William Blake
1757–1827
In his Life of William Blake(1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake "neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself 'a divine child,' whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth." Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of men. Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing. After the peace established in 1762, the British Empire seemed secure, but the storm wave begun with the American Revolution in 1775 and the French Revolution in 1789 changed forever the way men looked at their relationship to the state and to the established church. Poet, painter, and engraver, Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men.
One may wonder how a child born in moderate surroundings would become such an original artist and powerful writer. Unlike many well-known writers of his day, Blake was born into a family of moderate means. His father, James, was a hosier, one who sells stockings, gloves, and haberdashery, and the family lived at 28 Broad Street in London in an unpretentious but "respectable" neighborhood. Blake was born on 28 November 1757. In all, seven children were born to James and Catherine Harmitage Blake, but only five survived infancy. Blake seems to have been closest to his youngest brother, Robert, who died while yet young.
By all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant by his skipping any formal schooling. As a young boy he wandered the streets of London and could easily escape to the surrounding countryside. Even at an early age, however, his unique mental powers would prove disquieting. According to Gilchrist, on one ramble he was startled to "see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." His parents were not amused at such a story, and only his mother's pleadings prevented him from receiving a beating.
His parents did, however, encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled at the age of ten in Pars' drawing school. The expense of continued formal training in art, however, was a prohibitive one, and the family decided that at the age of fourteen William would be apprenticed to a master engraver. At first his father took him to William Ryland, a highly respected engraver. William, however, resisted the arrangement telling his father, "I do not like the man's face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!" The grim prophecy was to come true twelve years later. Instead of Ryland the family settled on a lesser-known engraver but a man of considerable talents, James Basire. Basire seems to have been a good master, and Blake was a good student of the craft. Blake was later to be especially grateful to Basire for sending the young student to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of monuments Basire was commissioned to engrave. The vast Gothic dimensions of Westminster and the haunting presence of the tombs of kings affected Blake's romantic sensibilities and were to provide fertile ground for his active imagination.
At the age of twenty-one Blake left Basire's apprenticeship and enrolled for a time in the newly formed Royal Academy. It was as a journeyman engraver, however, that Blake earned his living. Booksellers employed him to engrave illustrations for publications ranging from novels such as Don Quixote to serials such as Ladies' Magazine.
One incident at this time affected Blake deeply. In June of 1780 riots broke out in London incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord George Gordon but also by resistance to continued war against the American colonists. Houses, churches, and prisons were burned by uncontrollable mobs bent on destruction. On one evening, whether by design or by accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that burned Newgate prison. These images of violent destruction and unbridled revolution gave Blake powerful material for works such as Europe (1794) and America (1793).
Not all of the young man's interests were confined to art and politics. After one ill-fated romance, Blake met Catherine Boucher, an attractive and compassionate woman who took pity on Blake's tales of being spurned. After a year's courtship the couple were married on 18 August 1782. The parish registry shows that Catherine, like many women of her class, could not sign her own name. Blake soon taught her to read and to write, and under Blake's tutoring she also became an accomplished draftsman, helping him in the execution of his designs.
By all accounts the marriage was a successful one, but no children were born to the Blakes. Catherine also managed the household affairs and was undoubtedly of great help in making ends meet on Blake's always limited income.
Blake's friend John Flaxman introduced Blake to the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, wife of the Rev. Henry Mathew and a celebrated lady of fashion whose drawing room was often a meeting place for artists and musicians. There Blake gained favor by reciting and even singing his early poems. Thanks to the support of Flaxman and Mrs. Mathew, a thin volume of poems was published under the title Poetical Sketches(1783). Many of these poems are imitations of classical models, much like the sketches of models of antiquity the young artist made to learn his trade. Even here, however, one sees signs of Blake's protest against war and the tyranny of kings. David Erdman argues that the ballad "Gwin, King of Norway" is a protest against King George's treatment of the American colonies, a subject Blake treated more extensively inAmerica (1793). Only about fifty copies of Poetical Sketches are known to have been printed. Blake's financial enterprises also did not fare well. In 1784, after his father's death, Blake used part of the money he inherited to set up shop as a printseller with his friend James Parker. The Blakes moved to 27 Broad Street, next door to the family home and close to Blake's brothers. The business did not do well, however, and the Blakes soon moved out.
Of more concern to Blake was the deteriorating health of his favorite brother, Robert. Blake tended to his brother in his illness and according to Gilchrist watched the spirit of his brother escape his body in his death: "At the last solemn moment, the visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heaven ward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, 'clapping its hands for joy.'"
Blake always felt the spirit of Robert lived with him. He even announced that it was Robert who informed him how to illustrate his poems in "illuminated writing." Blake's technique was to produce his text and design on a copper plate with an impervious liquid. The plate was then dipped in acid so that the text and design remained in relief. That plate could be used to print on paper, and the final copy would be then hand colored.
After experimenting with this method in a series of aphorisms entitled There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (1788?), Blake designed the series of plates for the poems entitled Songs of Innocence and dated the title page 1789. Blake continued to experiment with the process of illuminated writing and in 1794 combined the early poems with companion poems entitled Songs of Experience. The title page of the combined set announces that the poems show "the two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Clearly Blake meant for the two series of poems to be read together, and Robert Gleckner has pointed out in reading the poems one should always consider the point of view of the speaker of the poem and the context of the situation.
The introductory poems to each series display Blake's dual image of the poet as both a "piper" and a "Bard." As man goes through various stages of innocence and experience in the poems, the poet also is in different stages of innocence and experience. The pleasant lyrical aspect of poetry is shown in the role of the "piper" while the more somber prophetic nature of poetry is displayed by the stern Bard.
In the "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence, Blake presents the poet in the form of a simple shepherd: "Piping down the valleys wild / Piping songs of pleasant glee." The frontispiece displays a young shepherd simply dressed and holding a pipe, and it is clear Blake is establishing a pastoral world. The "piping songs" are poems of pure pleasure.
The songs of pleasure are interrupted by the visionary appearance of an angel who asks for songs of more seriousness:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"
So I piped with merry chear.
"Piper, pipe that song again."
So I piped: he wept to hear.
The piper is no longer playing his songs for his own enjoyment. Now the piper is in the position of a poet playing at the request of an appreciative audience. The "song about a Lamb" suggests a poem about the "Lamb of God," Christ.
The child commands that the poet not keep the songs for himself but share them with his audience:
"Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read."
So he vanish'd from my sight
And I pluck'd a hollow reed.
