John Keats

1795–1821






Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton.

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of
Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he
died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most
remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four
poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his
short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of
poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the
Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own
distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting
perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and,
occasionally, dry ironic wit.
Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary
tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been associated
with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was often uneasy
among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of liberal
intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day
attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of an
upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart), and as
consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth
language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a liberal
education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at Guy’s
Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary education.
Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers, interpreters,
questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he saw as
beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a world
devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in the
desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise sense
of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-historical
moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a relative
handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and exactly
controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William
Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in
English.
Keats was said to have been born in his maternal grandfather’s
stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury Circus, but
there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief that his
family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the stable for
his father-in-law and later owned it, providing the family an income
comfortable enough for them to buy a home and send the older
children, John and George (1797-1841), to the small village
academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted teacher John
Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) soon followed them.
Although little is known of Keats’s early home life, it appears to
have been happy, the family close-knit, the environment full of the
exuberance and clamor of a big-city stable and inn yard. Frances
Keats was devoted to her children, particularly her favorite, John,
who returned that devotion intensely. Under Keats’s father the
family business prospered, so that he hoped to send his son, John, to
Harrow.

At the age of eight Keats entered Enfield Academy and became

friends with young Charles Cowden Clarke, the fifteen-year-old son
of the headmaster. He was not a shy, bookish child; Clarke
remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and fought
passionately in their defense: “He was not merely the ‘favorite of
all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-
mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his
placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his
behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one,
superior or equal, who had known him.” On the night of 15 April
1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident
occurred that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a
series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him throughout
his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his horse
stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The shock to
the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within two
months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the
children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage soon
proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the stables and
some of her inheritance to her estranged husband, William
Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live with
another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken and ill;
she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few months
before) in March 1809. John became the oldest male in his family,
and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to his
brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and moving
letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to human
suffering and spiritual development, were written to his brothers.

At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and

his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarke’s favorite
pupils, reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests
his last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest
was a response to his loneliness after his mother’s death. But he had
by then already won an essay contest and begun translating Latin
and French. Keats’s love for literature, and his association of the
life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia, really
began in Clarke’s school. It was modeled on the Dissenting
academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical and
modern languages, as well as history and modern science; discipline
was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their own
interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself was a
friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph Priestley
and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which Cowden Clarke
said, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil and
religious liberty.”

Keats’s sense of the power and romance of literature began as the

Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their
library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels, travel
stories; but the books “that were his constantly recurrent sources of
attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s ‘Classical
Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn, and Spence’s ‘Polymetis.’
This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek
mythology.” On his own, Keats translated most of the Aeneid and
continued learning French. Literature for him was more than a
dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was a domain for energetic
exploration, “realms of gold,” as he later wrote, tempting not only
as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a beauty that enlarges
our imaginative sympathies. All through his life his friends
remarked on his industry and his generosity: literature for Keats
was a career to be struggled with, fought for, and earned, for the
sake of what the poet’s struggle could offer humankind in insight
and beauty. This impression recurs often in accounts of Keats, this
pugnacity of one who fought his way into literary circles, and this
compassion for others that justifies the literary career.

Of course, at this point, when Keats was only fifteen or sixteen, a

literary career was not a serious thought. In 1810 Alice Whalley
Jennings, Keats’s grandmother, was seventy-five, and in charge of
the four orphaned children, John, George (then thirteen), Tom
(eleven), and Fanny (seven). She had inherited a considerable sum
from her husband, John Jennings (who died in 1805), and in order
to ensure the children’s financial future turned to Richard Abbey, a
tea merchant who, on the advice of her attorney, she appointed to
act as trustee. Most of Keats’s later financial misery can be traced to
this decision. If Abbey was no villain, he was nevertheless narrow-
minded and conventional, and, where money was concerned, tight-
fisted and often deceitful. He dispensed the children’s money
grudgingly and often lied or freely interpreted the terms of the
bequest: it was not until 1833, years after Fanny Keats came of age,
that she finally forced a legal settlement. It has been estimated that
by the time of Keats’s death in 1821 either Abbey had withheld
from him, or Keats had failed to discover, about £2,000, a
considerable inheritance (in those days £50 per year was at least a
living wage, and £100-200 would provide a comfortable existence).
Keats left Enfield in 1811, and, perhaps at Abbey’s urging—though
Clarke remembered it as Keats’s choice—he began to study for a
career as a surgeon. He was apprenticed to a respected surgeon,
Thomas Hammond, in a small town near Enfield, Edmonton, where
his grandmother lived.

We know little of Keats’s life during these years 1811-1814, other

than that Keats assisted Hammond and began the study of anatomy
and physiology. Surgery would have been a respectable and
reasonable profession for one of Keats’s means: unlike the
profession of medicine, the job of surgeon in Keats’s day did not
require a university degree. A surgeon, licensed by examination,
was a general practitioner, setting bones, dressing wounds, giving
vaccinations. Keats always maintained he was “ambitious of doing
the world some good.” It is likely that he began his career with
enthusiasm, but living in the small rooms over the surgery, Keats
grew restless and lonely; he began to wander the woods and walk
the four miles to Enfield to see the Clarkes. He completed his
translation of the Aeneid, and, according to Cowden Clarke, he
“devoured rather than read” books he borrowed:
Ovid’s Metamorphosis , John Milton‘s Paradise Lost,
Virgil’s Eclogues, and dozens of others. But the book that
decisively awakened his love of poetry, indeed shocked him
suddenly into self-awareness of his own powers of imagination,
was Edmund Spenser‘s Faerie Queene.

This was a turning point. Certainly this close teacher-pupil

friendship with Cowden Clarke, these evenings at the headmaster’s
table, and the long late-night rambles discussing books borrowed
from the library, were crucial in making John Keats a poet. His
friend Charles Brown believed Keats first read Spenser when he
was eighteen, in 1813 or 1814: “From his earliest boyhood he had
an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the
animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally
seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his
feelings? It was the ‘Fairy Queen’ that awakened his genius. In
Spenser’s fairy land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world,
and became another being.” Soon, wrote Brown, he “was entirely
absorbed in poetry.” (Brown subsequently struck out the
word entirely.) Clarke recalled Keats’s exuberant joy, “he ramped
through the scenes of that… purely poetical romance, like a young
horse into a Spring meadow.” Some time in 1814 Keats wrote his
first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser.” What is remarkable about this
first poem is its vitality, its appropriation of the Spenserian rhyme
scheme and richly compressed imagery to evoke a romantically
voluptuous dream world. It is a youthful piece. But the poetic ear is
acute, the natural description delights in itself, and the verse dares
with naive persistence to draw attention to the power of poetic
image to set a dreamy scene (“Ah! could I tell the wonders of an
isle / That in that fairest lake had been / I could e’en Dido of her
grief beguile.” And of course he does attempt to tell).

But there was more than “pure poetry” involved in Keats’s turn,
over the next year or two, to poetry as a vocation. Politics played a
role as well—in fact, a decisive one. As early as 1812 Cowden
Clarke had met the radical publisher of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt;
in 1814 he was a regular visitor to Hunt’s prison cell (he had been
imprisoned in 1813 for libeling the Prince Regent), and Keats must
have been enthralled by another kind of romance than Spenser’s—
the romance of the London circle of artists and intellectuals who
supported progressive causes and democratic reform, and opposed
the aristocratic counterrevolution then waging war on Napoleon.
Indeed, in these liberal circles of the Regency bourgeoisie, Keats
might even hope to attract attention, even as an outsider, on the
strength of his political enthusiasm and poetic talent. His next
poems are political: in April 1814 the kings of Europe had defeated
Napoleon, but amid the general optimism in England, liberals,
including Keats in “On Peace,” called on the victors to support
reform. The sonnet, his first, is clumsy and shrill. But it does show
how Keats meant to get attention. In February 1815, Hunt was
released, and Keats offered a sonnet, “Written on the Day That Mr.
Leigh Hunt Left Prison,” through Cowden Clarke, whom he
stopped on his way to meet Hunt: “when taking leave, he gave me
the sonnet,” said Clarke, “... how clearly do I recall the conscious
look and hesitation with which he offered it!” The publication of
this sonnet in the Poems of 1817 would have been noted by the
conservative reviewers who would later attack him as an associate
of Hunt’s. To take a political stand so early in his career was a bold
act: in those turbulent times political passions ran deep.

It may have been over political matters that Keats quarreled with
Dr. Hammond. We know that he did and that for some reason he
left his apprenticeship early. On 1 October 1815, Keats moved to
London and registered at Guy’s Hospital for a six-month course of
study required for him to become a licensed surgeon and
apothecary. This move to the dreary neighborhood of the Borough,
just south of London Bridge, was exciting for Keats. He could be
near his family now: his grandmother had died in December 1814,
and George and Tom moved to Abbey’s countinghouse where they
were apprenticed (Fanny went to live with the Abbeys at
Walthamstow). Before the move, Keats in 1815 seems to have been
moody and at times deeply depressed. In the February 1815 poem
“To Hope” he speaks of “hateful thoughts [that] enwrap my soul in
gloom,” and “sad Despondency.” This was perhaps only a
fashionable literary pose—he had recently written a sonnet in praise
of Byron’s “sweetly sad” melody—and it takes a political turn,
looking to “Hope” as a principle of social liberation. But his brother
recalled this time as one of brooding uncertainty, his grandmother’s
death no doubt having increased his anxiety to bring some stability
to what remained of a family so shaken by death and dislocation.
More pressing, perhaps, was his growing eagerness, in the exciting
political climate of Napoleon’s brief return from March until the
Battle of Waterloo in June, to make some contribution as a poet to
the liberal cause. He was fully committed to a career as a surgeon
but was still determined to find time to write verse.

His brother George, to ease John’s troubled moods, introduced him

to his friends Caroline and Anne Mathew and their cousin, would-
be poet, George Felton Mathew. Keats’s friendship with Mathew
was brief but stimulating. With the two sisters Keats maintained a
conventional literary friendship, addressing to them some stilted
anapests (“To Some Ladies,” “On Receiving a Curious Shell ...,”
“O Come, dearest Emma!”) in the style of the popular Regency
poet Thomas Moore. The friendship with George Mathew, though,
buoyed his spirits and encouraged him in his poetic purpose. Here
at last was a poet, who—initially at least—seemed to share his
literary tastes and encouraged his verse writing. If his brother
remembered Keats’s emotional distress, Mathew, writing to Keats’s
biographer Richard Monckton Milnes more than thirty years later,
remembered that Keats “enjoyed good health—a fine flow of
animal spirits—was fond of company—could amuse himself
admirably with the frivolities of life—and had great confidence in
himself.” Mathew was reserved, rather conservative, and earnestly
religious; the friendship soon cooled. But in November 1815 Keats
addressed to him his longest poem yet, “To George Felton
Mathew,” in heroic couplets modeled on the Elizabethan verse
epistle. Despite the stiffness of the verse, the style, colloquial yet
descriptively lush, is becoming recognizably Keats’s own though
clearly developed from his reading of Hunt and Wordsworth; and,
most interestingly, the themes would become characteristic, though
here they are only suggested: that poets associate in a
“brotherhood” of the “genius—loving heart”; that they represent, as
much as political figures, fighters for “the cause of freedom”; and
that poets bring “healing” to a suffering world, often hostile to their
genius, by evoking a world of escape and timeless myth.

