Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious origins of some of Keats's best poems. We know that his sad love affair with Fanny Brawne, who coquetted with him, inspired a few poems directly addressed to her; it is also indisputable that Keats had her in mind when he wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he was telling of his own fate in the account of the knight's mishap. But it is rarely recognised that emotions connected with Fanny Brawne inspired his two most famous odes, the one to the Nightingale and the other to the Grecian urn; that the tale of Lamia, which ranks among his best poems, is a symbolic description of his attitude towards Miss Brawne, and that her presence is felt in other poems and sonnets by Keats. He thought of her constantly, and he could scarcely write a love poem but she somehow or other stepped into the pages. When we compare these and other poems to the letters that he had written to her about the same time, we will find that often the same emotions inspired both.
Keats met Miss Brawne in the fall of 1818, when he was twenty-three years old. He quarrelled with her in February, 1819, but, nevertheless, was her declared lover in the spring. His first love letter that we have to her is dated July 1, 1819, and the last about May, 1820. In the spring and summer of 1819 he wrote some of his best poems, and he showed most emphatically the repression of his emotions by the coquetries of Fanny. He took a walk among the marbles of the British Museum, in February, 1819, and three months later penned his Ode to a Grecian Urn. In the latter part of April he heard the nightingale in Brown's garden, and he wrote the famous ode. In the same month he also wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In August and September of 1819 he worked on Lamia. He had his first hemorrhage in February, 1820, left England in September, and died in Italy February, 1821.
Those who have read the letters to Fanny will remember with what anxiety the poet wrote, how he showed his jealousy and complained and pleaded without pride. In one letter dated June 19, 1819, he said he would resent having his heart made a football, that Brown, with whom she flirted, was doing him to death by inches, and that the air of a room from which Fanny was absent was unhealthy to him. "I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in.... Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen." In October he writes, "Love is my religion—I could die for that; I could die for you." The letters are the record of the agony of a man who is being played with and who cries out in helplessness. He cannot bear seeing her smiling with others or dancing with them. Miss Brawne asserted after his death that she did not regard him as a great poet, and thought it advisable for people to let his reputation die. It is also said she referred to him as the foolish poet who loved her.
Let us see how this sad affair influenced his work.
The Keats of the first volume, Poems, 1817, is a much different person from the Keats of the Lamia volume, in 1820. The three intervening years had brought a maddening love affair, a fatal disease and the famous, though not as once thought fatal review, attacking Endymion. His art principles remained much the same. With growing sorrow he worshipped beauty more and sought in it a refuge from grief. His attitude towards women and life was now somewhat different. He paid woman a tribute in the poem in the first volume, beginning with the lines, "Woman! I behold thee," etc. But he had not yet suffered from a Fanny Brawne; here he spoke of woman's being "like a milk-white lamb that bleats for man's protection." And yet before he was twenty he may have had a foreboding that his fate in love might not be a happy one. In the poem, To Hope, he wrote:
"Should e'er unhappy love my bosom pain,
From cruel parents or relentless fair;
O let me not think it is quite in vain
To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air."
Alas for himself, but perhaps (it may be cruel to say) fortunately for the lovers of literature, those sonnets and other poems were sighed out later!