The "book" is Songs of Innocence, which is designed in a form that "all may read." The simple piper is now a true poet. He no longer writes only for his own enjoyment but for the delight of his audience. The piper is inspired by the directions of the child, and the poet is inspired by his vision of his audience. The child vanishes as the author interiorizes his vision of his audience and makes it a central part of his work. Immediately after the child's disappearance, the author begins the actual physical composition of the poem by plucking the hollow reed for his poem. At the end of the poem the poet is no longer the simple shepherd of Arcadia playing for his own amusement. Now he writes his poems for "Every child" of England.
The "Introduction" to Songs of Experience is a companion to the earlier poem, and, as a poem written in the state of experience, it presents a different view of the nature of the poet and his relation to his audience.
The strident tone of the first stanza provides a marked contrast to the gentle piping of the first poem and reminds us that we are now in the state of experience:
Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past and Future sees:
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees.
This is not an invocation, but a direct command to the reader to sit up and pay attention. Instead of playing at the request of his audience, the poet now demands that his reader listen to him. The speaker now has authority because of what he has heard. The voice of the poet is that of the ancient Bard and that also of the biblical prophet who has heard the "Holy Word," the word of God. Assuming the role of the prophet and the Bard gives the modern poet a sense of biblical authority to speak on matters sacred and profane.
With his authority, the Bard is more willing to instruct his audience than is the piper. The Bard repeats the call of the Holy Word to fallen man. The message repeated by the Bard is that man still "might control" the world of nature and bring back the "fallen light" of vision.
Blake presents two sides of his view of the poet in these introductory poems. Neither one should be dismissed in favor of the other. The poet is both a pleasant piper playing at the request of his audience and a stern Bard lecturing an entire nation. In part this is Blake's interpretation of the ancient dictum that poetry should both delight and instruct. More important, for Blake the poet is a man who speaks both from the personal experience of his own vision and from the "inherited" tradition of ancient Bards and prophets who carried the Holy Word to the nations.
In reading any of the poems, one has to be aware of the mental "state" of the speaker of the poems. In some cases the speakers address the same issue, but from entirely different perspectives. The child of "The Chimney Sweeper" in Songs of Innocencelives in deplorable conditions and is clearly exploited by those around him: "So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep." Yet in his childish state he explains away his misery with a dream of a promised afterlife where God will be his father and he will "never want joy." The same issue of child exploitation is addressed in "The Chimney Sweeper" of Songs of Experience. The speaker is also a child, but one who understands the social forces that have reduced him to misery:
"And because I am happy, & dance & sing
They think they have done me no injury.
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King.
Who make up a heaven of our misery."
In each poem the reader can see what the speaker can not always see because of his unique perspective: religion and government share a responsibility in the persecution of children.
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb.
The speaker sees God in terms he can understand. God is gentle and kind and very much like us. The close association between the "I," "child," and "lamb" suggests that all men share in the same spiritual brotherhood.
The speaker in "The Tyger" also sees God in terms he can understand, but he sees him from a different perspective. The raging violence of the animal forces him to ask what kind of God could create such terror:
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The answer, of course, is never given, but again the reader should be able to perceive more than the speaker of the poem. God did make both the lamb and the tyger, and his nature contains both the gentleness of the lamb and the violence of the tyger. Neither perspective is true by itself; both have to be understood.
The two states of innocence and experience are not always clearly separate in the poems, and one can see signs of both states in many poems. The companion poems titled "Holy Thursday" are on the same subject, the forced marching of poor children to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The speaker in the state of innocence approves warmly of the progression of children:
'Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow[.]
The brutal irony is that in this world of truly "innocent" children there are evil men who repress the children, round them up like so many herd of cattle, and force them to show their piety. In this state of innocence, experience is very much present.
The speaker of the companion "Holy Thursday" presents an entirely different perspective:
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc'd to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
The speaker of experience understands that the children have been brutalized and places the blame for this condition not just on the "Grey headed beadles" who have direct responsibility for the children but on the country at large. In a "rich and fruitful land" like England, it is appalling that children are allowed to suffer:
For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall[.]
If experience has a way of creeping into the world of innocence, innocence also has a way of creeping into experience. The golden land where the "sun does shine" and the "rain does fall" is a land of bountiful goodness and innocence. But even here in this blessed land, there are children starving. The sharp contrast between the two conditions makes the social commentary all the more striking and supplies the energy of the poem.
The contrast between innocence and experience is also apparent in another illuminated book produced in 1789, The Book of Thel. Thel is a maiden who laments the passing of youth and of innocence: "O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water, / Why fade these children of the spring, born but to smile & fall?" Thel questions elements of nature, like the Lilly of the Valley and the Cloud, that are beautiful but transitory. Yet each understands that the transitory nature of beauty is necessary. The Cloud answers Thel's complaint by saying that "Every thing that lives / Lives not alone nor for itself." Thel is innocent but when one is stuck in a state of innocence there can be no growth.
Thel is allowed to enter into the world of experience, and she is startled by a voice from her own grave:
"Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?"
The Virgin is shocked by this peek into her own sexuality and mortality and runs back to the quiet vales of Har "with a shriek." Blake satirizes those who are unable to see the necessary connection between innocence and experience, the spiritual world and the physical world. Thel's world of soft watercolors is not enough. She cannot understand that even the lowly worm is loved by God and serves his part in creating life.
The storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 and the agonies of the French Revolution sent shock waves through England. Some hoped for a corresponding outbreak of liberty in England while others feared a breakdown of the social order. In much of his writing Blake argues against the monarchy. In his early Tiriel (written circa 1789) Blake traces the fall of a tyrannical king.
Politics was surely often the topic of conversation at the publisher Joseph Johnson's house, where Blake was often invited. There Blake met important literary and political figures such as William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. According to one legend Blake is even said to have saved Paine's life by warning him of his impending arrest. Whether or not that is true, it is clear that Blake was familiar with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day.
In The French Revolution Blake celebrates the rise of democracy in France and the fall of the monarchy. King Louis represents a monarchy that is old and dying. The sick king is lethargic and unable to act: "From my window I see the old mountains of France, like aged men, fading away." The "old mountains" of monarchy are doomed to collapse under the pressure of the people and their representatives in the assembly. The "voice of the people" demands the removal of the king's troops from Paris, and their departure at the end of the first book signals the triumph of democracy.
On the title page for book one of The French Revolution Blake announces that it is "A Poem in Seven Books," but none of the other books has been found. The "Advertisement" to the poem promises "The remaining Books of the Poem are finished, and will be published in their Order." The first book was set in type in 1791, but exists only in proof copies. Johnson never published the poem, perhaps because of fear of prosecution, or perhaps because Blake himself withdrew it from publication. Johnson did have cause to be nervous. Erdman points out that in the same year booksellers were thrown in jail for selling the works of Thomas Paine.
