24 April 1817: Toward Endymion, the Temple of Fame, & Why I Should be a Poet
Margate
Beginning about 24 April 1817, Keats, aged twenty-one, goes to Margate after a week on the Isle of Wight. The island seems not to have turned on his poetic tap. He hopes Margate will. He will stay a few weeks, and after visits to Canterbury and the area around Hastings, he will be back in Hampstead by the second week of June.
Keats has stayed in Margate before (in August/September 1816), where he managed to
write a
few epistle poems about his mad
poetic ambitions and uncertain poetic intentions. Now,
in this second visit to Margate, his poetic trials and tribulations continue: he writes
to his
friend and unofficial mentor Leigh Hunt that, while
on the Isle of Wight, he thought so much about Poetry so long together that I could not get
to sleep at night
—not to mention that the food was bad (10 May). At this moment and in
this letter, we might want to imagine a young, inexperienced poet attempting to impress
an
older, experienced poet with his commitment to and passion for their shared art; yet,
with
measured humility, he worries about his poetic worthiness and uniqueness; Hunt is
less worried
about his own poetic talent. And so, as we will also see, the younger poet at the
same has
some emerging doubts about the older figure’s inflated sense of his poetic worth.
Letters from
Margate also show that Keats is somewhat obsessed with fame—whether he might attain
it,
whether he might be worthy of it, and what it means. He has concerns about what, in
light of
his somewhat uneven temperament, he calls his ultimate Progression
(to his publishers,
Taylor and Hessey, 16 May).
Keats has just begun work on what he projects as a 4,000-line poem, Endymion, based mainly on material—a narrative— from Lampriere’s Classical Dictionary. A first draft takes him to end of the year to produce, with a few more months in early 1818 required to copy, correct, make revisions, and (with some difficulty) fashion a Preface that almost invites slamming the poem. Endymion appears as a separate volume in April 1818, published by Taylor & Hessey. By the second week of May, Keats is, understandably, daunted by the task he has set for himself.
The idea to write a long poem emerges less from a creative impulse than Keats’s need
to prove
that he is, so to speak, made of the right poetic stuff. While conceiving Endymion in this spring of 1817, he writes to his brother, George, that he sees it as a test, a trial of my
Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention. [. . .] I must make 4000 Lines
of one
bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry [. . .] it will take me but a dozen paces
toward
the Temple of Fame [. . .] a long poem is a test of Invention which I take to be the
Polar
Star of Poetry
(Keats quoting himself in a letter of 8 Oct 1817). The poem’s achievement
(barely a few steps toward fame) may be modest, even if the poem’s length (4,000 lines
from a
bare circumstance
) is not. Writing the poem is less an act of inspiration and rather
more an act of perspiration.
Keats nonetheless claims that he likes the idea of a poem wherein a reader can wander
happily
among numerous enjoyable images—food for a Week’s stroll in Summer,
he writes. This
artistic position of creating fanciful, entertaining, and leisurely poetry formulated
in the
spring of 1817 (aligned to Hunt’s credo of poetic
sociability) is very far from the goals Keats begins to develop and embrace by the
end of the
year. It is, in fact, in some ways opposite to Keats’s much more serious, complex
idea of
Shakespearean Negative Capability,
and that poetry requires something to be
intense upon
(letters, 21/27 Dec 1817), rather that the experience of light, strolling
pleasantries.
By the end of May, then, some progress is made on Endymion, but, as noted, behind his work
is that lurking and confusing subject of poetic fame. From Margate he writes to Hunt, who, into the early half of 1817, remains Keats’s
unofficial mentor: I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men,
seeing how great a thing it is,—how great things are to be gained by it, what a thing
to be
in the Mouth of Fame,—that at last the idea has grown so monstrously beyond my seeming
power
of attainment [ . . . ] Yet ’tis a disgrace to fail, even in a huge attempt; and at
this
moment I drive the thought from me
(10 May). The obsession with the laurels of fame, in
fact, largely comes from Hunt; but, unlike Hunt, Keats is less certain about his destined
greatness and inherent superiority.
At this point in his writing career, then, with his indifferent and clearly immature
1817
collection behind him, and with the prospect of a long, undetermined poem ahead of
him, Keats
has some doubts. To his close friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, he writes that the Cliff of Poesy Towers above me
(10-11 May). To George, in the context of
explaining his need to write Endymion and in defining his
identity as a poet, Keats uses the same metaphor: the high Idea I have of poetic fame makes
me think I see it towering to [sic] high above me
(Keats quoting himself in the letter
to Bailey, 8 Oct 1817). Clearly Keats is
overwhelmed, if not confused, by ideas of poetic aspirations and accomplishment. Beyond
the
obvious problem for Keats—How do I become a poet?—lurk other questions: Why do I
write poetry, and for whom? And what is to be my subject?
Well before completing Endymion, Keats begins to recognize the poem’s indifferent qualities: My
Ideas with respect to it I assure you are very low— [. . .] I am tired of it
(letters,
28 Sept 1817). When completed, and when he begins to maturely assess his own strengths
and
weaknesses, he realizes the poem is largely a slipshod
and failed effort, yet necessary
for his own poetic progress (letters, 8 Oct 1818). By August 1820, after he has written
his
best poetry, he looks back upon it with the wish he could unwrite
it (letters, 18 Aug
1820).
What becomes clear during this period is that Keats feels something akin to periods
of
profound anxiety-depression: to Haydon he
writes, 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 that it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment
(11 May). And to his new
publishers Taylor & Hessey he confesses, I have a swimming in my head and feel all
the effects of a Mental debauch, lowness of Spirits, anxiety to go on without the
power to
do so, which does not at all tend to my ultimate progression
(16 May). It seems this
state comes and goes throughout his adult life; that is, it is periodical rather than
sustained. Is it a medical condition (disorder) in the modern sense? The answer is
probably
no, since his state of lowness and anxiety actually have clear causes; true disorders
normally
don’t.
Importantly, perhaps with the prodding of Haydon, Keats at this time begins to note Hunt’s self delusions
of greatness—greatness as a poet, that is (letters, 11
May 1817). Nevertheless, Keats personally praises Hunt for the journalistic and political
edge
of The Examiner (letters, 10 May). This is a quiet turning
point, since it is only in late March 1817 that Keats writes a poem that praises Hunt’s
most
famous poem, The Story of Rimini, a work that, certainly for
the worst, influences Keats’s earlier poetry. Keats in his sonnet mentions the sweetness
and
delights in Hunt’s poem, the lingering and the leafy bowers, as well as hopping robins—just
the kind of characteristics and poetic props that Keats in fact needs to avoid in
his crafting
of his own progress as a poet. Clearly, Haydon and Keats trust each other with their
opinions.
It was, after all, Hunt who introduces Keats to Haydon.
The stay in Margate can be reduced to a fairly glib assessment: letters from Margate
once
more make it clear that Keats is anxious over whether poetry (that is, being a poet)
is really
for him—whether, in short, he is up to it. He will, nevertheless, and in a dogged,
determined
way, get on with that project poem, Endymion, which he will eventually
subtitle A Poetic Romance, and further preface it an epigraph on the title page with
a quotation from Shakespeare’s sonnet XVII: THE STRETCHED METRE OF AN ANTIQUE SONG.
Stretched, indeed—after all, how much can you do with the moon falling in love with
a
shepherd? And, for what it is worth, and if Shakespeare is to be quoted accurately,
THE
should read AND.
