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

to Margate-Hazlitt and Southey-Hunt and Haydon-Ambition and self-doubt-Stays at Canterbury-Joins brothers at Hampstead-Dilke and Brown-

essions-Speculations-Imagination and truth-Composes various lyrics-'O love me truly'-'In drear-

ns and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that will follow.' Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in Clarke's copy of the Floure and the Lefe. Leigh Hu

glories peris

n hath thy race

r'st! for lo!

ht of song: an

ant sounds, Keat

proclaims the co

e also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little impression, and the publi

and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the strug

as youthfu

ves by haun

which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears he might succeed.' The preachment of the Eclectic is still more pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the sonnets,

lure of the volume and to impute it, as authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers. George in John's absence wrote to the Olliers taking them to

e it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was only on Saturday last that we were u

rm is not quite clear: probably through Benjamin Bailey, a new acquaintance whom we know to have been a friend of Taylor's. Bailey was an Oxford man five years older than Keats. He had been an undergraduate of Trinity and was now staying up at Magdalen Hall to read for orders. He was an ardent student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a devout worshipper of Milton, and scarcely less of Wordsworth, with whom he had some personal acquaintance. Of his appetite for books Keats wrote when they had come to know each other well: 'I should not like to be pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy. Your teeth are the Rock Tarpeian down which you

oodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in Herefordshire, some of whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was owner or part owner of the White Hart at Bath). He had been educated at Eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as w

issue of his first volume brought him. During this interval he and his brothers were lodging at 17 Cheapside, having left their old quarters in the Poultry. Some time in March it was decided, partly on Haydon's urging, that John should for the sake of quiet and self-improvement go and

ey give up the temporary pleasure of living with me continually for a great good which I hope will follow. So I shall soon be out of Town. You must soon bring all your present troubles to a close, and so must I,

d at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice, mention

ernal whisp

e shore

ion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters, not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations, but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being. Having foun

rlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you, which must be continually h

ch

ast of night tha

rcise o

bringing to you

ackward and a

made me a Leviathan I had become all in a Tremble from not having written anything of late-the Sonnet over-leaf did me good. I slept the

that harbours

ild of gloriou

until it fort

brood of glo

reading some of it out, when his correspondent comes to visit him,

ionship. He made straight for his last year's lodging at Margate and got Tom to join him there. Thence in the second week of May he writes a long letter to Hunt and another to Haydon. To Hunt he criticizes some points in the last number of the Examiner, and especially, in his kind-hearted, well-conditioned way, deprecates a certain vicious allusion to grey hairs in an attack of Hazlitt upon Southey. Later on we shall have to tell of the critical savagery of Blackwood and the Quarterly, now long since branded and proverbial. But it shoul

poison, or gold, to gain her ends-bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train-infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her slaves-driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever she come

faults a l

virtues

will not give her up, because she keep

as Southey's is an allegorical being, while the B

ght, except travelling days, and how thoughts of the greatness of his ambition and the uncertainty of his powers have thrown him into a fit of

self to drop into a Phaeton ... I see nothing but continual uphill journeying. Now is there anything more unpleasant than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last? But I intend to whistle all those cogitations into the sea, where

aydon's from which I have already quoted the passage about the efficacy of prayer as Haydon had experienced it. Perfectly sincere

f the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend.2 He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own

opening speech of the Kin

all pant afte

d upon our bra

ly of some good genius-can it be Shakespeare?-presiding over him. Continuing the next day, he is downhearted again at hearing from George of money difficulties actual and prospective. 'You tell me never to despair-I wish it was as easy for me to deserve the saying-truth is I have a horrid morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals it is I have no doubt the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear-I may even say it is likely to

ned, but we do not know exactly when, nor how long he stayed there, nor what work he did (except that he was certainly going on with the first book of Endymion), nor what impressions he received. It was his first visit to a cathedral city, and few in the world, none in England, are more fitted to impress. Chichester and Winchester he came afterwards to know, Winchester well and with affection; but it was with thoughts of Canterbury in his mind that he planned, some two years later, first a serious and then a frivolous verse romance having an English cathedral town for scene (The Eve of St Mark, The Cap and Bells). The heroine of bo

