Poems of the Week: John Keats

In earlier articles in this series, we have examined the lives of a number of the great poets in the English language, and to some extent we have seen the evolution of English poetry from Chaucer on. Following the romantically inclined poetry of the late16th and 17th centuries renaissance period, the 18th century became more formal, with Alexander Pope’s (1688 – 1744) An Essay on Criticism, which was published in 1711, largely defining the direction. The majority of the poets for the next hundred years followed this path, and the large majority were from the upper classes and educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Typically, they had a good knowledge of Latin, and often Greek as well; and they also had some knowledge of one or two more modern European languages. Of course, the major voice before that was Shakespeare, who didn’t fit into any of these groups; you may remember Ben Jonson (1573 – 1637) saying in his memorial to him that he had “small Latin, and less Greek”. For this reason, during the 17th century Shakespeare was sometimes dismissed as naïve. Towards the end of the 18th century the Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), Coleridge (1772-1834) and Southey (1774 – 1843) began the change in direction, but they still were generally still in the cultural ‘educated class’.

The time was ripe for a working class poet, and John Keats was the man. Even the poets in the same school as himself, notably Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) and James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859), tried to portray Keats as a fragile person – as Jonson described Shakespeare as ‘nature’s child’. Here is the great actor Henry Irving, in an address on The Drama to the Philosophical Institution in Edinburgh, on November 8th, 1881:

“It has been too much the custom to talk of Shakespeare as nature's child—as the lad who held horses for people who came to the play--as a sort of chance phenomenon who wrote these plays by accident and unrecognized. How supremely ridiculous! How utterly irreconcilable with the grand dimensions of the man!”

I believe that the image of Keats that has come down to us, first protected by his friend Shelley, and then made acceptable to the Victorians by Tennyson and others, gives us a view ‘irreconcilable with the grand dimensions of the man’. It is sad that an illness which was a family problem cut his creative life so short, but he has left us with a legacy that everyone should value.

As I was writing this column, I received a new book, John Keats – Fugitive Poems with a Foreword by Andrew Motion that takes a very similar view of Keats; it also has a number of poems that one does not often see, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the important changes in English poetry.

John Keats was born on October 31st, 1795, at the Swan and Hoop inn and livery stables in London. His father was Thomas Keats, who was head ostler at the stables (an ostler was a stableman, and the head ostler was essentially the stable manager). Thomas has been described as an ambitious and energetic young man. He had come up to London from Devon, and married the ‘handsome and headstrong’ Frances, the daughter of the stable proprietor, John Jennings. John was their first child; they had two other sons, George, who was born in 1797, and Thomas, who was born on in 1799. In 1801, they had a third son, Edward, but he died in infancy. In 1803, their daughter, Frances Mary (always called Fanny), was born. In that same year, John entered John Clarke’s School at Enfield; George entered the school at the same time, and Tom joined them later.

Thomas Keats died in April, 1804, as a consequence of a fall from his horse, while he was returning from a visit to John and George at school. Just two months later, his widow married William Rawlings. This marriage led to a family row, and the children went to live with their grandparents. John Jennings, their grandfather, was an astute business man who left a respectable estate at his death in March, 1805, but the family became embroiled in financial troubles which were not finally sorted out until well after John Keats’s death. Meanwhile, their mother Frances left her new husband and, after some years, returned in 1809 to the family home ill with tuberculosis. John had always been deeply attached to his mother, and he took over the responsibility for nursing her; he was heartbroken when she died in March, 1810.

