Course 9

The Poets: The Younger Generation

3. JOHN KEATS
1795-1821

The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature states that when

Shelley died sailing in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, a volume of poetry written by
Keats was found in his pocket.
John Keats’s father was head stableman at London. He married his
employer’s daughter and inherited the business. The poet’s mother was a
sensuous woman, but very affectionate rear of her five children of which one
died in infancy. As a boy, John Keats was a noisy, high-spirited little fellow; and
even if he was of small stature he remarked himself in sports and fistfights. At
the private school where he was sent, he was fortunate to meet his mentor,
Charles Cowden Clarke, who encouraged Keats’s passion for reading, then both
began to feel attracted to music and theatre.
When Keats was eight, his father was killed by a fall from a horse and
when he was fourteen his mother died of tuberculosis. Although the children
were left enough money to live prosperously, the estate remained tied up in the
law courts for all Keats’s life time. The children’s guardian took Keats out of
school and bound him apprentice to a surgeon and apothecary in Edmonton.
Keats went on his medical studies and he even qualified to practice as an
apothecary and surgeon. Nevertheless, he immediately abandoned medicine for
poetry. The poet’s decision was influence by a certain Leigh Hunt, editor of The
Examiner, who also introduced him to writers like William Hazlitt or Percy
Shelley and others who provided him a sympathetic and appreciative audience.
The rapidity and sureness of Keats’s development are known as having no
match. He took up poetry at the age of eighteen and from then on he produced
album verse appreciated by the critics as competent and sentimental. In 1816 he
wrote On First looking into Chapmen’s Homer. The same year he wrote Sleep
and Poetry, in which he laid a programme for himself,
O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen1
Of thy wide heaven—Should I rather kneel
Upon some mountain-top until I feel 50
A glowing splendour round about me hung,
And echo back the voice of thine own tongue?[…]

for ten years, that I may overwhelm2

Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed

1
Citizen
2
To affect someone’s emotions in a very powerful way (English Assistance UK)

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 That my own soul has to itself decreed3.
Even if his health was good, Keats felt a foreboding of early death and
“applied himself to his art with a desperate urgency” [CHEL: 824]. In 1817 he
began writing Endymion, an ambitious project of more than four thousand lines,
which he then published in 1818. It is based on a mythological subject, the
shepherd Endymion4’s love for the moon and his search for her. The theme of
pursuit has something in common with Shelley’s Alastor, nonetheless the
domain belong to Keats through the descriptions of nature at ground level. The
poem starts with ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ revealing Keats’s deeper
thought.
ENDYMION
A Poetic Romance
“THE STRETCHED METRE OF AN ANTIQUE SONG”
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY,
93, FLEET STREET.
1818.
INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS CHATTERTON5

PREFACE.

Knowing within myself the manner in which this Poem has been
produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.
What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon
perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish
attempt, rather than a deed accomplished. The two first books, and indeed the
two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the
press; nor should they if I thought a year's castigation would do them any
good;–it will not: the foundations are too sandy. It is just that this youngster
should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is
dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live.
This may be speaking too presumptuously, and may deserve a
punishment: but no feeling man will be forward to inflict it: he will leave me
alone, with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a
great object. This is not written with the least atom of purpose to forestall
criticisms of course, but from the desire I have to conciliate men who are
competent to look, and who do look with a zealous eye, to the honour of English
literature.
3
Officially decide or order something (idem)
4
In Greek mythology, Endymion (/ɛnˈdɪmiən/; Ancient Greek: Ἐνδυμίων, gen.: Ἐνδυμίωνος), was variously a
handsome Aeolian[citation needed] shepherd, hunter, or king who was said to rule and live at Olympia in Elis,
and he was also venerated and said to reside on Mount Latmus in Caria, on the west coast of Asia Minor.
5
Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval
poetry. He committed suicide, dying of arsenic poisoning.

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 The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man
is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment,
the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted:
thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I
speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.
I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of
Greece, and dulled its brightness: for I wish to try once more, before I bid it
farewel [sic!].
Teignmouth, April 10, 1818.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways10
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms20
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
The poem received foul6 reviewers. The early 19th century had seen the
foundation of new reviews and magazines which took regular notice of literary
works. Their articles contained extracts from the works under review and critical
judgements. For the author they had a negative side because of the fact that each
periodical had a pronounced political loyalty and at any time a writer might find
himself the victim of some irresponsible squib 7 in a semi-anonymous reviewer.
Keats himself was the victim of such negative reviews. John Gibson Lockhart
6
Unpleasant (English Assistance UK)
7
A short satirical piece that acts as a filler in a newspaper (idem)

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with social snobbery and political bias wrote: “It is a better and a wiser thing to
be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John…”
Lockhart had written this before getting married Scott’s daughter and writing the
novelist’s biography and becoming more humanely.
Keats died at the age of twenty-five of tuberculosis, though Shelley in an
elegy, Adonais (1821), implied his death was the consequence of the reviewers.
Despite his robustness, he was killed of the same disease that killed his mother
and one brother.
Undoubtedly we remember the poem Sleep and Poetry, where the poet
asked for ten years that may overwhelm him in poetry. Critics say that his best
poetry was written in one year, 1818-1819 and the result was one of the most
distinguished volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and
Other Poems, appearing in 1820 and containing most of Keats’s odes.
The subject matter of most of Keats’s poems is absorption between love
and poetry and problem arising from these in the real world. Though successful
love is not common with the poet, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is an example in this
sense. It is a narrative poem based on a folk superstition. In other poems like
‘Lamia’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, the poet makes use of supernatural in
order to convey the uncanniness8 of love.
Apart from enquiry into ‘truth’, the theme of his odes is the lack of
permanence. Keatsian ode is a ceremonious address in lengthy stanzas. His ‘Ode
to a Nightingale’ follows a procedure often used by romantic poets, that of
pursuing a mental experience of the poet starting from a circumstance in the
natural world.
Keats was also known as a letter-writer. In his letters, thoughts on life and
poetry are to be traced and even the process of making poetry. One can find out
the key of his poetic creed. Keats expressed his suspicion of philosophical
systems and disliked poetry that ‘has a palpable design upon us; Axioms in
philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’, he wrote. The
point in discussion here is the individual experience which can be found in all
the romantic poets. Keats considers great poets those who like Shakespeare
absorb and respond to life. Keats wanted a poem to have ‘intensity’ rather than
argument. He wrote in a letter:
“Its touches of Beauty should never be half way therby making the reader
breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should
like the Sun come natural, natural to him – shine over him and set soberly
although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight…” [Keats’s
language]
The Romantic poetry has always tended to have a special place in the
hearts of the readers due to the fact that these kinds of poems defy explications
and “are in the supreme sense poetic”. Shelley’s words in Defence of Poetry
(1821) are still true:
8
Too strange or unlikely to seem merely natural or human (English Assistance UK)

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“We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to
reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than
we can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it
multiplies…We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we
want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of
life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can
digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the
empire of man over external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty,
proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having
enslaved the elements, remains itself a slave.”
It is important to emphasize that however burdensome the man’s journey,
still ‘came trailing9 clouds of glory’.

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Behind