of the myth of Endymion. In this poem, Keats begins with lush natural description, although his purpose is Wordsworthian, to write poetry inspired by nature that will rise to myth: “For what has made the sage or poet write / But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?” Nature inspires poets to sing sweet songs of mythic figures; but the poet is called by “unearthly singing” from a resting place of the divine, “Full in the speculation of the stars.” This meeting of the divine with the human is symbolized by the marriage of the mortal Endymion with the moon, Cynthia, and initiates a regenerated world of art and poetry: “Was there a Poet born?” in this marriage, the poem asks. Keats finished this poem in December, and tentatively called it “Endymion,” his first poetic use of the myth.

“Sleep and Poetry,” written in December, is the more serious poem of the two. It lays out a poetic project and manifesto for the young poet. Poetry here is distinguished from mere sleep, or dream, in engaging “the strife of human hearts,” the sorrow of life, as well as proceeding from an immersion in the joys of sensation. Keats boldly aligns himself with Wordsworth’s naturalism, attacking the “foppery” of neoclassicism: he will begin his poetic education in nature in order to comprehend the human heart. The “great end” of poetry is “that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” The poem ends with the notion of a “brotherhood” of literary cultivation as the poet returns to his evening in Hunt’s library, an ideal union of natural grace, liberality, and poetic tradition. Although these thoughts began with the verse epistles, this poem is his most earnest attempt yet to find a purpose for literature within modern life, and he boldly asserts that a new poetry has begun, a modern humanism with roots in nature and myth. Contemporary critics immediately understood, and condemned, this young poet’s radical associations—more offensive to them than the poem’s occasional Huntian lapses and adolescent posturing.

On 1 December, Hunt published in The Examiner a brief notice of “Young Poets”—Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds—extolling a “new school” that would “revive Nature” and “‘put a spirit of youth in everything.’” He quotes in full the “excellent” “Homer” sonnet. At about this time Keats was determined to give up medicine and devote himself to poetry. Stephens believed that this notice “sealed his fate,” and that he immediately changed his mind, but Stephens may not have known the whole story. Charles Brown remembers Keats becoming disillusioned with his career as a surgeon and becoming fearful that he might not be a good enough surgeon to avoid inflicting needless suffering. The truth was undoubtedly a complex mixture of these, but certainly the excitement of these months, and the promise of a published volume, gave him confidence and determination. In December Haydon took his life mask of Keats, as a study for including him (standing behind Wordsworth) in his large painting Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem, completed in 1819.

Later that month, the Hunt household was set into commotion by the arrival of Shelley, whose wife Harriet’s suicide provoked a crisis, as Shelley arranged to marry Mary Godwin (with whom he had eloped in 1814) and fight for custody of his children. The pride and fuss over Keats’s forthcoming volume was shared with the attention Shelley demanded. The two poets walked together across the Heath frequently that winter, and at least once Shelley cautioned Keats to wait for publication until he had a more mature body of work from which to compile a volume. It was perhaps good advice, but Keats never warmed to Shelley as Shelley did to him, and he seems to have been annoyed at Hunt for moving to Marlow for an extended visit with Shelley that spring.

Keats’s first volume, Poems, appeared on 3 March 1817, with its dedicatory sonnet to Leigh Hunt. It begins with “I stood tip-toe,” ends with another long poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” and includes youthful poems as well as some recent, good work, “Keen, fitful gusts”; the poem to Wordsworth, Hunt, and Haydon, “Addressed to the Same [Haydon]”; and the three long verse epistles, to Mathew, George Keats, and Clarke. It received about half a dozen notices, half from Keats’s circle. In October 1817 a polite review, warning the young poet to “Cast off the uncleanness of [Hunt’s] school,” appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany. Months later, in the 1-13 June Examiner, Hunt extolled Wordsworth’s revolutionary modern poetry and placed Keats as an emerging new poet of a second wave, though his praise of Keats’s actual poetry was rather reserved. The volume was no success, and few copies were sold. “The book might have emerged in Timbuctoo,” recalled Clarke. One of the Ollier brothers wrote to George Keats (who perhaps had written to complain about the book’s promotion), “We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book… By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it.”

On 1 March Hunt had invited Keats home to celebrate the publication. After dinner Hunt wove a laurel crown for Keats; Keats wove an ivy one for Hunt; and Hunt then suggested a fifteen-minute sonnet-writing contest to commemorate this event. Keats dashed off a poor, rather silly sonnet, which Hunt published to Keats’s dismay. Horribly embarrassed, angry at Hunt’s frivolity, he sought out Haydon the next day, and the two went to see the Elgin Marbles, which Haydon had been active in persuading the government to buy. Keats wrote his sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles“ that evening; it is a splendid evocation of the grandeur of monumental art set against the aspirations of the individual artist, of human weakness and pain poised against an aesthetic vision of the gods.

Keats was not deterred by the book’s poor sales. He determined to begin a large poem, on the great theme that he so cannily saw had produced his most serious thought, the striving of man to be one with his ideals, his gods. He resolved to get away, to return to the seaside. Before he left on 14 April for the Isle of Wight, he and his brothers moved to Hampstead, to a home in Well Walk, hoping the country air might be good for young Tom, who was becoming ill. He also arranged for John Taylor, of Taylor and Hessey, to become his new publisher, and this association was, both emotionally and financially, to be a source of real support for years to come.

On the Isle of Wight he sat alone for some weeks, writing to Haydon of his new passion for Shakespeare, whom Haydon had read to him with inspiring gusto, whose works he had brought along, and whose portrait he hung up over his desk (he took this portrait with him everywhere all his life). His goal was to write a four-thousand-line poem, Endymion, by autumn. It was an unrealistic, though bold, project, and he sat for weeks anxious and depressed, though moved by the beauty and power of the sea. His friends back home had faith in him, which sustained him: Reynolds wrote a fine review of his Poems in the radical Champion (9 March 1817); Haydon wrote to him, “bless you My dear Keats go on, dont despair… read Shakespeare and trust in Providence”; and Taylor kindly advanced him money—having written to his father, “I cannot think he will fail to become a great Poet.”

He did, by the end of April, manage to write part of book I, the “Hymn to Pan.” Yet he was lonely, nervous, and blocked. He fled the Isle of Wight for Margate, where he had been so productive the previous summer. In May he went to Canterbury with Tom, hoping “the Remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball,” as he wrote to Taylor. By June he was back at Well Walk, Hampstead, spending many days with the quiet, shy, by no means intellectual painter Joseph Severn, who would be with Keats to his last moments in Rome; and also with Reynolds, with whom he read Shakespeare. By August his first extended narrative poem was half finished, a total of two thousand lines.

Severn remarked that during these days he noticed the development of Keats’s power of sympathy , of a kind of imaginative identification valued in Keats’s day as the hallmark of poetic sensitivity (William Hazlitt’s teachings reflect this view). Keats was moved to an unusual degree toward almost sensory identification with things around him: “Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undertone of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal,” said Haydon. “The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble!” This power of overcoming self through loving the world’s beauty became a crucial doctrine for Keats—he found his feeling here confirmed by Hazlitt’s theories of imagination—that evolved into a moral principle of love for the good. This doctrine would become Keats’s ultimate justification for the aesthetic life, and it would be implied even as early as Endymion.

He worked on the poem throughout the late summer and fall of 1817, writing on a strict plan of at least forty lines a day, a remarkable project for a beginning poet that ultimately, of course, did not produce consistently good poetry. But as an exercise it was both stimulating and courageous, and he emerged a mature, thoughtful, self-critical poet for this effort. During these months, his friendship with Benjamin Bailey deepened, and he saw little of Hunt. “Every one who met him,” Brown recalled of Keats, “sought for his society, and he was surrounded by a little circle of hearty friends.” As Bailey remembered him in those days, thinking back over thirty years, “socially he was the most loveable creature, in the proper sense of that word, as distinguished from amiable, I think I ever knew as a man.” Bailey invited him up to Oxford in September, where amid the beautiful autumn foliage and academic camaraderie of Magdalen College, Bailey crammed for his exams and Keats sat writing daily the third book of Endymion. With Bailey he read and discussed Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Milton, Dante . Bailey, the methodical but energetic scholar, and Keats, lively and intuitive, were excellent study mates, and Keats was able to write with ease and find time in the afternoons for boating on the Isis, strolling in the countryside, and once visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon.

He returned from Oxford in October with a new seriousness of thought and purpose; he was weary of Endymion, and though he plodded along with it, he was already planning another long poem. But in London, trouble vexed him: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1817) published “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” the first of several vicious attacks on Hunt by John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson, which boded ill for Keats. Keats’s brother Tom was now clearly consumptive, and a trip to the Continent was planned for him; George was out of work and needing money; and Keats himself was ill and being treated with mercury for what was almost surely venereal disease. In late November he left London for the pleasant suburb of Burford Bridge, and there he completed Endymion .