As a refuge from his grief he turned to books, a passion which never left him. Before this he had been an indifferent scholar – at Enfield he had a reputation as a sportsman and a fighter – but he threw himself into his studies and “won all the school prizes in sight”. (This quote is from Aileen Ward’s introduction to The Poems of John Keats, a collection first published in 1966). On their mother’s death, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell were appointed the children’s guardians. The boys remained in school, and Fanny was moved to the Abbey family, where she remained for several years. In 1811 John and George left school, and John decided to follow a medical career. The biographers appear to have somewhat different views on whether this was his idea, or Richard Abbey’s suggestion. There are several biographical sources, with considerable differences, both in the facts and in the interpretations. I have used a timeline from a website (http://englishhistory.net/keats/chronology.html), the compiler is Merilee; I have also used some of the biographical details from the site, but I could not find an author’s name. I have also used my regular source, Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Another site, (http://www.poetseers.org/the_romantics/john_keats/) contains this statement:

“Details of Keats's early life are scarce. During the last few years of his life, letters allow one to track him virtually week-to-week but his childhood and adolescence are another matter. Indeed, virtually all the information known is in the form of reminiscences, many taken years after Keats had died. Understandably, one must view these memories with some skepticism. Whether discussing Keats's physical appearance (his brother George said he resembled their mother while a family friend said it was the father) or his pastimes, these sources contradict one another.”

Keats became apprenticed to the apothecary Dr. Hammond of Edmonton, and apparently enjoyed the work and did well; his apprenticeship was due to be completed in mid 1815. An apothecary was what we would now call a pharmaceutical chemist. However, in July 1815 the Apothecary Act was passed, the purpose of this being to ensure that an apothecary had adequate medical training. This meant that Keats could not simply become an apothecary by completing the apprenticeship, and as a consequence he entered Guy’s Hospital. He planned to study there for a year and then apply for membership in the Royal College of Surgeons. His classes include a variety of subjects - anatomy, chemistry, dissection, physiology, botany, as well as various duties around the hospital. Contrary to later rumors, Keats did well enough to earn a 'dressership' at Guy's for the new year. (Only 12 dressers were chosen from 700 students.)

Henry Stephens, a classmate (and later the inventor of blue-black ink) described the would-be poet:

“Whilst attending lectures, he [Keats] would sit & instead of Copying out the lecture, would often scribble some doggerel rhymes, among the Notes of Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another Student's Syllabus - In my Syllabus of Chemical Lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper cover, This cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on which is the following fragment of Doggerel rhyme

Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out "hold, enough!"
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection;
For, bless my beard, they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.”

While at school, Keats had formed a close friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the school Principal. Clarke was eight years older than Keats, and appears to have been his tutor. As Keats discovered his interest in literature, Clarke encouraged him, and Keats continued to visit the school on a regular basis after his departure. In 1813 Clarke read Spenser’s Epithalamion to him, and Keats was enormously impressed and excited. Clarke then lent him a copy of The Faerie Queene which he went through in a week, as Clarke recalled “like a young horse through a spring meadow, ramping.” Later he read Shakespeare. Clarke himself was attempting to establish himself as a poet, and discussed the work of Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859) with John. This led the young Keats in the direction of Romantic poetry, which, as I said before, had fallen out of favor in the 18th Century. ‘Hunt’s first collection of poetry, Juvenilia, showed his love for Italian literature, and later in The Story of Rimini he reintroduced a freedom of movement in English couplet verse lost in the 18th Century’ (Merriam-Webster).

At this time, critical periodicals were of enormous importance, both in the publication of new poetry, and in sometimes savage criticism. Hunt and his brother John launched the reformist weekly The Examiner in 1808, and in 1813 the brothers were imprisoned for their attacks on the unpopular Prince Regent. After Leigh’s release in 1815 he moved to Hampstead, then the home of Keats, and in 1817 introduced him to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), a friend of Hunt’s since 1811. The Examiner supported the new Romantic Poets against the attacks by such journals as Blackwood’s Magazine, who referred to them as ‘the Cockney Poets’. In addition to Hunt himself, Shelley, and Keats, this group included William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830). Their principal attacker was the Scottish critic John Gibson Lockhart (1794 – 1854), who was later the biographer of Sir Walter Scott, as some of the readers of this column may remember!

