John Keats

John Keats is, for many readers, the most purely gifted of all English poets after Shakespeare. Born in London in 1795, the son of a stable-keeper, trained as a surgeon, attacked by reviewers as a vulgar “Cockney” upstart, he wrote almost all his great poetry in a little over two years and died of tuberculosis in Rome in February 1821, aged twenty-five. In that time he moved from the luxuriant, sometimes clumsy sensuousness of his early verse to the mature mastery of “The Eve of St. Agnes”, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, the unfinished Hyperion poems and, above all, the odes of 1819 — “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy” and “To Autumn” — which are among the most perfect lyric poems in any language. His letters, full of humour, warmth and penetrating ideas about poetry and life (“negative capability”, “the vale of soul-making”), are a literary achievement in their own right.

Life

An orphaned boyhood

Keats was born on 31 October 1795 at the Swan and Hoop inn and livery stable in Moorfields, London, the eldest of four surviving children of Thomas Keats, the head ostler who married the owner’s daughter, Frances Jennings. His father was killed in a riding accident when John was eight; his mother remarried hastily, left, returned, and died of tuberculosis in 1810 when he was fourteen, John nursing her devotedly. At the progressive Clarke’s School in Enfield he was a pugnacious boy, small (he grew to just over five feet), quick to fight, and then a voracious reader; the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, introduced him to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which awakened his vocation.

The children’s guardian, a tea merchant named Richard Abbey, apprenticed John to a surgeon-apothecary in Edmonton. In 1815 he enrolled as a student at Guy’s Hospital in London, and in 1816 passed the examination as an apothecary — able to practise as a general doctor. But he had begun to write poetry, and soon abandoned medicine.

Poetry and friends

In October 1816 Clarke and Keats sat up all night reading George Chapman’s Elizabethan translation of Homer; walking home at dawn, Keats wrote the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and had it on Clarke’s breakfast table by ten o’clock:

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 star’d at the Pacific — and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(It was Balboa, not Cortés, who first saw the Pacific — the mistake is famous and immaterial.)

He was taken up by Leigh Hunt, the radical poet and editor of The Examiner, then just out of prison for libelling the Prince Regent, and met Shelley, Wordsworth, the painter Benjamin Haydon and a circle of devoted friends. His first book, Poems (1817), sold poorly. He then set himself the task of a long poem, Endymion (1818), four thousand lines on the shepherd beloved of the moon goddess, beginning “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness”.

Endymion was savaged by the Tory reviewers of Blackwood’s Magazine, who attacked the “Cockney School of Poetry” around Hunt and told Keats, “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes”; the Quarterly Review was equally contemptuous. The legend that the reviews killed him was spread by Shelley and Byron; in fact Keats took them stoically: “Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.”

1818: death and love

In 1818 his brother George emigrated to America with his new wife, and Keats went on a gruelling walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, which may have weakened his health. He returned to nurse his youngest brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis; Tom died in December 1818. Keats moved into half of Wentworth Place in Hampstead with Brown. Next door lived Fanny Brawne, eighteen, lively, fashionable and intelligent, and Keats fell passionately in love with her. They became secretly engaged, but he had no money to marry.

The great year

1819 was Keats’s annus mirabilis. In January he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, a richly coloured romance in Spenserian stanzas in which young Porphyro steals into the castle of his enemies on the night when maidens dream of their future husbands, and carries off his beloved Madeline into the storm. He worked on Hyperion, an epic in Miltonic blank verse about the overthrow of the old Titans by the young Olympian gods, which he abandoned (“there were too many Miltonic inversions in it”) and later recast as The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. In April came the ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci, in which a pale knight-at-arms “alone and palely loitering” tells how he was enchanted by a faery lady who left him on the cold hillside, where “the sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.”

In the spring he wrote the great odes — “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode on Indolence” — and in September, after a walk in the stubble fields near Winchester, “To Autumn”. He also wrote the narrative poem Lamia and, perhaps, the sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”.

Illness and death

In February 1820, returning on the outside of a coach in the cold, he coughed blood. With his medical training he knew at once: “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.” His last collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (July 1820), was well reviewed. His doctors ordered him to a warm climate. In September 1820 he sailed for Italy with the young painter Joseph Severn, and in Rome lodged in a house beside the Spanish Steps. He was starved on a diet of an anchovy and a piece of bread a day and bled repeatedly — the treatments of the time. He could not bear to read Fanny’s letters. He died in Severn’s arms on 23 February 1821. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome under a stone, as he wished, without his name: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais for him, and drowned the following year, with a volume of Keats in his pocket.