Few English authors have ever, in fact, had as much direct

observation and experience of suffering as John Keats. Until the
early summer of 1816 he studied medicine at Guy’s Hospital, and
he did so well he was promoted to “dresser” unusually quickly. His
duties involved dressing wounds daily to prevent or minimize
infection, setting bones, and assisting with surgery. He took to the
work well, lodging with two older students at 28 St. Thomas Street,
attending lectures by the foremost surgeon of the day, Astley
Cooper, as well as courses in anatomy and physiology, botany,
chemistry, and medical practice. Yet by the spring of 1816 he was
clearly becoming restless, even defensive, about poetry. He was
increasingly excited by the new modern poetry of Wordsworth
(whose 1815 Poems Keats had obtained just as he entered Guy’s),
its naturalism and direct appeal to the secular imagination so
different from Spenser’s romance. And, once again, there was the
influence of Hunt, whose homey poetic diction with its colloquial
informality, seemed daring to the twenty-year-old Keats, who
would have associated Hunt’s 1816 poems in The Examiner with a
politically antiauthoritarian movement of which modern poetry was
a part. He began to speak about poetry, and little else, to his fellow
students, with a kind of insecure arrogance. “Medical knowledge
was beneath his attention,” said his fellow student and roommate,
Henry Stephens, “no—Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his
Aspirations—The only thing worthy the attention of superior
minds.... The greatest men in the world were the Poets, and to rank
among them was the chief object of his ambition.... This feeling
was accompanied with a good deal of Pride and some conceit; and
that amongst mere Medical students, he would walk & talk as one
of the Gods might be supposed to do, when mingling with mortals.”
We need not, perhaps, take this memory too seriously, but clearly
Keats wanted to think of himself as a man of literature. Flushed
with enthusiasm for Hunt’s poetry, he sent to The Examiner in
March a sonnet that he had written the previous autumn, “Solitude.”
It was published 5 May 1816. Stephens recalled, “he was
exceedingly gratified.”

However lofty his conception of the poet in 1816, Keats chose an

unfortunate model in Leigh Hunt. The typical Hunt idiom was a
highly mannered luxuriance, characterized by an abundance of -
y and -ly modifiers, adjectives made from nouns and verbs
(“bosomy,” “scattery,” “tremblingly”), as well as a jaunty
colloquialism. Surely we can hear this Huntian influence in the little
verses Keats scribbled on the cover of Stephens’s lecture notebook:
“Give me women, wine and snuff, / Until I cry out ‘hold,
enough!’”; or in some verses he began in the style of Hunt’s Story
of Rimini (1815), “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem”: “Lo! I
must tell a tale of chivalry; / For while I muse, the lance points
slantingly / Athwart the morning air: some lady sweet ... Hails it
with tears.” The reader notes in this poem the frequent enjambment
for which Hunt himself had argued, against the masculine (strong-
syllable) rhymed, end-stopped couplets of Alexander Pope; Hunt
also disliked median caesurae, arguing for the fluidity of lines that
paused later, after “weak” syllables. This argument (however arcane
it may appear now) had political resonance for Hunt, since it
promised to break the “aristocratic” sound of the heroic couplet so
pleasing to conservative tastemakers. (Lord Byron, who objected to
Hunt’s theories, never completely forgave Keats for his attack on
Pope in “Sleep and Poetry.”)

But if these elements in Hunt’s poetry seemed declassé to his and

Keats’s critics, today one cannot say that Hunt’s influence on Keats
was in any simple sense bad. For one thing Hunt was not Keats’s
only model. Spenser was a more serious and enduring influence, as
were Browne, Drayton, Milton, Wordsworth, and later,
Shakespeare. Most twenty-year-old poets need a model of some
sort, and there were certainly more banal models in his day from
which to choose. On the other hand (as Walter Jackson Bate
suggests), to attempt to have written like a greater and more popular
poet, like Byron, would not have had the energizing effect on
Keats’s verse that Hunt had. Hunt enabled Keats to write and,
eventually, to surpass him. For a young middle-class liberal with no
university training, a healthy dislike of Pope and an enthusiasm for
Hunt and Wordsworth provided an enabling sense of identity.
Finally, Keats was by no means, even in 1815-1816, a slavish
imitator. His works have a troubled sense of self-consciousness
completely absent from Hunt’s. Keats’s are also poems of escape to
nature, and in these tropes we can sense as much Keats’s very
shrewd (and early) understanding of Wordsworth’s poetic project as
of Hunt’s. In poems such as the fine sonnet “How many bards gild
the lapses of time!” or the “Ode to Apollo,” or the lovely (summer
1816) sonnet “Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve,” one finds
an important Keatsian trope: the poem about the poet’s own sense
of himself as a modern, preparing to write from his experience a
new poetry to match that of England’s great writers.

On 25 July 1816 Keats took, and passed, the examinations that

allowed him to practice surgery, and left London for the fashionable
seaside resort of Margate. It had been a trying year (and a difficult
exam: Stephens flunked), and Keats needed to escape the hot, dirty
streets of the Borough to collect his thoughts. Here, for the first
time really, he confronted, in a long poem of generally self-assured
verse, his own struggle to become a poet, in the Epistle to My
Brother George, inspired by verse epistles Hunt published in The
Examiner but interesting in its own right. For here Keats explored
what it would mean to him “to strive to think divinely,” to have a
poet’s imaginative vision while absorbing the sights and sounds of
nature in a kind of Wordsworthian “wise passiveness.” As so often
in Romantic poetry, a poet’s complaint at being unable to have a
vision itself becomes a vision of what he might see if he were a true
poet. After fifty lines or so of such inspiration, though, Keats breaks
off—”And should I ever see [visions], I will tell you / Such tales as
must with amazement spell you”—in favor of a long, discursive
speech by a dying poet who celebrates the joy he has brought the
world. Despite the sketchiness of the effort, and Keats’s obvious
frustration with himself, this poem and the other Margate epistle,
“To Charles Cowden Clarke,” are remarkable for their brave and
serious tone of self-exploration. Keats, confronting his indebtedness
to other poets and his hopes for himself, had found a theme that
would launch his career.

He returned to London in late September and took rooms near

Guy’s Hospital, 9 Dean Street, and amid the gloomy little alleys
began again his work as a dresser until he could formally assume
the duties of a surgeon on his twenty-first birthday in October.
Dreary as this beginning must have seemed, the month would be
fateful for the young poet.

Cowden Clarke had been living in London, and this warmhearted

schoolmaster was excited to receive the long epistle from Keats.
One night in early October, Clarke invited Keats to his rooms in
Clerkenwell. He especially wanted to show Keats a volume that
was being shown around Hunt’s circle, a 1616 folio edition
of George Chapman‘s translation of Homer. The two friends pored
over the volume until six in the morning, and when Keats reached
home he sat down immediately to compose a sonnet, titled in
manuscript “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” With
obvious pride and excitement he sent it to Clarke by a post that
reached him at ten that morning. Surely Keats felt, as critics today
would agree, that this was the most perfect poem, the most
beautifully written and sustained verse, he had yet written.

As he would so often, Keats wrote the “Homer” sonnet in response

to the power and imaginative vision of another poet. And again, that
power is perceived as an absence, a gap between Keats’s small
voice—or the concrete experience of any individual—and the
sublime limitlessness of a great and distant imagination (this
tension reappears in the more complex relation of the poet to the
Grecian urn and the nightingale). Unlike his first sonnets, inspired
by the natural charm of Hunt’s sonnets, this sonnet is based on a
structural principle that he would later bring to perhaps its greatest
fulfillment in English poetry in his odes, the expression of the
irresolvable contrarieties of experience in the interplay of verse
elements—quatrain, octave and sestet, rhymes, words, and even
sounds. In this sonnet, the energy and excitement of literary
discovery—Keats, in reading Homer, feels not bookish pleasure but
the awe of a conquistador reaching the edge of an uncharted sea—is
presented as direct emotion, not, as it had been in the epistles, a
disabling and self-conscious pose. The emotion is, for the first time,
sustained and controlled throughout the verse, with a sureness of
diction, and even sound, that never falters: for example, the sense of
openness to a vast sea of wonder is suggested by long vowels
(“wild,” “surmise,” “silent”), tapering off to hushed awe in the
weak syllables of the final word, “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
As published (with line 7 altered, in The Examiner , 1 December
1816), the sonnet takes its place with Wordsworth’s and some of
Keats’s own, as among the finest of the nineteenth century.

Keats carefully copied out this sonnet, along with some other
poems including the sonnet “How many bards,” and gave them to
Clarke to take to Hunt at his Hampstead cottage. Hunt, of course,
had published a Keats sonnet, but now was anxious to meet the man
himself. Keats responded to Clarke, in a letter of 9 October, “‘t will
be an Era in my existence.” It proved to be.

Some time that month he met not only Hunt, but also men who
were to be close friends and supporters all his life: John Hamilton
Reynolds and Benjamin Haydon. Within a few weeks he would
meet Shelley‘s publisher Charles Ollier, who would bring out
Keats’s first volume. Hunt recalled of this first meeting “the
impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine
though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of
which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer.
We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet’s heart
as warm as his imagination.” It was, said Clarke, “`a red-letter day’
in the young poet’s life, and one which will never fade with me
while memory lasts… Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the
household, and was always welcomed.” This was so to the last
months of his life, when the ill poet made his way back to the
Hunts’ even though by then Keats had come to judge him
egotistical and manipulative and had long since rejected his poetical
influence on his career.

However trying Keats may have found Hunt, throughout his life he
could think of Hampstead as a refuge, Hunt’s pleasant domesticity
in his beautiful surroundings harmonizing with the easy urbanity of
high Regency culture, of books, paintings, music, liberal politics,
and literary conversation with the great talents of the age. Keats
himself had moved, in November, to lodgings at 76 Cheapside, with
his brothers, George and Tom. Until Tom’s death two years later
broke it up, this would be the happiest household Keats would
know. He traveled often to Hunt’s in these months, his friendship
growing with the witty young Reynolds and the crotchety, energetic
egomaniac Haydon. Reynolds, about Keats’s age, was a not too
successful poet and essayist, but had a quick mind and literary
polish; in the next few weeks he would introduce Keats to John
Taylor and James Hessey, who became his publishers after Ollier
dropped him; to Charles (Armitage) Brown, the rugged, worldly
businessman who was one of Keats’s most loyal friends, traveling
with him through Scotland in the summer of 1818, and sharing
rooms with him at his home at Wentworth Place, Hampstead (now
the Keats House and Museum), from December 1818 until May
1820; Charles and Maria Dilke, who built the double house in
Hampstead with Brown; and Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford student
with whom Keats stayed the following fall. Haydon’s vast canvases
and blustering (later in life, sadly manic), often pugnacious self-
assurance impressed Keats with his notion that modern artists could
produce great works of epic dimensions; he introduced Keats to
William Hazlitt, whose notions of poetic energy, “gusto,” and of
imagination as an intensification of sensory experience enabling us
to transcend self, were to begin Keats’s own meditations on
aesthetics.