Endymion is in many ways a response to Shelley’s Alastor (1816), where a young poet dreams of an ideal mate, in fruitless pursuit of whom he quests across the world, only to die alone and unloved. Keats’s poem begins with a mortal, Endymion, discovered restless and unhappy with the pastoral delights of his kingdom, for he has become enraptured with a dream vision, the moon goddess Cynthia. After a series of adventures, he abandons his restless quest, which by book 4 has come to seem illusory, in favor of an earthly Indian maid, who is eventually revealed to have been Cynthia all along. Although the actual narrative will hardly bear much scrutiny, the themes evoked here would haunt Keats all his life. Only through a love for the earthly is the ideal reached, the real and the ideal becoming one through an intense, sensuous love that leads to a “fellowship with essence.” The theme of a mortal’s love for an ideal figure that proves either illusory or redemptive would be a continuing source of philosophical exploration and ironic play for Keats, as would the paradox of redemption or transcendence evolving from a fuller engagement with human suffering and finitude.

The poetry of Endymion varies widely from some thoughtful speeches and lovely description to some of the most awful and self-indulgent verse ever written by a mature major English poet. The story is tedious and the point often obscure. Most of Keats’s circle, including Keats himself, recognized its weaknesses. Yet as a long, sustained work that would broach Keats’s most serious concerns, as a romance that itself attempts to reconsider that genre’s own polarities of human and divine, finite and ideal, erotic love and spiritual transcendence, it was a breakthrough for Keats’s career.

The critical reaction to Endymion was infamous for its ferocity. The poem appeared in late April 1818; there was a supportive notice by Bailey in the Oxford University and City Herald (30 May and 6 June 1818) and an extremely perceptive review (by Reynolds or perhaps John Scott) in the Champion (7 and 14 June 1818): “Mr. Keats goes out of himself into a world of abstraction:—his passions, feelings, are all as much imaginative as his situations…when he writes of passion, it seems to have possessed him. This, however, is what Shakespeare did.” But these reviews lacked the sensationalist power of the attacks on Keats, who was associated with Hunt and “the Cockney School.” The two most vicious, written in cool, satiric tones, were John Gibson Lockhart’s in Blackwood’s (dated August 1818, appeared in September) and John Wilson Croker’s in the Quarterly Review (dated April 1818, appeared in September). For Lockhart, who had learned something of Keats’s background, the poem was another sad example of an upstart poet in an age when the celebrity of Robert Burns and Joanna Baillie has “turned the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies.” He attacked the 1817 Poems and then reacted with horror at the “imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion,” inspired, he thought by Hunt, “the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters,” compared to whom Keats was but “a boy of pretty abilities.” Croker, in the Quarterly, was unable to “struggle beyond the first of the four books,” whose diction and forced rhyme he found absurd.

In the years that followed it was common to believe that these attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health: Shelley, for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative reviewers’ savagery (he himself wrote, but did not send, a balanced defense of Endymion, which he privately disliked, although he recognized Keats’s genius). Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticize him publicly after his death. Charles Brown, too, spread abroad the notion that Keats had been dealt “his death-blow.”

Keats was indeed hurt but not in fact crushed: the nineteenth-century melodrama of Keats’s life being “snuffed out by an Article” (Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, 1823), his frail constitution wrecked, consumption immediately shaking him, is simply false. He showed no signs of tuberculosis for another year, his constitution was by no means frail (he was stocky and athletic), and he was not overly sensitive to criticism. He wrote to James Hessey on 8 October, “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict…J. S. [who had written to defend Keats in the 3 October Morning Chronicle] is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod Endymion…—The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man…That which is creative must create itself—In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.”

The fact was that Keats had grown beyond Endymion even before it was completed, nearly a year before these reviews. His association with Bailey in the fall of 1817, and his reading of Hazlitt, contributed to a new seriousness in his thinking about art; on 22 November 1817 he wrote to Bailey the first of his famous letters to his friends and brothers on aesthetics, the social role of poetry, and his own sense of poetic mission. Rarely has a poet left such a remarkable record of his thoughts on his own career and its relation to the history of poetry. The struggle of the poet to create beauty had become itself paradigmatic of spiritual and imaginative quest to perceive the transcendent or the enduring in a world of suffering and death. For Keats, characteristically, this quest for a transcendent truth can be expressed (or even conceived of) only in the terms of an intense, imaginative engagement with sensuous beauty: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”

The imagination’s “sublime,” transcending activity is a distillation and intensification of experience. Writing to his brothers at the end of December, he criticized a painting by Benjamin West: “there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout.” The intensity of beauty in art here is not identical to the intensity of actual life—although there is a tendency in all Romantic theory to equate them. Keats emphasizes that the artist remains aloof from single perspectives on life, because truly to paint life’s intensity is to reveal its fiercely dual nature and the precariousness of all attempts to fix or rationalize it: “it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Keats’s best-known doctrine, Negative Capability, implies an engagement in the actual through imaginative identification that is simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The artist loses the Selfhood that demands a single perspective or “meaning,” identifies with the experience of his/her object, and lets that experience speak itself through him/her. Both the conscious soul and the world are transformed by a dynamic openness to each other. This transformation is art’s “truth,” its alliance with concrete human experience; its “beauty” is then its ability to abstract and universalize from that experience the enduring forms of the heart’s desires.

But troubling questions remained, to be worked through not only in letters but, more important, in Keats’s poetry: What does it mean to experience both the intensity of the actual and the beauty of its distilled essence? Does the artist not demand more answers from real life than the disinterestedness of Negative Capability can offer? And, most urgent, is not aesthetic distillation really a kind of a falsification, a dangerous and blind succumbing to enchantment? Is the “truth” of experience only that pain accompanies all joy and cannot be transcended? Certainly without the transforming power of art, at least, growing self-consciousness implies knowledge of loss and death; perhaps even art does no more than deflect our attention. In early December 1817 Keats had written one of his most compressed lyrics on this theme, “In drear-nighted December,” where the passing of the seasons brings no pain to nature but only self-conscious sorrow to humanity. And in January 1818, in the sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” he resolves to leave wandering in the “barren dream” of “golden-tongued Romance” to be “consumed in the fire” and reborn as a poet of tragic insight.

In these months, the winter of 1817-1818, Keats returned to Shakespeare and to Wordsworth with renewed interest and a real deepening of aesthetic judgment and complexity, spurred by his attendance at William Hazlitt’s lectures on poetry at the Surrey Institution. In the course of his own poetic development he would challenge Hazlitt’s ideas of poetic “gusto” and aesthetic disinterestedness with questions like those above. But with what sympathy and excitement he must have heard Hazlitt say of Shakespeare that a great poet “was nothing in himself: but he was all that others were, or that they could become…When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects.” At the end of January 1818 he wrote his first Shakespearean sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” one of his finest: even in this first line one hears the Shakespearean counterpoint of sound, which is sustained throughout with a sure mastery of vocalic music. As he had before, Keats developed this sonnet along lines of antithesis, here taking off from the Shakespearean theme of time, death, and art; but Keats transformed these into a struggle along a borderline of vision (“the shore / Of the wide world”) between a poet’s aspiration after “high romance” and his fear of sinking into obscurity and death.

In Hazlitt’s lectures Keats would have heard the critic both praise and attack the new naturalism of Wordsworth, forcing him in his letters to consider his own position. In late December 1817 Keats met Wordsworth himself, through Haydon, who the year before had sent him a Keats sonnet, “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” which Wordsworth admired. One of these meetings was social gathering Haydon dubbed his “Immortal Dinner,” attended by Keats, Wordsworth, Lamb, Reynolds, and others. Here Keats read his “Hymn to Pan” from Endymion, Wordsworth pronouncing it “a very pretty piece of Paganism.” Although it is not clear that Wordsworth meant to belittle the verse, the tone of condescension was not lost on Keats or his friends. Keats was not overly hurt, however, since he saw Wordsworth several times more in London, dining with his family on 5 January 1818. That Wordsworth had revolutionized poetry Keats never doubted; but his sense of the man’s egotism did enforce his fear that contemporary poetry, however truer to experience than the assured mythmaking of a Milton, ran the risk of trivial or “obtrusive” self-absorption. In a letter to Reynolds written 3 February 1818 after a visit to the famous Mermaid Tavern (frequented by Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and Sir Francis Beaumont), he longed for a poetry of “unobtrusive” beauty, “Let us have the old Poets, & Robin Hood.” He enclosed his own “Lines on the Mermaid tavern,” and “Robin Hood“; but he knew that in fact the modern situation worked against poetry of unself-conscious grandeur.

