LIFE OF KEATS
John Keats
Of all the great poets of the early nineteenth century--Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats--John Keats was the last born
and the first to die. The length of his life was not one-third that of
Wordsworth, who was born twenty-five years before him and outlived him
by twenty-nine. Yet before his tragic death at twenty-six Keats had
produced a body of poetry of such extraordinary power and promise that
the world has sometimes been tempted, in its regret for what he might
have done had he lived, to lose sight of the superlative merit of what
he actually accomplished.
The three years of his poetic career, during which he published three
small volumes of poetry, show a development at the same time rapid and
steady, and a gradual but complete abandonment of almost every fault and
weakness. It would probably be impossible, in the history of literature,
to find such another instance of the 'growth of a poet's mind'.
The last of these three volumes, which is here reprinted, was published
in 1820, when it 'had good success among the literary people and . . . a
moderate sale'. It contains the flower of his poetic production and is
perhaps, altogether, one of the most marvellous volumes ever issued from
the press.
But in spite of the maturity of Keats's work when he was twenty-five, he
had been in no sense a precocious child. Born in 1795 in the city of
London, the son of a livery-stable keeper, he was brought up amid
surroundings and influences by no means calculated to awaken poetic
genius.
He was the eldest of five--four boys, one of whom died in infancy, and a
girl younger than all; and he and his brothers George and Tom were
educated at a private school at Enfield. Here John was at first
distinguished more for fighting than for study, whilst his bright,
brave, generous nature made him popular with masters and boys.
Soon after he had begun to go to school his father died, and when he was
fifteen the children lost their mother too. Keats was passionately
devoted to his mother; during her last illness he would sit up all night
with her, give her her medicine, and even cook her food himself. At her
death he was brokenhearted.
The children were now put under the care of two guardians, one of whom,
Mr. Abbey, taking the sole responsibility, immediately removed John from
school and apprenticed him for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton.
Whilst thus employed Keats spent all his leisure time in reading, for
which he had developed a great enthusiasm during his last two years at
school. There he had devoured every book that came in his way,
especially rejoicing in stories of the gods and goddesses of ancient
Greece. At Edmonton he was able to continue his studies by borrowing
books from his friend Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of his
schoolmaster, and he often went over to Enfield to change his books and
to discuss those which he had been reading. On one of these occasions
Cowden Clarke introduced him to Spenser, to whom so many poets have owed
their first inspiration that he has been called 'the poets' poet'; and
it was then, apparently, that Keats was first prompted to write.
When he was nineteen, a year before his apprenticeship came to an end,
he quarrelled with his master, left him, and continued his training in
London as a student at St. Thomas's Hospital and Guy's. Gradually,
however, during the months that followed, though he was an industrious
and able medical student, Keats came to realize that poetry was his true
vocation; and as soon as he was of age, in spite of the opposition of
his guardian, he decided to abandon the medical profession and devote
his life to literature.
If Mr. Abbey was unsympathetic Keats was not without encouragement from
others. His brothers always believed in him whole-heartedly, and his
exceptionally lovable nature had won him many friends. Amongst these
friends two men older than himself, each famous in his own sphere, had
special influence upon him.
One of them, Leigh Hunt, was something of a poet himself and a pleasant
prose-writer. His encouragement did much to stimulate Keats's genius,
but his direct influence on his poetry was wholly bad. Leigh Hunt's was
not a deep nature; his poetry is often trivial and sentimental, and his
easy conversational style is intolerable when applied to a great theme.
To this man's influence, as well as to the surroundings of his youth,
are doubtless due the occasional flaws of taste in Keats's early work.
The other, Haydon, was an artist of mediocre creative talent but great
aims and amazing belief in himself. He had a fine critical faculty which
was shown in his appreciation of the Elgin marbles, in opposition to the
most respected authorities of his day. Mainly through his insistence
they were secured for the nation which thus owes him a boundless debt of
gratitude. He helped to guide and direct Keats's taste by his
enthusiastic exposition of these masterpieces of Greek sculpture.
In 1817 Keats published his first volume of poems, including 'Sleep and
Poetry' and the well-known lines 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill'.