When Keats stayed at the Hunts’, a cot was set up in the library for
him, and it was here, in November and December 1816, he planned
his two long poems “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry.”
Though the diction of these rhymed couplets is often adolescent,
and the syntax turgid, these were the first serious long poems Keats
intended for publication, and their themes introduce enduring
concerns. Clearly, by November, Hunt had begun to plan a volume
of his new protégés verse, with the Olliers as publishers. “I stood
tip-toe” was filled out for this purpose, Keats having begun it
sometime in the summer as a treatment of the myth of Endymion.
In this poem, Keats begins with lush natural description, although
his purpose is Wordsworthian, to write poetry inspired by nature
that will rise to myth: “For what has made the sage or poet write /
But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?” Nature inspires poets to
sing sweet songs of mythic figures; but the poet is called by
“unearthly singing” from a resting place of the divine, “Full in the
speculation of the stars.” This meeting of the divine with the human
is symbolized by the marriage of the mortal Endymion with the
moon, Cynthia, and initiates a regenerated world of art and poetry:
“Was there a Poet born?” in this marriage, the poem asks. Keats
finished this poem in December, and tentatively called it
“Endymion,” his first poetic use of the myth.

“Sleep and Poetry,” written in December, is the more serious poem

of the two. It lays out a poetic project and manifesto for the young
poet. Poetry here is distinguished from mere sleep, or dream, in
engaging “the strife of human hearts,” the sorrow of life, as well as
proceeding from an immersion in the joys of sensation. Keats
boldly aligns himself with Wordsworth’s naturalism, attacking the
“foppery” of neoclassicism: he will begin his poetic education in
nature in order to comprehend the human heart. The “great end” of
poetry is “that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the
thoughts of man.” The poem ends with the notion of a
“brotherhood” of literary cultivation as the poet returns to his
evening in Hunt’s library, an ideal union of natural grace, liberality,
and poetic tradition. Although these thoughts began with the verse
epistles, this poem is his most earnest attempt yet to find a purpose
for literature within modern life, and he boldly asserts that a new
poetry has begun, a modern humanism with roots in nature and
myth. Contemporary critics immediately understood, and
condemned, this young poet’s radical associations—more offensive
to them than the poem’s occasional Huntian lapses and adolescent
posturing.

On 1 December, Hunt published in The Examiner a brief notice of

“Young Poets”—Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds—extolling a “new
school” that would “revive Nature” and “‘put a spirit of youth in
everything.’” He quotes in full the “excellent” “Homer” sonnet. At
about this time Keats was determined to give up medicine and
devote himself to poetry. Stephens believed that this notice “sealed
his fate,” and that he immediately changed his mind, but Stephens
may not have known the whole story. Charles Brown remembers
Keats becoming disillusioned with his career as a surgeon and
becoming fearful that he might not be a good enough surgeon to
avoid inflicting needless suffering. The truth was undoubtedly a
complex mixture of these, but certainly the excitement of these
months, and the promise of a published volume, gave him
confidence and determination. In December Haydon took his life
mask of Keats, as a study for including him (standing behind
Wordsworth) in his large painting Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem,
completed in 1819.

Later that month, the Hunt household was set into commotion by
the arrival of Shelley, whose wife Harriet’s suicide provoked a
crisis, as Shelley arranged to marry Mary Godwin (with whom he
had eloped in 1814) and fight for custody of his children. The pride
and fuss over Keats’s forthcoming volume was shared with the
attention Shelley demanded. The two poets walked together across
the Heath frequently that winter, and at least once Shelley cautioned
Keats to wait for publication until he had a more mature body of
work from which to compile a volume. It was perhaps good advice,
but Keats never warmed to Shelley as Shelley did to him, and he
seems to have been annoyed at Hunt for moving to Marlow for an
extended visit with Shelley that spring.

Keats’s first volume, Poems, appeared on 3 March 1817, with its

dedicatory sonnet to Leigh Hunt. It begins with “I stood tip-toe,”
ends with another long poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” and includes
youthful poems as well as some recent, good work, “Keen, fitful
gusts”; the poem to Wordsworth, Hunt, and Haydon, “Addressed to
the Same [Haydon]”; and the three long verse epistles, to Mathew,
George Keats, and Clarke. It received about half a dozen notices,
half from Keats’s circle. In October 1817 a polite review, warning
the young poet to “Cast off the uncleanness of [Hunt’s] school,”
appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany.
Months later, in the 1-13 June Examiner, Hunt extolled
Wordsworth’s revolutionary modern poetry and placed Keats as an
emerging new poet of a second wave, though his praise of Keats’s
actual poetry was rather reserved. The volume was no success, and
few copies were sold. “The book might have emerged in
Timbuctoo,” recalled Clarke. One of the Ollier brothers wrote to
George Keats (who perhaps had written to complain about the
book’s promotion), “We regret that your brother ever requested us
to publish his book… By far the greater number of persons who
have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain
terms, that we have in many cases offered to take the book back
rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time,
been showered upon it.”

On 1 March Hunt had invited Keats home to celebrate the

publication. After dinner Hunt wove a laurel crown for Keats; Keats
wove an ivy one for Hunt; and Hunt then suggested a fifteen-minute
sonnet-writing contest to commemorate this event. Keats dashed off
a poor, rather silly sonnet, which Hunt published to Keats’s dismay.
Horribly embarrassed, angry at Hunt’s frivolity, he sought out
Haydon the next day, and the two went to see the Elgin Marbles,
which Haydon had been active in persuading the government to
buy. Keats wrote his sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles“ that
evening; it is a splendid evocation of the grandeur of monumental
art set against the aspirations of the individual artist, of human
weakness and pain poised against an aesthetic vision of the gods.

Keats was not deterred by the book’s poor sales. He determined to

begin a large poem, on the great theme that he so cannily saw had
produced his most serious thought, the striving of man to be one
with his ideals, his gods. He resolved to get away, to return to the
seaside. Before he left on 14 April for the Isle of Wight, he and his
brothers moved to Hampstead, to a home in Well Walk, hoping the
country air might be good for young Tom, who was becoming ill.
He also arranged for John Taylor, of Taylor and Hessey, to become
his new publisher, and this association was, both emotionally and
financially, to be a source of real support for years to come.

On the Isle of Wight he sat alone for some weeks, writing to

Haydon of his new passion for Shakespeare, whom Haydon had
read to him with inspiring gusto, whose works he had brought
along, and whose portrait he hung up over his desk (he took this
portrait with him everywhere all his life). His goal was to write a
four-thousand-line poem, Endymion, by autumn. It was an
unrealistic, though bold, project, and he sat for weeks anxious and
depressed, though moved by the beauty and power of the sea. His
friends back home had faith in him, which sustained him: Reynolds
wrote a fine review of his Poems in the radical Champion (9 March
1817); Haydon wrote to him, “bless you My dear Keats go on, dont
despair… read Shakespeare and trust in Providence”; and Taylor
kindly advanced him money—having written to his father, “I
cannot think he will fail to become a great Poet.”

He did, by the end of April, manage to write part of book I, the

“Hymn to Pan.” Yet he was lonely, nervous, and blocked. He fled
the Isle of Wight for Margate, where he had been so productive the
previous summer. In May he went to Canterbury with Tom, hoping
“the Remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard-
Ball,” as he wrote to Taylor. By June he was back at Well Walk,
Hampstead, spending many days with the quiet, shy, by no means
intellectual painter Joseph Severn, who would be with Keats to his
last moments in Rome; and also with Reynolds, with whom he read
Shakespeare. By August his first extended narrative poem was half
finished, a total of two thousand lines.

Severn remarked that during these days he noticed the development

of Keats’s power of sympathy, of a kind of imaginative
identification valued in Keats’s day as the hallmark of poetic
sensitivity (William Hazlitt’s teachings reflect this view). Keats was
moved to an unusual degree toward almost sensory identification
with things around him: “Nothing seemed to escape him, the song
of a bird and the undertone of response from covert or hedge, the
rustle of some animal,” said Haydon. “The humming of a bee, the
sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature
tremble!” This power of overcoming self through loving the
world’s beauty became a crucial doctrine for Keats—he found his
feeling here confirmed by Hazlitt’s theories of imagination—that
evolved into a moral principle of love for the good. This doctrine
would become Keats’s ultimate justification for the aesthetic life,
and it would be implied even as early as Endymion.

He worked on the poem throughout the late summer and fall of

1817, writing on a strict plan of at least forty lines a day, a
remarkable project for a beginning poet that ultimately, of course,
did not produce consistently good poetry. But as an exercise it was
both stimulating and courageous, and he emerged a mature,
thoughtful, self-critical poet for this effort. During these months, his
friendship with Benjamin Bailey deepened, and he saw little of
Hunt. “Every one who met him,” Brown recalled of Keats, “sought
for his society, and he was surrounded by a little circle of hearty
friends.” As Bailey remembered him in those days, thinking back
over thirty years, “socially he was the most loveable creature, in the
proper sense of that word, as distinguished from amiable, I think I
ever knew as a man.” Bailey invited him up to Oxford in
September, where amid the beautiful autumn foliage and academic
camaraderie of Magdalen College, Bailey crammed for his exams
and Keats sat writing daily the third book of Endymion. With Bailey
he read and discussed Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Milton, Dante. Bailey,
the methodical but energetic scholar, and Keats, lively and intuitive,
were excellent study mates, and Keats was able to write with ease
and find time in the afternoons for boating on the Isis, strolling in
the countryside, and once visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace at
Stratford-upon-Avon.

He returned from Oxford in October with a new seriousness of

thought and purpose; he was weary of Endymion, and though he
plodded along with it, he was already planning another long poem.
But in London, trouble vexed him: Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine (October 1817) published “On the Cockney School of
Poetry,” the first of several vicious attacks on Hunt by John Gibson
Lockhart and John Wilson, which boded ill for Keats. Keats’s
brother Tom was now clearly consumptive, and a trip to the
Continent was planned for him; George was out of work and
needing money; and Keats himself was ill and being treated with
mercury for what was almost surely venereal disease. In late
November he left London for the pleasant suburb of Burford
Bridge, and there he completed Endymion .