For the time being, he was perplexed, and his poetry proceeded slowly. He continued to prepare Endymion for the press. The winter months were full of social activity, with visits to Haydon, dinner at the Hunts with the Shelleys and Peacock, and evenings at the theater. In early March, however, his brother George arrived in London to see Abbey, leaving Tom ill and unattended. Keats departed at once to stay with him in Teignmouth, Devonshire, where he remained until May . With Tom feverish and coughing , with the news that George had decided to immigrate to America, with his sense of being obliged to be far from the stimulation of London but fearful of losing both his brothers, these were sad months. Poetically, as Endymion was finished and a new poem, Isabella, begun, it was a time of intense introspection and transition marking Keats’s emergence as a poet whose most authentic subject would be the difficulties of writing romance itself, the genre paradigmatic for Keats of the transforming power of art, of the simple wonder of storytelling. Romance also implies a quest for closure, for a realized (or at least clearly envisioned) dream, and Keats questioned whether modern poetry can embody such belief.

The romance he wrote in March 1818, Isabella, based on a tale of Boccaccio, is an uneven poem, and though some of his contemporaries (including Lamb) admired it, Keats came to dislike it. It is best thought of as an experiment in tone, teetering uneasily between poignant, romantic tragedy and a dry, uneasy, narrational pose. This poem is a first attempt—and an interesting one—at that extraordinary poise he would achieve between romance and disillusionment almost a year later in The Eve of St. Agnes. But his mood in March is reflected in a letter to Reynolds on the twenty-fifth, containing a verse epistle, “Dear Reynolds,” in which he is most deeply suspicious of “Imagination brought / Beyond its proper bound,” that makes real life seem painful and cold, “spoils the singing of the Nightingale.” He can no longer be lifted by romance: “I saw too distinct into the core / Of an eternal fierce destruction.” He was uneasy with the tale he is telling in Isabella. The story from Boccaccio is simple, and Keats made few changes: Isabella, living with her two merchant brothers, loves Lorenzo, a clerk. The brothers, vile and materialistic, murder Lorenzo and bury him in the forest. Guided by Lorenzo’s ghost, Isabella discovers the body, exhumes it, severs the head, buries it in a pot of basil, and, weeping over the plant until her brothers take it from her, she dies mad. Again, the interest here is in Keats’s tone: he resists the tendency to sentimentality, displaying real compassion for the victim of greed, but also lingering with bizarre interest (“Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?” he asks at one point) on the realistic elements of physical decay and psychological derangement. And the lamentations (“O Melancholy, linger here awhile!”) are carried on with an excess that borders on arch humor. Keats later dismissed Isabella as “mawkish”; most likely he soon saw that the poem revealed awkwardly his growing self-consciousness about the complexity of romance to the modern sensibility. But did this realization mean the modern poet could not write poetry of “vision” or “grandeur?”

This question is the challenge to his career, as he takes it up in a long, remarkable letter to Reynolds on 3 May 1818. The letter is critical for understanding Keats’s mature thought. The letter takes for granted the general view of the Hunt-Shelley circle of progressives that there is “a grand march of intellect,” that the arts advance with the development of knowledge, and that both art and science, “by widening speculation... ease the Burden of the Mystery.” Like Hunt and Shelley, Keats expressed ambivalence about Wordsworth, whose great genius had expressed the modern, secular sensibility yet seemed too “circumscribed” to celebrate either the era’s buoyant optimism or its new scientific skepticism in a visionary myth. (Keats, of course, knew the Wordsworth of the reactionary Excursion , published in 1814, but not of The Prelude, first published in 1850.) Keats was uncertain “whether Miltons apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song.” Keats felt that for Milton religious faith came easily, with the great “emancipation” of the Reformation; but Wordsworth’s poetry had greater potential depth if perhaps more limited scope, the awakening of the soul to knowledge of its suffering. “Here,” wrote Keats, “I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton,” though perhaps that depth is forced on him by his place in intellectual history. Keats saw the working through of this challenge as his place in history as well.

If this conception of “modern” literature derived from progressives such as Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley, and Peacock, nevertheless, Keats brought to it his own distrust of their utopianism and his sense of tragedy cutting across the Promethean aspirations of the individual artist. Moreover, his goal was a kind of aesthetic detachment or “disinterestedness” that could transform pathos into a real, tragic vision, the Negative Capability he suspected Wordsworth lacked. He seems to have discovered that the way to Negative Capability was an arduous one, a descent into pain rather than ascent into romance. Using one of his best-known metaphors, he described human life as both he and Wordsworth perceived it: “I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe…—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think…” From this state of innocence we are impelled into the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” where knowledge is exhilarating but soon discloses that “the World is full of Misery and Heart-break, Pain, Sickness and oppression,” and the chamber darkens. The Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey” explored the dark chambers of experience, and “Now, if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them.” As for the aesthetic result, the possibility of such humanizing producing great poetry, that can be judged only by experience itself, for “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” The letter is remarkable indeed for its sense of poetic “mission,” but equally striking is Keats’s sense that poetry in his era would become a questioning of its own processes of interpreting and articulating concrete experience.

On these matters he would meditate the better part of the summer, and though he wrote little throughout these months, these would now be his dominant concerns. One can see them in his great poem Hyperion, begun in October. In June Tom seemed better, and Keats decided to accompany Charles Brown on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland. Keats hoped this would be the first of a series of travels in England and abroad to prepare him to write. The trip through the Lake country was invigorating; Keats and Brown energetically hiked in the mountains around Rydal and Ambleside. In the evenings Keats wrote long journal letters to Tom filled with natural detail and excited purpose: “I shall learn poetry here,” he wrote amid the rocks and waterfalls, “and shall henceforth write more than ever…” In Scotland the weather turned rainy and chill, and Keats became ill with a sore throat that would plague him for months after. This illness was not connected to his later tuberculosis, but for the next year he would have occasional recurrences of the sore throat. Though he was always aware of the consumption that seemed to curse his family, and his bouts with illness this year were often depressing, there is no reason to believe he thought at this time that these sore throats were dangerous or that his poetic career would be cut short.

In early August, leaving Brown in Scotland, Keats returned home to Hampstead to find his brother Tom seriously ill with tuberculosis. In June, George, now married, had immigrated to America to try his luck as a farmer (after several inevitable disasters he did prosper, in the 1830s, as a miller in Louisville, Kentucky); Keats was now alone with Tom, almost constantly, until his death on 1 December. But throughout the autumn of 1818 he began composing his most brilliant work yet, a poem even his critics saw as a major achievement, Hyperion.

Keats’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate has observed that the year that began with the fragment epic Hyperion “may be soberly described as the most productive in the life of any poet of the past three centuries.” One senses, too, in this annus mirabilis, an unprecedented engagement with three centuries of literary convention, a stretching out and probing of the limits of epic, ode, pastoral, and romance that realigns these forms with Keats’s modern sense of an uncanny reciprocity between myth and history, fantasy and experience, noble aspiration and tragic disillusionment. This is the stuff of Hyperion, and its interest is its fresh engagement with these issues, as they cluster around a traditional Western icon: the fall into suffering of the mighty or good and the hope for compensatory redemption. Hyperion tells the story of the fall of the Titans and their replacement by the Gods, more beautiful than the Titans by virtue of their superior knowledge, and, so, by implication, their insight into the suffering of humanity.

The epic begins not with the battle between Titans and Gods but with its aftermath. The opening lines are as solemn and subdued as any Keats wrote: “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale / Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, / Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, / Sat grayhaired Saturn, quiet as a stone.” All the Saturnians have fallen into a dark, still world, where time itself creeps slowly into their dawning senses. All but Hyperion have fallen, and some hope he will lead a revolt against the upstart Jove and prevent Apollo from directing the sun’s course. Like so many romantic epics, however, this one begins with an extraordinary sense of stasis, of emotional confusion, pain, and paralysis from which there is no apparent exit. The speeches of the fallen Titans are useless. Saturn is helpless and confused; Thea, his wife, can only grieve; Enceladus counsels war but can do no more than bluster; and Oceanus delivers a key speech (modeled on Ulysses’ speech on degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida) in which he sees history as an ordered, inevitable progress that leaves behind much that is beautiful in favor of a greater beauty and perfection. Hyperion tries in vain to force the sun to rise but falls back in impotent grief. Finally, Apollo is born a god through the most painful vision of tragic knowledge, and “with fierce convulse / Die[s] into life.” The fragment breaks off here.

The most direct source for this council of fallen Titans is, of course, Milton‘s Paradise Lost (1667), and Keats’s blank-verse epic is, at least partly, “Miltonic.” But the differences are great; Keats’s verse does not often, in its densely beautiful descriptions, subtle assonances, and emphasis on the verse line, resemble the heavier Latinate Miltonic syntax. But more important, Keats’s victims begin unable to define their plight or even comprehend how they differ from gods and came to fall. Their fall is in the nature of some cosmic process, echoing the Romantic age’s fascination with historical revolutionary forces (the parallel to Napoleon and the French Revolution has been suggested), with lost golden ages succeeded by self-conscious, demythologized modernity. The reader also understands the personal relevance to Hyperion of Keats’s conception of the modern poet, born to Apollo’s radiance by his identification with human suffering. The fall into self-consciousness would itself be redemptive if it formed the soul of a poet, whose creation of beauty is the more intense for his having felt and transcended tragic pain and the loss of faith.