In America (1793) Blake also addresses the idea of revolution, but the poem is less a commentary on the actual revolution in America as it is a commentary on universal principles that are at work in any revolution. The fiery figure of Orc represents all revolutions:
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness,
That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves.
The same force that causes the colonists to rebel against King George is the force that overthrows the perverted rules and restrictions of established religions.
The revolution in America suggests to Blake a similar revolution in England. In the poem the king, like the ancient pharaohs of Egypt, sends pestilence to America to punish the rebels, but the colonists are able to redirect the forces of destruction to England. Erdman suggests that Blake is thinking of the riots in England during the war and the chaotic condition of the English troops, many of whom deserted. Writing this poem in the 1790s, Blake also surely imagined the possible effect of the French Revolution on England.
Another product of the radical 1790s is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Written and etched between 1790 and 1793, Blake's poem brutally satirizes oppressive authority in church and state. The poem also satirizes the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted Blake's interests.
The powerful opening of the poem suggests a world of violence: "Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air / Hungry clouds swag on the deep." The fire and smoke suggest a battlefield and the chaos of revolution. The cause of that chaos is analyzed at the beginning of the poem. The world has been turned upside down. The "just man" has been turned away from the institutions of church and state, and in his place are fools and hypocrites who preach law and order but create chaos. Those who proclaim restrictive moral rules and oppressive laws as "goodness" are in themselves evil. Hence to counteract this repression, Blake announces that he is of the "Devil's Party" that will advocate freedom and energy and gratified desire.
The "Proverbs of Hell" are clearly designed to shock the reader out of his commonplace notion of what is good and what is evil:
Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
It is the oppressive nature of church and state that has created the repulsive prisons and brothels. Sexual energy is not an inherent "evil," but the repression of that energy is. The preachers of morality fail to understand that God is in all things, including the sexual nature of men and women.
Blake is, of course, not advocating moral and political anarchy, but a proper balance of energy and its opposing force, reason. Reason is defined as "the bound or outward circumference of Energy." Reason is a vital and necessary force to define Energy, and "Without Contraries is no progression." The problem now is that the forces of reason have predominated, and the forces of energy must be let loose.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell contains many of the basic religious ideas developed in the major prophecies. Blake analyzes the development of organized religion as a perversion of ancient visions: "The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & Numerous senses could perceive." Ancient man created those gods to express his vision of the spiritual properties that he perceived in the physical world. So far, so good, but the gods began to take on a life of their own separate from man: "Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood." The "system" or organized religion keeps man from perceiving the spiritual in the physical. The gods are seen as separate from man, and an elite race of priests is developed to approach the gods: "Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast." Instead of looking for God on remote altars, Blake warns, man should look within.
In August of 1790 Blake moved from his house on Poland Street across the Thames to the area known as Lambeth. The Blakes lived in the house for ten years, and the surrounding neighborhood often becomes mythologized in his poetry. Felpham was a "lovely vale," a place of trees and open meadows, but it also contained signs of human cruelty, such as the house for orphans. At his home Blake kept busy not only with his illuminated poetry but also with the daily chore of making money. During the 1790s Blake earned fame as an engraver and was glad to receive numerous commissions.
One story told by Blake's friend Thomas Butts shows how much the Blakes enjoyed the pastoral surroundings of Lambeth. At the end of Blake's garden was a small summer house, and coming to call on the Blakes one day Butts was shocked to find the couple stark naked: "Come in!" cried Blake; "it's only Adam and Eve you know!" The Blakes were reciting passages from Paradise Lost, apparently "in character."
Sexual freedom is addressed in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), also written during the Lambeth period. Oothoon, the "soft soul of America," expresses her unrestricted love for Theotormon who cannot accept such love because he is limited by jealousy and possessiveness. In the poem Oothoon is raped by Bromion, and the enraged Theotormon binds the two together. The frontispiece to the book shows Bromion and Oothoon back-to-back with their arms bound together while Theotormon, hunched over, stares at the ground. The relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is like that of marriage that is held together only by laws and not by love. In her lament to Theotormon, Oothoon denounces the destruction of a woman's sexual desire:
Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
Of life in weary lust?
The marriage "spells of law" bind a woman to man much like a slave is bound to a master, and marriage can become, in Mary Wollstonecraft's phrase, a form of "legalized prostitution."
Oothoon calls for the freedom of desire: "Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears" and even promises to provide women for Theotormon to enjoy "in lovely copulation," but Theotormon, bound by law and custom, cannot accept such love.
In 1793-1795 Blake produced a remarkable collection of illuminated works that have come to be known as the "Minor Prophecies." In Europe (1794), The First Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Song of Los (1795), and The Book of Ahania (1795) Blake develops the major outlines of his universal mythology. In these poems Blake examines the fall of man. In Blake's mythology man and God were once united, but man separated himself from God and became weaker and weaker as he became further divided. Throughout the poems Blake writes of the destructive aspects of this separation into warring identities.
The narrative of the universal mythology is interwoven with the historical events of Blake's own time. The execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 led to an inevitable reaction, and England soon declared war on France. England's participation in the war against France and its attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit is addressed in Europe . In Blake's poem liberty is repressed in England after it declares war on France:
Over the windows Thou shalt not; & over the chimneys
Fear is written
With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into
the walls of citizens
The very force of that repression, however, will cause its opposite to appear in the revolutionary figure of Orc: "And in the vineyards of reds France appear'd the light of his fury." Orc promises fire and destruction, but he also wars against the forces of repression.
Blake's minor prophecies are, of course, much more than political commentaries. In these poems Blake analyzes the universal forces at work when repression and revolution clash. Erdman has pointed out the historical parallel in Europe between Rintrah and William Pitt, the English Prime Minister who led his country into war against France. Yet in the same poem we see references to repression from the time of Christ to the Last Judgement. Blake saw English repression of the French Revolution as but one moment in the stream of history.
The causes of that repression are examined in The First Book of Urizen. The wordUrizen suggests "your reason" and also "horizon." He represents that part of the mind that constantly defines and limits human thought and action. In the frontispiece to the poem he is pictured as an aged man hunched over a massive book writing with both hands in other books. Behind him stand the tablets of the ten commandments, and Urizen is surely writing other "thou shalt nots" for others to follow. His twisted anatomical position shows the perversity of what should be the "human form divine."