The odes

The odes of 1819 are Keats’s supreme achievement — meditative lyrics in a stanza form he developed from the sonnet, rich in sensuous detail and philosophical tension.

“Ode to a Nightingale” begins in drowsy numbness: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.” Hearing the nightingale’s song, the poet longs to escape with it from “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of the human world, “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” — a line written months after Tom’s death. He flies “on the viewless wings of Poesy” into the dark, fragrant wood; he is “half in love with easeful Death”; he imagines the bird’s song as immortal, heard by “emperor and clown” and by Ruth “amid the alien corn”. But the word “forlorn” tolls him back to his “sole self”; the song fades; “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” contemplates the scenes painted on an ancient vase — a pursuit of maidens by men or gods, a piper playing under the trees, a lover about to kiss his beloved, a heifer led to sacrifice by a priest from an emptied little town. Art freezes life at its moment of greatest intensity: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”; the lover can never kiss, “yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Yet the urn is also a “Cold Pastoral”, outside life. It ends with its famous, endlessly debated lines: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (Who speaks the last words — the urn or the poet — depends on the punctuation, which varies between versions; T. S. Eliot called the lines “a serious blemish on a beautiful poem”.)

“Ode on Melancholy” advises the sufferer not to seek oblivion (“go not to Lethe”) but to feed melancholy on beauty — a morning rose, a rainbow, a mistress’s anger — because melancholy and joy are inseparable: “She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die; / And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.” Only one “whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” can see melancholy’s shrine.

“To Autumn”, written in September 1819, is often called the most perfect short poem in English. It contains no explicit argument; it celebrates the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”, the swelling gourds and plump hazel shells, autumn personified as a reaper “on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, / Drows’d with the fume of poppies”, a gleaner, a cider-press watcher “patient” over “the last oozings hours by hours”. The last stanza answers the question “Where are the songs of Spring?” — “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too” — with the sounds of the dying day: gnats mourning, lambs bleating, crickets, the robin, and “gathering swallows twitter in the skies”. It is an acceptance of mortality without a word about death.

The letters

Keats’s letters — to his brothers, to friends like Benjamin Bailey and John Hamilton Reynolds, and passionately to Fanny Brawne — are among the greatest in English, and contain the ideas through which he is read.

Negative capability. In December 1817, walking home from a pantomime, he realised “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Coleridge, by contrast, would let go “a fine isolated verisimilitude” for want of being content with “half knowledge”.

The chameleon poet. “The poetical Character… has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character… it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet… A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.” He contrasted this with Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime”.

Beauty and imagination. “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.”

The vale of soul-making. In a long letter to George in April 1819 he rejects the idea of the world as “a vale of tears” from which we are redeemed by God: “Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making’… Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?” It is a remarkable, original theodicy.

He also wrote that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all”, and, to Fanny: “I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion — I have shudder’d at it — I shudder no more — I could be martyr’d for my Religion — Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you.”

Art

Keats’s poetry is distinguished by its sensuousness — the appeal to all the senses, not just sight but taste, touch, smell (“a beaker full of the warm South… With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth”) — and by its density of language, a concentrated richness he developed by revising and by study of Shakespeare and Milton. He was, Matthew Arnold said, “with Shakespeare” in his gift of “natural magic”. His mature poems combine this luxuriance with intellectual tension: between art and life, permanence and change, imagination and reality, joy and pain.

Reputation

Little known at his death, Keats was championed by the Victorians — Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who illustrated his poems — and Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains (1848) established his reputation. By the twentieth century he was regarded as one of the greatest English poets, and his odes as the summit of the English lyric. Wentworth Place is now Keats House in Hampstead; the house in Rome is the Keats–Shelley House. Jane Campion’s film Bright Star (2009) tells the story of his love for Fanny Brawne.

In conversation

• Negative capability — the ability to dwell in uncertainty and doubt without forcing answers.
• “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” — the opening line of Endymion.
• “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — the Grecian Urn’s riddling claim, quoted (and argued over) whenever art and truth meet.