Yet the poem proved too problematic, and for many reasons by April 1819 Keats had given it up. As many critics have noted, Keats may have attempted a cool, “disinterested” sympathy with both Hyperion and Apollo, but there were elements of himself in the suffering of both that were hard to overcome. If Apollo’s knowledge deifies him, Hyperion’s more passive suffering and dark bewilderment are tragically compelling. What would be the dramatic focus of the poem? As Keats nursed his consumptive brother Tom, he must have felt the difficulties of rising to Negative Capability—even its moral impossibility in the face of Tom’s dying agony. What good, really, to speak of either inevitable human progress or the birth of a poet in the face of such pain? This indeed would be the subject of Hyperion when Keats attempted to revise it in summer 1819 as The Fall of Hyperion.

Keats had spent the autumn almost constantly with Tom and saw few of his friends. On 1 December 1818, the day of Tom’s death, Charles Brown invited Keats to come live with him at Wentworth Place, now the Keats House, Hampstead . It was a double house Brown had built with his friend Charles Dilke, who lived with his wife in one half. In the previous summer while he was away, Brown rented his side of the house to a widow, Mrs. Frances Brawne, and her three children, the oldest of whom, Fanny, was just eighteen. They later continued to visit the Dilkes at Wentworth. Here, probably in November, Keats met Fanny. This house, with Brown a constant companion, and the Dilkes and later Fanny and her mother renting next door, would be Keats’s last real home in England.

Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne has tantalized generations of lovers of his poetry. Unfortunately, some key aspects of that relationship are, and will likely remain, obscure. It seems that on 25 December 1818 they declared their love; they were engaged (though without much public announcement) in October 1819. But Keats felt he could not marry until he had established himself as a poet—or proved to himself he could not. What Fanny felt is hard to know. Keats burned all but her last letters, which were buried with him. She later married and lived most of her life abroad; her written remarks about Keats reveal little about her feelings. From Keats’s letters we get a picture of a lively, warm-hearted young woman, fashionable and social. She respected Keats’s vocation but did not pretend to be literary.

Readers of Keats’s letters to her are moved—or shocked—by their frank passion, their demands upon a sociable young girl for seriousness and attention to a suffering, dying, lonely man, insecure in all his achievements, asking only for her saving love. But it would be wrong to judge Keats (or Fanny) by the letters of 1820, written by a Keats at times desperate and confused, feverish and seriously ill. Almost certainly, as would have been conventional in their day for a couple so uncertain of their future, their relationship was not sexual. But it was passionate and mutual, certainly becoming the central experience of intense feeling in both their lives. It was to Fanny he addressed one of his most direct, passionate love poems, “Bright Star,” which she copied out in a volume of Dante that Keats gave her in April 1819, but which may have been written four or five months earlier. Even here, however, the intensity of experience is not simple: humans may desire the “stedfastness” of the stars only in a paradoxical “sweet unrest,” an ecstasy of passion both intense and annihilating, a kind of “swoon to death,” fulfilling but inhumanly “unchangeable.”

Keats explores these antinomies of human desire in one of his finest and best-loved long poems, The Eve of St. Agnes, a romance in Spenserian stanzas written in January 1819. The story recalls Romeo and Juliet, though its details are based on several traditional French romances (see Robert Gittings, John Keats, 1968). In Keats’s hands the story itself is less important than what, through a highly self-conscious art, it becomes, a meditation on desire and its fulfillment, on wishes, dreams, and romance. It is framed by the coldness of eternity, by an ancient Beadsman whose frosty prayers and stony piety contrast with the fairytale-like revelry and warm lights within. The heroine, Madeline, does not mix with the company but ascends to her own kind of dream, the superstitious wish that, by following various rites on this St. Agnes’ Eve, her future husband will appear in her dreams. Porphyro, of some feuding clan, has crept into the party, and is aided by Angela, the old nurse, in a “strategem”: he will sneak into her room and fulfill the dream, wakening her to his warm, real presence. He does so, after watching her undress and sleep, spreading before her a feast of delicacies (rather magically), and easing her into a wakefulness instinct with romance. The lovers flee into the cold storm; and suddenly the poem shifts to a long historical vision, the tale acknowledged as a story far away and long ago, the Beadsman himself cold and dead.

The moment of Madeline’s awakening is a crucial one, pointing out the poem’s central dilemma. Porphyro must waken her to his real presence, but his fulfillment also depends on his “melting” into her dream. The moment is typical of so many romantic “falls” from innocence to experience: the consummation of their love “is no dream,” says Porphyro, but Madeline weeps in fear that he has betrayed her . “ Sweet dreamer! ” Porphyro then responds, “‘tis an elfin storm from faery land,” into which he will carry her to be his bride, “o’er the southern moors.” In the nineteenth century, Hunt and others admired the rich pictorial beauty, the beautiful contrasts of warmth and chill, sensuality and religion, color and gray. Today we see the poem more as a great achievement not only in style but also in thoughtful and carefully balanced tone. Some modern critics, including Earl Wasserman, have the story arguing for success of imagination and warm love over cold piety; others, such as Jack Stillinger, have argued that Keats meant to debunk the conventions of fairy tale by suggesting that Porphyro’s motive is a rather sinister seduction. But most critics today see the poem as an extraordinary balance of these opposing forces, shrewdly and at times playfully self-aware of its own conventions, leading the reader to a continuous series of mediations between artifice and reality, dream and awakening. Finally, waking life seems to require some degree of enchantment to be humanly fulfilling; yet dreaming, being “taken in”—as one is by the rich tapestry of The Eve of St. Agnes—is precarious, and the deeper one sleeps the ruder one’s awakenings.

This dialectical probing of enchantment, of the always-threatened artifice by which imagination seeks its fulfillment in the world, initiates Keats’s most profound meditations in the spring of 1819. The dangers of enchantment deepen in the haunting, beautifully suggestive ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written 21 or 28 April 1819, and published in a slightly altered version by Hunt in his Indicator of 10 May 1820. Here a knight-at-arms is seduced by a strange, fairylike woman, reminiscent of Morgan Le Fay or Merlin’s Niniane, and in the midst of this enchantment a warning dream comes to him from other lost princes and warriors. But his awakening from her does him little good; he wanders “palely” on “the cold hill’s side,” where “no birds sing,” a world as empty of charm as the fay’s was empty of real life. The poem has been seen as allegorical of Keats’s ambivalent feelings for Fanny Brawne or for poetry itself. More fundamental, though, is Keats’s growing sense, here and in his letters, of the dark ironies of life, that is, the ways in which evil and beauty, love and pain, aspiration and finitude, are not so much “balanced” as interwoven in ways that resist philosophical understanding. The more we imagine beauty the more painful our world may seem—and this, in turn, deepens our need for art.

The great odes of the spring and fall—Ode to Psyche, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn (written in September), Ode on Indolence (not published until 1848, and often excluded from the group as inferior)—do not attempt to answer these questions. They rather explore the ironies of our attempts to answer them and of poetry’s attempts to articulate them. The order of the odes has been much debated; it is known that Ode to Psyche was written in late April, Ode to a Nightingale probably in May, and To Autumn on 19 September 1819, but although Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on Melancholy are assumed to belong to May, but no one can be certain of any order or progression. In style and power the odes represent Keats’s finest poetry; indeed, they are among the greatest achievements of Romantic art.

The myth of Psyche—the mortal who is loved by Eros himself and who, after many trials, is deified—was well known in Peacock and Hunt’s circle, its allegorical implications much discussed. Briefly, for Keats, who read the tale in Apuleius and in a contemporary poem by Mary Tighe, Psyche, the human spirit, becomes a goddess late, after the older gods, the Olympians, have already “faded.” In Keats’s Ode to Psyche the poet initially has a vision that seems to be a dream: as he wanders “thoughtlessly” he comes upon Psyche and Eros making love. But for a modern poet such visions do not come unself-consciously—”Surely I dreamt to—day, or did I see / ... ?” For Keats, as for Shelley and Peacock, Christianity had destroyed the naive visionary power of a mythic relation to nature. But, perhaps, a new kind of humanist paganism was possible to a modern world of self-consciousness and secular knowledge, emptied of Christian orthodoxy. Psyche, the human soul, is deified “Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,” but perhaps may be made present to the poet through the hard, painful work of growing self-awareness. The poem concludes with the goddess humanized and internalized, her temple now to be built, “In some untrodden region of my mind.” There the poet will labor amid “branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain” in a garden prepared for her appearance. Thus the poem turns from its questioned but spontaneous vision to a hope for a return of Psyche in a prepared consciousness. While Apuleius’s Psyche met Eros in a darkened room, Keats will provide “A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in!” Ode to Psyche has been understood in the context of Keats’s earlier notions of the modern poet, for whom Christian faith in otherworldly rewards can no longer provide a justification for human suffering. Now an openness to nature and erotic love, and a sense of the value of self-consciousness to the spirit can alone produce mature art: “Do you see not how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?” he wrote to his brother in the letter of 21 April 1819 in which he enclosed this ode.