With much that is of the highest poetic value, many memorable lines and
touches of his unique insight into nature, the volume yet showed
considerable immaturity. It contained indeed, if we except one perfect
sonnet, rather a series of experiments than any complete and finished
work. There were abundant faults for those who liked to look for them,
though there were abundant beauties too; and the critics and the public
chose rather to concentrate their attention on the former. The volume
was therefore anything but a success; but Keats was not discouraged, for
he saw many of his own faults more clearly than did his critics, and
felt his power to outgrow them.
Immediately after this Keats went to the Isle of Wight and thence to
Margate that he might study and write undisturbed. On May 10th he wrote
to Haydon--'I never quite despair, and I read Shakespeare--indeed I
shall, I think, never read any other book much'. We have seen Keats
influenced by Spenser and by Leigh Hunt: now, though his love for
Spenser continued, Shakespeare's had become the dominant influence.
Gradually he came too under the influence of Wordsworth's philosophy of
poetry and life, and later his reading of Milton affected his style to
some extent, but Shakespeare's influence was the widest, deepest and
most lasting, though it is the hardest to define. His study of other
poets left traces upon his work in turns of phrase or turns of thought:
Shakespeare permeated his whole being, and his influence is to be
detected not in a resemblance of style, for Shakespeare can have no
imitators, but in a broadening view of life, and increased humanity.
No poet could have owed his education more completely to the English
poets than did John Keats. His knowledge of Latin was slight--he knew no
Greek, and even the classical stories which he loved and constantly
used, came to him almost entirely through the medium of Elizabethan
translations and allusions. In this connexion it is interesting to read
his first fine sonnet, in which he celebrates his introduction to the
greatest of Greek poets in the translation of the rugged and forcible
Elizabethan, George Chapman:--
_On first looking into Chapman's Homer._
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Of the work upon which he was now engaged, the narrative-poem of
_Endymion_, we may give his own account to his little sister Fanny in a
letter dated September 10th, 1817:--
'Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell
you. Many years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his
flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus--he was a very contemplative
sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little
thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in
Love with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep she used to
come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at
last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of
that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I dare say you
have read this and all the other beautiful tales which have come down
from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece.'
On his return to London he and his brother Tom, always delicate and now
quite an invalid, took lodgings at Hampstead. Here Keats remained for
some time, harassed by the illness of his brother and of several of his
friends; and in June he was still further depressed by the departure of
his brother George to try his luck in America.
In April, 1818, _Endymion_ was finished. Keats was by no means
satisfied with it but preferred to publish it as it was, feeling it to
be 'as good as I had power to make it by myself'.--'I will write
independently' he says to his publisher--'I have written independently
_without judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_
hereafter. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby
have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and
the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly
pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.' He published it with a
preface modestly explaining to the public his own sense of its
imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the
critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem--the diffuseness of
the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic
coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of
which it is full.
Directly after the publication of _Endymion_, and before the appearance
of these reviews, Keats started with a friend, Charles Brown, for a
walking tour in Scotland. They first visited the English lakes and
thence walked to Dumfries, where they saw the house of Burns and his
grave. They entered next the country of Meg Merrilies, and from
Kirkcudbrightshire crossed over to Ireland for a few days. On their
return they went north as far as Argyleshire, whence they sailed to
Staffa and saw Fingal's cave, which, Keats wrote, 'for solemnity and
grandeur far surpasses the finest Cathedral.' They then crossed Scotland
through Inverness, and Keats returned home by boat from Cromarty.
His letters home are at first full of interest and enjoyment, but a
'slight sore throat', contracted in 'a most wretched walk of
thirty-seven miles across the Isle of Mull', proved very troublesome and
finally cut short his holiday. This was the beginning of the end. There
was consumption in the family: Tom was dying of it; and the cold, wet,
and over-exertion of his Scotch tour seems to have developed the fatal
tendency in Keats himself.
From this time forward he was never well, and no good was done to either
his health or spirits by the task which now awaited him of tending on
his dying brother. For the last two or three months of 1818, until
Tom's death in December, he scarcely left the bedside, and it was well
for him that his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was at hand to help and
comfort him after the long strain. Brown persuaded Keats at once to
leave the house, with its sad associations, and to come and live with
him.
