JOHN KEATS (1795–1821)
1. His Life. Keats was born in London, the son of the well-to-do keeper of a livery stable. He was educated at a private school at Enfield, and at the age of fifteen was apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1814 he transferred his residence to London, and followed part of the regular course of instruction prescribed for medical students. Already, however, his poetical bent was becoming apparent. Surgery lost its slight attraction, and the career of a poet became a bright possibility when he made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt (1815), the famous Radical journalist and poet, whose collisions with the Government had caused much commotion and his own imprisonment. Keats was soon intimate with the Radical brotherhood that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and thus he became known to Shelley and others. In 1817 he published his first volume of verse, but it attracted little notice, in spite of the championship of Hunt. By this time the family tendency to consumption became painfully manifest in him, and he spent his time in searching for places, including the Isle of Wight and the suburbs of London, where his affliction might be remedied. While he was staying in London he became acquainted with Fanny Brawne, and afterward was engaged to her for a time. His malady, however, became worse, and the mental and physical distress caused by his complaint, added to despair regarding the success of his love-affair, produced a frantic state of mind painfully reflected in his letters to the young lady. These letters were foolishly printed (1879), long after the poet’s death.
His second volume of verse, published in 1818, was brutally assailed by The Quarterly Review and (to a lesser degree) by Blackwood’s Magazine. These Tory journals probably struck at him because of his friendship with the radical Leigh Hunt. Keats bore the attack with apparent serenity, and always protested that he minded it little; but there can be little doubt that it affected his health to some degree. In 1820 he was compelled to seek warmer skies, and died in Rome early in the next year, at the age of twenty-five.
2. His Poetry. When he was about seventeen years old Keats became acquainted with the works of Spenser, and this proved to be the turning-point in his life. The mannerisms of the Elizabethan immediately captivated him, and he resolved to imitate him. His earliest attempt at verse is his Imitation of Spenser (1813), written when he was eighteen. This and some other short pieces were published together in his Poems (1817), his first volume of verse. This book contains little of any outstanding merit. The different poems, which include the pieces On Death, To Hope, and Sleep and Poetry, follow the methods of Shenstone, Gray, and Byron. Of a different quality was his next volume, which bore the title of Endymion (1818). Probably based partly on Drayton’s Man in the Moon and Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, this remarkable poem of Endymion professes to tell the story of the lovely youth who was kissed by the moon-goddess on the summit of Mount Latmos. Keats develops this simple myth into an intricate and flowery tale of over four thousand lines. The work is clearly immature, and flawed with many weaknesses both of taste and of construction, but many of the passages are most beautiful, and the poem shows the tender budding of the Keatsian style—a rich and suggestive beauty obtained by a richly ornamented diction. The first line is often quoted, and it contains the theory that Keats followed in a subconscious fashion during most of his poetical career:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
The crudeness of the work laid it temptingly open to attack, and, as we have noticed, the hostile reviews found it an easy prey.
Keats’s health was already failing, but the amount of poetry he wrote is marvelous both in magnitude and in quality. His third and last volume, published just before he left England, contains a collection of poems of the first rank, which were written approximately in the order that follows.
Isabella, or The Pot of Basil (1818), is a version of a tale from Boccaccio, and deals with the murder of a lady’s lover by her two wicked brothers. The poem, which is written in ottava rima, marks a decided advance in Keats’s work. The slips of taste are fewer; the style is richer and deeper in tone; and the conclusion, though it is sentimentally treated, is not wanting in pathos.
The Eve of St. Agnes (1818) has for a plot the merest incident dealing with the elopement of two lovers. The tale is so sumptuously adorned with the silks and jewels of poetical imagination that it is almost lost in the decoration. This is sometimes considered his masterpiece; it is certainly the most typical of his poems. The richness of fancy and pictorial effect mark the summit of the poet’s art. It is somewhat hectic and overloaded, but its faults are quite venial. We add one of its exquisite Spenserian stanzas:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
Hyperion (1818) is of a different type. For this poem Keats adopts blank verse, and for theme he goes to the primeval warfare between early deities, such as Saturn and Thea, and younger divinities, such as Apollo and Minerva. The poem remains unfinished, owing, it is stated, to the poet’s discouragement over the reception of Endymion. It is doubtful if Keats could ever have finished it. The scale of the story is so gigantic, and the style is pitched at such an altitude of sublimity that Keats appears to have been lacking in mere physical fitness to carry it to a conclusion. In the fragment that we have an observant reader can see that the poet’s grip is loosening, and his breath failing, before the effort ceases entirely. Keats, with his usual insight, appropriately writes the poem in a style of bleak and almost terrible simplicity. The opening lines are among the best:
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 gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds
Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.