In early 1814 Keats wrote what were apparently his first poems, Imitation of Spenser and On Peace; later in that year he wrote Fill for Me a Brimming Bowl. Here is Imitation of Spenser:

Now Morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touch’d a verdant hill;
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,
Silv’ring the untainted gushes of its rill;
Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distill,
And after parting beds of simple flowers,
By many streams a little lake did fill,
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And, in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.
There the king-fisher saw his plumage bright
Vieing with fish of brilliant dye below;
Whose silken fins, and golden scales’ light
Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow:
There saw the swan his neck of arched snow,
And oar’d himself along with majesty;
Sparkled his jetty eyes; his feet did show
Beneath the waves like Afric’s ebony,
And on his back a fay reclined voluptuously.
Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle
That in that fairest lake had placed been,
I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile;
Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen:
For sure so fair a place was never seen,
Of all that ever charm’d romantic eye:
It seem’d an emerald in the silver sheen
Of the bright waters; or as when on high,
Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the coerulean sky.
And all around it dipp’d luxuriously
Slopings of verdure through the glossy tide,
Which, as it were in gentle amity,
Rippled delighted up the flowery side;
As if to glean the ruddy tears, it tried,
Which fell profusely from the rose-tree stem!
Haply it was the workings of its pride,
In strife to throw upon the shore a gem
Outvieing all the buds in Flora’s diadem.

On the 3rd of March, 1816, John began work as a dresser at Guy’s. He was assigned to a surgeon whose operations were 'very badly performed and accompanied by much bungling if not worse.' Keats was required to dress wounds, change bandages and hold patients down during operations. He handled emergencies during his night duties and accompanied the surgeon on rounds. He sometimes performed his own operations. On the 25th of July in Blackfriars, John sat for the four exams necessary to become a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. The exams covered the following topics: a translation of the pharmacopoeia and physicians' prescriptions; the theory and practice of medicine; pharmaceutical chemistry; and materia medica. Keats passed. He was 20 years old and had become an apothecary 'in the shortest time possible and at the earliest possible age.' Neither of his roommates passed the exams.

However, in the same year, his first poem is published in The Examiner. O Solitude! was a sonnet, and during his brief life Keats would write 64 sonnets, generally using the Petrarchian form (see our article on Sonnets for a discussion of sonnet forms!). Recently a collection of his sonnets has been published as The 64 Sonnets by John Keats with an Introduction by Edward Hirsch (Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2004). Here is his first:

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings: climb with me the steep,—
Nature's observatory—whence the dell,
In flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refined,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

In late September, Keats moved to a new apartment, and began his next year at Guy’s. Clarke had moved to London, and had shown Hunt some of Keats’s poetry (the sonnet above had been submitted anonymously). In mid-October, Clarke and Keats read the translation of Homer’s Iliad by George Chapman (1559 – 1634), published in 1611; his translation of the Odyssey appeared in 1616. This translation had been largely forgotten; at that time, the best-known translation of Homer was that of Alexander Pope, and one can understand that two young poets exploring a new form of poetry would be excited by the more ‘romantic’ version of the early seventeenth century poet. Walking home from Clarke’s, Keats composed a sonnet which he had delivered to Clarke by 10 a.m. the following morning. This is regarded as his first mature work, On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
     And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
     Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
     That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
     Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
     When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
     He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
     Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Tennyson pointed out (considerably later) that it wasn’t Cortez, it was Balboa; but it doesn’t matter. An earlier critic pointed out that ‘demesne’ and ‘serene’ don’t actually rhyme, but that matters rather less today than it did then.

Keats began to meet the group of friends he would keep for the rest of his life. Among them were Leigh Hunt, James Rice, John Hamilton Reynolds, and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. On the 3rd of November, Keats visited Haydon's studio and wrote a sonnet praising Haydon, Hunt and William Wordsworth. Haydon sent the sonnet to Wordsworth. John met the influential critic William Hazlitt through Haydon.

In late 1816 or early 1817 Keats met Shelley, and they went for walks on Hampstead Heath, during which Shelley tried to persuade Keats not to publish his early poems. I have not been able to find why Shelley did this, but the following may give a clue. Richard Henry Horne (1802 – 1884) in 1844 wrote New Spirit of the Age, a collection of essays on contemporary writers. Here is an extract:

"When somebody expressed his surprise to Shelley, that Keats, who was not very conversant with the Greek language, could write so finely and classically of their gods and goddesses, Shelley replied 'He was a Greek.'"