Before long poetry absorbed Keats again; and the first few months of
1819 were the most fruitful of his life. Besides working at _Hyperion_,
which he had begun during Tom's illness, he wrote _The Eve of St.
Agnes_, _The Eve of St. Mark_, _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, and nearly
all his famous odes.
Troubles however beset him. His friend Haydon was in difficulties and
tormenting him, poor as he was, to lend him money; the state of his
throat gave serious cause for alarm; and, above all, he was consumed by
an unsatisfying passion for the daughter of a neighbour, Mrs. Brawne.
She had rented Brown's house whilst they were in Scotland, and had now
moved to a street near by. Miss Fanny Brawne returned his love, but she
seems never to have understood his nature or his needs. High-spirited
and fond of pleasure she did not apparently allow the thought of her
invalid lover to interfere much with her enjoyment of life. She would
not, however, abandon her engagement, and she probably gave him all
which it was in her nature to give. Ill-health made him, on the other
hand, morbidly dissatisfied and suspicious; and, as a result of his
illness and her limitations, his love throughout brought him
restlessness and torment rather than peace and comfort.
Towards the end of July he went to Shanklin and there, in collaboration
with Brown, wrote a play, _Otho the Great_. Brown tells us how they used
to sit, one on either side of a table, he sketching out the scenes and
handing each one, as the outline was finished, to Keats to write. As
Keats never knew what was coming it was quite impossible that the
characters should be adequately conceived, or that the drama should be a
united whole. Nevertheless there is much that is beautiful and promising
in it. It should not be forgotten that Keats's 'greatest ambition' was,
in his own words, 'the writing of a few fine plays'; and, with the
increasing humanity and grasp which his poetry shows, there is no reason
to suppose that, had he lived, he would not have fulfilled it.
At Shanklin, moreover, he had begun to write _Lamia_, and he continued
it at Winchester. Here he stayed until the middle of October, excepting
a few days which he spent in London to arrange about the sending of some
money to his brother in America. George had been unsuccessful in his
commercial enterprises, and Keats, in view of his family's ill-success,
determined temporarily to abandon poetry, and by reviewing or journalism
to support himself and earn money to help his brother. Then, when he
could afford it, he would return to poetry.
Accordingly he came back to London, but his health was breaking down,
and with it his resolution. He tried to re-write _Hyperion_, which he
felt had been written too much under the influence of Milton and in 'the
artist's humour'. The same independence of spirit which he had shown in
the publication of _Endymion_ urged him now to abandon a work the style
of which he did not feel to be absolutely his own. The re-cast he wrote
in the form of a vision, calling it _The Fall of Hyperion_, and in so
doing he added much to his conception of the meaning of the story. In no
poem does he show more of the profoundly philosophic spirit which
characterizes many of his letters. But it was too late; his power was
failing and, in spite of the beauty and interest of some of his
additions, the alterations are mostly for the worse.
Whilst _The Fall of Hyperion_ occupied his evenings his mornings were
spent over a satirical fairy-poem, _The Cap and Bells_, in the metre of
the _Faerie Queene_. This metre, however, was ill-suited to the subject;
satire was not natural to him, and the poem has little intrinsic merit.
Neither this nor the re-cast of _Hyperion_ was finished when, in
February, 1820, he had an attack of illness in which the first definite
symptom of consumption appeared. Brown tells how he came home on the
evening of Thursday, February 3rd, in a state of high fever, chilled
from having ridden outside the coach on a bitterly cold day. 'He mildly
and instantly yielded to my request that he should go to bed . . . On
entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly
coughed, and I heard him say--"that is blood from my mouth". I went
towards him: he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet.
"Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood." After regarding
it steadfastly he looked up in my face with a calmness of expression
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;--I must die."'
He lived for another year, but it was one long dying: he himself called
it his 'posthumous life'.