Next was written The Eve of St. Mark (1819), which also remains unfinished. The tale shows how far even Keats can improve upon himself. It is adorned with brilliant descriptive passages, and the strokes are more dashing than usual. The earlier languor and sentimentality are almost eliminated:
The bells had ceased, the prayers begun,
And Bertha had not yet half done
A curious volume, patched and torn,
That all day long, from earliest morn,
Had taken captive her two eyes,
Among its golden broideries;
Perplexed her with a thousand things,
The stars of heaven, and angels’ wings,
Martyrs in a fiery blaze,
Azure saints and silver rays,
Moses’ breastplate, and the seven
Candlesticks John saw in heaven,
The winged Lion of St Mark,
And the Covenantal Ark,
With its many mysteries,
Cherubim and golden mice.
The story of Lamia (1819) is taken from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and tells of a beautiful enchantress. It is the weakest of all the longer poems, and the lapses are more numerous. The language becomes mannered and overdone:
He answered, bending to her open eyes,
Where he was mirrored small in paradise,—
“My silver planet, both of eve and morn!
Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
While I am striving how to fill my heart
With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there,
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?”
In this passage we observe the strength of Keats running to seed. Phrases like “plead yourself” and “labyrinth you” go beyond the limits of poetical license; and the whole passage in conception resembles the conceits of the Caroline poets rather than the finer and stronger flights of imagination of which Keats was so thoroughly capable.
Together with the longer poems are many shorter pieces of supreme beauty. The great odes—To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn—were nearly all written in 1819. Among the other shorter poems La Belle Dame sans Merci, a kind of lyrical ballad, is considered to be one of the choicest in the language.
In 1819 Keats collaborated in a drama, Otho the Great, and began another, King Stephen, which he did not complete. Neither effort is of much consequence. The Cap and Bells, a longish fairy-tale which also is unfinished, is much below the level of his usual work.
3. Features of his Poetry. (a) His style should be considered first, for Keats is above all a stylist. The typical Keatsian poetry is, one imagines, the ideal of what is popularly considered to be “poetry”: it is gorgeously attractive, with its melodic beauty and sensuous passion; soft and caressing, like velvet; and richly colored and odorous. At its very best the spell of it works like a divine enchantment; but at even a little less than the best it becomes unctuous, sickly, and stuffily uncomfortable. There can be little doubt that Keats’s physical malady shows itself in his writings. With all their genius, they are the work of an unhealthy brain. His heroes are languid and neurotic creatures, and his style is attuned to their swoons and faintings. A stanza from Isabella will illustrate what has already been exemplified in the verse we have quoted from The Eve of St. Agnes:
So once more had he waked and anguished
A dreary night of love and misery,
If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed
To every symbol on his forehead high;
She saw it waxing very pale and dead,
And straight all flushed; so, lisped tenderly,
“Lorenzo!”—here she ceased her timid quest,
But in her tone and look he read the rest.
(b) His descriptive and romantic quality is of the highest. He modeled his work upon that of Spenser, but before he had finished he almost bettered his model. In beauty and splendor he is nearly unrivaled. He ranges among classical and medieval subjects, and distills from them the essence of their beauty. For example, he knew no Greek, but he could reproduce the full charm of the Greek seaboard:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
(c) Keats’s lyrical faculty is limited. When brooding over his woes he can utter a complaint on the true lyrical note. Hence we obtain such results as his wonderful last sonnet and La Belle Dame sans Merci, which is a lyric thinly disguised as a ballad. He was perhaps physically unable to experience the healthier joys of Burns, and so was incapable of expressing them.
(d) His Influence. A single glance at the table at the head of this chapter will show how piteously short was his poetical career; but, short as it was, his labor created a larger school than that of any of his contemporaries. His tradition was carried on by Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, and to this day his influence is strong in English poetry.