Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

ummer walks at Hampstead-Holiday epistles from Margate-Return to London-First reading of Chapman's Homer-Date of the Chapman sonnet-Intimacy with Leigh Hunt-The Examiner: Hunt's imprisonment-His visit

the library-The intercoronation scene-Sonnets of Hun

eve of publishing his first volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit of medicine for that of poetry, declared his intention to his guardian, and ceased attending the hospitals without seeking or receiving the usual certificate of proficiency. For the first two or three months of this period, from the beginning of October 1815 till about the new year of 1816, Keats lodged alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and then for half a year or more with several other students over the shop of a tallow chandler named Markham1 in St Thomas's Street. Thence, in the summer or early autumn of 1816, leaving the near neighbourhood of the hospitals, he went to join his brothers in ro

ergency, and though hating the notion of practice evidently did not feel himself unqualified for it so far as knowledge went. He could not find in the scientific part of the study a satisfying occupation for his thoughts; and though a few years later, when he had realized that there is no kind of knowledge but may help to nourish a poet's mind, he felt unwilling to lose hold of what he had learned as apprentice and student, he was never caught by that special passion of philosophical curiosity which laid hold for a season on Coleridge and Shelley successively, and drew them powerfully towards the study of the mechanism and mysteries of the human frame. The practical responsibilities of the profession at the same

rom whom Keats will really, as all witnesses agree, have learnt the best of what he knew was the great dissector and anatomist, Astley Cooper, then almost in the zenith of his power as a lecturer and of his popular fame and practice. He is described as one of the handsomest and most ingratiating of men, as well as one of the most indefatigable and energetic, with an admirable gift of exposition made racy by a strong East Anglian accent; and it is on record that he took an interest in young Keats, and recommended him to the special care of his own dresser and namesake, George Cooper. It was in consequence of this recommen

readily acceded to. We were therefore constant companions, and the following is what I recollect of his previous history from conversation with him. Of his parentage I know nothing, for upon that subject I never remember his speaking, I think he was an orphan. He had been apprenticed to a Mr Hammond surgeon of Southgate from whence he came on the completion of his time to the hospitals. His passion, if I may so call it, for poetry was soon manifested. He attended lectures and went through the usual routine but he

o his mind the zenith of all his aspirations: the only thing worthy the attention of superior minds: so he thought: all other pursuits were mean and tame. He had no idea of fame or greatness but as it was connected with the pursuits of poetry, or the attainment of poetical excellence. The greatest men in the world were the poets and to rank among them was the

onversation on the merits of particular poets, but our tastes did not agree. He was a great admirer of Spenser, his Faerie Queene was a great favourite with him. Byron was also in favour, Pope he maintained was no poet, only a versifier. He was fond of imagery, the most trifling simi

w's Hospital who came often to see him, as they had formerly been intimate, but though old friends they did not cordially agree. Newmarsh or Newmarch (I forget which was his name) was a classical schola

rch and they frequently quarrelled. Whilst attending lectures he would sit and instead of copying out the lecture, would often scribble some doggrel rhymes among the notes of Lecture, particularly if he got hold of an

omen, win

y out, 'ho

o so, san

day of res

n he condescended to talk upon other subjects he was agreeable and intelligent. He was quick and apt at learning, when he chose to give

rake, indeed, but neither was he a puritan: his passions were strong in proportion to the general intensity of his being:

of surpassing beauty on his march through India, and reads like the beginning of an attempt to tell the story of the old French Lai d'Aristote in the style and spelling of an early-printed English prose romance,-possibly the Morte d'Arthure. Into his would-be archaic prose, luxuriantly describing the lady's beauty, Keats works in tags taken direct from Spenser a

ance all dreams

thought is of

n still lingering in Keats's imagination when he devised the epi

n to put down anatomy notes and Keats has followed. Beginning from both ends, he has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but f

er London Bridge, take the first turning to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door, which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as St Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your fingers.' Clarke seems to have complied promptly with this petition, and before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences. Keats's fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of verse. Some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year 1815, as Woman, when I behold thee, Happy is En

at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm fact we have to start with,-that Hunt printed in his paper, the Examiner, for May 5th, 1816, K