Keats was one of the most charming of letter-writers. He had that rare
quality of entering sympathetically into the mind of the friend to whom
he was writing, so that his letters reveal to us much of the character
of the recipient as well as of the writer. In the long journal-letters
which he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America he is
probably most fully himself, for there he is with the people who knew
him best and on whose understanding and sympathy he could rely. But in
none is the beauty of his character more fully revealed than in those to
his little sister Fanny, now seventeen years old, and living with their
guardian, Mr. Abbey. He had always been very anxious that they should
'become intimately acquainted, in order', as he says, 'that I may not
only, as you grow up, love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as
my dearest friend.' In his most harassing times he continued to write to
her, directing her reading, sympathizing in her childish troubles, and
constantly thinking of little presents to please her. Her health was to
him a matter of paramount concern, and in his last letters to her we
find him reiterating warnings to take care of herself--'You must be
careful always to wear warm clothing not only in Frost but in a
Thaw.'--'Be careful to let no fretting injure your health as I have
suffered it--health is the greatest of blessings--with _health_ and
_hope_ we should be content to live, and so you will find as you grow
older.' The constant recurrence of this thought becomes, in the light of
his own sufferings, almost unbearably pathetic.
During the first months of his illness Keats saw through the press his
last volume of poetry, of which this is a reprint. The praise which it
received from reviewers and public was in marked contrast to the
scornful reception of his earlier works, and would have augured well for
the future. But Keats was past caring much for poetic fame. He dragged
on through the summer, with rallies and relapses, tormented above all by
the thought that death would separate him from the woman he loved. Only
Brown, of all his friends, knew what he was suffering, and it seems that
he only knew fully after they were parted.
The doctors warned Keats that a winter in England would kill him, so in
September, 1820, he left London for Naples, accompanied by a young
artist, Joseph Severn, one of his many devoted friends. Shelley, who
knew him slightly, invited him to stay at Pisa, but Keats refused. He
had never cared for Shelley, though Shelley seems to have liked him,
and, in his invalid state, he naturally shrank from being a burden to a
mere acquaintance.
It was as they left England, off the coast of Dorsetshire, that Keats
wrote his last beautiful sonnet on a blank leaf of his folio copy of
Shakespeare, facing _A Lover's Complaint_:--
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
The friends reached Rome, and there Keats, after a brief rally, rapidly
became worse. Severn nursed him with desperate devotion, and of Keats's
sweet considerateness and patience he could never say enough. Indeed
such was the force and lovableness of Keats's personality that though
Severn lived fifty-eight years longer it was for the rest of his life a
chief occupation to write and draw his memories of his friend.
On February 23rd, 1821, came the end for which Keats had begun to long.
He died peacefully in Severn's arms. On the 26th he was buried in the
beautiful little Protestant cemetery of which Shelley said that it 'made
one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a
place'.
Great indignation was felt at the time by those who attributed his
death, in part at least, to the cruel treatment which he had received
from the critics. Shelley, in _Adonais_, withered them with his scorn,
and Byron, in _Don Juan_, had his gibe both at the poet and at his
enemies. But we know now how mistaken they were. Keats, in a normal
state of mind and body, was never unduly depressed by harsh or unfair
criticism. 'Praise or blame,' he wrote, 'has but a momentary effect on
the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic
on his own works,' and this attitude he consistently maintained
throughout his poetic career. No doubt the sense that his genius was
unappreciated added something to the torment of mind which he suffered
in Rome, and on his death-bed he asked that on his tombstone should be
inscribed the words 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'. But it
was apparently not said in bitterness, and the rest of the
inscription[xxiii:1] expresses rather the natural anger of his friends
at the treatment he had received than the mental attitude of the poet
himself.
Fully to understand him we must read his poetry with the commentary of
his letters which reveal in his character elements of humour,
clear-sighted wisdom, frankness, strength, sympathy and tolerance. So
doing we shall enter into the mind and heart of the friend who, speaking
for many, described Keats as one 'whose genius I did not, and do not,
more fully admire than I entirely loved the man'.
FOOTNOTES:
[xiii:1] Many of the words which the reviewers thought to be coined were
good Elizabethan.
[xxiii:1] 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 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water' Feb. 24th
1821.