16-23 April 1817: Endymion, On the Sea,
& Eternal
Poetry: Picturing Young Keats
Shanklin and Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight
Via Southampton, Cowes, Newport (he spends one night there), and Shanklin (which is too pricey to stay), Keats goes to Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight for a week (he arrives 17 April). While on the island, he thinks so much about poetry—about being a poet—that he cannot sleep. But in truth, the solitude that Keats seeks by visiting the island quickly translates into loneliness, and after about a week he leaves the island and settles inland at Margate, where his younger brother Tom joins him. Two years later, from late June 1819 until the second week of August, Keats returns to the island, and is in very different circumstances: Tom is dead, the poem he begins in April 1817 has been published, he is not alone, his writing prospects seem not too bad (in co-authoring a play), and though he doesn’t know it, almost all of his best poetry, written earlier in the year, is behind him.
In motivating himself for the daunting task of writing about 4,000 lines on the Endymion myth (gleaned mainly from a classical dictionary), Keats writes to fellow poet and good friend John Hamilton Reynolds about how he has surrounded himself with inspirational material—including the landscape as well as pictures of Milton and Shakespeare. Keats writes that he can see Carisbrooke Castle from his window (letters, 17 April). Keats is doubly motivated, since earlier this month he has the assurance from a publisher—Taylor & Hessey—that they will take on his future work.
So here we have a picture of young Keats, aged twenty-one: there he sits—impatient, holding his pen, literally looking for inspiration, ready to begin this long, uncertain project. It is a touching scene, in a way. In fact, the situation of a young poet looking for inspiration and confronting imaginative capabilities works itself into Endymion’s blurred, embowered allegory. In this way, Endymion is on one level about Keats’s sensualized quest for not just the ideal, but for the poetic ideal—for inspired, enduring, beautiful poetry, for a capable imagination—in the moment of writing Endymion. This does not mean the poem is without any strong or interesting poetry; the problem is that poetry that effectively handles what it randomly sets upon appears only here and there, but there’s very little here-and-there.
Keats purposefully believes that a long poem will, in effect, prove his poetic worth—not
to
mention his determination to take on the mantle of poet. While waiting for creativity
to lift
him, he sends Reynolds an indifferent but
enthusiastic sonnet—On the
Sea— that includes the incapacitated line, O ye who have your eyeballs vext
and tir’d / Feast them on the wideness of the Sea [. . .]
(letters, 17, 18 April 1817).
That the poem is inspired by a line from King Lear does not
raise its quality, but perhaps more importantly we begin to get the sense that, for
Keats,
Shakespeare is becoming not just a figure to venerate, but one to emulate.
Keats begins his trip full of strong encouragement from another friend, the well-known
historical painter Benjamin Robert Haydon.
Haydon is impressed—touched, even—that Keats (like him) is so conscious of a higher
calling.
Keats reports that Haydon has told him that it is necessary that he should be alone to
improve myself
(reported to Reynolds, 9
March 1817). Keats also begins his trip feeling he needs to find his way without the
influence
of others—by this, he mainly means his London circle of friends, and perhaps most
significantly, Leigh Hunt. In a few weeks, Keats
will in fact condemn Hunt’s great sin of deluding himself that he is a great poet
(letters, 11
May).
Importantly, Keats makes a strong and precarious declaration of purpose to Reynolds: I find that I cannot exist without poetry—without
eternal poetry—half the day will not do—the whole of it—[. . .],
while also citing lines
from Spenser about how great intent, / Can
never rest
until it creates something great and eternal (letters, 18 April). For Keats,
his life is, as it were, on the line—the line of poetry.
On 8 May, Haydon writes to Keats, passionately
encouraging him: God bless you My dear Keats go on, don’t despair, collect incidents, study
characters, read Shakespeare and trust in
Providence
(8 May 1817). A good part of this is sound advice: in reading and in
deliberately studying Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth in particular, Keats will make significant progress, especially in
understanding the qualities of great poetry—the poetic character. He comes to a point
where he
can make particularized critical judgments about the value and significance of respective
writers and their work.
Such focused study also weans him away from easier, incidental subjects as well as
from a
tone that at moments too openly aims to entertain and to encourage sociability, rather
than
strive for deeper, artful, and timeless subjects. But Keats writes back to Haydon
that he is
distracted by a few things, including (and as usual) Money Troubles.
He also
experiences a bout of what he calls a horrid Morbidity of Temperament
that shows up at
intervals—what we today might call nervous anxiety or mild depression (letters, 11
May). This
comes and goes during his adult life, but it is more a dispositional or character
trait than a
medicalized condition (today we are perhaps overly fond of naming or attributing
illness—pathologization). At any rate, moving forward with Endymion does not at this point come
easily, though overall his determination and pacing is admirable. Using his own guiding
terms
of reference for his project, he does indeed manage to take one bare circumstance
and fill it
with poetry—4,050 lines, to be exact. But no one said it had to be great poetry, least
alone
Keats; it just has to be done, learned from, and left behind.
In the end, then, Keats comes to hold an ambivalent attitude toward his long, pastoral
romance. While he sees it necessary as a sustained gesture of dedication, endurance,
and
independence, on another level he recognizes that it is in some ways an ill-considered
work—a
failure he would be happy to rewrite or, better yet, unwrite. In the Preface he eventually writes for
the poem almost a year after beginning it, he pleads for critical lenience in judging
the
poem’s literary worth, while regretfully drawing attention to how the poem signals
great
inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than
a deed
accomplished.
Keats is all too right. And while his humility and critical self-awareness
is admirable, it also exposes him and his work to criticism from certain influential
reviewing
quarters. A possible translation of the preface: This is the work of a young,
inexperienced poet, so please take it easy on me. I may come back to Greek myth for
inspiration, but by then I hope I will be a more capable, developed poet. In fact,
Keats does come back to myth at a later stage in his writing—via the Hyperion story—but
in a
style that starkly shows a remarkable development in his poetry.
