INTRODUCTION
Edward Hirsch
John Keats’s poems and letters were for me—as they have been for so many others over the past two centuries—the portals of poetry itself, the highly decorated doors through which one passed into a magisterial kingdom, a realm of pure feeling, passionate thought. “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination,” Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey in November 1817. “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” This is the sort of certainty that announces a vocation—it helped to seal mine—and opens the pathway to a life’s work. “The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream,” Keats continued, “he awoke and found it truth.” So many of Keats’s formulations are like a bell, a trumpet call, leading us to our deepest, most imaginative selves.
Keats believed that “the excellence of every Art is its intensity.” One discovers in the luxuriant lyric spaces of his art that the emotions are deemed sacred and the daydreaming capacities of the mind are given free rein to join with a feverishly active consciousness, with what he calls in “Ode to Psyche” “a working brain.” He left ample room in his poems for reverie and trance, for waking into a “slumberous tenderness” (“The Eve of St. Agnes”), and he combined that associative drift with a startling openheartedness and a ferocious working intellect, the mind of a maker. He believed in the essential healthiness of the lyric—the healing powers of art—and early on borrowed a metaphor from medicine to declare that poetry itself “should be a friend/To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (“Sleep and Poetry”).
Keats was a keen, indelible phrase maker—“I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover,” he wrote—and his work has great verbal sumptuousness. Many of his phrases and lines seem almost to have been formulated by the English language itself, as if he had become its vehicle, a transparent vessel, like Shakespeare, who was his supreme source.
The poetry of earth is never dead.
(“On the Grasshopper and Cricket”)
When I have fears that I may cease to be
(“When I have fears …”)
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
(Endymion)
Tender is the night,
(“Ode to a Nightingale”)
Where are the songs of Spring?
(“To Autumn”)
When I was a boy my grandfather used to quote Keats’s lines to me, like proverbs or psalms. I had no idea where these phrases, these formulas and equations (such as the urn’s claim, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”) actually originated. I felt as if he had pulled them out of the summer air or summoned them from the collective pool of all the poetry he knew. Later, when I was in high school, I was surprised, and a little discomfited, to discover that so many of his lines had come from the teeming brain of a single nineteenth-century author. It was as if my grandfather had taken to heart Keats’s own formulation that “Poetry should … strike the Reader’s a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance….” Sometimes, reading Keats’s poems late at night, on my own, I still feel as if I am hearing not the beautifully formed cadences of a solitary writer, one of the major Romantic poets, but the Orphic voice of English poetry itself.
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John Keats belongs to the second wave, second generation, of Romantic poets. He was the last born (1795), the most short-lived (twenty-five years old), the most easily endearing, obviously lovable, and the first to die (1821) of the key Romantic figures. Shelley, for example, was born three years before him and outlasted him by one year, long enough to write one of his best poems for him, the elegy “Adonais.” (“And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.”) Coleridge, who once shook hands with Keats on Hampstead Heath and declared “There is death in that hand,” outlived him by thirteen years. Wordsworth, who was twenty-five years Keats’s senior, survived him by nearly three decades.
Keats’s background was obscure. He came from a lower-middle-class milieu in an extremely class-bound society, and thereby entered poetry without the advantages of birth, wealth, or university education. An aura of class still sometimes hovers around his achievement and reputation. This comes not only from his early detractors, the nasty politically motivated Tory critics from Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review who labeled him part of “the Cockney School of Poetry,” but also from some of his later admirers, such as W. B. Yeats who in the poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” characterized Keats as “poor, ailing, and ignorant,” and defined him as “the coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper” who made “luxuriant song” out of his frustrated disadvantages. Yeats’s snobbery was gratuitous since he was primarily using Keats to demonstrate his own theory of how every poet seeks his or her own opposite. But from the first there seem always to have been readers who could not abide Keats’s liberal sympathies and “Cockney” roots, his radical sensuality and democratic feeling for literary culture, his mask of—to use Yeats’s fine phrase—“deliberate happiness.”
