Read an Excerpt
John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, and he died of tuberculosis on February 23, 1821, aged twenty-five. In that narrow patch of existence he composed some of the most unrepentingly alive poems in the English language. It is possible that, had he survived, he would have written no more; quitting had always been an option, and he needed real money to support himself and his fiancée, Fanny Brawne. It is also possible that he would have kept writing, and possible too that he would have burrowed even deeper into the broken heart of his century, which, he knew, was reordering time and space in answer to the demands of a new and rapacious economic system. George Bernard Shaw saw in Keats the makings of “a full-blooded modern revolutionist,” and if he didn’t reach the barricades he did belong on them, because there was nothing Keats loved more than us: those who know this is not all we are meant to be. His poetry is a record of that love and its wild, inconvenient expression. It is a lover’s discourse, at once compassionate, exacting, indecent, and pure.
This book collects six of Keats’s poems, known together as the Great Odes. I follow each ode with a short essay that is both critical and autobiographical, although the autobiographical dimension will not always be obvious. In that sense, the essays work like the odes. Odes, roughly speaking, are poems meant to celebrate something or someone, but because they are written from a place of emotional excess or ferment it’s easy for them to tip over into more private preoccupations: thus Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which connects the cycle of the seasons to the here today, gone tomorrow movement of revolutionary struggle, also erupts into the furiously personal cri de coeur “I fall upon the thorns of life—I bleed!” In writing about Keats’s odes, I have tried to prop myself open to this same uneven traffic of literary and intimate concerns. This book, then, is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.
Keats himself was famously lovable, despite having been born (he said) into an “unpromising morning.” That sense of bleakness, of having failed before he had begun, dogged him. He was poor. He was short, six inches below average, and in ill health. Once he began publishing his work was almost universally panned. He was temperamental, obsessive, and thin-skinned, and his childhood, which was traumatic, left him “nervous, morbid,” in the words of his brother George. All the same, he amassed a small army of devoted friends, one of whom called him “the most lovable associate ... ‘that ever lived in the tide of times.’” Of his death, or perhaps their relationship, Brawne wrote, “I have not got over it, and never shall.”
When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.
The word that gets used most often in conjunction with Keats is sensuous. He is fascinated by how things feel, and by the capacity of metaphor to register the dizzying strangeness of being a body among others. Only Keats could come up with “the thrilling liquidity of dewy piping” or “a breathless honeyfeel of bliss,” and not always to his credit. The early poetry, like the soupy epic Endymion, expels an unfortunate phrase every couple of lines: “well-wooing sun,” “night-swollen mushrooms,” “fire-tailed exhalations,” and so on. This kind of writing disgusted contemporary reviewers, who called it “puerile” and “effeminate,” “unhealthy” and “unclean”; “In Wordsworth,” one sniffed, “there is no such unhealthy lusciousness.” Lord Byron agreed: “Such poetry,” he declared, “is a sort of mental masturbation,” and elsewhere he snickers about “Johnny Keats’s piss-a-bed-poetry.” A century later William Butler Yeats slides into the same vein:
I see a schoolboy when I think of him
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery stable-keeper—
Luxuriant song.
Yeats makes explicit what Byron doesn’t have to: not only is Keats’s poetry sexually deviant, its indecency (or “luxuriance”) is amplified by his lower-middle-class status. The Romantic period had a taste for so-called peasant poets like Stephen Duck, Ann Yearsley, and John Clare, but Keats was not a peasant. Worse, he skimmed the proletarian perimeter while being aspirationally “shabby-genteel,” “a fanciful dreaming tea-drinker” with a false claim on respectability. In the alchemy of nineteenth-century social prejudice, this rendered him at once oversexed and insufficiently masculine. He was an outcast and a striver and out of genital control, “f-gg-g his Imagination” (Byron again) instead of a nice warm body. It’s a singularly nasty assessment, and it sticks.
It sticks, in part, because when he died, Keats’s friends played up elements of this picture, and the Victorian era (which Keats missed by just nine years) ate it up. He was a special favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites, who mined his work for inspiration; in their poems and canvases, colorless young men repine in the arms of no-good women with hair like candy floss. He became then what he still is to many people now: an escapist, rolling around in visions of fairies and butterflies, deliriously aroused but somehow still chaste. In the big-box bookstores of my youth, you could always find cheap editions of his poems, squat volumes with gold paint sprayed along their edges. The checkout line held stacks of blank notebooks with Frank Dicksee’s 1901 painting La Belle Dame sans Merci spilled across the front and Keats’s more notable quotables— “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination”—printed in the margins. The poetry, it seemed, was safe, commercial, decorative. Above all, it was apolitical.
This would have stuck painfully in Keats’s craw. The reason he got so much negative attention in the press is because he hung out with well-known radicals, and was a radical himself. When one reviewer dubbed Keats and his friends “the Cockney School of Poetry,” he didn’t just mean that they were, as the Brits say, N.O.C.D. (not our class, dear), he meant they were left-wingers, even revolutionaries. This is a view of Keats most academics now share, thanks in large measure to the legendary Walter Jackson Bate—who went from busing tables in campus dining halls to Harvard professor—whose 1963 biography turned Yeats’s picture of the schoolboy randy for candy on its head. Bate’s Keats was a bruiser, his Jacobin sympathies hung in plain sight. Today, if you suggest to a room full of Keats scholars that their man is apolitical, you might be asked to step outside.
The trouble with this view of Keats is that it rests heavily on his biography and not much, if at all, on his poetry. Although that poetry was written in dark times—in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and in the middle of the catastrophic economic downtown they engendered; during the breakneck acceleration of the Industrial Revolution, with its unspeakable dependence on human slavery in the Caribbean and elsewhere; in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, when armed cavalry maimed or killed a still-unknown number of peaceful protestors—it says close to nothing about them. Keats’s radicalism lies elsewhere, in his style.
Show More
