John Keats (1795-1821)
Major Works: 1820: Hyperion,
Lamia, "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale,"
"Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence," "To Autumn"
"La Belle Dame sans Merci"; Written 1819, pub. 1856: The Fall of Hyperion.
Biographical Notes: Keats
was the son of a livery stable manager, and both his parents were dead by his
14th year, leaving the four surviving Keats children in the care of a tea merchant
who controlled the children's £8000 trust mainly to his own advantage.
After brief formal schooling, Keats was apprenticed four years to an apothecary
surgeon and then entered medical studies at Guy's Hospital. Despite financial
problems after he was licensed as an apothecary, Keats chose to earn his living
writing poetry. He became friends with a number of important poets and
artists and published poetry which received mild praise but did not sell well.
Keats was attacked in the press as one of the "Cockney school" of bad upstart
poets. When his brother, George, emigrated to America, Keats nursed his
consumptive brother, Tom, who died in 1818. Keats himself caught tuberculosis
and died at 26. He wrote seriously for only three and a half years, and
in the last five months he was physically able to work, Keats produced an astonishing
number of masterpieces: his 1820 collection of poems has often been called
the greatest single volume of poetry in the English language. In his day,
many viewed Keats's poetry as shockingly and inappropriately sensuous or voluptuous;
too, it was often thought dense and strange to the point of obscurity).
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, among others, saw Keats as the greatest poet of the 19th
century—today, many rank Keats alone with Milton and Shakespeare in raw,
natural poetic genius.
Notes: Why Keats is special
Keats
was a self-made poet; he determined that he wanted to be one of England's
greatest poets, and more than responding consciously to any "genius"
he recognized in himself, he applied himself to learning to write great poetry
until he accomplished his dream. His rapid development in poetic skill,
moving quickly through various poetic forms and influences, is clearly discernible
in his progress from relatively "bad" poetry influenced by his friend,
the radical activist and poet, Leigh Hunt, to the powerful productions of his
final efforts. (The "bad" poetry is considered "flowery and mawkish.")
Keats's
mature work reveals a highly sympathetic imagination—what he was inspired
by Hazlitt to recognize in Shakespeare as "negative capability."
Keats thought great poets are capable of negating their own identities,
ignoring the restraints of "reason" and "moral or rational judgment"
and throwing themselves wholly, empathetically into the characters and objects
they create—negative capability is the highest form of imaginative connection
with the external world. In Keats's words:
"[The] poetical Character
. . . has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it
enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low,
rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an
Iago as an Imogen. . . . A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in
existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually . . . filling some
other Body" (October 27, 1818 letter to Woodhouse).
Or, as Woodhouse paraphrased in a letter to Keats's publisher,
Taylor:
"The highest order
of Poet will . . . be able to throw his own soul into any object he sees or
imagines, so as to see feel be sensible of, & express, all that the object
itself wod see feel be sensible of or express—& he will speak out of
that object—so that his own self will be 'annihilated.'"
This
sense of "negative capability" is most evident in Keats's poetry through
his density of powerful, concrete imagery, which packs a great number of
things that can be visualized or vividly imagined through the other senses in
the short space of a few lines. Similarly, Keats's poetry is compactly dense
with specific suggestion and meaning. According to the experts, it is this
rich, complex poetic style that explains the "greatness" of Keats.
Keats's
best poetry combines intensity and control: intensity of feeling and passion,
as well as sensual imagery, controlled through the construction of carefully measured
and balanced lines and rhythms, the repetition and interplay of sounds (alliteration
and assonance), and in diction often emphasizing more suggestively "active"
words such as descriptive verbals and participles instead of adjectives—a
kind of "stillness in motion," as in "to load and bless/ With fruit
the vines that round the thatch-eves run;/ To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,/
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core" ("To Autumn").
Keats
scholar Jack Stillinger notes a recurrent motif in Keats's poetry of flight
or escape from reality into a "higher" imaginative or visionary realm
(dreams, poetic "trances," the supernatural, worlds of immortal gods,
fairies, etc.), evident particularly in longer works such as Endymion
and Lamia but present in most of Keats's major poems. Typically,
the imaginative "flight" ends with a return to reality, but the poem's
speaker or one of its main characters is changed by the experience, and now
possesses a new understanding or a new attitude towards both self and situation
(reminiscent of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's moments of revelation in nature).
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