But despite the sense of achieved conclusion, Ode to Psyche begins with a question and ends with a hope. The unself-conscious and delightful initial vision can only be expectantly invoked. The whole notion that art or imagination may provide some middle ground between the gods and humanity is questioned in the greatest and most complex of Keats’s lyrics, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale. Though Keats had worked hard and long on Ode to Psyche, the Nightingale ode, if Charles Brown’s memory is correct, was written with amazing speed. He recalled that Keats, one morning in the spring, on hearing a nightingale’s song, “took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass—plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours.” Brown later saw him stuff behind his books some papers which proved to be his poem. In a sense the spontaneous joy of the bird’s song recalls the visionary realm of Ode to Psyche; but in this poem, the “pleasant pain” of self-awareness is not so pleasant, and the transcendent is both elusive and perhaps inapplicable to the human. Ode to a Nightingale begins not with a vision but with a dull, unexplained pain, not a pain at all but a vague “ache” of emptiness and “drowsy numbness.” Although we expect the bird’s joyful singing to inspire and regenerate the poet, it does not, or at least not in any simple way. Instead what follows is a troubled meditation, one of the richest and most compressed in English poetry, on the power of human imagination to meet joy in the world and transform the soul.

In Ode to a Nightingale, the poet attempts to flee the “weariness, the fever, and the fret,” of our tragic existence, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre—thin, and dies,” first through an ecstasy of intoxication and then “on the viewless wings of Poesy,” through imagination itself. In the crucial and difficult middle section of the poem, the mind attempting both to transcend life and remain aware of itself becomes lost in a dark wild, an “embalmed darkness” of fleeting sensations that suggests not escape but its very opposite, death. But the nightingale—or, rather, its song as the imagination elaborates upon it—is immortal, and in “ancient days” belonged to a world of enchantment. It is the same song, “that oft—times hath / Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” With these beautiful words the poem turns about, the word forlorn shocking the poet into awareness. The beauty of an imagined “long ago” suggested by this word (forlorn = “long ago”) turns by a sad pun (forlorn = “sad”) into a remarkable moment of pained self-consciousness. The bird flies off, and “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. / ... / Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” The poem ends by dismantling its own illusion.

That illusion, or trope, is that imagination, by creating permanence and beauty, may allow the individual himself a transcendence of the mind’s fleeting sensations, like the bird’s song. But imagination needs temporality to do its work. It then tantalizes us with a desire to experience the eternity of the beauty we create. But again, no real experience is possible to us—as the central stanzas suggest—apart from time and change. Imagination seems to falsify: the more the poet presses the bird to contain, the more questionable this imaginative projection becomes. For Keats, an impatience for truth only obscures it. If art redeems experience at all it is in the beauty of a more profound comprehension of ourselves (not of a transcendent realm), of the paradoxes of our nature. To expect art to provide a more certain closure is to invite only open questions or deeper enigmas. In Ode on a Grecian Urn this theme is explored from the perspective not of a natural and fleeting experience (the bird song) but of a work of pictorial art, a timeless rendering of a human pageant.

Perhaps more has been written on this poem, per line, than any other Romantic lyric. And today it is perhaps the best—known and most—often-read poem in nineteenth-century literature. No one knows whether Keats had in mind a particular urn: it is known that he drew or traced a vase portrayed in a volume of engravings, Musée Napoléon , that he saw at Haydon’s; and certainly his visits to the British Museum provided other examples as well. The poem seems to be an imaginative creation of an artwork that serves as an image of permanence. Though the urn depicts a passionate scene of dance and erotic pursuit, it itself remains a “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” transcendent and calm. Probing the apparent timelessness of pictorial art is the action of the poem’s speaker, as he attempts to force some meaning from the form. But it is in the nature of poetry, unlike painting—a distinction we know Keats often debated with Haydon—to create its meaning sequentially. The poet thus imagines a narrative, albeit one frozen by the pictorial medium: “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.” This seems to be a moment, like that of the “Bright Star” sonnet, of eternal consummation: “More happy love! more happy, happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, / For ever panting, and for ever young; / All breathing human passion far above....” And yet, as most critics would agree, the mawkishness of the repeated “happy” reveals the strained paradox by which the imagined narrative develops. Human happiness requires fulfillment in a world of process and inevitable loss. The lovers are “forever panting,” since fulfillment outside of temporal process is a contradiction forced on the urn by the very logic of the speaker’s questioning. The further the questions are pushed the more they seem to reveal only the artifice of the questioner, not the urn’s hidden truth.

In the poem’s fourth stanza the poet imagines a deserted town whose people had provided the urn its images but who are themselves forever silent, dead, unknown . As in the Nightingale ode, the poet’s attempt to imagine a timeless realm ends in his facing a desolation , an absence of human life. And again, wordplay restores a thoughtful distance between speaker and object, in this case the oxymoron “Cold pastoral!” and the witty puns on “brede” and “overwrought” revealing the paradox informing the poem all along. There follow, however, the most debated lines in Keats’s poetry, the sudden, concluding speech to the suffering generations of mankind from the silent urn,” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (the punctuation of the lines is significant for interpretation but disputed: see Stillinger’s edition). Because the urn has revealed more of the mysterious incommensurability between human truth and eternal beauty, the lines have seemed to some critics an awkward intrusion on the poem’s studied indeterminacy. Others see the lines dissolving all doubts in an absolute aestheticism that declares the power of art to transform painful truths into beauty. Still others have found them an appropriately riddling oracle to questions that art cannot answer with consecutive reasoning, thus calming the speaker’s anxious probing. This critical debate itself testifies to the dramatic richness of the poem’s debate, for the poet, with wit and irony, has imagined a response fully appropriate and articulate from the urn’s eternal perspective, but nonetheless from the human perspective riddling and as elusive as the initial silence.

In the Ode on Melancholy the subject is not the ironies of our experience of art but of intense experience itself. Melancholy is not just a mood associated with sad objects; in this poem, it is the half-hidden cruel logic of human desire and fulfillment. In our temporal condition the most intense pleasure shades off into emptiness and the pain of loss, fulfillment even appearing more intense as it is more ephemeral. Keats’s thinking, then, had matured with remarkable speed from the poet of Endymion, for whom a poetry of intense sensation was itself a model of transcendence. His maturing irony had developed into a re-evaluation and meditative probing of his earlier concerns, the relation of art and the work of imagination to concrete experience. But the odes also show supreme formal mastery: from the play of rhyme (his ode stanza is a brilliantly compressed yet flexible development from sonnet forms), to resonance of puns and woven vowel sounds, the form itself embodies the logic of a dialogue among conflicting and counterbalancing thoughts and intuitions.

It has often been pointed out that the thinking in Ode on Melancholy on the paradox of desire emerges as much from Keats’s experience as from abstract meditation. By May 1819 Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne was strained by her again moving next door, intensifying his frustration and anger at himself that he could not provide for her and marry her. He must have felt that he could never have a sexual relationship with her or a “normal” married life while his career, and soon his health, was so uncertain. Adding to this concern, in June, were severe financial pressures, including news that George’s wife was pregnant and the couple in dire need as they tried to establish themselves in America. Keats considered giving poetry a last try, but returned all the books he had borrowed and thought of becoming a surgeon, perhaps on a ship. Brown persuaded him to make one more attempt at publishing, and he wrote to Haydon, “My purpose now is to make one more attempt in the Press if that fail, `ye hear no more of me’ as Chaucer says...” In July he left for Shanklin, the Isle of Wight, where he would stay with his ailing friend, James Rice, to begin his last and most intense session of writing.

Keats was ill this summer with a sore throat, and it is likely that the early stages of tuberculosis were beginning. His letters to Fanny Brawne became jealous, even tormented. But throughout the summer he wrote with furious concentration, working on his rather bad verse tragedy Otho the Great, which Brown had concocted as a scheme to earn money, and completing Lamia, his last full-length poem.

The plot of this difficult poem came from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which Keats had been reading in the spring. The treatment, however, fraught with double-edged ironies, is Keats’s own. A young man, Lycius, falls in love with a beautiful witch, Lamia, who is presented with real sympathy. She leads Lycius away from his public duties into an enchanted castle of love. But at their marriage banquet Lamia withers and dies under the cold stare of the rationalist philosopher Apollonius, who sees through her illusion, and Lycius, too, dies as his dream is shattered. The issues, of course, recall The Eve of St. Agnes, but here the balance of beautiful but destructive enchantment / harsh but public and solid reality is portrayed with dramatic directness and power. One’s sympathies are divided between two characters, the extremely rational and the extremely enchanted, and one’s feelings about Lamia herself are divided, depending on whether one adopts her immortal perspective or Apollonius’s human one. To many readers, it has seemed that these unresolvable ironies imply a bitterness about love and desire. It is clear, though, that Keats sought to present his story without sentimentality or the lush beauty of romance.

