20 December 1819: The Span & Nature of Keats’s Poetic Progress: Some Key Factors
Wentworth Place, Hampstead
Where Keats, twenty-four years old, has lived since the second half of October. He first rents part of the double-house a year before, having been invited by his very close friend, Charles Brown, after the death of his younger brother, Tom, 1 December 1818. Between then and now, Keats has stayed in a few other places (notably, Shanklin and Winchester), and during this period of something less than a year, he writes almost all of his best poetry, much of which ends up in his third book, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, published June 1820 by Taylor & Hessey. Keats prepares at least some of the volume for publication during December, even though the previous month he tells his publisher that he does not want to publish his recent work. It looks like many of the editorial decisions were out of Keats’s hands.
Keats’s chronic sore throat surfaces once again during the month. As he writes to
his younger
sister, Fanny, on 20 December, my throat [. .
.] on exertion or cold continually threatens me,
and his doctor advises him to get shoes
and a coat that will protect him. Two days later he writes to her again—a shabby note,
he calls it—in order to apologize for his uncertain plans: I am sorry to say I have been
and continue rather unwell, and therefore shall not be able to promise certainly.
Keats’s throat problem haunts and plagues him, and is most pronounced during August 1818-March 1819, though it resurfaces at earlier points in 1819. These may be indications of a predisposition to or even lingering signs of consumption (tuberculosis—TB), of which he is very much aware, and at moments makes him dreadfully fear cold weather and exertion. His family history—being a witness to the deaths of both his younger brother and mother from the illness—gives these fears some credence. Keats’s other younger brother, George, also dies of consumption in 1841, aged forty-four. Having said this, consumption is the pervasive contagious illness of the era (though not understood until later in the century as contagious), and Keats could have contracted it just about anywhere at any time. (The TB bacilli is passed through the air or in dust, where it can survive up to six months; someone can also be infected, though full symptoms can take years to develop.)
In the 20 December letter to Fanny, Keats
expresses financial and reputational expectations for a play, Otho the
Great, which he co-wrote with Brown
mainly in the summer, with some recent minor revisions: My hopes of success in the literary
world are better than ever,
he writes. How wrong he is—at least in the short term.
Despite genuine interest from Drury Lane Theatre, and with some vague signs that the
premier
English actor of the moment, Edmund Kean, might
feature in it, their impatience to have it staged quickly causes them to pull back
the tragedy
and offer it to Covent Garden Theatre, which perfunctorily rejects it. Thus Otho the Great comes to nothing, which is not surprising since its
dramatic and literary merits are modest and blandly derivative. This is really the
last blow
to Keats’s possible writing career.
Keats writes little if any new poetry after late 1819. His poetic progress up until this point is, quite naturally, the product of complex and often interconnected factors, including, of course, his own inherent and unique capacities and personal history, which are infinitely complicated and never fully knowable. How do we account for and measure the extraordinary variability in and the shaping of anyone’s personality and abilities? How, in Keats’s case, do we, for example, account for his truly uncommon sympathetic imagination, or the paradoxical grace of his awkwardness? But, back to something closer to the finite and the knowable: there are at least nine key factors or moments (some of them conflated) that might be usefully identified in chasing down and articulating what went into Keats’s rapid and remarkable poetic progress.
~First: the constant practice in writing poetry since about 1814, and possibly a little earlier. This boils down to the result of such practice: the poetry itself. This involves (put in the most basic way) Keats trying to get it right; here, his clarity of purpose sounds everywhere in his drive to write enduring poetry. This factor is thus connected to most of the others below. But at least one thread might be useful in order to gauge Keats’s progress, and it might revolve around ideas of escape. First, for Keats, he voices a growing awareness that imagination for its own sake—as an escape, as it were, from the slings and arrows of human fate—needs to evolve into imagination as a way of knowing and then representing the subject, in a way that does not escape from addressing those slings and arrows. Second, what we can see develop is the very deliberate escape from the confines of short history into the meaning of long history, and this clearly works itself into the thematics of his greatest poetry. Then there is the complex issue of Keats’s developing style: What becomes apparent is that in Keats’s best work—that is, much of the last year or so of his writing, from about September 1818 (with his start on Hyperion) until September 1819 (with the completion of To Autumn )—there develops a more syntactically natural style that remarkably couples with a new denseness to accompany that clarity; the new poetry is generally fairly descriptive but with learned purpose, and without much distracting poetic decorum via neither odd nor expected diction, intrusive rhythm, or sound for its own sake. Nothing is lost in the abstract; Keats, in his best work, almost always keeps us in the senses.