Endymion is in many ways a response to Shelley’s Alastor (1816),

where a young poet dreams of an ideal mate, in fruitless pursuit of
whom he quests across the world, only to die alone and unloved.
Keats’s poem begins with a mortal, Endymion, discovered restless
and unhappy with the pastoral delights of his kingdom, for he has
become enraptured with a dream vision, the moon goddess Cynthia.
After a series of adventures, he abandons his restless quest, which
by book 4 has come to seem illusory, in favor of an earthly Indian
maid, who is eventually revealed to have been Cynthia all along.
Although the actual narrative will hardly bear much scrutiny, the
themes evoked here would haunt Keats all his life. Only through a
love for the earthly is the ideal reached, the real and the ideal
becoming one through an intense, sensuous love that leads to a
“fellowship with essence.” The theme of a mortal’s love for an ideal
figure that proves either illusory or redemptive would be a
continuing source of philosophical exploration and ironic play for
Keats, as would the paradox of redemption or transcendence
evolving from a fuller engagement with human suffering and
finitude.

The poetry of Endymion varies widely from some thoughtful

speeches and lovely description to some of the most awful and self-
indulgent verse ever written by a mature major English poet. The
story is tedious and the point often obscure. Most of Keats’s circle,
including Keats himself, recognized its weaknesses. Yet as a long,
sustained work that would broach Keats’s most serious concerns, as
a romance that itself attempts to reconsider that genre’s own
polarities of human and divine, finite and ideal, erotic love and
spiritual transcendence, it was a breakthrough for Keats’s career.

The critical reaction to Endymion was infamous for its ferocity. The
poem appeared in late April 1818; there was a supportive notice by
Bailey in the Oxford University and City Herald (30 May and 6
June 1818) and an extremely perceptive review (by Reynolds or
perhaps John Scott) in the Champion (7 and 14 June 1818): “Mr.
Keats goes out of himself into a world of abstraction:—his
passions, feelings, are all as much imaginative as his
situations…when he writes of passion, it seems to have possessed
him. This, however, is what Shakespeare did.” But these reviews
lacked the sensationalist power of the attacks on Keats, who was
associated with Hunt and “the Cockney School.” The two most
vicious, written in cool, satiric tones, were John Gibson Lockhart’s
in Blackwood’s (dated August 1818, appeared in September) and
John Wilson Croker’s in the Quarterly Review (dated April 1818,
appeared in September). For Lockhart, who had learned something
of Keats’s background, the poem was another sad example of an
upstart poet in an age when the celebrity of Robert
Burns and Joanna Baillie has “turned the heads of we know not how
many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen
compose tragedies.” He attacked the 1817 Poems and then reacted
with horror at the “imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion,”
inspired, he thought by Hunt, “the meanest, the filthiest, and the
most vulgar of Cockney poetasters,” compared to whom Keats was
but “a boy of pretty abilities.” Croker, in the Quarterly, was unable
to “struggle beyond the first of the four books,” whose diction and
forced rhyme he found absurd.

In the years that followed it was common to believe that these

attacks had shaken Keats’s resolve and broken his health: Shelley,
for reasons of his own, exaggerated the effect of the conservative
reviewers’ savagery (he himself wrote, but did not send, a balanced
defense of Endymion, which he privately disliked, although he
recognized Keats’s genius). Byron was at first scornful of Keats’s
weakness, as Shelley portrayed it to him, but refused to criticize
him publicly after his death. Charles Brown, too, spread abroad the
notion that Keats had been dealt “his death-blow.”

Keats was indeed hurt but not in fact crushed: the nineteenth-
century melodrama of Keats’s life being “snuffed out by an Article”
(Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, 1823), his frail constitution wrecked,
consumption immediately shaking him, is simply false. He showed
no signs of tuberculosis for another year, his constitution was by no
means frail (he was stocky and athletic), and he was not overly
sensitive to criticism. He wrote to James Hessey on 8 October, “My
own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison
beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict…J.
S. [who had written to defend Keats in the 3 October Morning
Chronicle] is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod
Endymion…—The Genius of Poetry must work out its own
salvation in a man…That which is creative must create itself—In
Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have
become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, &
the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a
silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.”

The fact was that Keats had grown beyond Endymion even before it
was completed, nearly a year before these reviews. His association
with Bailey in the fall of 1817, and his reading of Hazlitt,
contributed to a new seriousness in his thinking about art; on 22
November 1817 he wrote to Bailey the first of his famous letters to
his friends and brothers on aesthetics, the social role of poetry, and
his own sense of poetic mission. Rarely has a poet left such a
remarkable record of his thoughts on his own career and its relation
to the history of poetry. The struggle of the poet to create beauty
had become itself paradigmatic of spiritual and imaginative quest to
perceive the transcendent or the enduring in a world of suffering
and death. For Keats, characteristically, this quest for a transcendent
truth can be expressed (or even conceived of) only in the terms of
an intense, imaginative engagement with sensuous beauty: “I am
certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and
the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty
must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the
same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their
sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”

The imagination’s “sublime,” transcending activity is a distillation

and intensification of experience. Writing to his brothers at the end
of December, he criticized a painting by Benjamin West: “there is
nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no
face swelling into reality. the 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 examplified throughout.” The intensity of beauty in art
here is not identical to the intensity of actual life—although there is
a tendency in all Romantic theory to equate them. Keats emphasizes
that the artist remains aloof from single perspectives on life,
because truly to paint life’s intensity is to reveal its fiercely dual
nature and the precariousness of all attempts to fix or rationalize it:
“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.”

Keats’s best-known doctrine, Negative Capability, implies an

engagement in the actual through imaginative identification that is
simultaneously a kind of transcendence. The artist loses the
Selfhood that demands a single perspective or “meaning,” identifies
with the experience of his/her object, and lets that experience speak
itself through him/her. Both the conscious soul and the world are
transformed by a dynamic openness to each other. This
transformation is art’s “truth,” its alliance with concrete human
experience; its “beauty” is then its ability to abstract and
universalize from that experience the enduring forms of the heart’s
desires.

But troubling questions remained, to be worked through not only in

letters but, more important, in Keats’s poetry: What does it mean to
experience both the intensity of the actual and the beauty of its
distilled essence? Does the artist not demand more answers from
real life than the disinterestedness of Negative Capability can offer?
And, most urgent, is not aesthetic distillation really a kind of a
falsification, a dangerous and blind succumbing to enchantment? Is
the “truth” of experience only that pain accompanies all joy and
cannot be transcended? Certainly without the transforming power of
art, at least, growing self-consciousness implies knowledge of loss
and death; perhaps even art does no more than deflect our attention.
In early December 1817 Keats had written one of his most
compressed lyrics on this theme, “In drear-nighted December,”
where the passing of the seasons brings no pain to nature but only
self-conscious sorrow to humanity. And in January 1818, in the
sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” he
resolves to leave wandering in the “barren dream” of “golden-
tongued Romance” to be “consumed in the fire” and reborn as a
poet of tragic insight.

In these months, the winter of 1817-1818, Keats returned to

Shakespeare and to Wordsworth with renewed interest and a real
deepening of aesthetic judgment and complexity, spurred by his
attendance at William Hazlitt’s lectures on poetry at the Surrey
Institution. In the course of his own poetic development he would
challenge Hazlitt’s ideas of poetic “gusto” and aesthetic
disinterestedness with questions like those above. But with what
sympathy and excitement he must have heard Hazlitt say of
Shakespeare that a great poet “was nothing in himself: but he was
all that others were, or that they could become…When he
conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only
entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and
as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same
objects.” At the end of January 1818 he wrote his first
Shakespearean sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,”
one of his finest: even in this first line one hears the Shakespearean
counterpoint of sound, which is sustained throughout with a sure
mastery of vocalic music. As he had before, Keats developed this
sonnet along lines of antithesis, here taking off from the
Shakespearean theme of time, death, and art; but Keats transformed
these into a struggle along a borderline of vision (“the shore / Of the
wide world”) between a poet’s aspiration after “high romance” and
his fear of sinking into obscurity and death.

In Hazlitt’s lectures Keats would have heard the critic both praise
and attack the new naturalism of Wordsworth, forcing him in his
letters to consider his own position. In late December 1817 Keats
met Wordsworth himself, through Haydon, who the year before had
sent him a Keats sonnet, “Great spirits now on earth are
sojourning,” which Wordsworth admired. One of these meetings
was social gathering Haydon dubbed his “Immortal Dinner,”
attended by Keats, Wordsworth, Lamb, Reynolds, and others. Here
Keats read his “Hymn to Pan” from Endymion, Wordsworth
pronouncing it “a very pretty piece of Paganism.” Although it is not
clear that Wordsworth meant to belittle the verse, the tone of
condescension was not lost on Keats or his friends. Keats was not
overly hurt, however, since he saw Wordsworth several times more
in London, dining with his family on 5 January 1818. That
Wordsworth had revolutionized poetry Keats never doubted; but his
sense of the man’s egotism did enforce his fear that contemporary
poetry, however truer to experience than the assured mythmaking of
a Milton, ran the risk of trivial or “obtrusive” self-absorption. In a
letter to Reynolds written 3 February 1818 after a visit to the
famous Mermaid Tavern (frequented by Ben Jonson, John Fletcher,
and Sir Francis Beaumont), he longed for a poetry of “unobtrusive”
beauty, “Let us have the old Poets, & Robin Hood.” He enclosed
his own “Lines on the Mermaid tavern,” and “Robin Hood“; but he
knew that in fact the modern situation worked against poetry of
unself-conscious grandeur.

For the time being, he was perplexed, and his poetry proceeded
slowly. He continued to prepare Endymion for the press. The winter
months were full of social activity, with visits to Haydon, dinner at
the Hunts with the Shelleys and Peacock, and evenings at the
theater. In early March, however, his brother George arrived in
London to see Abbey, leaving Tom ill and unattended. Keats
departed at once to stay with him in Teignmouth, Devonshire,
where he remained until May. With Tom feverish and coughing,
with the news that George had decided to immigrate to America,
with his sense of being obliged to be far from the stimulation of
London but fearful of losing both his brothers, these were sad
months. Poetically, as Endymion was finished and a new
poem, Isabella, begun, it was a time of intense introspection and
transition marking Keats’s emergence as a poet whose most
authentic subject would be the difficulties of writing romance itself,
the genre paradigmatic for Keats of the transforming power of art,
of the simple wonder of storytelling. Romance also implies a quest
for closure, for a realized (or at least clearly envisioned) dream, and
Keats questioned whether modern poetry can embody such belief.

