1.9: John Keats (1795-1821)

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.

 

1.13.1: Letter to George and Thomas Keats

Hampstead Sunday

22 December 1818

My dear Brothers I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this [ . . . ] [T]he excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness— The picture is larger than Christ rejected—I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment—These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter— They talked of Kean & his low company—Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on wednesday—Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

 

1.13.2: “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.

 

1.13.4: “Ode on Melancholy”

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

 

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

 

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue       

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung

 

1.13.8: “To Autumn”

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

 Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

 With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

 And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

  To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

 With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

 For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

 Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

 Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

 Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook    

  Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

 Steady thy laden head across a brook;

 Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

  Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

 

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

 Among the river sallows, borne aloft

  Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly born;

 Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

 The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.