1 July 1819: To Wight to Write: Harnessed to a Dog-Cart, Entrammelled by Fanny Brawne, & Kissing her Writing
Eglantine Cottage, Shanklin, Isle of Wight


After a June in which Keats, aged twenty-three, struggles terribly with financial matters, and with having to find a new and less expensive place to stay—and also a place where he hopes to get some writing done and avoid his London associates—Keats travels to the Isle of Wight. Here, in April 1817, he spent about a week, attempting to get a start on what would be his long and largely lackluster poem, Endymion, published spring 1818—it proves to be more an act of adolescent perseverance than a display of sustained, youthful brilliance, and he knows as much. In fact, proofreading and revising it was probably the best lesson he had in what not to do again. Now his purposes are not art-for-art’s-sake or to prove himself a poet, but to write for the sake of money, and he throws himself into purposefully into writing a play for the stage with his good friend, Charles Brown. The title: Otho the Great. The plan: Brown will mainly supply the plot, and Keats the words.
Keats arrives 28 June at Eglantine Cottage on the High Street of Shanklin with his
dear
friend James Rice, who for some time has been ill.
Because of Rice’s poor health, Keats says he is rather a melancholy companion
(letters,
8 July). By the end of July, Keats confesses that I cannot bear a sick person in a House
especially alone—it weighs upon me day and night
(letters, 31 July). The situation
likely triggers the agonizing closing months of 1818, when he spent nursing his dying
brother,
Tom. Travelling via Portsmouth through
terrible rain, Keats also arrives with the return of his chronic sore throat, which
may be a
precursor sign of more lingering and dangerous health issues; the current chill and
sore
throat sticks with him for a couple of weeks. [For much more on Keats and consumption,
as well
as a possible connection to his throat issues, see 3 February
1820.]
Again, Keats hopes that his new writing will generate poetic and dramatic success—and
some
much-needed cash. Alignment with the truly immortal is not necessarily foremost in
his
thoughts. He is there, he writes to his sister on 6 October, to try the fortune of my Pen
once more,
though if he fails, he can, he wryly says, always return to my
gallipots,
which alludes to the fully brutal treatment he receives from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1818, in which the
reviewer mockingly pleads Keats to ditch his lame poetic aspirations for a respectable
career
in medicine.
Writing to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, he seems somewhat surprised at how
diligent
he is in getting on with the play he is writing with Brown, as well in
completing the first 400 lines of the Lamia poem (11 July), which he hopes will
generate some popular interest. Keats, however, remains uncertain about success.
But,
at least personally, he feels grounded and realistic: he can now, he writes, look upon the
affairs of the world with a healthy deliberation.
Whether this is a maturing of his
poetic goals, or a new pragmatic Keats, it is hard to tell, but he does describe himself
as
being in a less high-flying and fluttery state. With a nice touch of humor he writes,
The
first time I sat down to write, I could scarcely believe in the necessity of so doing.
It
struck me as a great oddity
(11 July).

In a few letters from Shanklin, in July and into early August, we finally begin to
get some
sense of Keats’s complex relationship with and love for 18-year-old Fanny Brawne. He writes to her at least four times during July,
beginning the morning of first day of the month. As he writes, The morning is the only
proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much.
No matter what else
he experiences, her beauty remains with him—her love, he tells her, has entrammelled
him, and so destroyed my freedom
; he aches to be with her; until he met her, he never
knew of or believed in such love. He wants her to confess her love in a letter that
will
intoxicate
him. In the context of telling her that he tries to write some poetry
every day, he says, I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake
and for nothing else,
and he gets quasi-philosophical about Pleasure
and her
Beauty
; he confesses that he finds himself kissing her writing (8 July). We find,
though, that, with a little time, Keats shies away from full commitment. So, too,
is he prone
to jealousy, even without there being anything definite or rational to be jealous
of; and he
is also driven by his own poetic pursuits, which demands solitude for study and composition.
Of course his unstable finances and health complicate and counterbalance his commitment
to
Fanny. One side of Keats is determined to maintain his personal freedoms.
Keats, in a letter of 15 July, does express to Fanny his plan, though uncertain, to put together and publish a volume of his work,
perhaps by year-end. He is cynical, though, about the state of publishing poetry and
public
tastes: Poems are as common as newspapers and I do not see why it is a greater crime in me
than in another to let the verses of an half-fledged brain tumble into the reading-rooms
and
drawing room windows
(?15 July). However undirected this protest, it does suggest that
Keats feels he already has or will have enough for a decent volume. How right he is!
Despite
his glib yet resentful tone, Keats has earlier said that he won’t publish unless he
is certain
of its worthiness.
Even with the arrival of his playwriting partner Brown about the third week of July, Keats returns to his Hyperion poem once more, though now he will begin to revise it in the form we know
as The Fall of Hyperion. This return
signals that Keats has not given up on serious poetry—poetry for its enduring qualities,
rather than for the sake of the public, his purse, or sociable occasion. In about
two months,
he will give up on it again, though its considerable literary merits display, at least
for us,
Keats’s new level of poetic maturity. Meanwhile, until about the third week of August,
he and
Brown will be, as Keats writes, pretty well harnessed again to our dog-cart
—that is, to
writing Otho the Great (31 July).
Keats leaves Shanklin about the end of the second week of August.