Yet Keats was striving for some sense of resolution in these months, as autumn approached. He turned back to Hyperion with the thought of justifying the life of the poet as both self-conscious and imaginative, committed to the real, public sphere even while his imagination soothes the world with its dreams. This strange, troubling, visionary fragment, The Fall of Hyperion (unpublished until 1856), is his most ambitious attempt to understand the meaning of imaginative aspiration. It is a broad Dantesque vision, in which the poet himself is led by Moneta, goddess of knowledge, to the painful birth into awareness of suffering that had deified the poet-god Apollo in the earlier version. Moneta’s tragic wisdom challenges the poet in his vision with his own deepest fears, that imagination is the source of misery, conjuring ideals that for mortals only cause pain. If so, the whole “modern” romantic conception of imaginative life would be a snare, leaving mankind empty of real belief in favor of fragile illusions. Better not to “fall,” to remain an unself-conscious laborer for human good. But while the poet accepts that poets are not as exalted as the socially committed who directly reform the world, he argues that surely “a poet is a sage; / A humanist , physician to all men.” Moneta distinguishes the poet from the mere “dreamer” whose imagination feeds only on its own idealisms (like Lycius in Lamia); true poets have awakened their imaginations to tragic pain while yet striving to redeem sorrow with visionary acceptance and compassion. Yet the climactic vision of the poem, the poet’s parting of Moneta’s veils, reveals a withered face of continuous dying, of unredeemed tragic knowledge. A far darker poem than Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion achieves no resolutions but rather presents both Keats’s most tragic vision and his fragile but most clearly expressed hope for the redemptive imagination.

Both this poem and his last great lyric, To Autumn, seem, in their nearly opposite ways, to summarize the themes of Keats’s entire career. Written 19 September 1819, at Winchester, where he and Brown had moved in August, it was inspired by a walk in the chill, crisp countryside: “I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm”—he wrote to Reynolds of that day. The ode is Keats’s most perfect poem; as Bate says, generations of readers “have found it one of the most perfect poems in English.” Written with the same controlled visionary power in the face of death as The Fall of Hyperion, the tone of the ode is, however, an acceptance of process, setting the human experience of time within the larger cycles of nature. Notably, the speaker here never appears as a subject, except implicitly as a calming presence, asking questions but allowing the sights, sounds, and activities of the season itself to answer them. The poem’s three stanzas move through a process of ripening, then reaping and gleaning and pressing, to a final vision of “soft-dying day” still alive with sounds of bleating lambs and singing birds. The richness of sound creates an intensity of ripeness: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”; note too the words swell, plump, budding, and o’er-brimmed. But the intensity here, unlike that of Ode to Melancholy, does not end in extinction and painful memory. Such subjectivity is avoided; the season is mythologized and imagined as herself a part of the rhythms of the year. The final stanza momentarily recalls the feeling of loss: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” But in immediate response, the poet soothes the goddess figure herself with the injunction, “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” No singular loss is without recompense, in the larger, essentially comic vision of nature’s transforming, renewing power. In the last lines, the present-tense verbs give a sense of an intense present that gathers up the past and is impelled toward the future: “The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Here, for the first time in the odes, intense experience and mythological vision achieve a poised, dialectical balance within a purely natural context.

This poem would effectively mark the end of Keats’s poetic career. He lived to see his new volume, which included the odes, published as Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems in early July 1820. The praise from Hunt, Shelley, Lamb, and their circle was enthusiastic. In August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a serious and thoughtful review, praising not just the new poems but also Endymion. Other reviews, particularly John Scott’s in the September 1820 London Magazine, were suddenly respectful of the new power of his verse, particularly of the odes and Hyperion, this last considered, in Keats’s generation, his greatest achievement. The volume sold slowly but steadily and increasingly in the next months. His odes were republished in literary magazines. But by summer 1820, Keats was too ill to be much encouraged.

The story of Keats’s last year makes sad reading. In the winter of 1819 he nearly decided to give up poetry and write for some London review. He was often confused and depressed, worried about money, often desperate with the pain of being unable to marry Fanny Brawne, to whom he became openly engaged about October. Dilke, Brown, and visitors to Wentworth Place became concerned for his health and his state of mind: “from this period,” wrote Dilke, “his weakness & his sufferings, mental & bodily, increased—his whole mind & heart were in a whirl of contending passions—he saw nothing calmly or dispassionately.” He even, on the verge of concluding publishing arrangements with Taylor in November, declared he would publish no more until he had completed a new, greater poem (probably The Fall of Hyperion) or perhaps a drama. But Keats continued to prepare his poems for publication, and to work on The Fall of Hyperion and a new satiric drama, The Jealousies (first published as The Cap and Bells), never completed. Then, in February 1820, came the lung hemorrhage that convinced him he was dying. Brown’s account is simple and moving: “one night, at eleven o’clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible.” Brown helped the feverish Keats to bed, “and I heard him say,—‘That is blood from my mouth… Bring me the candle Brown; and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it stead-fastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that colour;—that drop of blood is my death warrant;—and I must die.’” He would live little more than one year.

Despite some remissions in the spring, he continued to hemorrhage in June and July. His friends were shaken, but in those days there was no certain way to diagnose tuberculosis or to gauge its severity, and there were hopes for his recovery. In the early summer he lived alone in Kentish Town (Brown had rented out Wentworth Place), where the Hunts, nearby, could look in on him. But living alone, fearful and restless, trying to separate himself from Fanny Brawne because of the pain thoughts of her caused him, he became more ill and agitated. The Hunts took him in, as they had years before at the beginning. He often walked past Well Walk, his last home with his brothers; once, Hunt remembered, he wept “and told me he was ‘dying of a broken heart.’” He thought bitterly about the disappointments of his brothers, writing to Brown in November, “O, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers!—then I might hope,—but despair is forced upon me as a habit.” He soon left the Hunts’ after a quarrel and tried to return to the house in Well Walk. But he was taken in, desperately ill, by Fanny and Mrs. Brawne, and he spent his last month in England being nursed in their home. He was advised to spend the winter in Italy. In August, Shelley—who would write his beautiful elegy Adonais for Keats and who himself would die in 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia with a copy of Keats’s 1820 poems in his pocket—invited him to stay with him in Pisa. He declined, but hoped to meet Shelley after a stay in Rome.

Keats left for Rome in November 1820, accompanied by Joseph Severn, the devoted young painter who, alone in a strange country, nursed Keats and managed his affairs daily until his death. They took pleasant rooms on the Piazza di Spagna, and for a while Keats took walks and rode out on a small horse. He tried to keep his friend’s spirits up, and it is characteristic of the man that he was always concerned for poor Severn. In his last weeks he suffered terribly and hoped for the peace of death. He was in too much pain to look at letters, especially from Fanny Brawne, believing that frustrated love contributed to his ill health. He asked Severn to bury her letters with him (it is not clear he did). Yet he thought always of his friends and brothers. His last known letter, 30 November 1820, asks Brown to write to his brother, and “to my sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost—she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. / God bless you! / John Keats .”

On the night of 23 February 1821, Keats died, peacefully, in Severn’s arms. His last words were to comfort Severn: “Severn—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come!” He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. He had requested that the stone bear no name, only the words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn and Charles Brown honored his wishes but added these words above Keats’s own epitaph: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone.” Brown later regretted the addition.

Keats’s dying fears of persecution and eternal obscurity were proved wrong in the generations to come. Even in 1820 and 1821 there were a few positive notices, such as the influential Francis Jeffrey’s approving, if belated, essay in the Edinburgh Review, and the obituary in the London Magazine (April 1921), which noted, “There is but a small portion of the public acquainted with the writings of this young man, yet they were full of high imagination and delicate fancy.” His friends, particularly Hunt and Brown, continued to collect materials and publish memoirs. In 1828 Hunt wrote the first of his several biographical sketches, in his Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. The most complete offering yet of Keats’s poetry, The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1829), published in Paris and Philadelphia, contains a long memoir drawn from Hunt’s.

But most important to establishing Keats’s reputation was the biography produced in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, a minor poet and essayist known and admired in literary circles of the 1840s and 1850s. Brown, Severn, Clarke, Reynolds, and others all contributed to his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, which, whatever its flaws as a reliable scholarly biography, was widely read and respected. Keats was thought of as a poet whose talent, though its development was cut short, was the equal of Shelley’s and Byron‘s.