Keats was the eldest of five children and learned to greet death early. By the time he was fifteen he had lost an infant brother, two uncles, his kindly maternal grandfather, and both his parents, whose death left him, as he said, with “a personal soreness which the world had exacerbated.” To add to the misfortune, the orphaned children were then cheated out of their modest inheritance by an unscrupulous guardian. Keats nursed his mother through much of her final eighteen-month illness—she died, presumably from tuberculosis—just as he would later nurse his brother Tom, and the experience seems to have spilled over into the decision to apprentice himself to a surgeon-apothecary. He always was ambitious, as he said, “of doing the world some good.” In one of his last poems, “The Fall of Hyperion: a Vision,” written well after he had abandoned medicine for poetry, he describes the poet as “a sage;/A humanist, physician to all men.”
Keats offers us the very model of a self-directed artistic development as a life well lived. He was entirely self-actualized, self-actualizing. There would be no Harrow or Eton, no Oxford or Cambridge in his experience, though he was fortunate to attend Clarke School in Enfield (1803–1811), a small progressive, enlightened academy on the outskirts of London. There he became particular friends with the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, who was eight years his senior. Many years after Keats’s death, Clarke recalled how as a schoolboy Keats had been “highly pugnacious” with an “ungovernable” temper and a “terrier courage.” Clarke’s portrait stands as a corrective to the myth of “poor Keats,” the fatal victim of hostile reviews (Byron tartly claimed that Keats was “snuffed out by an article”) and replaces it with a more accurate portrait of a person who plunged into things, who was scrappy, volatile, and impetuous, both physically vital and mentally robust.
At Clarke Keats became a voracious reader with an insatiable appetite for poetry, for Latin authors and mythological keys to classical culture, such as Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, Tooke’s Pantheon, and Spence’s Polymetis. “I know nothing, I have read nothing and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions of ‘get Wisdom—get understanding.’” He vowed with iron resolve: “There is but one way for me—the road lies th[r]ough application study and thought. I will pursue it….” The unappeasable hunger for books, for ancient stories and myths, for beautiful works of art only increased after Keats left school at sixteen—it was lifelong, needful to him as food. Clarke recalled how ardently his young friend responded to Spenser’s “Epithalamion” and then went through the first volume of the Faerie Queene “as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping!” Spenser’s highly descriptive passages opened Keats up to his own wondrously florid isle, his own laurel groves, a shady Bower of Bliss.
Keats wrote his first known poem in 1814 (“Imitation of Spenser”) under the excited spell of a writer who instigated his own dreamy sensuousness, whose imagery fomented his enchantments. Many of his early poems exhibit his dissenting political spirit (“On Peace,” “Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison”), his sense of the grandeur of poetry (“Ode to Apollo”), and his feeling for the way nature inspires and instructs poets (“To one who has been long in city pent,” “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”). I have always been moved by Keats’s tribute poem and verse epistle “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” which speaks to Clarke’s mentorship but also to their exalted experience of reading poetry together. “That you first taught me all the sweets of song,” Keats remembers in a series of richly balanced couplets:
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;
What swell’d with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o’er summer seas;
Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness;
Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve’s fair slenderness.
Keats summarizes the wide range he hears in “the sweets of song,” the particular mellifluous sounds (“Spenserian vowels”) and enabling tones (“Miltonian storms and … tenderness”) he discovers in two keys poets who spurred and made possible his own practice. He also goes on to glory in the swelling capabilities—the immense possibilities—of the poetic forms themselves: the sonnet, the ode, the epigram, and the epic. One feels that Keats’s generous poem of acknowledgment, written in September 1816, signals the virtual completion of his poetic apprenticeship. A few weeks later he penned his first major poem, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which, as Leigh Hunt recognized, “completely announced the new poet taking possession.”
Keats wrote his breakthrough poem at a fever pitch in a couple of enthralling early morning hours. He always did love the intoxication of creating in a fine frenzy. This is an emblematic or allegorical moment in Keats’s writing life—in the life of any young poet—because his reading vitally seizes him and spurs him into his own extravagant making. It delivers him to himself. Keats and Clarke had spent the entire night excitedly poring over a borrowed 1616 folio edition of George Chapman’s translation of Homer, which contained both the Iliad and the Odyssey. They searched out the great passages, the heart-stopping scenes, comparing Pope’s well-tempered eighteenth-century couplets with Chapman’s more propulsive, free-striding Elizabethan verse. Keats finally tore himself away at six A.M. He departed “at day-spring,” as Clarke later recalled, “yet he contrived that I should receive the poem, from a distance of nearly two miles, before 10 A.M.” A fair copy of the poem was sitting on Clarke’s table when he came down to breakfast.
Copyright © 2009 by John Keats. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
