1.14.2: John Keats Biography and works Part II

John Keats, like Blake, was trained in a profession. He studied to be a surgeon and was expected to earn his own living. His mother Frances Jennings was from the landed gentry; his father Thomas Keats was a livery stable-keeper. Because his society consequently placed him within the labor class, Keats’s decision to write poetry, a “genteel” art, was in itself a radical act.

His poetic aspirations were encouraged by Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), editor at The Examiner, who published Keats’ first collection of poems and Endymion, an epic poem based on the poetic myth of a young shepherd who becomes beloved by the goddess of the moon. During the course of writing this epic, Keats honed his skill, expressing the desire for just ten years more to reach his poetic epitome. He lived for only two.

Keats’ first published poems received harsh criticism, to some extent sharpened by Keats’ association with Hunt and by Keats’ lower class status. The conjunction of these criticisms and Keats’s death at the age of twenty-five led some contemporaries to believe that Keats died of a broken heart. This belief connected with some views of Keats’ poetry as sensual and emotional without intellectual heft. Keats’ letters, though, published after his death, demonstrate his extraordinary conceptual thinking, about poetry’s role in society and about what makes a poem or poet great.

His theory of Negative Capability in particular fleshes out his ideas on the imagination. Negative Capability is sustained potentiality; it allows all possibilities to exist at once in the imagination together without the poet reaching towards one and thus eliminating all of the others. Through Negative Capability, the poet sees both the world of color, or the rainbow world, and the world in black and white; sees both the glittery surface of the ocean and the menacing whales beneath; sees both the delightful, delicate sparrow and the worm-ravening beast. Through Negative Capability, the poet doesn’t reach after fact or reason but allows all things—new stars, flowers bred by the fancy—to be. The completion of an experience is the negative capability, the not reaching after. For Keats, the poet sustains intensity and detachment, poise, suspension.

To learn medicine, Keats worked as a dresser, that is, the person who cleans up after the surgeons’ bloody work. He was apprenticed to a surgeon named Hammond—sometimes called “Butcher” Hammond—for five years, but stayed with him three and a half years. Keats then studied with well-known doctors, particularly Astley Cooper, who mentored Keats. After a year more of study, Keats began to doubt his abilities and interest in medicine. He took an apothecary license, but, with six months of study remaining for him to license as a surgeon, Keats left medicine for poetry.

His medical skills, though, were required in his caring for his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis. His emotional skills were called on when he fell in love with Fanny Brawne (1800-1865), the daughter of his landlord. He hoped to marry her, but his having contracted tuberculosis—probably from his mother—made that impossible, due to the disease being extremely contagious. In hopes of recovery, he traveled to Rome, accompanied by his friend the portrait artist John Severn (1793- 1879). Keats died in Rome, with both acceptance and bitter awareness of his fate. He described himself as being like a frog going out in the first frost. And he said his epitaph should read that “here is one whose name is writ on water,” that is, no sooner visible than gone. His last hours were spent writing letters of to his friends, to whom he made an “awkward bow.”

His poetry is characterized by its sensuality, to the point of sensual overload, and its pursuit of beauty—often (but not always) idealized like Greek art; its use of paradox that evokes Negative Capability by sustaining opposites; and its subjectivity to the point of relativity, for what the heart loves becomes its truth and whatever the imagination seizes on as beauty must be true. He lauds imagination as a power to help people recover from sorrow and misery, from the inevitable pains and suffering of life.

 

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

1

Ah what can ail thee, wretched wight,

Alone and palely loitering;

The sedge is wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

 

2

Ah what can ail thee, wretched wight,      

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

 

3

I see a lilly on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;

And on thy cheek a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

 

4

I met a lady in the meads

Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

 

5

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sideways would she lean, and sing

A faery’s song.

 

6

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look’d at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

 

7

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said,

I love thee true.

 

8

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she gaz’d and sighed deep,

And there I shut her wild sad eyes—

So kiss’d to sleep.

 

9

And there we slumber’d on the moss,

And there I dream’d, ah woe betide

The latest dream I ever dream’d

On the cold hill side.

 

10

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cry’d—”Le belle Dame sans mercy

Hath thee in thrall!”

 

11

I saw their starv’d lips in the gloom

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke, and found me here

On the cold hill side.

 

12

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,

And no birds sing.

 

 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express       

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,               

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?       

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?               

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

 

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 this 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.

 

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”