The poem traces the birth of Urizen as a separate part of the human mind. He broods upon himself and comes to insist on laws for all to follow:
"One command, one joy, one desire
One curse, one weight, one measure,
One King, one God, one Law."
Urizen's repressive laws bring only further chaos and destruction. Like Milton's hell, Urizen's world is filled with the contradictions of darkness and fire: "no light from the fires." The lawgiver can only produce destruction, not understanding. Appalled by the chaos he himself created, Urizen fashions a world apart.
The process of separation continues as the character of Los is divided from Urizen. Los, the "Eternal Prophet," represents another power of the human mind. Los forges the creative aspects of the mind into works of art. Like Urizen he is a limiter, but the limitations he creates are productive and necessary. In the poem Los forms "nets and gins" to bring an end to Urizen's continual chaotic separation.
Los is horrified by the figure of the bound Urizen and is separated by his pity, "for Pity divides the Soul." Los undergoes a separation into a male and female form. His female form is called Enitharmon, and her creation is viewed with horror:
Eternity shudder'd when they saw
Man begetting his likeness
On his own divided image.
This separation into separate sexual identities is yet another sign of man's fall. The "Eternals" contain both male and female forms within themselves, but man is divided and weak.
Enitharmon gives birth to the fiery Orc, whose violent birth gives some hope for radical change in a fallen world, but Orc is bound in chains by Los, now a victim of jealousy. Enitharmon bears an "enormous race," but it is a race of men and women who are weak and divided and who have lost sight of eternity.
Urizen explores the fallen world, spreading his "Net of Religion" over the cities of men:
And their children wept, & built
Tombs in the desolate places,
And form'd laws of prudence, and call'd them
The eternal laws of God.
In his fallen state man has limited senses and fails to perceive the infinite. Divided from God and caught by the narrow traps of religion, he sees God only as a crude lawgiver who must be obeyed.
The Book of Los also examines man's fall and the binding of Urizen, but from the perspective of Los whose task it is to place a limit on the chaotic separation begun by Urizen. The decayed world is again one of ignorance where there is "no light from the fires." From this chaos the bare outlines of the human form begin to appear:
Many ages of groans, till there grew
Branchy forms organizing the Human
Into finite inflexible organs.
The human senses are pale imitations of the true senses that allow one to perceive eternity. Urizen's world where man now lives is spoken of as an "illusion" because it masks the spiritual world that is everywhere present.
In The Song of Los, Los sings of the decayed state of man, where the arbitrary laws of Urizen have become institutionalized:
Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave
Laws & Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more
And more to Earth, closing and restraining,
Till a Philosophy of five Senses was complete.
Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke.
The "philosophy of the five senses" espoused by scientists and philosophers argues that the world and the mind are like industrial machines operating by fixed laws but devoid of imagination, creativity, or any spiritual life. Blake condemns this materialistic view of the world espoused in the writings of Newton and Locke.
Although man is in a fallen state, the end of the poem points to the regeneration that is to come:
Orc, raging in European darkness,
Arose like a pillar of fire above the Alps,
Like a serpent of fiery flame!
The coming of Orc is likened not only to the fires of revolution sweeping Europe, but also to the final apocalypse when the "Grave shrieks with delight."
The separation of man is also examined in The Book of Ahania, which Blake later incorporated in Vala, or The Four Zoas. In The Book of Ahania Urizen is further divided into male and female forms. Urizen is repulsed by his feminine shadow that is called Ahania:
He groan'd anguish'd, & called her Sin,
Kissing her and weeping over her;
Then hid her in darkness, in silence,
Jealous, tho' she was invisible.
Blake satirizes the biblical and Miltonic associations of sin and lust. "Ahania" in Blake's poem is only a "sin" in that she is given that name. Urizen, the lawgiver, can not accept the liberating aspects of sexual pleasure. At the end of the poem, Ahania laments the lost pleasures of eternity:
"Where is my golden palace?
Where my ivory bed?
Where the joy of my morning hour?
Where the sons of eternity singing."
The physical pleasures of sexual union are celebrated as an entrance to a spiritual state. The physical union of man and woman is sign of the spiritual union that is to come.
At the same time as he was writing these individual poems that center on aspects of man's fall, Blake was also composing an epic poem on the fall of man into separate identities. Blake originally called the poem Vala and later changed the name to The Four Zoas. He worked on the poem for a number of years but never completed it. It survives in manuscript form with rough designs for illustrations, but it never became one of the "illuminated books."
The Four Zoas is subtitled "The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man," and the poem develops Blake's myth of Albion, who represents both the country of England and the unification of all men. Albion is composed of "Four Mighty Ones": Tharmas, Urthona, Urizen, and Luvah. Originally, in "Eden," these four exist in the unity of "The Universal Brotherhood." At this early time all parts of man lived in perfect harmony, but now they are fallen into warring camps. The poem traces the changes in Albion:
His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity:
His fall into the Generation of decay & death, & his
Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead.
The poem begins with Tharmas and examines the fall of each aspect of man's identity. The poem progresses from disunity toward unity as each Zoa moves toward final unification.
In the apocalyptic "Night the Ninth," the evils of oppression are overturned in the turmoil of the Last Judgment:
The thrones of Kings are shaken, they have lost their robes & crowns
The poor smite their oppressors, they awake up to the harvest.
The final overthrow of all kings and tyrants that earthly revolutions tried but failed to achieve will be accomplished on the last day. The "harvest" imagery is from the Book of Revelations and represents the process of gathering and discarding that marks the progress of man's soul on the last day.
As dead men are rejuvenated, Christ, the "Lamb of God," is brought back to life and sheds the evils of institutionalized religions:
Thus shall the male & female live the life of Eternity,
Because the Lamb of God Creates himself a bride & wife
That we his Children evermore may live in Jerusalem
Which now descendeth out of heaven, a City, yet a Woman
Mother of myriads redeem'd & born in her spiritual palaces,
By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death.
The heavenly City of Jerusalem is the true form of God's church. The earthly city of Jerusalem and the numerous forms of religions are but pale imitations of that true religion where God and the church are joined. In that City man's separate identities are reunited, and man is reunited with God.