The romance he wrote in March 1818, Isabella, based on a tale of

Boccaccio, is an uneven poem, and though some of his
contemporaries (including Lamb) admired it, Keats came to dislike
it. It is best thought of as an experiment in tone, teetering uneasily
between poignant, romantic tragedy and a dry, uneasy, narrational
pose. This poem is a first attempt—and an interesting one—at that
extraordinary poise he would achieve between romance and
disillusionment almost a year later in The Eve of St. Agnes. But his
mood in March is reflected in a letter to Reynolds on the twenty-
fifth, containing a verse epistle, “Dear Reynolds,” in which he is
most deeply suspicious of “Imagination brought / Beyond its proper
bound,” that makes real life seem painful and cold, “spoils the
singing of the Nightingale.” He can no longer be lifted by romance:
“I saw too distinct into the core / Of an eternal fierce destruction.”
He was uneasy with the tale he is telling in Isabella. The story from
Boccaccio is simple, and Keats made few changes: Isabella, living
with her two merchant brothers, loves Lorenzo, a clerk. The
brothers, vile and materialistic, murder Lorenzo and bury him in the
forest. Guided by Lorenzo’s ghost, Isabella discovers the body,
exhumes it, severs the head, buries it in a pot of basil, and, weeping
over the plant until her brothers take it from her, she dies mad.
Again, the interest here is in Keats’s tone: he resists the tendency to
sentimentality, displaying real compassion for the victim of greed,
but also lingering with bizarre interest (“Ah! wherefore all this
wormy circumstance?” he asks at one point) on the realistic
elements of physical decay and psychological derangement. And
the lamentations (“O Melancholy, linger here awhile!”) are carried
on with an excess that borders on arch humor. Keats later
dismissed Isabella as “mawkish”; most likely he soon saw that the
poem revealed awkwardly his growing self-consciousness about the
complexity of romance to the modern sensibility. But did this
realization mean the modern poet could not write poetry of “vision”
or “grandeur?”
This question is the challenge to his career, as he takes it up in a
long, remarkable letter to Reynolds on 3 May 1818. The letter is
critical for understanding Keats’s mature thought. The letter takes
for granted the general view of the Hunt-Shelley circle of
progressives that there is “a grand march of intellect,” that the arts
advance with the development of knowledge, and that both art and
science, “by widening speculation... ease the Burden of the
Mystery.” Like Hunt and Shelley, Keats expressed ambivalence
about Wordsworth, whose great genius had expressed the modern,
secular sensibility yet seemed too “circumscribed” to celebrate
either the era’s buoyant optimism or its new scientific skepticism in
a visionary myth. (Keats, of course, knew the Wordsworth of the
reactionary Excursion, published in 1814, but not of The Prelude,
first published in 1850.) Keats was uncertain “whether Miltons
apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing
further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in
truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main
region of his song.” Keats felt that for Milton religious faith came
easily, with the great “emancipation” of the Reformation; but
Wordsworth’s poetry had greater potential depth if perhaps more
limited scope, the awakening of the soul to knowledge of its
suffering. “Here,” wrote Keats, “I must think Wordsworth is deeper
than Milton,” though perhaps that depth is forced on him by his
place in intellectual history. Keats saw the working through of this
challenge as his place in history as well.

If this conception of “modern” literature derived from progressives

such as Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley, and Peacock, nevertheless, Keats
brought to it his own distrust of their utopianism and his sense of
tragedy cutting across the Promethean aspirations of the individual
artist. Moreover, his goal was a kind of aesthetic detachment or
“disinterestedness” that could transform pathos into a real, tragic
vision, the Negative Capability he suspected Wordsworth lacked.
He seems to have discovered that the way to Negative Capability
was an arduous one, a descent into pain rather than ascent into
romance. Using one of his best-known metaphors, he described
human life as both he and Wordsworth perceived it: “I compare
human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I
can only describe…—The first we step into we call the infant or
thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not
think…” From this state of innocence we are impelled into the
“Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” where knowledge is exhilarating
but soon discloses that “the World is full of Misery and Heart-
break, Pain, Sickness and oppression,” and the chamber darkens.
The Wordsworth of “Tintern Abbey” explored the dark chambers of
experience, and “Now, if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall
explore them.” As for the aesthetic result, the possibility of such
humanizing producing great poetry, that can be judged only by
experience itself, for “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until
they are proved upon our pulses.” The letter is remarkable indeed
for its sense of poetic “mission,” but equally striking is Keats’s
sense that poetry in his era would become a questioning of its own
processes of interpreting and articulating concrete experience.

On these matters he would meditate the better part of the summer,

and though he wrote little throughout these months, these would
now be his dominant concerns. One can see them in his great
poem Hyperion, begun in October. In June Tom seemed better, and
Keats decided to accompany Charles Brown on a walking tour of
the Lake District and Scotland. Keats hoped this would be the first
of a series of travels in England and abroad to prepare him to write.
The trip through the Lake country was invigorating; Keats and
Brown energetically hiked in the mountains around Rydal and
Ambleside. In the evenings Keats wrote long journal letters to Tom
filled with natural detail and excited purpose: “I shall learn poetry
here,” he wrote amid the rocks and waterfalls, “and shall henceforth
write more than ever…” In Scotland the weather turned rainy and
chill, and Keats became ill with a sore throat that would plague him
for months after. This illness was not connected to his later
tuberculosis, but for the next year he would have occasional
recurrences of the sore throat. Though he was always aware of the
consumption that seemed to curse his family, and his bouts with
illness this year were often depressing, there is no reason to believe
he thought at this time that these sore throats were dangerous or that
his poetic career would be cut short.

In early August, leaving Brown in Scotland, Keats returned home to

Hampstead to find his brother Tom seriously ill with tuberculosis.
In June, George, now married, had immigrated to America to try his
luck as a farmer (after several inevitable disasters he did prosper, in
the 1830s, as a miller in Louisville, Kentucky); Keats was now
alone with Tom, almost constantly, until his death on 1 December.
But throughout the autumn of 1818 he began composing his most
brilliant work yet, a poem even his critics saw as a major
achievement, Hyperion.

Keats’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate has observed that the year
that began with the fragment epic Hyperion “may be soberly
described as the most productive in the life of any poet of the past
three centuries.” One senses, too, in this annus mirabilis, an
unprecedented engagement with three centuries of literary
convention, a stretching out and probing of the limits of epic, ode,
pastoral, and romance that realigns these forms with Keats’s
modern sense of an uncanny reciprocity between myth and history,
fantasy and experience, noble aspiration and tragic disillusionment.
This is the stuff of Hyperion, and its interest is its fresh engagement
with these issues, as they cluster around a traditional Western icon:
the fall into suffering of the mighty or good and the hope for
compensatory redemption. Hyperion tells the story of the fall of the
Titans and their replacement by the Gods, more beautiful than the
Titans by virtue of their superior knowledge, and, so, by
implication, their insight into the suffering of humanity.
The epic begins not with the battle between Titans and Gods but
with its aftermath. The opening lines are as solemn and subdued as
any Keats wrote: “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale / Far sunken
from the healthy breath of morn, / Far from the fiery noon, and
eve’s one star, / Sat grayhaired Saturn, quiet as a stone.” All the
Saturnians have fallen into a dark, still world, where time itself
creeps slowly into their dawning senses. All but Hyperion have
fallen, and some hope he will lead a revolt against the upstart Jove
and prevent Apollo from directing the sun’s course. Like so many
romantic epics, however, this one begins with an extraordinary
sense of stasis, of emotional confusion, pain, and paralysis from
which there is no apparent exit. The speeches of the fallen Titans
are useless. Saturn is helpless and confused; Thea, his wife, can
only grieve; Enceladus counsels war but can do no more than
bluster; and Oceanus delivers a key speech (modeled on Ulysses’
speech on degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida) in which
he sees history as an ordered, inevitable progress that leaves behind
much that is beautiful in favor of a greater beauty and perfection.
Hyperion tries in vain to force the sun to rise but falls back in
impotent grief. Finally, Apollo is born a god through the most
painful vision of tragic knowledge, and “with fierce convulse /
Die[s] into life.” The fragment breaks off here.
The most direct source for this council of fallen Titans is, of
course, Milton‘s Paradise Lost (1667), and Keats’s blank-verse epic
is, at least partly, “Miltonic.” But the differences are great; Keats’s
verse does not often, in its densely beautiful descriptions, subtle
assonances, and emphasis on the verse line, resemble the heavier
Latinate Miltonic syntax. But more important, Keats’s victims
begin unable to define their plight or even comprehend how they
differ from gods and came to fall. Their fall is in the nature of some
cosmic process, echoing the Romantic age’s fascination with
historical revolutionary forces (the parallel to Napoleon and the
French Revolution has been suggested), with lost golden ages
succeeded by self-conscious, demythologized modernity. The
reader also understands the personal relevance to Hyperion of
Keats’s conception of the modern poet, born to Apollo’s radiance
by his identification with human suffering. The fall into self-
consciousness would itself be redemptive if it formed the soul of a
poet, whose creation of beauty is the more intense for his having
felt and transcended tragic pain and the loss of faith.
Yet the poem proved too problematic, and for many reasons by
April 1819 Keats had given it up. As many critics have noted, Keats
may have attempted a cool, “disinterested” sympathy with both
Hyperion and Apollo, but there were elements of himself in the
suffering of both that were hard to overcome. If Apollo’s
knowledge deifies him, Hyperion’s more passive suffering and dark
bewilderment are tragically compelling. What would be the
dramatic focus of the poem? As Keats nursed his consumptive
brother Tom, he must have felt the difficulties of rising to Negative
Capability—even its moral impossibility in the face of Tom’s dying
agony. What good, really, to speak of either inevitable human
progress or the birth of a poet in the face of such pain? This indeed
would be the subject of Hyperion when Keats attempted to revise it
in summer 1819 as The Fall of Hyperion.
Keats had spent the autumn almost constantly with Tom and saw
few of his friends. On 1 December 1818, the day of Tom’s death,
Charles Brown invited Keats to come live with him at Wentworth
Place, now the Keats House, Hampstead. It was a double house
Brown had built with his friend Charles Dilke, who lived with his
wife in one half. In the previous summer while he was away, Brown
rented his side of the house to a widow, Mrs. Frances Brawne, and
her three children, the oldest of whom, Fanny, was just eighteen.
They later continued to visit the Dilkes at Wentworth. Here,
probably in November, Keats met Fanny. This house, with Brown a
constant companion, and the Dilkes and later Fanny and her mother
renting next door, would be Keats’s last real home in England.

Keats’s relationship to Fanny Brawne has tantalized generations of

lovers of his poetry. Unfortunately, some key aspects of that
relationship are, and will likely remain, obscure. It seems that on 25
December 1818 they declared their love; they were engaged
(though without much public announcement) in October 1819. But
Keats felt he could not marry until he had established himself as a
poet—or proved to himself he could not. What Fanny felt is hard to
know. Keats burned all but her last letters, which were buried with
him. She later married and lived most of her life abroad; her written
remarks about Keats reveal little about her feelings. From Keats’s
letters we get a picture of a lively, warm-hearted young woman,
fashionable and social. She respected Keats’s vocation but did not
pretend to be literary.

Readers of Keats’s letters to her are moved—or shocked—by their

frank passion, their demands upon a sociable young girl for
seriousness and attention to a suffering, dying, lonely man, insecure
in all his achievements, asking only for her saving love. But it
would be wrong to judge Keats (or Fanny) by the letters of 1820,
written by a Keats at times desperate and confused, feverish and
seriously ill. Almost certainly, as would have been conventional in
their day for a couple so uncertain of their future, their relationship
was not sexual. But it was passionate and mutual, certainly
becoming the central experience of intense feeling in both their
lives. It was to Fanny he addressed one of his most direct,
passionate love poems, “Bright Star,” which she copied out in a
volume of Dante that Keats gave her in April 1819, but which may
have been written four or five months earlier. Even here, however,
the intensity of experience is not simple: humans may desire the
“stedfastness” of the stars only in a paradoxical “sweet unrest,” an
ecstasy of passion both intense and annihilating, a kind of “swoon
to death,” fulfilling but inhumanly “unchangeable.”

