Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Enfield, Clarke’s Academy

With his younger brother George, Keats (aged 7) attends Reverend John Clarke’s excellent and progressive boarding school for boys (sometimes called Enfield School or Academy), which has a strong dissenting, nonconformist tradition. No doubt at least some republican (and therefore radical) sympathies filter through to its students, which would have been a touchy standpoint given Britain’s ongoing war with France, which is more or less continuous, 1792-1815. Keats’s youngest brother, Tom, will later attend. The school greatly encourages students to pursue all forms of knowledge and, at times, to set their own consequences for negative behaviors or indifferent commitment. The idea is to produce freethinkers and free thinking—and toleration. That some of Keats’s poetry comes to challenge accepted tastes (and in particular conservative or neoclassical tastes) and that he develops an independent voice is not surprising. The boys were fully encouraged to take responsibility for what they learned, and this becomes extraordinarily significant in the narrative of Keats’s poetic progress, where he often makes it clear that he needs to deliberately study poetry in order to achieve what will become lofty ambitions.

Physically, the school (on Nags Head Road, Enfield Town) was apparently fairly pleasant, and by no means gloomy, with its large, airy rooms. Outside there was a good-sized playground, as well as a very big garden where some of the boys at the school were allowed to cultivate their own little plot of land. And beyond the school grounds stretched some accessible meadows.

Keats, then, receives a very good, if not exceptional, education at the academy. Moreover, Keats, after a somewhat undirected beginning at the school, eventually becomes a prize-winning student and is known for his stamina as a reader and for after-hours study. According to the recollections of the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, it seems Keats reads most, if not all, of the books in the library, and he often reads during meals. He is especially taken with Greek mythology. So, too, on occasion, is Keats known to be feisty, not easily physically intimidated, and ready and willing to battle (which he does), despite his small stature (at adulthood Keats stands a bit over five feet, but is otherwise very physically sturdy).

In his final year at school, Keats is formally rewarded for his scholarship, some of which revolves around him translating Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid, from Latin, and he continues working on it when he is pulled out of school in 1811. With the project, Keats is introduced not just to the mechanics of translating of classical work, but in the process he evaluatively examines what he translates, thus developing his own critical tastes and ideas; Cowden Clarke recalls that Keats, barely a teenager, actually finds flaws in Virgil’s narrative structure! Importantly, Keats’s ability and desire to study is set at Enfield; more than once, years later, when Keats is utterly determined to become an enduring poet, he mentions that his progress will require deliberate study, what he will call the drinking in of Knowledge, which can only be gained through application study and thought (letters, 24 April 1818).

The school takes copies of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, an independent, progressive, and controversial newspaper formative in Keats’s career in ways that Keats, as a schoolboy, could hardly have imagined: his first published poem—O Solitude—will be in The Examiner (May 1816); and Hunt, as its editor, is central to Keats’s working out of his initial poetic direction—for better and then for worse—but, more importantly, in connecting Keats with a wide network of artists, poets, writers, publishers, and critics. This network is a crucial component of Keats’s poetic progress.

Charles Cowden Clarke, eight years Keats’s senior, encourages and directs Keats’s early poetic tastes (and seems to have encouraged and supervised Keats’s translation of The Aeneid), and they are close friends up until 1817. It is Clarke, in fact, who introduces Keats to Hunt in October 1816, thus, as mentioned, immediately connecting Keats with an important faction of London’s intellectual and artistic network. Clarke’s interest in Keats, along with meeting Hunt, are two early key moments in setting Keats’s direction as a poet. And so Keats’s poetic progress has its origin at Enfield School, and Clarke is the person responsible for making Keats’s first contact with and the introduction into an important faction of London’s literary society.

Keats’s September 1816 epistle to Clarke expresses Keats’s somewhat immature desires to be an enduring poet, but it also thanks Clarke for first teaching him all the sweets of song (53). At this point, these aspirations are both insecure and a little pretentious, which, given Keats’s age and experience, is to be expected: that is, Keats is nowhere close to finding anything like a relatively mature poetic voice—one that is less concerned with fame and poetic affectation and more concerned with capturing something universally deep, clear, and original.

Clarke’s Academy is also significant inasmuch as it may be the one continuous, predictable part of Keats’s life between 1803 and 1811, the period during which his father dies (1804), his mother quickly remarries badly (1804), he has to live with maternal grandparents (1804), his maternal grandfather passes away (1805), and his mother dies (1810)—and his access to family finances (his inheritance money) becomes blurred, as does his future direction.