Very little of Blake's poetry of the 1790s was known to the general public. His reputation as an artist was mixed. Response to his art ranged from praise to derision, but he did gain some fame as an engraver. He received several commissions, the most important probably being his illustrations to Edward Young's Night Thoughts. In 1795 the publisher and bookseller Richard Edwards commissioned Blake to illustrate the then-famous poems of Young. Blake produced 537 watercolor designs of which 43 were selected for engraving. The first volume of a projected four-volume series was published in 1797. However, the project did not prove financially successful, and no further volumes were published. After the disappointment of that project, Blake's friend and admirer Flaxman commissioned Blake to illustrate the poems of Thomas Gray. Blake painted 116 watercolors and completed the project in 1798. Blake was also aided by his friend Thomas Butts, who commissioned a series of biblical paintings. His commissions did not produce much in the way of income, but Blake never seems to have been discouraged. In 1799 Blake wrote to George Cumberland, "I laugh at Fortune & Go on & on."
Because of his monetary woes, Blake often had to depend on the benevolence of patrons of the arts. This sometimes led to heated exchanges between the independent artist and the wealthy patron. Dr. John Trusler was one such patron whom Blake failed to please. Dr. Trusler was something of a dabbler in a variety of fields. Aside from being a clergyman, he was a student of medicine, a bookseller, and the author of such works as Hogarth Moralized (1768), The Way to be Rich and Respectable (1750?), and A Sure Way to Lengthen Life with Vigor (circa 1819). Blake's friend Cumberland had recommended Blake to Trusler in hopes of providing some needed income for Blake. Blake, however, found himself unable to follow the clergyman's wishes: "I attempted every morning for a fortnight together to follow your Dictate, but when I found my attempts were in vain, resolv'd to shew an independence which I know will please an Author better than slavishly following the track of another, however admirable that track may be. At any rate, my Excuse must be: I could not do otherwise; it was out of my power!" Dr. Trusler was not convinced and replied that he found Blake's "Fancy" to be located in the "World of Spirits" and not in this world.
Blake's rebuttal is a classic defense of his own principles. To the charge that Blake needed someone to "elucidate" his idea, Blake replied with characteristic wrath: "That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients consider'd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculities to act." Blake relies on a basic principle of rhetoric that is evident in his writing: it is often best to leave some things unsaid so that the reader must employ his imagination. To the charge that his visions were not of this world, Blake replied that he had seen his visions in this world, but not all men see alike: "As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination." The problem then is not the location of Blake's subjects, but the relative ability of man to perceive. If Dr. Trusler could not understand Blake's drawings, the problem was his inability to see with the imagination.
Dr. Trusler was not the only patron that tried to make Blake conform to popular tastes. Blake's stormy relation to his erstwhile friend and patron William Hayley directly affected the writing of the epics Milton and Jerusalem. When Blake met him Hayley was a well-known man of letters who had produced several popular volumes of poetry. His Triumphs of Temper (1781), which admonishes women to control their tempers in order to be good wives, was very popular. In 1800 under Hayley's promptings Blake moved from London to the village of Felpham, where Hayley lived. It was expected that Blake would receive numerous engraving commissions, and his financial problems would disappear.
Hayley did provide Blake with some small commissions. Blake began work on a series of eighteen "Heads of the Poets" for Hayley's library and worked on the engravings for Hayley's Life of Cowper (1802). Hayley also set Blake to work on a series of small portraits, but Blake soon bristled under the watchful eye of his patron. In January of 1803 Blake wrote to Butts that "I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the meer drudgery of business, & intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live; this has always pursu'd me." In the same letter Blake argued that his duty to his art must take precedence to the necessity of making money: "But if we fear to do the dictates of our Angels, & tremble at the Tasks set before us; if we refuse to do Spiritual Acts because of natural Fears of natural Desires! Who can describe the dismal torments of such a state!"
The "Spiritual Acts" Blake referred to include the writing of his epic poetry despite Hayley's objections. In the same month Blake wrote to his brother James that he is determined "To leave This Place" and that he can no longer accept Hayley's patronage: "The truth is, As a Poet he is frighten'd at me & as a Painter his view & mine are opposite; he thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do."
Blake left Felpham in 1803 and returned to London. In April of that year he wrote to Butts that he was overjoyed to return to the city: "That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy'd, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & Prophecy & Speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals." In the same letter Blake refers to his epic poem Milton, composed while at Felpham: "But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years' Slumber on the banks of the Ocean, unless he has seen them in the Spirit, or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts."
In a later letter to Butts, Blake declares his resolution to have Milto
printed:
This Poem shall, by Divine Assistance be progressively Printed & Ornamented with Prints & given to the Public. But of this work I take care to say little to Mr H., since he is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a Chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shewn it to him, & he has read Part by his own desire & has looked with sufficient contempt to inhance my opinion of it. But I do not wish to irritate by seeming too obstinate in Poetic pursuits. But if all the World should set their faces against This, I have Orders to set my face like flint (Ezekiel iiiC, 9v) against their faces, & my forehead against their foreheads.
Blake's letter reveals much of his attitude toward his patron and toward his readers. Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by the general public, but he was determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. Men of letters such as Hayley would not be allowed to dictate his art. Blake compares himself to the prophet Ezekiel, whom the Lord made strong to warn the Israelites of their wickedness. Blake's images of a stern prophet locked head to head with his adversary is a fitting picture of part of Blake's relation with his reader. Blake knew that his poetry would be derided by some readers. In Milton Blake tells us that "the idiot reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination," and in the face of that laughter Blake remained resolute.
In his "slumber on the banks of the Ocean," Blake, surrounded by financial worries and hounded by a patron who could not appreciate his art, reflected on the value of visionary poetry. Milton, which Blake started to engrave in 1804 (probably finishing in 1808), is a poem that constantly draws attention to itself as a work of literature. Its ostensible subject is the poet John Milton, but the author, William Blake, also creates a character for himself in his own poem. Blake examines the entire range of mental activity involved in the art of poetry from the initial inspiration of the poet to the reception of his vision by the reader of the poem. Milton examines as part of its subject the very nature of poetry: what it means to be a poet, what a poem is, and what it means to be a reader of poetry.
In the preface to the poem, Blake issues a battle cry to his readers to reject what is merely fashionable in art:
Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.
In attacking the "ignorant Hirelings" in the "Camp, the Court & the University," Blake repeats a familiar dissenting cry against established figures in English society. Blake's insistence on being "just & true to our own Imaginations" places a special burden on the reader of his poem. For as he makes clear, Blake demands the exercise of the creative imagination from his own readers.
In the well-known lyric that follows, Blake asks for a continuation of Christ's vision in modern-day England:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant Land.
The poet-prophet must lead the reader away from man's fallen state and toward a revitalized state where man can perceive eternity.