Keats explores these antinomies of human desire in one of his finest

and best-loved long poems, The Eve of St. Agnes, a romance in
Spenserian stanzas written in January 1819. The story
recalls Romeo and Juliet, though its details are based on several
traditional French romances (see Robert Gittings, John Keats,
1968). In Keats’s hands the story itself is less important than what,
through a highly self-conscious art, it becomes, a meditation on
desire and its fulfillment, on wishes, dreams, and romance. It is
framed by the coldness of eternity, by an ancient Beadsman whose
frosty prayers and stony piety contrast with the fairytale-like revelry
and warm lights within. The heroine, Madeline, does not mix with
the company but ascends to her own kind of dream, the
superstitious wish that, by following various rites on this St. Agnes’
Eve, her future husband will appear in her dreams. Porphyro, of
some feuding clan, has crept into the party, and is aided by Angela,
the old nurse, in a “strategem”: he will sneak into her room and
fulfill the dream, wakening her to his warm, real presence. He does
so, after watching her undress and sleep, spreading before her a
feast of delicacies (rather magically), and easing her into a
wakefulness instinct with romance. The lovers flee into the cold
storm; and suddenly the poem shifts to a long historical vision, the
tale acknowledged as a story far away and long ago, the Beadsman
himself cold and dead.
The moment of Madeline’s awakening is a crucial one, pointing out
the poem’s central dilemma. Porphyro must waken her to his real
presence, but his fulfillment also depends on his “melting” into her
dream. The moment is typical of so many romantic “falls” from
innocence to experience: the consummation of their love “is no
dream,” says Porphyro, but Madeline weeps in fear that he has
betrayed her. “Sweet dreamer!” Porphyro then responds, “‘tis an
elfin storm from faery land,” into which he will carry her to be his
bride, “o’er the southern moors.” In the nineteenth century, Hunt
and others admired the rich pictorial beauty, the beautiful contrasts
of warmth and chill, sensuality and religion, color and gray. Today
we see the poem more as a great achievement not only in style but
also in thoughtful and carefully balanced tone. Some modern
critics, including Earl Wasserman, have the story arguing for
success of imagination and warm love over cold piety; others, such
as Jack Stillinger, have argued that Keats meant to debunk the
conventions of fairy tale by suggesting that Porphyro’s motive is a
rather sinister seduction. But most critics today see the poem as an
extraordinary balance of these opposing forces, shrewdly and at
times playfully self-aware of its own conventions, leading the
reader to a continuous series of mediations between artifice and
reality, dream and awakening. Finally, waking life seems to require
some degree of enchantment to be humanly fulfilling; yet dreaming,
being “taken in”—as one is by the rich tapestry of The Eve of St.
Agnes—is precarious, and the deeper one sleeps the ruder one’s
awakenings.
This dialectical probing of enchantment, of the always-threatened
artifice by which imagination seeks its fulfillment in the world,
initiates Keats’s most profound meditations in the spring of 1819.
The dangers of enchantment deepen in the haunting, beautifully
suggestive ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written 21 or 28
April 1819, and published in a slightly altered version by Hunt in
his Indicator of 10 May 1820. Here a knight-at-arms is seduced by
a strange, fairylike woman, reminiscent of Morgan Le Fay or
Merlin’s Niniane, and in the midst of this enchantment a warning
dream comes to him from other lost princes and warriors. But his
awakening from her does him little good; he wanders “palely” on
“the cold hill’s side,” where “no birds sing,” a world as empty of
charm as the fay’s was empty of real life. The poem has been seen
as allegorical of Keats’s ambivalent feelings for Fanny Brawne or
for poetry itself. More fundamental, though, is Keats’s growing
sense, here and in his letters, of the dark ironies of life, that is, the
ways in which evil and beauty, love and pain, aspiration and
finitude, are not so much “balanced” as interwoven in ways that
resist philosophical understanding. The more we imagine beauty the
more painful our world may seem—and this, in turn, deepens our
need for art.
The great odes of the spring and fall—Ode to Psyche, Ode to a
Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To
Autumn (written in September), Ode on Indolence (not published
until 1848, and often excluded from the group as inferior)—do not
attempt to answer these questions. They rather explore the ironies
of our attempts to answer them and of poetry’s attempts to
articulate them. The order of the odes has been much debated; it is
known that Ode to Psyche was written in late April, Ode to a
Nightingale probably in May, and To Autumn on 19 September
1819, but although Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode on
Melancholy are assumed to belong to May, but no one can be
certain of any order or progression. In style and power the odes
represent Keats’s finest poetry; indeed, they are among the greatest
achievements of Romantic art.
The myth of Psyche—the mortal who is loved by Eros himself and
who, after many trials, is deified—was well known in Peacock and
Hunt’s circle, its allegorical implications much discussed. Briefly,
for Keats, who read the tale in Apuleius and in a contemporary
poem by Mary Tighe, Psyche, the human spirit, becomes a goddess
late, after the older gods, the Olympians, have already “faded.” In
Keats’s Ode to Psyche the poet initially has a vision that seems to
be a dream: as he wanders “thoughtlessly” he comes upon Psyche
and Eros making love. But for a modern poet such visions do not
come unself-consciously—”Surely I dreamt to—day, or did I see /
... ?” For Keats, as for Shelley and Peacock, Christianity had
destroyed the naive visionary power of a mythic relation to nature.
But, perhaps, a new kind of humanist paganism was possible to a
modern world of self-consciousness and secular knowledge,
emptied of Christian orthodoxy. Psyche, the human soul, is deified
“Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,” but perhaps may be
made present to the poet through the hard, painful work of growing
self-awareness. The poem concludes with the goddess humanized
and internalized, her temple now to be built, “In some untrodden
region of my mind.” There the poet will labor amid “branched
thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain” in a garden prepared for
her appearance. Thus the poem turns from its questioned but
spontaneous vision to a hope for a return of Psyche in a prepared
consciousness. While Apuleius’s Psyche met Eros in a darkened
room, Keats will provide “A bright torch, and a casement ope at
night, / To let the warm Love in!” Ode to Psychehas been
understood in the context of Keats’s earlier notions of the modern
poet, for whom Christian faith in otherworldly rewards can no
longer provide a justification for human suffering. Now an
openness to nature and erotic love, and a sense of the value of self-
consciousness to the spirit can alone produce mature art: “Do you
see not how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an
Intelligence and make it a soul?” he wrote to his brother in the letter
of 21 April 1819 in which he enclosed this ode.
But despite the sense of achieved conclusion, Ode to Psyche begins
with a question and ends with a hope. The unself-conscious and
delightful initial vision can only be expectantly invoked. The whole
notion that art or imagination may provide some middle ground
between the gods and humanity is questioned in the greatest and
most complex of Keats’s lyrics, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to
a Nightingale. Though Keats had worked hard and long on Ode to
Psyche, the Nightingale ode, if Charles Brown’s memory is correct,
was written with amazing speed. He recalled that Keats, one
morning in the spring, on hearing a nightingale’s song, “took his
chair from the breakfast table to the grass—plot under a plum tree,
where he sat for two or three hours.” Brown later saw him stuff
behind his books some papers which proved to be his poem. In a
sense the spontaneous joy of the bird’s song recalls the visionary
realm of Ode to Psyche; but in this poem, the “pleasant pain” of
self-awareness is not so pleasant, and the transcendent is both
elusive and perhaps inapplicable to the human. Ode to a
Nightingale begins not with a vision but with a dull, unexplained
pain, not a pain at all but a vague “ache” of emptiness and “drowsy
numbness.” Although we expect the bird’s joyful singing to inspire
and regenerate the poet, it does not, or at least not in any simple
way. Instead what follows is a troubled meditation, one of the
richest and most compressed in English poetry, on the power of
human imagination to meet joy in the world and transform the soul.
In Ode to a Nightingale, the poet attempts to flee the “weariness,
the fever, and the fret,” of our tragic existence, “Where youth grows
pale, and spectre—thin, and dies,” first through an ecstasy of
intoxication and then “on the viewless wings of Poesy,” through
imagination itself. In the crucial and difficult middle section of the
poem, the mind attempting both to transcend life and remain aware
of itself becomes lost in a dark wild, an “embalmed darkness” of
fleeting sensations that suggests not escape but its very opposite,
death. But the nightingale—or, rather, its song as the imagination
elaborates upon it—is immortal, and in “ancient days” belonged to
a world of enchantment. It is the same song, “that oft—times hath /
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas,
in faery lands forlorn.” With these beautiful words the poem turns
about, the word forlorn shocking the poet into awareness. The
beauty of an imagined “long ago” suggested by this word (forlorn =
“long ago”) turns by a sad pun (forlorn = “sad”) into a remarkable
moment of pained self-consciousness. The bird flies off, and “the
fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. /
... / Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I
wake or sleep?” The poem ends by dismantling its own illusion.
That illusion, or trope, is that imagination, by creating permanence
and beauty, may allow the individual himself a transcendence of the
mind’s fleeting sensations, like the bird’s song. But imagination
needs temporality to do its work. It then tantalizes us with a desire
to experience the eternity of the beauty we create. But again, no real
experience is possible to us—as the central stanzas suggest—apart
from time and change. Imagination seems to falsify: the more the
poet presses the bird to contain, the more questionable this
imaginative projection becomes. For Keats, an impatience for truth
only obscures it. If art redeems experience at all it is in the beauty
of a more profound comprehension of ourselves (not of a
transcendent realm), of the paradoxes of our nature. To expect art to
provide a more certain closure is to invite only open questions or
deeper enigmas. In Ode on a Grecian Urn this theme is explored
from the perspective not of a natural and fleeting experience (the
bird song) but of a work of pictorial art, a timeless rendering of a
human pageant.
Perhaps more has been written on this poem, per line, than any
other Romantic lyric. And today it is perhaps the best—known and
most—often-read poem in nineteenth-century literature. No one
knows whether Keats had in mind a particular urn: it is known that
he drew or traced a vase portrayed in a volume of
engravings, Musée Napoléon , that he saw at Haydon’s; and
certainly his visits to the British Museum provided other examples
as well. The poem seems to be an imaginative creation of an
artwork that serves as an image of permanence. Though the urn
depicts a passionate scene of dance and erotic pursuit, it itself
remains a “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” transcendent and
calm. Probing the apparent timelessness of pictorial art is the action
of the poem’s speaker, as he attempts to force some meaning from
the form. But it is in the nature of poetry, unlike painting—a
distinction we know Keats often debated with Haydon—to create
its meaning sequentially. The poet thus imagines a narrative, albeit
one frozen by the pictorial medium: “Fair youth, beneath the trees,
thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.”
This seems to be a moment, like that of the “Bright Star” sonnet, of
eternal consummation: “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....” And yet, as
most critics would agree, the mawkishness of the repeated “happy”
reveals the strained paradox by which the imagined narrative
develops. Human happiness requires fulfillment in a world of
process and inevitable loss. The lovers are “forever panting,” since
fulfillment outside of temporal process is a contradiction forced on
the urn by the very logic of the speaker’s questioning. The further
the questions are pushed the more they seem to reveal only the
artifice of the questioner, not the urn’s hidden truth.
In the poem’s fourth stanza the poet imagines a deserted town
whose people had provided the urn its images but who are
themselves forever silent, dead, unknown. As in the Nightingale
ode, the poet’s attempt to imagine a timeless realm ends in his
facing a desolation, an absence of human life. And again, wordplay
restores a thoughtful distance between speaker and object, in this
case the oxymoron “Cold pastoral!” and the witty puns on “brede”
and “overwrought” revealing the paradox informing the poem all
along. There follow, however, the most debated lines in Keats’s
poetry, the sudden, concluding speech to the suffering generations
of mankind from the silent urn,” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—
that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (the
punctuation of the lines is significant for interpretation but disputed:
see Stillinger’s edition). Because the urn has revealed more of the