rit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appre

not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and accelerated st

the matter, as given about ten years after the even

conded 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. We read and walked together, and used to write verses of an evening on a g

ummer strolls there occur in his poetry of the next few months. The 'happy fields' where he had been rambling when he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt Hunt's statement that the 'little hill' from which Keats drank the summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem I stood

spiriting personal sympathies. To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In it he explains,

ght; and days on

rapidly-unw

y my dull, un

w, but that I'v

aught me all the

eet, the terse, t

h pathos, and wh

wels that elo

g like birds o

, and more, Milt

nd more, meek Eve'

e the sonnet s

max and then

me the grand

Atlas, stronge

e that more tha

he rapier-po

t epic was of

spanning all li

the veil from

ut the patrio

lfred, and the

rutus, that s

s head. Ah! ha

indness, what m

ments in my y

that now my

er these ben

r repay the f

et should these

the grass with

g time been my

ou would one day

erses not an

be so, what a

poetry of the past. The couplet about Spenser's vowels could scarcely be happier, and the next on Milton anticipates, though without

celebrated by him in a sonnet, classical now almost to triteness, which is his first high achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form. The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly, seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was printed in the Examiner for the fir

of the folio edition of Chapman's translation of Homer had been lent me. It was the property of Mr. Alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no sma

n them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with Helen, who is pointing o

nt Ithacus did to

till, and fix'd upo

g neither way, bu

ly doth affect. Of

judging), you woul

ample breast he gave

bout our ears like dr

ontend with him, though

n the opening of the third book; and the prodigious description

great hills near tremb

ving feet. Three s

as reach'd, but with

s dread

lysses, in the fifth book of the Odysseis, and I had the reward o

me, his both kne

hanging down, a

ostrils flowing,

se, and down h

d his heart throu

ck'd t'a labouri

eary w

im the couplet, in Pope's trans

nose the brin

ssitude lay al

ast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. We had

which lay on his table the next morning. His error is in remembering these circumstances as having happened when he and Keats first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815, whereas Keats's positive evidence above quoted shows that they did not really happen until a year later, after his return from his summer holiday in 1816.7 Before printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hunt had the satisfaction of hearing his own opinion of it and of some other manuscript poems of Keats confirmed by good judges. I quote his words for the sake of the excellent concluding phrase. '

. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the War Office: an occupation which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in order to take part in the conduct of the Examiner newspaper, then just founded by his brother John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince's flatterers, the Examiner at last broke bound

er an affectionate husband and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political persecution th

oughts as ble

ummer flowers

He, who feasts

servatories

m-the smiles th

se circling c

'd ones Heaven h

l all Mankind a

suffers withou

Spirit, that c

n-bars, its h

rs from his father's garden; and this was followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libert

convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. In revising this skit while he was in prison, Hunt modified some of his earlier verdicts, but in the main he let them stand. Moore and Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof; Coleridge and Wordsworth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more lenient terms than in the first edition) and dismissed. Hunt's notes are of still living interest as setting forth, at that pregnant moment of our literary history, the considered judgments of a kindly and accomplished critic on his contemporaries. Seen at a distance of a hundred years they look short-sighted enough, as almost all contemporary judgments must, and are coloured as a matter of course with party feeling, though not so grossly as was the habit of the hour. Since Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth had been transformed, first by the Terror and then by the aggressions of Bonaparte, from

oice to say them in, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. To the misfortune of himself and his friends, he had no notion of even attempting to balance income and expenditure, and was perfectly light-hearted in the matter of money obligations, which he shrank neither from receiving nor conferring,-only circumstances made him almost invariably a receiver. But men of sterner fibre and better able to order their affairs have often been much more ready than he was to sacrifice conviction to advantage, and his friends found more to admire in his smiling steadfastness under obloquy and persecution than to blame in his chronic incapacity to pay his way. Hardly anyone

.