By 1853 Matthew Arnold could speak of Keats as “in the school of Shakespeare,” and, despite his weak sense of dramatic action and his overly lush imagery was “one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him forever interesting.” Yet it was just this quality of lush, “pictorial” imagery that Victorians admired in Keats, as reflected in popular paintings from his works by Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote of Keats’s mastery of visual detail, his “instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty.” Fascination with the sensuous surface of his verse and a sentimental belief that Keats was a subjective lyricist of sensitive feeling contributed to the Victorians’ admiration of his poetry. Indeed, in 1857, Alexander Smith, in the Encyclopædia Britannica (eighth edition) entry on Keats, could proclaim, with some exaggeration, that “With but one or two exceptions, no poet of the last generation stands at this moment higher in the popular estimation, and certainly no one has in a greater degree influenced the poetic development of the last thirty years.”

Keats brought out the warmest feelings in those who knew him, and that included people with a remarkable range of characters, beliefs, and tastes. One can say without sentimentality or exaggeration that no one who ever met Keats did not admire him, and none ever said a bad—or even unkind—word of him. His close friends, such as Brown, Clarke, and Severn, remained passionately devoted to his memory all their lives. “On his deathbed in great emotion at his cruel destiny he told me that his greatest pleasure had been the watching the growth of flowers,” Severn remembered, more than twenty years later. “There was a strong bias of the beautiful side of humanity in every thing he did.”

“I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in February 1820, just after he became ill. In Keats’s work the struggle with aesthetic form becomes an image of a struggle for meaning against the limits of experience. His art’s very form seems to embody and interpret the conflicts of mortality and desire. The urgency of this poetry has always appeared greater to his readers for his intense love of beauty and his tragically short life. Keats approached the relations among experience, imagination, art, and illusion with penetrating thoughtfulness, with neither sentimentality nor cynicism but with a delight in the ways in which beauty, in its own subtle and often surprising ways, reveals the truth. 

167- ] English Literature

 

167- ] English Literature

John Keats

Isabella Jones and Fanny Brawne, 1817–1820

Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817, while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings. She is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure , an enigmatic figure who would become a part of Keats's circle. Throughout their friendship Keats never hesitated to own his sexual attraction to her, although they seemed to enjoy circling each other rather than offering commitment. He writes that he "frequented her rooms" in the winter of 1818–19, and in his letters to George says that he "warmed with her" and "kissed her".The trysts may have been a sexual initiation for Keats according to Bate and Robert Gittings. Jones inspired and was a steward of Keats's writing. The themes of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "The Eve of St Mark" may well have been suggested by her, the lyric Hush, Hush! ["o sweet Isabel"] was about her, and that the first version of "Bright Star" may have originally been for her., Jones was one of the first in England to be notified of Keats's death.

Letters and drafts of poems suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818. It is likely that the 18-year-old Brawne visited the Dilke family at Wentworth Place before she lived there. She was born in the hamlet of West End (now in the district of West Hampstead), on 9 August 1800. Like Keats's grandfather, her grandfather kept a London inn, and both lost several family members to tuberculosis. She shared her first name with both Keats's sister and mother, and had a talent for dress-making and languages as well as a natural theatrical bent. During November 1818 she developed an intimacy with Keats, but it was shadowed by the illness of Tom Keats, whom John was nursing through this period.

On 3 April 1819, Brawne and her widowed mother moved into the other half of Dilke's Wentworth Place, and Keats and Brawne were able to see each other every day. Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante's Inferno, and they would read together. He gave her the love sonnet "Bright Star" (perhaps revised for her) as a declaration. It was a work in progress which he continued until the last months of his life, and the poem came to be associated with their relationship. "All his desires were concentrated on Fanny".From this point there is no further documented mention of Isabella Jones. Sometime before the end of June, he arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne, far from a formal engagement as he still had too little to offer, with no prospects and financial stricture. Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne. Their love remained unconsummated; jealousy for his 'star' began to gnaw at him. Darkness, disease and depression surrounded him, reflected in poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" where love and death both stalk. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;" he wrote to her, "your loveliness, and the hour of my death".

In one of his many hundreds of notes and letters, Keats wrote to Brawne on 13 October 1819: "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you ... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder'd at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr'd for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you."

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised by his doctors to move to a warmer climate. In September 1820 Keats left for Rome knowing he would probably never see Brawne again. After leaving he felt unable to write to her or read her letters, although he did correspond with her mother. He died there five months later. None of Brawne's letters to Keats survive.

It took a month for the news of his death to reach London, after which Brawne stayed in mourning for six years. In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married and went on to have three children; she outlived Keats by more than 40 years.

Last years

There is no more to record of Keats’s poetic career. The poems “Isabella,” “Lamia,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and Hyperion and the odes were all published in the famous 1820 volume, the one that gives the true measure of his powers. It appeared in July, by which time Keats was evidently doomed. He had been increasingly ill throughout 1819, and by the beginning of 1820 the evidence of tuberculosis was clear. He realized that it was his death warrant, and from that time sustained work became impossible. His friends Brown, the Hunts, and Brawne and her mother nursed him assiduously through the year. Percy Bysshe Shelley, hearing of his condition, wrote offering him hospitality in Pisa, but Keats did not accept. When Keats was ordered south for the winter, Joseph Severn undertook to accompany him to Rome. They sailed in September 1820, and from Naples they went to Rome, where in early December Keats had a relapse. Faithfully tended by Severn to the last, he died in Rome.

Last months: Rome, 1820

During 1820 Keats displayed increasingly serious symptoms of tuberculosis, suffering two lung haemorrhages in the first few days of February. On first coughing up blood, on 3 February 1820, he said to Charles Armitage Brown, "I know the colour of that blood! It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die."

He lost large amounts of blood and was bled further by the attending physician. Hunt nursed him in London for much of the following summer. At the suggestion of his doctors, he agreed to move to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. On 13 September, they left for Gravesend and four days later boarded the sailing brig Maria Crowther. On 1 October the ship landed at Lulworth Bay or Holworth Bay, where the two went ashore; back on board ship he made the final revisions of "Bright Star". The journey was a minor catastrophe: storms broke out, followed by a dead calm that slowed the ship's progress. When they finally docked in Naples, the ship was held in quarantine for ten days due to a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. Keats reached Rome on 14 November, by which time any hope of the warmer climate he sought had disappeared.

Keats wrote his last letter on 30 November 1820 to Charles Armitage Brown; "Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad , that I feel it worse on opening any book – yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence".

On arrival in Italy, he moved into a villa on the Spanish Steps in Rome, today the Keats–Shelley Memorial House museum. Despite care from Severn and Dr. James Clark, his health rapidly deteriorated. The medical attention Keats received may have hastened his death. In November 1820, Clark declared that the source of his illness was "mental exertion" and that the source was largely situated in his stomach. Clark eventually diagnosed consumption (tuberculosis) and placed Keats on a starvation diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day intended to reduce the blood flow to his stomach. He also bled the poet: a standard treatment of the day, but also likely a significant contributor to Keats's weakness. Severn's biographer Sue Brown writes: "They could have used opium in small doses, and Keats had asked Severn to buy a bottle of opium when they were setting off on their voyage. What Severn didn't realise was that Keats saw it as a possible resource if he wanted to commit suicide. He tried to get the bottle from Severn on the voyage but Severn wouldn't let him have it. Then in Rome he tried again.... Severn was in such a quandary he didn't know what to do, so in the end he went to the doctor, who took it away. As a result Keats went through dreadful agonies with nothing to ease the pain at all." Keats was angry with both Severn and Clark when they would not give him laudanum (opium). He repeatedly demanded, "How long is this posthumous existence of mine to go on?"[71]

166-] English Literature

166-] English Literature

John Keats

 John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

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.

In 1819 Keats wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Hyperion", "Lamia" and a play, Otho the Great (critically damned and not performed until 1950). The poems "Fancy" and "Bards of passion and of mirth" were inspired by the garden of Wentworth Place. In September, very short of money and in despair considering taking up journalism or a post as a ship's surgeon, he approached his publishers with a new book of poems. They were unimpressed with the collection, finding the presented versions of "Lamia" confusing, and describing "St Agnes" as having a "sense of pettish disgust" and "a 'Don Juan' style of mingling up sentiment and sneering" concluding it was "a poem unfit for ladies". The final volume Keats lived to see, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was eventually published in July 1820. It received greater acclaim than had Endymion or Poems, finding favourable notices in both The Examiner and Edinburgh Review. It would come to be recognised as one of the most important poetic works ever published. 

165-] English Literature

165-] English Literature

John Keats – Summary

John Keats (born October 31, 1795, London, England—died February 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States [Italy]) English Romantic lyric poet of the second generation, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley ,who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. He is best known for his odes, including "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and his long form poem Endymion. His usage of sensual imagery and statements such as “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” made him a precursor of aestheticism.