mysterious incommensurability between human truth and eternal
beauty, the lines have seemed to some critics an awkward intrusion
on the poem’s studied indeterminacy. Others see the lines
dissolving all doubts in an absolute aestheticism that declares the
power of art to transform painful truths into beauty. Still others
have found them an appropriately riddling oracle to questions that
art cannot answer with consecutive reasoning, thus calming the
speaker’s anxious probing. This critical debate itself testifies to
the dramaticrichness of the poem’s debate, for the poet, with wit
and irony, has imagined a response fully appropriate and articulate
from the urn’s eternal perspective, but nonetheless from the human
perspective riddling and as elusive as the initial silence.
In the Ode on Melancholy the subject is not the ironies of our
experience of art but of intense experience itself. Melancholy is not
just a mood associated with sad objects; in this poem, it is the half-
hidden cruel logic of human desire and fulfillment. In our temporal
condition the most intense pleasure shades off into emptiness and
the pain of loss, fulfillment even appearing more intense as it is
more ephemeral. Keats’s thinking, then, had matured with
remarkable speed from the poet of Endymion, for whom a poetry of
intense sensation was itself a model of transcendence. His maturing
irony had developed into a re-evaluation and meditative probing of
his earlier concerns, the relation of art and the work of imagination
to concrete experience. But the odes also show supreme formal
mastery: from the play of rhyme (his ode stanza is a brilliantly
compressed yet flexible development from sonnet forms), to
resonance of puns and woven vowel sounds, the form itself
embodies the logic of a dialogue among conflicting and
counterbalancing thoughts and intuitions.
It has often been pointed out that the thinking in Ode on
Melancholy on the paradox of desire emerges as much from Keats’s
experience as from abstract meditation. By May 1819 Keats’s
relationship to Fanny Brawne was strained by her again moving
next door, intensifying his frustration and anger at himself that he
could not provide for her and marry her. He must have felt that he
could never have a sexual relationship with her or a “normal”
married life while his career, and soon his health, was so uncertain.
Adding to this concern, in June, were severe financial pressures,
including news that George’s wife was pregnant and the couple in
dire need as they tried to establish themselves in America. Keats
considered giving poetry a last try, but returned all the books he had
borrowed and thought of becoming a surgeon, perhaps on a ship.
Brown persuaded him to make one more attempt at publishing, and
he wrote to Haydon, “My purpose now is to make one more attempt
in the Press if that fail, `ye hear no more of me’ as Chaucer says...”
In July he left for Shanklin, the Isle of Wight, where he would stay
with his ailing friend, James Rice, to begin his last and most intense
session of writing.
Keats was ill this summer with a sore throat, and it is likely that the
early stages of tuberculosis were beginning. His letters to Fanny
Brawne became jealous, even tormented. But throughout the
summer he wrote with furious concentration, working on his rather
bad verse tragedy Otho the Great, which Brown had concocted as a
scheme to earn money, and completing Lamia, his last full-length
poem.
The plot of this difficult poem came from Robert Burton’s Anatomy
of Melancholy (1621), which Keats had been reading in the spring.
The treatment, however, fraught with double-edged ironies, is
Keats’s own. A young man, Lycius, falls in love with a beautiful
witch, Lamia, who is presented with real sympathy. She leads
Lycius away from his public duties into an enchanted castle of love.
But at their marriage banquet Lamia withers and dies under the cold
stare of the rationalist philosopher Apollonius, who sees through
her illusion, and Lycius, too, dies as his dream is shattered. The
issues, of course, recall The Eve of St. Agnes, but here the balance
of beautiful but destructive enchantment / harsh but public and solid
reality is portrayed with dramatic directness and power. One’s
sympathies are divided between two characters, the extremely
rational and the extremely enchanted, and one’s feelings about
Lamia herself are divided, depending on whether one adopts her
immortal perspective or Apollonius’s human one. To many readers,
it has seemed that these unresolvable ironies imply a bitterness
about love and desire. It is clear, though, that Keats sought to
present his story without sentimentality or the lush beauty of
romance.
Yet Keats was striving for some sense of resolution in these
months, as autumn approached. He turned back to Hyperion with
the thought of justifying the life of the poet as both self-
conscious and imaginative, committed to the real, public sphere
even while his imagination soothes the world with its dreams. This
strange, troubling, visionary fragment, The Fall of
Hyperion (unpublished until 1856), is his most ambitious attempt to
understand the meaning of imaginative aspiration. It is a broad
Dantesque vision, in which the poet himself is led by Moneta,
goddess of knowledge, to the painful birth into awareness of
suffering that had deified the poet-god Apollo in the earlier version.
Moneta’s tragic wisdom challenges the poet in his vision with his
own deepest fears, that imagination is the source of misery,
conjuring ideals that for mortals only cause pain. If so, the whole
“modern” romantic conception of imaginative life would be a snare,
leaving mankind empty of real belief in favor of fragile illusions.
Better not to “fall,” to remain an unself-conscious laborer for
human good. But while the poet accepts that poets are not as
exalted as the socially committed who directly reform the world, he
argues that surely “a poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all
men.” Moneta distinguishes the poet from the mere “dreamer”
whose imagination feeds only on its own idealisms (like Lycius
in Lamia); true poets have awakened their imaginations to tragic
pain while yet striving to redeem sorrow with visionary acceptance
and compassion. Yet the climactic vision of the poem, the poet’s
parting of Moneta’s veils, reveals a withered face of continuous
dying, of unredeemed tragic knowledge. A far darker poem
than Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperionachieves no resolutions but
rather presents both Keats’s most tragic vision and his fragile but
most clearly expressed hope for the redemptive imagination.
Both this poem and his last great lyric, To Autumn, seem, in their
nearly opposite ways, to summarize the themes of Keats’s entire
career. Written 19 September 1819, at Winchester, where he and
Brown had moved in August, it was inspired by a walk in the chill,
crisp countryside: “I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—
Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble
plain looks warm”—he wrote to Reynolds of that day. The ode is
Keats’s most perfect poem; as Bate says, generations of readers
“have found it one of the most perfect poems in English.” Written
with the same controlled visionary power in the face of death as The
Fall of Hyperion, the tone of the ode is, however, an acceptance of
process, setting the human experience of time within the larger
cycles of nature. Notably, the speaker here never appears as a
subject, except implicitly as a calming presence, asking questions
but allowing the sights, sounds, and activities of the season itself to
answer them. The poem’s three stanzas move through a process of
ripening, then reaping and gleaning and pressing, to a final vision of
“soft-dying day” still alive with sounds of bleating lambs and
singing birds. The richness of sound creates an intensity of ripeness:
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of
the maturing sun”; note too the words swell, plump, budding,
and o’er-brimmed. But the intensity here, unlike that of Ode to
Melancholy, does not end in extinction and painful memory. Such
subjectivity is avoided; the season is mythologized and imagined as
herself a part of the rhythms of the year. The final stanza
momentarily recalls the feeling of loss: “Where are the songs of
spring? Ay, where are they?” But in immediate response, the poet
soothes the goddess figure herself with the injunction, “Think not of
them, thou hast thy music too.” No singular loss is without
recompense, in the larger, essentially comic vision of nature’s
transforming, renewing power. In the last lines, the present-tense
verbs give a sense of an intense present that gathers up the past and
is impelled toward the future: “The red-breast whistles from a
garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Here,
for the first time in the odes, intense experience and mythological
vision achieve a poised, dialectical balance within a purely natural
context.
This poem would effectively mark the end of Keats’s poetic career.
He lived to see his new volume, which included the odes, published
as Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems in early
July 1820. The praise from Hunt, Shelley, Lamb, and their circle
was enthusiastic. In August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of
the Edinburgh Review, wrote a serious and thoughtful review,
praising not just the new poems but also Endymion. Other reviews,
particularly John Scott’s in the September 1820 London Magazine,
were suddenly respectful of the new power of his verse, particularly
of the odes and Hyperion, this last considered, in Keats’s
generation, his greatest achievement. The volume sold slowly but
steadily and increasingly in the next months. His odes were
republished in literary magazines. But by summer 1820, Keats was
too ill to be much encouraged.
The story of Keats’s last year makes sad reading. In the winter of
1819 he nearly decided to give up poetry and write for some
London review. He was often confused and depressed, worried
about money, often desperate with the pain of being unable to
marry Fanny Brawne, to whom he became openly engaged about
October. Dilke, Brown, and visitors to Wentworth Place became
concerned for his health and his state of mind: “from this period,”
wrote Dilke, “his weakness & his sufferings, mental & bodily,
increased—his whole mind & heart were in a whirl of contending
passions—he saw nothing calmly or dispassionately.” He even, on
the verge of concluding publishing arrangements with Taylor in
November, declared he would publish no more until he had
completed a new, greater poem (probably The Fall of Hyperion) or
perhaps a drama. But Keats continued to prepare his poems for
publication, and to work on The Fall of Hyperion and a new satiric
drama, The Jealousies (first published as The Cap and Bells), never
completed. Then, in February 1820, came the lung hemorrhage that
convinced him he was dying. Brown’s account is simple and
moving: “one night, at eleven o’clock, he came into the house in a
state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I
knew, was impossible.” Brown helped the feverish Keats to bed,
“and I heard him say,—‘That is blood from my mouth… Bring me
the candle Brown; and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it
stead-fastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of
countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know the colour
of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived in that
colour;—that drop of blood is my death warrant;—and I must die.’”
He would live little more than one year.
Despite some remissions in the spring, he continued to hemorrhage
in June and July. His friends were shaken, but in those days there
was no certain way to diagnose tuberculosis or to gauge its severity,
and there were hopes for his recovery. In the early summer he lived
alone in Kentish Town (Brown had rented out Wentworth Place),
where the Hunts, nearby, could look in on him. But living alone,
fearful and restless, trying to separate himself from Fanny Brawne
because of the pain thoughts of her caused him, he became more ill
and agitated. The Hunts took him in, as they had years before at the
beginning. He often walked past Well Walk, his last home with his
brothers; once, Hunt remembered, he wept “and told me he was
‘dying of a broken heart.’” He thought bitterly about the
disappointments of his brothers, writing to Brown in November,
“O, that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my
brothers!—then I might hope,—but despair is forced upon me as a
habit.” He soon left the Hunts’ after a quarrel and tried to return to
the house in Well Walk. But he was taken in, desperately ill, by
Fanny and Mrs. Brawne, and he spent his last month in England
being nursed in their home. He was advised to spend the winter in
Italy. In August, Shelley—who would write his beautiful
elegy Adonais for Keats and who himself would die in 1822,
drowned in the Gulf of Spezia with a copy of Keats’s 1820 poems
in his pocket—invited him to stay with him in Pisa. He declined,
but hoped to meet Shelley after a stay in Rome.
Keats left for Rome in November 1820, accompanied by Joseph
Severn, the devoted young painter who, alone in a strange country,
nursed Keats and managed his affairs daily until his death. They
took pleasant rooms on the Piazza di Spagna, and for a while Keats
took walks and rode out on a small horse. He tried to keep his
friend’s spirits up, and it is characteristic of the man that he was
always concerned for poor Severn. In his last weeks he suffered
terribly and hoped for the peace of death. He was in too much pain
to look at letters, especially from Fanny Brawne, believing that
frustrated love contributed to his ill health. He asked Severn to bury
her letters with him (it is not clear he did). Yet he thought always of
his friends and brothers. His last known letter, 30 November 1820,
asks Brown to write to his brother, and “to my sister—who walks
about my imagination like a ghost—she is so like Tom. I can
scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an
awkward bow. / God bless you! / John Keats .”