ENRY LE

ING BY MAYER A

s of what he always persists in calling the 'French school,' the school of polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown. In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which this return sho

e. As to his success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his free and idiomatic-or as he elsewhere says 'unaffected, contemporaneous'-cast of language to supersede t

e companion o

ntleness befor

sense, readi

, every sweet t

seemed, when he

th his eyes wi

roll into som

s, upon the th

ould he think,

then, and perfe

st things this

oman in a

table enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for the last. At the climax, Hunt's version

t, and felt wit

hange, they ca

vra, with her f

celot when he ki

last, through e

d, scarce knowi

he could no m

mouth to mouth,

suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott's metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron's of Greece and the Levant,-contemporaries found something fresh and homefelt in Leigh Hunt's Rimini, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated, writes to Moore:-'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one-quaint here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed it to me.' And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem from Sir Henry Englefie

gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under th

I touch, and not

has haunted my yo

ng prospects, its c

hite houses, and

down, where the

ove him with ro

e season,-half su

een oaks-makes on

ighty murmur com

repeats his sho

e clouds lie ab

n the west, and

urprise that the wet weather has not brought a visit from C

thunder and l

ht have led you t

think your desert

o bad, there was

ive; for the night

h wet, and the pat

oldened by yout

lanthorns,-nor the

ee the bright sp

e or fell, was

seemed, pitching u

on us their brig

d a mind naturally unapt for dogma: ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognized their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this time was given to 'luxuriating' too effusively and fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever he liked in art, books, or nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception and acuteness of enjoyment which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and vitality of classic fable, a

ng the bookshelves. Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there' records a night of October or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers the life affectionatel

ch

oices had jus

silence, when

day, upon a c

's house who

temple. Round

eatures of the

es-cold and

h other. Happ

turity his

e fauns and sa

apples with

ingers, 'mid a

Then there ros

ble, and th

oaching fairly

holding her wh

sun-rise: two

raceful figures

ppings of a

hearing, eage

iquidity of

r picture, nym

Diana's tim

wny mantle d

dge, and keeps

iding crystal

s broad swelling

ge, and balan

eds; that now

t their undul

tepping from t

sight of Laura

er sweet face.

m was seen a

ngs, and from be

Poesy: from

things that I s

god and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or left: the same artist's 'Venus and Adonis': Stothard's 'Bathers' and 'Vintage,' his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura and her friend; Raphael's 'Poetry' from the Vati

leasan

n opening

s or that figure in a picture; how pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what

promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject, Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was The Grasshopper and the

of earth is

he said; and when he came to

ter morning,

ought a

m seized them over their wine to crown themselves 'after the manner of the elder bards.' Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in-conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs

ivy! I su

d that gives it,

ght, for 'tis

leaves feel! an

ad angles, lik

s! and how co

I lean, to f

reshness,-Fancy

ls, with smell of

y, and downwar

n cymbals, a

e, and many tr

h his bright ey

bride has of hi

ty feeling,

ed with leaves;

aded thought

ature's fingers

sacred, verd

allowed with th

bows to her

fancied trumpe

in us crowned. A

nquering wishe

lasting, love o

self, and ard

od befitting

gain, and haun

rts of the day; they are of slight account poe

LAUREL CROWN

flying swift

rthly has en

ic labyrinth

rtal thought

e kind poet

ious head a g

urel sprigs-'t

ious of suc

fleeting, and

I would have

n of what the w

crowns and b

un into most

any glories

IES WHO SA

e in the uni

an a wreath fr

o round the

ree sweet pair o

u will say t

roses-rippl

halcyon's brea

parisons are

nothing in the

ears of April

eathes out life

ese can from m

lm-yet shal

to your most s

es (and no wonder considering the circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats'

lord it o'er t

prevaili

as a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interr

occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting

the gol

the gol

the gol

the gol

rio

patie

re slept

ank idiot I pu

rel, th

ht of t

m-too low craw

phic

to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on

account sa

sclepiad,

ghton

G. L. Way: Fabliaux or Tales, London

bequeathed by the late Sir Charles Dil

s that when he printed the 'Solitude' sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other ano

ar earlier, would have made the feat more difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet's twentieth year but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats's own explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to ne

Cornwall, admitting that he 'indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar,' goes on to say that 'he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in manner, in his conside

subsequent palinode, A Hymn to Apollo. Woodhouse says the friends were both crowned with laurel, but it seems more like