"Book the First" contains a poem-within-a-poem, a "Bard's Prophetic Song." The Bard's Song describes man's fall from a state of vision. We see man's fall in the ruined form of Albion as a representative of all men and in the fall of Palamabron from his proper position as prophet to a nation. Interwoven into this narrative are the Bard's addresses to the reader, challenges to the reader's senses, descriptions of contemporary events and locations in England, and references to the life of William Blake. Blake is at pains to show us that his mythology is not something far removed from us but is part of our day to day life. Blake describes the reader's own fall from vision and the possibility of regaining those faculties necessary for vision.
The climax of the Bard's Song is the Bard's sudden vision of the "Holy Lamb of God": "Glory! Glory! to the Holy lamb of God: / I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord." The vision of the "Lamb of God" is traditional in apocalyptic literature. In this case the Bard's final burst of vision is important not only for its content, but also for its placement in the poem. The Bard's sudden vision of the Lamb of God testifies that man need not remain "in chains of the mind Lock'd up." The Bard begins by describing the fall from vision, but he ends with a vision of his own that indicates that man still possesses the powers of vision.
At the end of the Bard's Song, the Bard's power of vision is questioned much as Blake's prophecies were criticized. The Bard's spirit is incorporated into that of the poet Milton. Blake portrays Milton as a great but flawed poet who must unify the separated elements of his own identity before he can reclaim his powers of vision and become a true poet. Upon hearing the Bard's Song, Milton is moved to descend to earth and begin the process of becoming an inspired poet. It is a journey of intense self-discovery and self-examination that requires Milton to cast off "all that is not inspiration."
As Milton is presented as a man in the process of becoming a poet, Blake presents himself as a character in the poem undergoing the transformation necessary to become a poet. As Milton is inspired by the "Bard's Song," Blake is inspired by the spirit of Milton:
Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift:
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter'd there
But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe.
This sudden moment of inspiration extends to the very end of book one. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, the character Blake is not fully aware of the importance of this moment of illumination. Like Milton, Blake is in the process of becoming a poet.
In a moment of sudden inspiration, Blake overcomes his "earthly lineaments" and binds "this Vegetable World" as a sandal under his foot so that he can "walk forward thro' Eternity." Blake's act of creativity enables him to merge with Los:
And I became One Man with him arising in my strength
'Twas too late now to recede. Los had enter'd into my soul:
His terrors now possess'd me whole! I arose in fury & strength!
Blake's act of faith in the world of the imagination enables him to increase his powers of perception and sets a pattern for the reader to follow. Blake's union with Los marks the end of one stage of the unification process that began at the completion of the Bard's Song. In each case faith in the power of the imagination precedes union.
Only Milton believes in the vision of the Bard's Song, and the Bard takes "refuge in Milton's bosom." As Blake realizes the insignificance of this "Vegetable World," Los merges with Blake, and he arises in "fury and strength." This ongoing belief in the hidden powers of the mind heals divisions and increases powers of perception. The Bard, Milton, Los, and Blake begin to merge into a powerful bardic union. Yet it is but one stage in a greater drive toward the unification of all men in a "Universal Brotherhood."
In the second book of Milton Blake initiates the reader into the order of poets and prophets. Blake continues the process begun in book one of taking the reader through different stages in the growth of a poet. Ololon, Milton's female form, descends to earth to unite with Milton. Her descent gives the reader a radically new view of this world. Ololon's unique perspective turns the reader's world of time and space upside down to make him see the decayed and limited nature of this world. If he can learn to see his familiar world from a new perspective, then the reader can develop his own powers of perception. Indeed "learning to see" is the first requirement of the poet.
The turning of the outside world upside down is a preliminary stage in an extensive examination of man's internal world. A searching inquiry into the self is a necessary stage in the development of the poet. Milton is told he must first look within: "Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore, / What is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihilable." Milton descends within himself and judges the separate parts of his own identity; he must distinguish between what is permanent and what transitory. Central to the process of judging the self is a confrontation with that destructive part of man's identity Blake calls the Selfhood. The Selfhood continually hinders man's spiritual development. Only by annihilating the Selfhood, Blake believes, can one hope to participate in the visionary experience of the poem. Unless the Selfhood is annihilated, one cannot become a true poet, for the Selfhood continually blocks "the human center of creativity."
The Selfhood places two powerful forces to block our path: the socially accepted values of "love" and "reason." In its purest state love is given freely with no restrictions and no thought of return. In its fallen state love is reduced to a form of trade: "Thy love depends on him thou lovest, & on his dear loves / Depend thy pleasures, which thou hast cut off by jealousy." "Female love" is given only in exchange for love received. It is bartering in human emotions and is not love at all. When Milton denounces his own Selfhood, he gives up "Female love" and loves freely and openly.
As Blake attacks accepted notions of love, he also forces the reader to question the value society places on reason. The Seven Angels of the Presence warn that the "memory is a state Always, & the Reason is a State / Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created." Both Memory and Reason exercise the lesser powers of the mind. Nothing new can be created by the mental processes involved in memory and reason. In his struggle with Urizen, who represents man's limited power of reason, Milton seeks to cast off the deadening effect of the reasoning power and free the mind for the power of the imagination. Milton gains control of Urizen, and it is clear that in Milton's mind it is now the imagination that directs reason.
Destroying the Selfhood allows Milton to unite with others. He descends upon Blake's path and continues the process of uniting with Blake that had begun in book one. This union is also a reflection of Blake's encounter with Los that is described in book one and illustrated in book two. As was the case with seeing Los, Blake is startled by Milton's arrival. Los appears as a "terrible flaming Sun," and Milton's arrival turns Blake's path into a "solid fire, as bright as the Clear Sun." Both events describe the process of union and the assumption of the powers of the imagination necessary to become a true poet. All of this comes about through the individual annihilation of the Selfhood. To become a poet and prophet, the man of imagination must first look within and destroy the Selfhood.
Milton's final speech in praise of the virtue of self-annihilation is followed by Ololon's own annihilation of the Selfhood. She rejects her virgin Selfhood and joins with Milton:
Then as a Moony Ark Ololon descended to Felpham's Vale
In clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings
Into the fires of Intellect that rejoic'd in Felpham's Vale
Around the Starry Eight; with one accord the Starry Eight became
One Man, Jesus the Savior, wonderful!
As Noah's Ark saved lives upon earth, the "Moony Ark" of Ololon preserves man's individual nature. The Seven Eyes of God that had instructed Milton are now merged with Milton, Blake, and all men on earth. Jesus is "One Man," for he unites all men in a Universal Brotherhood. By destroying the Selfhood, we do not lose our identity but rather gain a new identity in the body of the universal brotherhood. Our entry into this union prepares us for the promise of vision.