On the night of 23 February 1821, Keats died, peacefully, in

Severn’s arms. His last words were to comfort Severn: “Severn—
lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be
firm, and thank God it has come!” He was buried in the Protestant
Cemetery. He had requested that the stone bear no name, only the
words “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn and
Charles Brown honored his wishes but added these words above
Keats’s own epitaph: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a
YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness
of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these
Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone.” Brown later regretted
the addition.

Keats’s dying fears of persecution and eternal obscurity were

proved wrong in the generations to come. Even in 1820 and 1821
there were a few positive notices, such as the influential Francis
Jeffrey’s approving, if belated, essay in the Edinburgh Review, and
the obituary in the London Magazine (April 1921), which noted,
“There is but a small portion of the public acquainted with the
writings of this young man, yet they were full of high imagination
and delicate fancy.” His friends, particularly Hunt and Brown,
continued to collect materials and publish memoirs. In 1828 Hunt
wrote the first of his several biographical sketches, in his Lord
Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. The most complete
offering yet of Keats’s poetry, The Poetical Works of Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats (1829), published in Paris and Philadelphia,
contains a long memoir drawn from Hunt’s.
But most important to establishing Keats’s reputation was the
biography produced in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord
Houghton, a minor poet and essayist known and admired in literary
circles of the 1840s and 1850s. Brown, Severn, Clarke, Reynolds,
and others all contributed to his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains
of John Keats, which, whatever its flaws as a reliable scholarly
biography, was widely read and respected. Keats was thought of as
a poet whose talent, though its development was cut short, was the
equal of Shelley’s and Byron‘s.
By 1853 Matthew Arnold could speak of Keats as “in the school of
Shakespeare,” and, despite his weak sense of dramatic action and
his overly lush imagery was “one whose exquisite genius and
pathetic death render him forever interesting.” Yet it was just this
quality of lush, “pictorial” imagery that Victorians admired in
Keats, as reflected in popular paintings from his works by Pre-
Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poets such as Alfred
Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote of Keats’s
mastery of visual detail, his “instinct for the absolute expression of
absolute natural beauty.” Fascination with the sensuous surface of
his verse and a sentimental belief that Keats was a subjective
lyricist of sensitive feeling contributed to the Victorians’ admiration
of his poetry. Indeed, in 1857, Alexander Smith, in
the Encyclopædia Britannica (eighth edition) entry on Keats, could
proclaim, with some exaggeration, that “With but one or two
exceptions, no poet of the last generation stands at this moment
higher in the popular estimation, and certainly no one has in a
greater degree influenced the poetic development of the last thirty
years.”
Keats brought out the warmest feelings in those who knew him, and
that included people with a remarkable range of characters, beliefs,
and tastes. One can say without sentimentality or exaggeration that
no one who ever met Keats did not admire him, and none ever said
a bad—or even unkind—word of him. His close friends, such as
Brown, Clarke, and Severn, remained passionately devoted to his
memory all their lives. “On his deathbed in great emotion at his
cruel destiny he told me that his greatest pleasure had been the
watching the growth of flowers,” Severn remembered, more than
twenty years later. “There was a strong bias of the beautiful side of
humanity in every thing he did.”
“I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had
time I would have made myself remembered,” Keats wrote to
Fanny Brawne in February 1820, just after he became ill. In Keats’s
work the struggle with aesthetic form becomes an image of a
struggle for meaning against the limits of experience. His art’s very
form seems to embody and interpret the conflicts of mortality and
desire. The urgency of this poetry has always appeared greater to
his readers for his intense love of beauty and his tragically short
life. Keats approached the relations among experience, imagination,
art, and illusion with penetrating thoughtfulness, with neither
sentimentality nor cynicism but with a delight in the ways in which
beauty, in its own subtle and often surprising ways, reveals the
truth.
 Order By Title

 Order By Date Added

 Order By Hit

 New Poems
1. Otho The Great - Act Iv 3/29/2010

2. Otho The Great - Act V 3/29/2010

3. Sonnet Xiii. Addressed To Haydon 3/23/2010

4. Sonnet. Written Before Re-Read King Lear 3/23/2010

5. Sonnet. If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain'D 3/23/2010

6. Otho The Great - Act Iii 3/29/2010

7. Sonnet Xiv. Addressed To The Same (Haydon) 3/23/2010

8. Sonnet Xiii. Addressed To Haydon 3/23/2010

 9. On Hearing The Bag-Pipe And Seeing 3/23/2010

10. Otho The Great - Act Ii 3/29/2010

11. Song. Written On A Blank Page In Beaumont And Fletcher's Works 3/23/2010

12. The Eve Of Saint Mark. A Fragment 3/23/2010

13. To A Cat 1/7/2015

14. Sonnet To John Hamilton Reynolds 3/23/2010

15. To George Felton Mathew 3/23/2010

16. Sonnet. A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode Of Paulo And Francesca 3/23/2010

17. Specimen Of An Induction To A Poem 3/23/2010

18. Sonnet Ix. Keen, Fitful Gusts Are 3/23/2010

19. What The Thrush Said. Lines From A Letter To John Hamilton Reynolds 3/23/2010

20. Lines Rhymed In A Letter From Oxford 3/23/2010

21. Translated From A Sonnet Of Ronsard 3/23/2010

22. Sonnet Xvi. To Kosciusko 3/23/2010

23. Sonnet Viii. To My Brothers 3/23/2010

Sonnet. Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucer's Tale Of 'The

24. 3/29/2010
Floure And The Lefe'
25. Spenserian Stanzas On Charles Armitage Brown 3/23/2010

26. To Charles Cowden Clarke 3/23/2010

27. The Devon Maid: Stanzas Sent In A Letter To B. R. Haydon 3/23/2010

Ode. Written On The Blank Page Before Beaumont And Fletcher's Tragi-
28. 3/23/2010
Comedy 'The Fair Maid Of The Inn'

29. Spenserian Stanza. Written At The Close Of Canto Ii, Book V, Of 3/23/2010

30. Sonnet Xvii. Happy Is England 3/23/2010

31. Sonnet. Written In Answer To A Sonnet By J. H. Reynolds 3/23/2010

32. Sonnet To Spenser 3/23/2010

33. Sonnet Xii. On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour 3/23/2010

34. Sonnet. On A Picture Of Leander 3/23/2010

35. Sonnet Xiv. Addressed To The Same (Haydon) 3/23/2010

36. Lines Written In The Highlands After A Visit To Burns's Country 3/23/2010

37. Sonnet. Written Upon The Top Of Ben Nevis 3/23/2010

38. Sonnet Xi. On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer 3/23/2010

39. On Receiving A Laurel Crown From Leigh Hunt 3/23/2010

40. King Stephen 3/23/2010

41.Sonnet To Homer3/23/2010

42.Sonnet: Before He Went3/23/2010

43.Sonnet Vi. To G. A. W.3/23/2010

44.On Visiting The Tomb Of Burns3/23/2010

45.Sonnet Iv. How Many Bards Gild The Lapses Of Time!3/23/2010

46.Sonnet To The Nile3/23/2010

47.The Cap And Bells; Or, The Jealousies: A Faery Tale -- Unfinished3/23/2010

48.Imitation Of Spenser3/23/2010

49.Sonnet. Written On A Blank Page In Shakespeare's Poems, Facing 'A Lover's

Complaint'3/23/2010

50.Sonnet On Sitting Down To Read King Lear Once Again3/23/2010

51.Fragment Of3/29/2010

52.Fragment Of An Ode To Maia. Written On May Day 18183/29/2010

53.Daisy's Song2/4/201654.Sonnet. On Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story Of

Rimini'3/23/201055.Two Or Three3/23/201056.Sonnet I. To My Brother
George3/23/201057.Lines On Seeing A Lock Of Milton's Hair3/23/201058.Stanzas To
Miss Wylie3/23/201059.Two Sonnets. To Haydon, With A Sonnet Written On Seeing
The Elgin Marbles3/23/201060.Sonnet Iii. Written On The Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt
Left Prison3/23/201061.Epistle To John Hamilton
Reynolds3/23/201062.Staffa3/23/201063.To ****3/23/201064.Written In The Cottage
Where Burns Was Born3/23/201065.Sonnet: After Dark Vapors Have Oppress'D Our
Plains3/23/201066.Sonnet Ii. To ******3/23/201067.To -------.3/23/201068.Fragment Of
'The Castle Builder.'3/23/201069.Sonnet V. To A Friend Who Sent Me Some
Roses3/23/201070.Stanzas. In A Drear-Nighted December3/29/201071.Sonnet: As
From The Darkening Gloom A Silver Dove3/23/201072.Extracts From An
Opera3/23/201073.Fragment. Where's The Poet?3/23/201074.The
Gadfly3/23/201075.Sonnet. To A Young Lady Who Sent Me A Laurel
Crown3/23/201076.Sonnet Vii. To Solitude3/23/201077.Sonnet To
Chatterton3/23/201078.Isabella; Or, The Pot Of Basil: A Story From
Boccaccio3/29/201079.Sonnet To Byron3/23/201080.On Receiving A Curious
Shell3/23/2010