“This was the highest sort of praise from Shelley, who wrote to Leigh Hunt's wife Marianne of his desire to help Keats: ‘I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.’”

My belief, therefore, is that Shelley wanted to delay his publication until his work had achieved the maturity that Shelley expected; the barrage of criticism that Keats’s early work received may suggest that his advise was wise.

In December of 1816, Keats informed Richard Abbey that he has decided not to continue his medical career. As one might expect, Abbey was not very happy about this, and later recalled the conversation : 'Not intend to be a Surgeon! Why what do you mean to be? I mean to rely on my Abilities as a Poet - John, you are either mad or a Fool, to talk in so absurd a Manner. My mind is made up said the youngster very quietly. I know that I possess Abilities greater than most Men, and therefore I am determined to gain my Living by exercising them. - '

On the first or second of March 1817, Haydon took Keats to see the Elgin Marbles. Haydon had played a significant role in having them arranged for public exhibition and Keats (as by now you might expect) promptly wrote a couple of sonnets about them. The next day, his first collection, Poems, was published by C. and J. Ollier. On March 14th he lodged at Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight and began the writing of his first long poem, Endymion. This begins:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

Keats described this as “A Poetic Romance. ‘The stretched metre of an antique song.’ Inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton.”

On November 28th, he finished Endymion. A couple of weeks later, Haydon took Keats to meet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), and the two poets met several time afterwards.

On December 28th, 1817, Haydon held what has become famous as "The Immortal Dinner". The guests in addition to Keats were Wordsworth; the engraver John Landseer; the essayist Charles Lamb; the explorer Joseph Ritchie; Mary Wordsworth’s cousin Tom Monkhouse; John Kingston, the Comptroller of Stamps, who was Wordsworth’s boss; and perhaps others. The occasion was described in great detail in Haydon’s autobiography, but it recently has been the subject of a delightful book by Penelope Hughes-Hallett (The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London, 1817). During the evening, Keats recited a portion of Endymion, which he had presented to Wordsworth a few days earlier. It has been said that Wordsworth was initially critical, but since Keats repeated it at the dinner a month later, he can’t have been too depressed! As one might suppose, the painter described the physical appearances of his guests: Wordsworth was the tallest, at about five foot nine inches, and Lamb the shortest, at just under five feet. Keats was also short, at a little over five feet, but he had very broad shoulders and an athletic build; he always stood in a very upright manner, leaning a little back to make himself appear taller. He was a bit sensitive about his height: he once commented on Byron’s showing the benefits of being an aristocrat and six feet tall!

In August of 1818, attacks appear in two of the critical magazines on Poems and Endymion. To some extent, these attacks were more directed at Hunt than at Keats. Here is a little of John Gibson Lockhart, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1818:

“As for Mr. Keats's 'Endymion', it has just as much to do with Greece as it has with "old Tartary the fierce;" no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every association in the manner which has been adopted by this "son of promise". ....[We] must inform our readers that this romance is meant to be written in English heroic rhyme. To those who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless. Mr. Keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and Cockney rhyme of the poet of Rimini; but in fairness to that gentleman, we must add, that the defects of the system are tenfold more conspicuous in his disciple's work than in his own. Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but he is a clever man. Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is a boy of pretty abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil.

And now, good-morrow to "the Muses' son of Promise;" as for "the feats he yet may do," as we do not pretend to say, like himself, "Muse of my native land am I inspired," we shall adhere to the safe old rule of pauca verba.

We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50 quid upon any thing he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," &c. But, for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.”

John Wilson Croker, in The Quarterly Review, April 1818, wrote:

“Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read [Endymion: A Poetic Romance]. Not that we have been wanting in our duty - far from it - indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation - namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into.

It is not that Mr. Keats, (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his sense would put his real name to such a rhapsody,) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius - he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language....