The apex of Blake's vision in Felpham is the brief image of the Throne of God. In Revelation, John's vision of the Throne of God is a prelude to the apocalypse itself. Similarly Blake's vision of the throne is also a prelude to the coming apocalypse. Blake's vision is abruptly cut off as the Four Zoas sound the Four Trumpets, signaling the call to judgment of the peoples of the earth. The trumpets bring to a halt Blake's vision, as he falls to the ground and returns to his mortal state. The apocalypse is still to come.
Blake's falling to the ground is not a mystic swoon, but part of his design to take himself out of the poem and leave it to the reader to continue the vision of the coming apocalypse. The author falls before the vision of the Throne of God and the awful sound of the coming apocalypse. However, the vision of the author does not fall with him to the ground. In the very next line after Blake describes his faint, we see his vision soar: "Immediately the lark mounted with a loud trill from Felpham's Vale." We have seen the lark as the messenger of Los and the carrier of inspiration. Its sudden flight here demonstrates that the vision of the poem does not end but continues. It is up to the reader to follow the flight of the lark to the Gate of Los and continue the vision of Milton.
Milton does not come to a firm conclusion, for it can only be concluded by the reader. The reader, armed with the creative power of poetry and the power of his own imagination, is asked to continue the work of the poet and prophet.
Before Blake could leave Felpham and return to London, an incident occurred that was very disturbing to him and possibly even dangerous. Without Blake's knowledge, his gardener had invited a soldier by the name of John Scofield into his garden to help with the work. Blake seeing the soldier and thinking he had no business being there promptly tossed him out. In a letter to Butts, Blake recalled the incident in detail:
I desired him, as politely as possible, to go out of the Garden; he made me an impertinent answer. I insisted on his leaving the Garden; he refused. I still persisted in desiring his departure; he then threaten'd to knock out my Eyes, with many abominable imprecations & with some contempt for my Person; it affronted my foolish Pride. I therefore took him by the Elbows & pushed him before me till I had got him out; there I intended to leave him, but he, turning about, put himself into a Posture of Defiance, threatening & swearing at me. I, perhaps foolishly & perhaps not, stepped out at the Gate, & putting aside his blows, took him again by the Elbows, &, keeping his back to me, pushed him forwards down the road about fifty yards--he all the while endeavouring to turn round & strike me, & raging & cursing, which drew out several neighbours....
What made this almost comic incident so serious was that the soldier swore before a magistrate that Blake had said "Damn the King" and had uttered seditious words. Blake denied the charge, but he was forced to post bail and appear in court. Hayley came to Blake's aid by helping to post the bail money and arranging for counsel.
Blake left Felpham at the end of September 1803 and settled in a new residence on South Molton Street in London. His trial was set for the following January at Chichester. Hayley was almost forced to miss the trial because of a fall he suffered while riding his horse, but he was determined to help Blake and appeared in court to testify to the good character of the accused. The soldier's testimony was shown to be false, and the jury acquitted Blake. A local newspaper, the Sussex Weekly Advertiser(16 January 1804), reported on the acquittal: "After a very long and patient hearing, he was by the Jury acquitted, which so gratified the auditory, that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations."
Blake's radical political views made him sometimes fear persecution, and he wondered if Scofield had been a government agent sent to entrap him. In any event Blake forever damned the soldier by attacking him in the epic poem Jerusalem. One positive result of the trial was that Blake was reconciled with Hayley, whose support during the trial was greatly appreciated.
Jerusalem is in many ways Blake's major achievement. It is an epic poem consisting of 100 illuminated plates. Blake dated the title page 1804, but he seems to have worked on the poem for a considerable length of time after that date.
In Jerusalem Blake develops his mythology to explore man's fall and redemption. As the narrative begins, man is apart from God and split into separate identities. As the poem progresses man's split identities are unified, and man is reunited with the divinity that is within him.
In chapter one Blake announces the purpose of his "great task":
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
It is sometimes easy to get lost in the complex mythology of Blake's poetry and forget that he is describing not outside events but a "Mental Fight" that takes place in the mind. Much of Jerusalem is devoted to the idea of awakening the human senses, so that the reader can perceive the spiritual world that is everywhere present.
At the beginning of the poem, Jesus addresses the fallen Albion: "'I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend; / 'Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.'" In his fallen state Albion rejects this close union with God and dismisses Jesus as the "Phantom of the overheated brain!" Driven by jealousy Albion hides his emanation, Jerusalem. Separation from God leads to further separation into countless male and female forms creating endless division and dispute.
Blake describes the fallen state of man by describing the present day. Interwoven into the mythology are references to present-day London. There one finds: "Inspiration deny'd, Genius forbidden by laws of punishment." Instead of inspiration man is driven by the "Reasoning Power" which Blake calls "An Abstract objecting power that Negates everything." It is against this mental error that Los wars: "'I must create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's. / 'I will not Reason & Compare : my business is to Create.'" Like the poet Blake, Los emphasizes the importance of the human imagination. Systems of thought, philosophies or religions, when separated from men, destroy what is human. To put an end to the destructive separation, Los struggles to build "The Great City of Golgonooza." Like a work of art, Golgonooza gives form to abstract ideas. It represents the human form and is composed of bodies of men and women.
In chapter two the "disease of Albion" leads to further separation and decay. As the human body is a limited form of its divine origin, the cities of England are limited representations of the Universal Brotherhood of Man. Fortunately for man, there is "a limit of contraction," and the fall must come to an end.
Caught by the errors of sin and vengeance, Albion gives up hope and dies. The flawed religions of moral law cannot save him: "The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix'd into furrows of death." Our limited senses make us think of our lives as bounded by time and space apart from eternity. In such a framework physical death marks the end of existence. But there is also a limit to death, and Albion's body is preserved by the Savior.
About Aeschylus who was the great for ancient time
Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, a Greek town near Athens, in 525 B.C. He was the first of the great Greek tragedians, preceding both Sophocles and Euripides, and is credited by many as having invented tragic drama. Prior to Aeschylus, plays were more rudimentary, consisting of a single actor and a chorus offering commentary. In his works, Aeschylus added a "second actor" (often more than one), creating a new range of dramatic possibilities. He lived until 456 B.C., fighting in the wars against Persia, and attaining great acclaim in the world of the Athenian theater.
Aeschylus wrote nearly ninety plays. However, only seven have survived to the modern era, including such famous works as Prometheus Bound and The Seven Against Thebes.Agamemnon is the first of a trilogy, the Oresteia, the other two parts of which are The Libation-Bearers and The Eumenides. The trilogy--the only such work to survive from Ancient Greece--is considered by many critics to be the greatest Athenian tragedy ever written, because of its poetry and the strength of its characters.
