Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Wentworth Place, Hampstead

Keats’s younger brother, George, arrives from America early in the month; he leaves 1 February. George’s mission is to clear up and make his claims for his share of family funds, which in part is now tied to the death of their younger brother, Tom, and the resulting redistribution. George aims to re-finance himself, having lost most of his money in a dubious business venture in America.

In December, Keats, aged twenty-four, works hard to help George by meeting with the usually truculent trustee of the family money and family guardian, Richard Abbey. When George’s deal is worked out, George reports that Abbey behaved very kindly to me (30 Jan). Keats feels very differently: Abbey, he believes, has been stingy in even allowing Keats open access to meeting with the youngest of the Keats siblings, Fanny—and also denied her pocket money. Keats also notes that Abbey, By detaining money from me and George when we most wanted it he has increased our expenses. Keats’s conclusion: Abbey has not behaved well (letters, 14 Feb). The general feeling (with Keats himself and a few of his friends) is that George somewhat aggressively assumes more than his fair share of the estate, though this may not have been the case. (One of Keats’s closest friends, Charles Brown, believed George swindled Keats out of money.) To the end of his life, Keats never trusts Abbey. Keats is never aware that a significant inherited sum (perhaps around 800 pounds, via his maternal grandfather) is waiting for him through the court, where it has been accumulating interest. It appears Abbey himself might likewise not have known about these other funds.

Besides dealing with Abbey during January, George and Keats socializes quite a bit with mutual friends—dancing, dining, and partying. George makes some copies of Keats’s poetry, including Ode to a Nightingale (at this point it seems to be called The Nightingale).

Despite the wealth of social activity—or perhaps because of it—Keats feels idle and unsettled. In writing to George’s wife in America over 13-28 January, he expresses, somewhat playfully, that, Upon the whole I dislike Mankind, and, in particular, self-interested types. He also notes the boring predictability in socializing with certain friends, as well as a vague dullness and disenchantment with life, and London life in particular. Keats’s conclusion: like people for their good parts and ignore the dull process of their every day Lives (letters, 15 Jan). He has thoughts of retiring to the country, where he can avoid news. Somewhat whimsically, he also wishes he had money enough to do nothing but travel about for years. He nonetheless takes time to have some fun in his long journal letter, including a brilliantly humorous typology of three of his witty friends, as well as having some fun at those who have no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence. T wang-dillo-dee, Keats writes eight times to encapsulate random examples and sites of nonsense he observes, including modern poems, some lords, London, and Earth itself (letters, 17 Jan). This is, in fact, pretty funny.

In January, Keats, aged twenty-four, still maintains hopes for making some money from a play, Otho the Great, co-written with his generous and very close friend Charles Brown, his roommate at Wentworth Place. Keats initially believes the play will make him a badly needed 200 pounds, while also raising his name above the vulgar reputation he felt he had with the literary fashionables (letters, 17 Sept 1819). Keats records that the play, though accepted by Drury Lane for later in its theatre season, has been withdrawn since they want it staged sooner; with Brown, some revisions are now made in order to submit it to Covent Garden. Nothing, however, comes of the play,* and Keats during this cold winter writes almost nothing.

The only good news, in a way, is that one of his best poems, Ode on a Grecian Urn, is published in Annals of The Fine Arts. The poem, probably written in the spring of 1819, and perhaps May, reflects Keats’s mature and much-desired ability to capture a subject with controlled intensity, and it articulates and achieves what Keats posits in his poetics, that beauty is not bound by truth, fact, or reason, and thus beauty has its own unalterable value that will surpass knowing and outlast time. Thus art is a high ideal that counters and even distinguishes our mortal station. The unknowable but beautiful urn, in fact, is a symbol of the kind of poetry that Keats himself attempts to put before us: we do not know the truth of the urn (who are these figures? where are they going? what are they doing? who made the urn?), but we nonetheless know the urn is beautiful and possesses imaginative potency that speaks beyond its own material and historical circumstances: it takes us out of ourselves and beckons our own imaginative capabilities. The urn’s qualities, then, mirror Keats’s poetic aspirations: to write poetry that defies mortal time and rational knowing—poetry that will evermore remain a friend to man (line 48) despite the burden that our existence puts upon us. The poem pushed in this direction is an allegory of Keats’s writing.

These powerful conclusions have been on Keats’s mind since late 1817, when he writes that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes over other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration (letters, 21/27 Dec. 1817). Keats by 1819 has become that great poet, though his greatness will only begin to be (so to speak) writ large until after his death. Characteristically, Keats’s epistolary poetics both anticipate and propel his poetic progress. For the first two or three years of his life as a declared poet (approximately late 1816 to late 1818), rather than finding that mature voice, Keats too often ineffectually writes about desiring to be an enduring poet, or he writes poetry that, too self-consciously, he hopes will prove that he can simply write poetry. He’s a poet in search of a justification of his purpose as a poet. Those earlier years are, then, his apprentice years—could they be anything else?—and the vast majority of the poetry lacks direction in subject, voice, and form. By 1819, Keats finds his stance of the great poet mainly via lyric forms that often pit binaries both against themselves yet simultaneously blended; he achieves this via a kind of poetic equipoise that often, in complex ways, revolves around the tensions of thought and sensation, which might be called his primary blended binary. By late 1919, Keats seems to have neither peace of mind nor strength of body to find this voice again.