John Keats

John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. Keats' poetry is characterized by an exuberant love of language and a rich, sensuous imagination; all of which contrasts sharply with the tragic circumstances of his short life. Keats, like his fellow Romantics, was one of the most sensitive and sensuous poets to have ever written in the language, and — although some will dispute the merits of his style — no one can argue that his poems are some of the most moving works in Western literature.

Life

Keats was born on October 31, 1795 in Finsbury Pavement in London, where his father was an ostler. In 1804 his father died from a fractured skull after falling from his horse. His mother remarried soon afterwards, but as quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her children to live with Keats' grandmother. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature. In 1810 his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother.

The grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new charges, and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to make him a surgeon's apprentice. Then, in 1814, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at a local hospital. During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature.

In 1817 Keats found his brother, Tom, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering from tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed their mother. Finishing his epic poem "Endymion", Keats left to hike in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. Sadly, he, too, began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. On his return he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had his Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. In 1818, Tom Keats died from his infection, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in London. There he met Fanny Brawne, who had been staying at Brown's house with her mother, and he quickly fell in love. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalize Victorian society.

This relationship was cut short, however, when, by 1820, Keats began to worsen from the tuberculosis that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind, moving to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated. He died on February 23, 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. According to his last request was he was buried under a tomb stone reading "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Poetry

Keats' earliest major poem was the 1817 pastoral epic Endymion. The poem consists of four 1,000 line sections, written in loosely rhyming couplets. The poem tells the story of the Greek legend of the moon goddess Diana's love for the human shepherd, Endymion. However, in a characterisitcally Romantic twist, Keats focuses the narrative not on Diana's love for a mortal, but Endymion's love for the unattainable goddess. This narrative turn illustrates the Romantic movement's concern with discovering idealized, almost mystical expressions of passion. In the poem, Endymion, suffering terribly from his unrequited love for Diana, decides to abandon his goddess and engages in a romance with an earthly woman, only to discover that the earthly woman is, in fact, Diana. Though Endymion was a breakthrough for Keats in some regards — marking the first signs of his mature style — he immediately dismissed it as a failure.

Keats' poems written in 1818, immediately in the aftermath of Endymion, would primarily be love poems infused with extremes of emotion. It is important when critiquing this middle period of Keats' oeuvre to keep in mind the events of his biography. He had met and fallen madly in love with Fanny Brawne; he was desperately poor; his brother was dying; and he himself had begun cough up blood and exhibit other symptoms of the disease which would claim his life. Keats' poems of this turbulent period include the lengthy, supernatural love poem The Eve of St. Agnes and the dark sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Almost all of Keats' reputation, however, would rest upon the poetry he composed in his annus mirabilis, 1819. In three months during this year (between March and June) he would compose all but one of his tremendously influential odes: the Ode on Melancholy, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, On Indolence, To Psyche and To Autumn. The odes all follow a similar form, where the poet meditates on a theme (the song of a nightingale, the thought of mortality, or the coming of autumn) which leads him to reflection on the exuberant beauty of the world coupled with the sad realization of its transience and ultimate demise. The odes are not only remarkable for their content, which, in comparison to the superstition of Shelley or the epicureanism of Lord Byron, is strikingly sober for a Romantic poet. They are also, simply put, some of the most beautiful verses composed in the language, and are frequently ranked alongside the best of Milton and Shakespeare as one of the summits of English literature. Keats, who never receieved any formal education in poetry, in these odes and late poems developed a sense of sound remarkable in its musicality. A single single verse of Grecian Urn is sufficient to convey the brilliance of a master poet at work:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

During 1819, Keats also spent his last months of good health writing and re-writing an epic poem, Hyperion, which he sadly never finished and of which fragments of two versions, one earlier and one later, are all that remain. Hyperion was intended by Keats to be a revisiting of the topics of passion and anguish raised in Endymion, but minus the youthful follies from which the latter poem suffered. Hyperion was a retelling of the Greek legend of the Titans, and particularly the tragic story of Hyperion, the god of the sun and his battle with the upstart Zeus. The first version of the poem is an open imitation of Milton's Paradise Lost, but the second version, on which Keats worked almost until his death, was stripped down, and resembles more closely the beautifully clear language of the late odes. Although only fragments of the work exist, Hyperion is still considered by many to be one of the more remarkable poems to emerge from the Romantic period, and it contains within it, more than in any other piece of Keats' verse, a clear description of Keats' view of the role of poetry in the world. Through the voice of the goddess, Moneta, Keats reveals to another character in the poem that it is the duty of the poet not only to understand the world, but to immerse himself in its suffering, so as to do it justice. The thought is not new for Keats — it appears in the odes and in other earlier poems — but in Hyperion Keats' vision of poetry reaches its highest apex, and it is perhaps appropriate that such a vision was composed while Keats himself was suffering unto death.

Contexts and Criticism

His introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in Keats' development as a poet. Spenser's work inspired Keats to write his first poem, which he even titled Imitation of Spenser. He befriended Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who published Keats' first poem in 1816. In 1817, Keats published his first volume of poetry entitled simply Poems. Keats' Poems was not well received, largely due to his connection with the controversial Hunt. Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819 including: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. This series of odes is among the most important poetry ever written in English, ranking with the best of Shakespeare and Milton.

Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them "Negative Capability" and "The Mansion of Many Apartments" in letters to friends and family. In particular, he stated he wished to be a "chameleon poet" and to resist the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Oscar Wilde, the aestheticist non pareil was to later write: "[...] who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age[..] In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks."

William Butler Yeats was intrigued by the contrast between the "deliberate happiness" of Keats's poetry and the sadness that characterised his life. He wrote in Ego Dominus Tuus (1915):

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied,

And made – being poor, ailing and ignorant,

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper –

Luxurious song.

And an even greater compliment came from Wallace Stevens, who described Keats as the "Secretary for Porcelain" in Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.

Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe

That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,

If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit

Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.

The good is evil's last invention.

Bibliography

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) text
Sleep and Poetry (1816)
Endymion: A Poetic Romance]] (1817)
When I have fears that I may cease to be (1818) text
Hyperion (1818)
The Eve of St. Agnes (1819) text
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art (1819)
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (1819) text
Ode to Psyche (1819)
Ode to a Nightingale (1819) text
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) text
Ode on Melancholy (1819) text
Ode on Indolence (1819)
Lamia and Other Poems|Lamia (1819)
To Autumn (1819) text
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)

External links

Complete Poetical Works
The Life of John Keats: a memoir by his friend Charles Armitage Brown
Keats' House
Collection of Poetry and Quotes by John Keats
The Keats-Shelley House in Rome
Keats' Last Letter
Keats Biography in Chamber's Cyclopedia (1863). Includes selections from letters to and from Shelley regarding Keats
Criticism of Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John-Keats.com

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