Agamemnon depicts the assassination of the title character by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover. The Libation-Bearers continues the story with the return of Agamemnon's son, Orestes, who kills his mother and avenges his father. In The Eumenides, Orestes is pursued by the Furies in punishment for his matricide, and finally finds refuge in Athens, where the god Athena relieves him of his persecution.
The events of Agamemnon take place against a backdrop that would have been familiar to an Athenian audience. Agamemnon is returning from his victory at Troy, which has been besieged for ten years by Greek armies attempting to recover Helen, Agamemnon's brother's wife, who was stolen by the treacherous Trojan Prince, Paris. (The events of the Trojan War are recounted in Homer's Iliad.) The tragedies of the play occur as a result of the crimes committed by Agamemnon's family. His father, Atreus, boiled the children of his own brother, Thyestes, and served them to him. Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus (Thyestes's only surviving son), seeks revenge for that crime. Moreover, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to gain a favorable wind to Troy, and Clytemnestra murders him to avenge her death. The weight of history and heritage becomes a major theme of the play, and indeed the entire trilogy, for the family it depicts cannot escape the cursed cycle of bloodshed propagated by its past.
William Shakespeare
Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwick shire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-maker, Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582, he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare's company the greatest possible compliment by endowing them with the status of king's players. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare's death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theater.
Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life; but the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare's plays in reality were written by someone else--Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare's plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.
The date of composition for All's Well That Ends Well is uncertain. Our earliest copy of the play appears in the Folio of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, so other clues must be sought in order to date the work. The most common datin places it between 1601 and 1606, grouping it with Troilus and Cressida andMeasure for Measure in what are typically referred to as Shakespeare's problem comedies. All three share a dark, bitter wit and an unpleasant view of human relation s that contrasts sharply with earlier, sunnier comedies like Twelfth Nightand As You Like It. The darker sensibility is embodied, this theory argues, in the coarse pragmatism surrounding sexual intercourse in All's Well and the obvi ous difficulties of rejoicing about a "happy ending" that unites such an ill-suited couple as Helena and Bertram.
An alternative dating, held by a minority of critics, places the play's writing in 1598 or earlier, and associates it with a "lost play" called Love's Labour Won, which is listed in a 1598 catalogue of Shakespeare's plays but has never been seen or mentioned elsewhere. All's Well, it is argued, matches the title of this work admirably--Helena "labours" to gain her love, and wins. Supporters of this dating claim that All's Well is likely an edited or reworked version that Shakespeare published at a later date.
In either case, the source for the story is more obvious--it is derived, more or less directly, from the ninth story of the third day of Boccaccio's Decameron, a classic of early Renaissance literature written between 1348 and 1358. The work, and the story in question, were translated into English in the mid-16th century by William Painter as The Palace of Pleasure, and it was this version that Shakespeare probably drew upon. Typically, Shakespeare altered and reshaped the original text to create a richer story, adding characters like La-few, the Countess, and Parolles while keeping essential elements like the bed-trick and the war in Florence in place.
The critical reception of All's Well has always been mixed, with both critics and audiences often sharing the displeasure with Helena's choice of Bertram. Its reputation has revived significantly in recent years, but it remains an unpopular and little-performed play.
John Keats
1795–1821
John Keats, who died at the age of twenty-five, 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 at each point in his 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. In the case of the English ode he brought its form, in the five great odes of 1819, to its most perfect definition.
In his own lifetime John Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friendLeigh Hunt's circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work, with malicious zeal, 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 born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats's four children. Traditionally, he 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 a lively woman, tall and attractive, ardently devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely. Keats's father, recalled John Clarke, was a man "of fine commonsense and native respectability," under whom 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. 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." He was not a shy, bookish child; one of his schoolmates, Edward Holmes, later said that "Keats was not in childhood attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one."
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, certainly contributing to his mature sense that the career of the artist was an exploration of art's power to bring solace and meaning to human suffering. 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. It is likely, then, that his mother's reappearance in 1808 inspired him to act responsibly and to bring a sense of order and achievement to his turbulent family. 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."
Keats'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, niggardly 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 £2000, a considerable inheritance (in those days £50 per annum 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 even when clumsy 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 the circumstances, 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, a would-be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats's friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a bland and rather 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 and some awkwardness, 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, even vulgar 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, often vulgar, 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 clumsy and adolescent, and the syntax often 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 some time in the summer as a treatment of the myth of Endymion. In this poem, Keats begins with lush, tedious 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 hisPoems 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 Burnsand 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 1817Poems and then reacted with horror at the "imperturbable drivelling idiocy ofEndymion," 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 meanNegative 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 byBen 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 theway 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 ofHyperion, 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, demy-thologized 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 fairy-tale-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 Psychethe 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 anarrative, 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 thedramatic 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 wordsswell, 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 theEdinburgh 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 theEncyclopædia 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.
In his own lifetime John Keats would not have been associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy among them. Outside his friendLeigh Hunt's circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work, with malicious zeal, 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 born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats's four children. Traditionally, he 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 a lively woman, tall and attractive, ardently devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion intensely. Keats's father, recalled John Clarke, was a man "of fine commonsense and native respectability," under whom 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. 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." He was not a shy, bookish child; one of his schoolmates, Edward Holmes, later said that "Keats was not in childhood attached to books. His penchant was for fighting. He would fight any one."
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, certainly contributing to his mature sense that the career of the artist was an exploration of art's power to bring solace and meaning to human suffering. 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. It is likely, then, that his mother's reappearance in 1808 inspired him to act responsibly and to bring a sense of order and achievement to his turbulent family. 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."
Keats'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, niggardly 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 £2000, a considerable inheritance (in those days £50 per annum 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 even when clumsy 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 the circumstances, 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, a would-be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats's friendship with Mathew was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a bland and rather 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 and some awkwardness, 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, even vulgar 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, often vulgar, 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 clumsy and adolescent, and the syntax often 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 some time in the summer as a treatment of the myth of Endymion. In this poem, Keats begins with lush, tedious 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 hisPoems 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 Burnsand 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 1817Poems and then reacted with horror at the "imperturbable drivelling idiocy ofEndymion," 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 meanNegative 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 byBen 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 theway 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 ofHyperion, 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, demy-thologized 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 fairy-tale-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 Psychethe 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 anarrative, 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 thedramatic 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 wordsswell, 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 theEdinburgh 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 theEncyclopædia 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.
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