ou are confident of my responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me.' For the rest, indirect evidence allows us to picture Keats in these months as working regularly at Endymion, having now reached the second book, and as living socially, not without a certain amount of convivial claret-drinking and racket, in the company of his brothers and of his friends and theirs. Leigh Hunt was still close by in the Vale of Health, and both in his circle and in Haydon's London studio Keats was as welcome as ever. Reynolds and Rice were still his close intimates, and Reynolds's sisters in Lamb's Conduit Street almost like sisters o

inct as well as choice allowed his mind to cherish uncertainties and to be a thoroughfare for all thoughts (the phrase is again his own). There were many but always friendly discussions between Keats and Dilke, and their mutual regard never failed. Charles Brown, Dilke's contemporary, schoolfellow, and close friend, was a man of Scottish descent born in Lambeth, who had in early youth joined a business set up by an elder brother in Petersburg. The business quickly failing, he had returned to London and after some years of struggle inherited a modest competence from another brother. A lively, cultiva

ed, and the visit, lasting from soon after mid August until the end of September, proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this point our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey's memoranda, though not put on paper till thirty years later, are vivid and informing, and Keats's own correspondence during the visit is fairly full. I will tak

He bore, along with the strong impress of genius, much beauty of feature and countenance. His hair was beautiful-a fine brown, rather than auburn, I think, and if you placed your hand upon his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plumage of a bird. The eye was full and fine, and s

together. I think in August 1817. It was during this visit, and in my room, that he wrote the third book of Endymion.... His mode of composition is best described by recounting our habits of study for one day during the month he visited me at Oxford. He wrote, and I read, sometimes at the same table, and sometimes at separate desks or tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for exercise,-generally two or three o'clock. He sat down to his task,-which was about 50 line

hink I hear his voice, and see his countenance. Most vivid is my recollection of the following passage of

aised his hoa

stranger-seem

were so lifel

a trance; his

p, and like tw

rinkles in his

s fixedly as

withered lips h

to my memory have 'kept as fixedly as rocky marge.' I remember his upward look when he read o

to the house visited by so many thousands of all nations of Europe, and inscribed our names in addition to the 'numbers numberless' of those which literally blackened the walls. We also visited the Church, and were pestered with a

renewed our quiet mode of life, until he finished the third Book of Endymion, and the time came that we must part; and I never parted with one whom I had known so short

.

ask of

pe in the Nationa

emper was uncertain; and he himself confirms this judgment of him in a beautiful passage of a letter to myself. But with his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of

nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew, especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation. He had a truly poetic feeling for wome

The following passage from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality was deeply felt by Keats, who however at this time seemed to me to value this great Poet rather in particular passages tha

these

f thanks a

e obstinate

and outwa

from us,

ivings of

in worlds n

before which o

ke a guilty th

ture, like man, in the appalling nature of the feeling which they suggested to a though

lessed

burthen of

heavy and the

s unintell

ight

age are frequent in his letters

mong the un

e springs

di

known and fe

cy ceas

in her gr

ference

st line he declared to b

t taste. I remember to have been struck with this by his remarks on that well known an

y fe

blazing char

uth who touche

llumined groves

d have left it to the imagination to complete the picture, how he 'filled the il

f the verses of the marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of Endymion. Methinks I now hear

acorn cu

hertys bl

ll its goo

ight or fe

sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own v

he had his own notions, particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may, Keats's

ate from memory Keats's theory of vowel soun

at of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was now just fourteen, and liv

ing it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favourite litt

s now a Week since I disembark'd from his Whipship's Coach the Defiance in this place. I am living in Magdalen Hall on a visit to a young Man with whom I have not been long acquainted, but whom I like very much-we lead very industrious lives-he in general Studies and I in proceeding at a pretty good rate with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.-Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him.-However so it was; and when he was asleep