~Second, along with this: his increasingly very deliberate study of poetry—most tellingly, of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dante, and Spenser—as well as art and drama (see his crucial analysis of Edmund Kean’s acting), beginning in earnest over 1815 into 1816, but set off by the early literary tutelage of Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of his headmaster at Clarke’s Academy in Enfield; it should be added that Keats’s progressive and free-thinking education at Clarke’s influences his direction, disposition, values, and tastes; and, very importantly, for its students, the school purposefully fostered the aptitude for self-mastering subjects, which is evident in the kind of scholarly discipline Keats takes into his desire to become a poet. Keats is also an underestimated student of poetic forms. His parsing of the shortcomings of sonnet form takes us to his unique stanza forms in the so-called great odes of 1819. This deliberate study of poetry takes us to the third factor.
~Third: beginning 1816 and into 1817, we see articulated in Keats’s letters the
development of a complex and increasingly original poetics that guides and
anticipates his progress; he purposefully formulates what kind of poet he needs to
become and
what kind of poetry he needs to write. Recognizable, and by the end of 1817, and in
particular
his letter of 21/27 December, is a direction in his thinking
that we might usefully term Keatsian.
From his poetics and then into his poetry, Keats
becomes a poet of controlled risk.
~Fourth: as part of Keats’s development of a poetics, is his understanding that knowing what kind of poetry he does not want to write is as important as figuring out what kind of poetry he desires to write. For example, consider Keats’s dawning recognition that no matter how extraordinary Milton’s accomplishment, and particularly that of Paradise Lost, Milton’s style is not his style; Keats comes to see this in his attempts with the Hyperion project(s). Keats nevertheless profits by, for example, understanding how Milton’s descriptions powerfully hold a subject, so that they act as both description and action. Thus, as in the case of studying Wordsworth (as well as coming to terms with Hunt’s poetry and Robert Burn’s poetical career), Keats comes to distinguish his own poetical character in light of other major poets. And of course in the case of Shakespeare, Keats learns that contrasts and oppositions are not exclusive, but deeply bonded by imaginative acts that embrace and then fold into the subject.
~Fifth: the crucial fact of Keats, starting mainly in late 1816, finding himself within an astonishing intellectual, literary, and supportive network. Much of this is initiated by and channeled through his meeting with critic, poet, publisher, and celebrity journalist Leigh Hunt through Clarke in October 1816; more than a few within this grouping figure in the development of Keats’s poetics and in encouraging his poetic aspirations. This network includes Benjamin Robert Haydon (painter, public defender of art), John Hamilton Reynolds (poet, writer, reviewer, lawyer), Joseph Severn (painter), Horace Smith (poet, novelist), John Taylor (publisher, scholar), James Augustus Hessey (bookseller, publisher, journal editor), Benjamin Bailey (poet, scholar, translator), James Rice, Jr. (attorney), Charles Wentworth Dilke (scholar, civil servant), Charles Wells (solicitor, minor writer), Charles Brown (minor librettist, business person, but very supportive friend), William Haslam (business person), William Hazlitt (famous literary critic, essayist, lecturer), Richard Woodhouse, Jr. (scholar, literary advisor); and on the periphery, the brilliant young poet and implicit rival Percy Shelley, whom Keats also meets via Hunt. We can (for better and then worse) view Hunt as Keats’s early mentor and promoter, but moving away from Hunt’s sphere of influence (as a literary model) is also key. We cannot forget that Haydon also introduces Keats to the premier poet of the age, William Wordsworth, and they have contact in late 1817 into very early 1818—Keats is driven to articulate his deep ambivalence toward Wordsworth’s accomplishment and style. Within this above group, Hazlitt might be singled out as spurring and challenging Keats’s tastes and development: his ideas about poetic style and genius, as well as his critical lauding of the Elizabethan poetic temper, as well as his critical views about Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, push Keats to establish fairly particular poetic goals. Important, too, is Keats, in corresponding with Bailey, establishing his argument that the imagination is a prime agent of knowing and truth.
~Sixth: preparing Endymion for publication. By copying and reading over the poem, he
comes to an important moment of realization: it is the work of an immature poet—he
views the
poem as a necessary step in his poetic growth, but, as he declares, no more of that,
and time
to move forward. That is, Keats comes both to play down the poem and to place it in
the larger
course of his progress, agreeing that while it is slipshod,
its failure
is
necessary as a step toward being among the greatest
(letters, 9 Oct 1818).
~Seventh: on the immediate threshold of his greatest work, into his personal world
comes
the agonizing death of his younger brother, Tom, in December 1818. The loss of
Tom profoundly deepens his thinking and feeling about mortality in the face of death,
suffering, sadness, and difficult resolve, and it shapes most of his thinking about
how
beauty, art, and nature will (to quote from his Ode on a Grecian Urn) remain, in
midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man.