Early Life

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. His parents were Thomas Keats, a hostler at the stables at the Swan and Hoop Inn, which he would later manage, and Frances Jennings. He had three younger siblings: George, Thomas, and Frances Mary, known as Fanny. His father died in April 1804 in a horse riding accident, without leaving a will, and his mother remarried almost immediately. Throughout his life Keats had close emotional ties to his sister, Fanny, and his two brothers, George and Tom. After the breakup of their mother’s second marriage, the Keats children lived with their widowed grandmother at Edmonton, Middlesex. John attended a school at Enfield, two miles away, that was run by John Clarke, whose son Charles Cowden Clarke did much to encourage Keats’s literary aspirations.

John Keats received relatively little formal education. In 1803, Keats was sent to John Clarke's school in Enfield, which was close to his grandparents’ house and had a curriculum that was more progressive and modern than what was found in similar institutions.

At school Keats was noted as a pugnacious lad and was decidedly “not literary,” but in 1809 he began to read voraciously. After the death of the Keats children’s mother in 1810, their grandmother put the children’s affairs into the hands of a guardian, Richard Abbey. At Abbey’s instigation John Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton in 1811. He broke off his apprenticeship in 1814 and went to live in London, where he worked as a dresser, or junior house surgeon, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals. His literary interests had crystallized by this time, and after 1817 he devoted himself entirely to poetry. From then until his early death, the story of his life is largely the story of the poetry he wrote. John Clarke fostered his interest in classical studies and history. Charles Cowden Clarke, who was the headmaster’s son, became a mentor figure for Keats, and introduced him to Renaissance writers Torquato Tasso, Spenser, and the works of George Chapman. A temperamental boy, young Keats was both indolent and belligerent, but starting at age 13, he channeled his energies into the pursuit of academic excellence, to the point that, in midsummer 1809, he won his first academic prize.

When Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, and Richard Abbey and Jon Sandell were appointed as the children's guardians. That same year, Keats left John Clarke to become an apprentice to surgeon and apothecary Thomas Hammond, who was the doctor of his mother’s side of the family. He lived in the attic above Hammond’s practice until 1813.

Early works

Charles Cowden Clarke had introduced the young Keats to the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethans, and these were his earliest models. His first mature poem is the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman’s classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Clarke also introduced Keats to the journalist and contemporary poet Leigh Hunt, and Keats made friends in Hunt’s circle with the young poet John Hamilton Reynolds and with the painter Benjamin Haydon. Keats’s first book, Poems, was published in March 1817 and was written largely under “Huntian” influence. This is evident in the relaxed and rambling sentiments evinced and in Keats’s use of a loose form of the heroic couplet and light rhymes. The most interesting poem in this volume is “Sleep and Poetry,” the middle section of which contains a prophetic view of Keats’s own poetical progress. He sees himself as, at present, plunged in the delighted contemplation of sensuous natural beauty but realizes that he must leave this for an understanding of “the agony and strife of human hearts.” Otherwise the volume is remarkable only for some delicate natural observation and some obvious Spenserian influences.

In 1817 Keats left London briefly for a trip to the Isle of Wight and Canterbury and began work on Endymion, his first long poem. On his return to London he moved into lodgings in Hampstead with his brothers. Endymion appeared in 1818. This work is divided into four 1,000-line sections, and its verse is composed in loose rhymed couplets. The poem narrates a version of the Greek legend of the love of the moon goddess (variously Diana, Selene, and Artemis; also identified as Cynthia by Keats) for Endymion, a mortal shepherd, but Keats puts the emphasis on Endymion’s love for the goddess rather than on hers for him. Keats transformed the tale to express the widespread Romantic theme of the attempt to find in actuality an ideal love that has been glimpsed heretofore only in imaginative longings. This theme is realized through fantastic and discursive adventures and through sensuous and luxuriant description. In his wanderings, Endymion is guilty of an apparent infidelity to his visionary moon goddess and falls in love with an earthly maiden to whom he is attracted by human sympathy. But in the end the goddess and the earthly maiden turn out to be one and the same. The poem equates Endymion’s original romantic ardour with a more universal quest for a self-destroying transcendence in which he might achieve a blissful personal unity with all creation. Keats, however, was dissatisfied with the poem as soon as it was finished.

Keats wrote his first poem, “An Imitation of Spenser,” in 1814, aged 19. After finishing his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in October 1815. While there, he started assisting senior surgeons at the hospital during surgeries, which was a job of significant responsibility. His job was time consuming and it hindered his creative output, which caused significant distress. He had ambition as a poet, and he admired the likes of Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron.

He received his apothecary license in 1816, which allowed him to be a professional apothecary, physician, and surgeon, but instead, he announced to his guardian that he would pursue poetry. His first printed poem was the sonnet “O Solitude,” which appeared in Leigh Hunt’s magazine The Examiner. In the summer of 1816, while vacationing with Charles Cowden Clarke in the town of Margate, he started working on “Caligate.” Once that summer was over, he resumed his studies to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Thanks to Clarke, Keats met Leigh Hunt in October of 1816, who, in turn introduced him to Thomas Barnes, editor of the Times, conductor Thomas Novello, and the poet John Hamilton Reynolds. He published his first collection, Poems, which includes “Sleep and poetry” and “I stood Tiptoe,” but it was panned by the critics. Charles and James Ollier, the publishers, felt ashamed of it, and the collection aroused little interest. Keats promptly went to other publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who strongly supported his work and, one month after the publication of Poems, he already had an advance and a contract for a new book. Hessey also became a close friend of Keats. Through him and his partner, Keats met the Eton-educated lawyer Richard Woodhouse, a fervent admirer of Keats who would serve as his legal advisor. Woodhouse became an avid collector of Keats-related materials, known as Keatsiana, and his collection is, to this day, one of the most important sources of informations on Keats' work. The young poet also became part of William Hazlitt’s circle, which cemented his reputation as an exponent of a new school of poetry.

Upon formally leaving his hospital training in December 1816, Keats' health took a major hit. He left the damp rooms of London in favor of the village of Hampstead in April 1817 to live with his brothers, but both he and his brother George ended up taking care of their brother Tom, who had contracted tuberculosis. This new living situation brought him close to Samuel T. Coleridge, an elder poet of the first generation of Romantics, who lived in Highgate. On April 11, 1818, the two took a walk together on Hampstead Heath, where they talked about “nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, and metaphysics.”

In the Summer of 1818 , Keats started touring Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District, but by July of 1818, while on the Isle of Mull, he caught a terrible cold that debilitated him to the point that he had to return South. Keats' brother, Tom, died of Tuberculosis on December 1st, 1818.

Keats moved to Wentworth place, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, the property of his friend Charles Armitage Brown. This is the period when he wrote his most mature work: five out of his six great odes were composed in the Spring of 1819: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence." In 1818, he also published Endymion, which, much like Poems, was not appreciated by critics. Harsh assessments include “imperturbable drivelling idiocy” by John Gibson Lockhart for The Quarterly Review, who also thought that Keats would have been better off resuming his career as an apothecary, deeming “to be a starved apothecary” a wiser thing than a starved poet. Lockhart was also the one who lumped together Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats as member as “the Cockney School,” which was spiteful of both their poetic style and their lack of a traditional elite education that also signified belonging to the aristocracy or upper class.

There were two important women in John Keats’ life. The first one was Isabella Jones, whom he met in 1817. Keats was both intellectually and sexually attracted to her, and wrote about frequenting “her rooms” in the winter of 1818-19 and about their physical relationship, saying that he “warmed with her” and “kissed her” in letters to his brother George. He then met Fanny Brawne in the fall of 1818. She had talent for dressmaking, languages, and a theatrical bent. By late fall 1818, their relationship had deepened, and, throughout the following year, Keats lent her books such as Dante’s Inferno. By the summer of 1819, they had an informal engagement, mainly due to Keats’ dire straits, and their relationship remained unconsummated. In the last months of their relationship, Keats’ love took a darker and melancholic turn, and in poems such as "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," love is closely associated with death. They parted in September 1820 when Keats, due to his deteriorating health, was advised to move to warmer climates. He left for Rome knowing that death was near: he died five months later.

The famed sonnet "Bright Star" was first composed for Isabella Jones, but he gave it to Fanny Brawne after revising it.

Themes and Literary Style

Keats often juxtaposed the comic and the serious in poems that are not primarily funny. Much like his fellow Romantics, Keats struggled with the legacy of prominent poets before him. They retained an oppressive power that hindered the liberation of the imagination. Milton is the most notable case: Romantics both worshipped him and tried to distance themselves from him, and the same happened to Keats. His first Hyperion displayed Miltonic influences, which led him to discard it, and critics saw it as a poem “that might have been written by John Milton, but one that was unmistakably by no other than John Keats.”

Death

Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821. His remains rest in Rome’s Protestant cemetery. His tombstone bears the inscription “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.” Seven weeks after the funeral, Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais, which memorialized Keats. It contains 495 lines and 55 Spenserian stanzas.