) how much better it would be if Italian instead of F

r days about it, and let it be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will secure yours-and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good Bu

out Dilke's shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at

the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown-the Air is our robe of state-the Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it-able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. I

s writes on Sept

river-folks,-there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt meeting in the Pit.-What a very pleasant fellow

h pleased him, truly of her best, are those To M. A. at parting, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to laugh and chafe at

has done:-'You will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines-which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you are very low-and I would write the subject thoroughly again-but I am tired of it

at Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated-there's Haydon's picture in statu quo-There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room-criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has been talking flippantly and patronizingly of Endymion, saying that if it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousan

an idea he has of shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem The Gipsies and also of Hazlitt's criticism of it in the Round Table. A fragment of another letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same fragment records the appearance in Blackwo

in the beautiful vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote, was intended 'to change the scene-change the air-and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there

ye chosen

oil of batt

irtue, for the

e, as in the v

hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction-a beautiful thing made more

s, mor

n a silent

angelical t

oic deeds and

m of b

he charm is i

after the moon-"you a' seen the Moon"-came down and wrote some lines.' 'Whenever I am separated from you,' he continues, 'and not engaged in a continuous Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric-but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:' the whole, that is, of Endymion. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in the spring. 'I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets-they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally-in

ve and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from Endymion to the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing hint of the distinction between men of Genius,

ll always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this-'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'-and I beg now, my dear Bailey, that hereafter sho

peculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of Paradise Lost, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream an

ifferent sex,

fair in all the

r sum'd up, in

s, which from t

o my heart, u

things from h

love and amo

d, and left me

, or for ev

other pleasu

pe, behold her

w her in my

Earth or Heave

her am

t their main current and purport will be found not difficult to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of 'Sensations' as opposed to 'Thoughts' he does not limit the word to sensations of the body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever instantaneously transforming themselve

been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning-and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come-and this consideration has further convinced me,-for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,-that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and it

ng must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none of Keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by

love, but

an a nun's

vespers t

chime-bel

e me

love; but

unrise in

re St Cup

his week

e me

e an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats's memory. Listen to the first three stanzas of A Proper Wooing

ye loue m

trothe and

lesse than

me t

ouer that loo

e tim

t thinke yours

nd all the

selfe when He

me t

is helpe when

e tim

God's will

u disdaine yo

with a wi

him t

doing you

ason r

of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the

he express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finishing Endymion at Burford Bridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings o

-nighted

py, hap

hes ne'er

reen fe

cannot u

ty whistle

n thawing

ding at

-nighted

py, hap

ings ne'e

s summe

a sweet f

heir crysta

never

he froz

'twere s

e girl

e there

not at p

of not to

is none t

d sense t

r said i

is ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey

ungratefu

my perjur

r injure

e a ma

sure of

s all ex

oo short a

too lon

try, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vestu

these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon Endymion. In finishing the p

y a verse I

ies, vermeil ri

erbage; and er

es of clover a

ar the middl

ry season, ba

nish'd: but le

sal tinge o

t me when I

upposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love it is the season itself, the season and

Ca

d: both lovelor

lies green t

, they were p

h a fair lone

other gaz'd,

azle cirque of

ag

s he p

st his face, an

n a mossy hi

'd as he a co

y; save when he

d, to see how

ove of time,-sl

lar tops, in

river's brim.

s that very

he temple grove

lden eve? The

ft, that not a

erene father

summer head

ath, speech, an

setting I m

last time. Ni

ss myriads of l

hall I die; nor

ummer dies on

local interest if one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this valley in the winter. I know not if

long poem, and composing, we know, the 'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christm

incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a stage coach by suddenly breaking out w

' of course i

ghton

Lost, vii

viii,

prematurely lost Mary Suddard, in E

ears earlier in Heliconia, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park; and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of researchers in the field of

ewe

t hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive form 'feel' for feeling. But 'feel,' which after all had been good enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat blunt the point of Keats's meaning? To be emphatically aware of no longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither so easy nor so n

he Soul'

y backwa

ly doth

of gol

e thought

gone past

r the hear

e told i

of Immortality, may be responsible for the 'falling' in the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a common-place phrase little in Kea