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,