[Mr. Keats] is a copyist of Mr. Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats had advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples: his nonsense therefore is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry....”

There is considerable disagreement as to how Keats reacted to this criticism. Some of his friends believed he was bitterly disappointed; but as we have seen above, his belief in his own talent was considerable. Nevertheless, here is one of his Odes, the Ode on Melancholy:

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
     Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
     By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
          Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
     Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
          Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
     For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
          And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
     Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
     And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
     Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
          Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
     Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
          And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
     And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
     Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
     Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
          Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
     Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
          And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Over the next few months, Keats produced many of his major works. In January of 1819 he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, and in February, The Eve of St. Mark. In late April, he wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which has appeared in these pages before.

In this year also he wrote the Odes that are regarded as perhaps his major contributions, and he became unofficially engaged to Fanny Brawne. Tragically, in July and August of the same year he experienced the first signs of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. He was staying in the Isle of Wight again, at Shanklin, beginning Lamia. In October, having moved to Winchester, where he wrote To Autumn, and began and abandoned The Fall of Hyperion.

As early as January, 1818, he seems to have recognized that his lifetime might be too short to realize his promise:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love – then on the shore
Of the wild world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

In 1820, in June, following two severe haemorrhages he moved to Leigh Hunt’s home. That July, Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes and other poems were published and well-reviewed. Here is the opening to St. Agnes:

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

On the 17th of September, John sailed for Italy with his artist friend Joseph Severn, arriving in Rome in November. On the 23rd of February 1821, John Keats died at 26 Piazza di Spagna, Rome; and on the 26th of February he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery there.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont were staying in a house on Lake Geneva. Keats had promised he would come in the spring but he died in February. It was April before Shelley heard of his death, which inspired one of his greatest poems, Adonais; we discussed this poem in our earlier piece on Shelley. Here is a brief portion from stanzas 42 and 43:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music; from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear.

By this time, of course, Shelley felt that the criticisms Keats had received contributed to his early death. He wrote to Byron to inform him of Keats’s death, and received a reply, of which this is an extract:

“I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats - is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of "Endymion" in the Quarterly. It was severe, - but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.

I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem; it was rage, and resistance, and redress - but not despondency nor despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena.

"Expect not life from pain nor danger free,
Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee."

You know my opinion of that second-hand school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry, - because it is of no school. I read Cenci - but, besides that I think the subject essentially undramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists, as models. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to my drama, pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.

I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know if it is yet published. I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead - or that he was alive and so sensitive - I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope, and my disapprobation of his own style of writing.”

Little more than a year later, in July 1822, Shelley was drowned while sailing off the Coast of Viareggio. The Shelleys were then living in Lerici and the bay is still known as the Bay of the Poets. Shelley’s body was identified by a book of Keats’s poems which was in his pocket. His friends Trelawney and Byron made arrangements for his body to be cremated on the sea shore, and his ashes were transported to Rome and buried in the Protestant Cemetery, the same cemetery where Keats had been laid to rest.

Shelley always believed that the critical attacks on Keats’s poetry were what led to his death. But I think it is clear from the information presented above that John Keats was a much stronger personality than this view would support. In particular, I think it is clear that his death was as the result of a disease that was shared by his family, exacerbated perhaps by his life style. His confidence in his own gifts, and in the poetry he produced, seem to me clear.

Keats is now regarded as one of the English language’s truly great poets. As I said at the beginning of this long series, the object of the poet is the search for the right word. In the case of Keats, it appears that he didn’t have to search: it was there at the end of his pen.

It is a problem to choose the Poems of the Week, but I thought I would choose three of his great Odes, all written in 1819: the Ode on a Grecian Urn; the Ode to a Nightingale; and my final Poem of this Week, appropriately enough, To Autumn.

I will close with one of his last sonnets, written in 1819 and directed to his love, Fanny Brawne:

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and lang'rous waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday—or holinight
Of fragrant-curtained love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I've read love's missal through today,
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

I hope you enjoy this view of one of the truly great poets of the English language.