This quality of profundity—and the
understated style of expression—is simply not present in much of his earlier work.
In short,
the idea of death and duration, which had been with him since the early deaths of
his parents,
is now to be more fully reckoned with in his thoughts and then into his poetry.
~Eighth: not long after Tom passes away,
Keats begins what evolves into a very long journal letter to his remaining younger
brother, George, and his wife, Georgiana, who have moved to America in
search of opportunities. The letter, which dates from 14 February to 3 May 1819, and
is taken
up on at least thirteen days and amounts to almost 16,000 words (counting the transcribed
poems), works through and up to the very threshold dates when he is writes his greatest
poetry. The letter can be seen to provide some of the background and, importantly,
the
momentum for the astonishing leap his poetry makes in spring 1819. The letter begins,
mid-February, with Keats waiting for spring to rouse
his imaginative capabilities, and
then it works its way through subjects, theories, and concerns that are at the core
of what
separates his early poetry from this later work: life as an allegory, categories of
indolence,
mutability, disinterestedness of mind, the speculative mind, the meaning of Wordsworth’s one human heart, speculations about human
purpose, poetry being as fine as philosophy, worries about life as a poet, struggles
with
perfectibility in a world of death and loss, the world as a vale of soul-making, how
pain and
suffering are necessary for a feeling heart—and at the end of the letter, he mentions
that he
is working on a sonnet form more suited to natural language, which in fact he puts
into
practice in the innovative stanza forms of his odes. This opportunity for conversation,
set
off by death and separation, is then a further step toward and factor in his poetic
progress.
So, the letter which, back in February, begins by confessing that his poetic life
seems stuck,
ends on 3 May with him writing, every thing is in delightful forwardness.
~And finally, ninth: although as an adult Keats’s finances are in a constant state of uncertainty under the management of the family trustee, Richard Abbey, the trickle of funds he receives allows him to pursue his career as a poet—much to Abbey’s disfavor. That is, Keats does not have to work while he pursues his desire to be a poet. At the same time, Keats would have been aware that the clock was, as it were, ticking down on the period of time bought by his family money, and this, no doubt, was a source of urgency for his rapid poetic progress. The generosity of his very closest friends also, at a few key moments, helps him.
These, then, are some of the overlapping and moving parts of what propels Keats forward and underwrites his remarkable and remarkably fast poetic progress. They are not, of course, the whole story, but just some that, in the course of the present examination, contribute to the mystery of the growth of a poet’s mind.
The span and nature of Keats’s poetic progress might thus be distilled: Keats is a full-time poet for about four years, 1816-1819, with the first three generally resulting in poor, random, or middling attempts to find a voice, a style, a worthy subject; this poetry is largely occasional, too often overly poeticized, and for the most part motivated by unformed yet serious ambition rather than informed purpose, with the subtext often reducible to his desire to be poet.
And in the case of Endymion (which takes up Keats’s attentions for the better part of 1817), the project-poem openly acts as an apprenticeship to poetry, a test of perseverance, and a self-warning about potential poetic pitfalls; he is fully aware that it is an imperfect piece; it is a poem that also, paradoxically, shows how Keats was certain his poetry was going to be drawn into the history of his own times—that is, more particularly, Keats was perfectly aware that the deeply partisan review culture of his time would, as it were, suck his poem into the small-mindedness of contemporary party politics; and in the end, after his death, this immediately turns Keats into the victim he never wanted to be, beginning with an epitaph on his grave that he never wanted. His too-obviously escapist poem could not escape. When poetry (or art) offends or challenges or complicates culturally-determined tastes, or when it is simply not very good, criticism can degenerate into value judgment clothed in politics. The easy criticisms are to level the work with a range of labels: as treasonous, seditious, irrelevant, irreverent, diseased, flippant, childish—these were all, in fact, put on to Keats’s poetry.
Keats’s last year of writing (mainly 1819) is marked (remarkably so) by his success
in
finding and developing a voice and forms—and now with highly conceptualized subjects—that
balance yet conflate intensity and impersonality, with an empathetic imagination as
a form of
knowing that explores the mutual, mutable relationship of sensation and thought attuned
to a
principle of beauty. He now comes to achieve this without a forced poetic register,
and with
forms that reflect the subject rather than detracting from it. Keats in part predicts
this
achievement when, just preceding his great year, he declares he is determined to write
independently & with judgment
(to Hessey, 8 Oct 1818).
Without the poetry of 1819, his last year of writing, Keats, at best, would have become a romanticized and tragic figure of poetic potential, and, at worst, a marginal poet within a larger, more important circle of London Regency culture. He escapes both destinies for a larger one.
