John keats (1795-1821)

Such was the quality of the verse written by Keats in his cruelly short-lived career as a poet, that critics have been tempted to think that if he had lived longer hr would have become the greatest of the Romantic poets. His achievement was indeed remarkable, and the small body of the work he left demonstrates a maturity and imaginative power surprising in one so young.

John Keats’s father was head stableman at a London livery stable who married his employer’s daughter and inherited the business. The family had five children, John being the first born. He was sent to the Reverend John Clarke’s private school. His teacher Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s son, encouraged his passion for reading and, both at school and in the course of their later friendship, introduced him to Spenser and other poets, to music, and to the theatre.

When Keats was eight his father was killed by a fall from a horse and six years later his mother died of tuberculosis. Although the livery stable had prospered and £8000 had been left in trust to the children by Keats’s grandmother, the estate remained tied up in the law courts for all of Keats’s lifetime. The guardian took Keats out of school at the age of fifteen and bound him apprentice to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary. In 1815 Keats continued his medical studies at Guy’s Hospital, London, and the next year qualified as an apothecary-surgeon, but almost immediately he abandoned medicine for poetry.

The rapidity and sureness of Keats’s development has no match. He did not even undertake poetry until his eighteenth year. When he was twenty-two he produced his first book, Poems. In Sleep and Poetry he laid out for himself a program asking only for some time “ For ten years, that I may overwhelm/ Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed/That my own soul has to itself decreed”.

Keats felt a foreboding of early death and applied himself to his art with a desperate urgency. In 1818 he published Endymion: A Poetic Romance. It is an allegory of a mortal’s quest for an ideal feminine counterpart and a flawless happiness beyond earthly possibility. But long before Keats completed the poem he declared impatiently that Endymion was only a poetic exercise and “trial of invention” and began to construct Hyperion, an epic poem conceived on the model of Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, he left Hyperion unfinished: he recognized that he was uncommonly susceptible to poetic influences and imitated Milton’s manner too closely.

The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (a revision of Hyperion) was written when Keats served as a nurse to his dying brother. Its subject, the displacement of Saturn and his fellow Titans by Zeus and the other Olympians, was taken from Greek mythology, but the primary epic question, like that in Paradise Lost, was: whence and why evil? Keats set out to represent an answer not according to any religious creed but in humanistic terms. The Titans used to be benign gods, ruling in the Saturnian, or golden, age of general felicity. Yet at the beginning of the poem all the Titans except Hyperion, god of the sun, have been dethroned; and the uncomprehending Saturn again and again raises the question Who? Why? How? Can blank unreason and injustice determine the course of things? Oceanus, god of the sea, offers a solution: the gods, although blameless, have fallen in the natural progression of things, according to which each stage of development is fated to give place to a higher excellence, and it is part of wisdom and virtue among the Titans to accept this truth uncomplainingly.

In book 3 of the original Hyperion these scenes among the Titans are supplemented by the experience of the Olympian Apollo, still a youth but destined to displace Hyperion among the heavenly gods. He lives in ignorance of the universe and its processes, but he is avid for knowledge. To him appears Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, who will be the mother of the muses, and so of all the arts. In her face Apollo reads the silent record of the defeat of the Titans and comes to the understanding that life involves process, that process entails change and suffering and that there can be no creative process except by the defeat and destruction of the preceding stage. Apollo’s awareness to the tragic nature of life is what the Titans lacked. Apollo’s cried out: “Knowledge enormous makes a god of me”. Apollo is transfigured not only into the god of the sun, who has earned the right to displace Hyperion, but also into the god of the highest poetry.

Keats abandoned the poem in April 1819. But in autumn he took up the theme again. This time his model was Dante, especially the Purgatorio. Keats begins his new poem with a long induction in which the poet, in a dream, earns the right to a vision finally granted him by Moneta (her Latin name suggests “the Admonisher”), who replaces Mnemosyne. The centre of poetic concern is shifted from the epic action to the consciousness of the poet, as he seeks his identity and status. The earlier ordeal through which Apollo had become god of poetry is displaced by the ordeal of this particular poet. The induction is Keats’s equivalent of a poem he never saw, Wordsworth Prelude, the account of “the Growth of the Poet’s Mind”. But whereas Wordsworth had represented his evolution in the mode of literal autobiography, Keats employs the form of a ritual initiation. The poet progresses, in leaps of expanding awareness of what it is to be human and a poet of humanity, to the stage at which, having passed through and beyond the ordinary experience of suffering, he achieves aesthetic insight and detachment and the power “To see as God sees” – earns to right to speak of his tragic experience

The second Hyperion remains unfinished as well: Keats felt that in his age the high artifice of epic matter and style had ceased to be the natural voice of the poet.

Keats is often cited as one of the forerunners if the Cult of Beauty in the nineteenth century. His search for beauty in art and nature was one of his central concerns. Nature for Keats was another source of beauty which the poet might enrich by using his creative imagination. This immortality of beauty provided consolation to an artist whose life had been far from easy: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, he wrote in Endymion. Through the exercise of imagination Keats saw the means towards achieving knowledge of beauty, and hence of truth.

His poetry is rich in imagery, and is highly sensuous. In his rendering of human experience, Keats employs all the senses –visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory and organic. A keen awareness of the world of the senses and the capacity to lose himself entirely within the object he is describing, make him one of the most “passionate” of poets, and his influence on later Victorian poets –especially Tennyson and Rossetti –was substantial. An interest in the past was another characteristic of Keats’ poetry which was also to become a recurrent theme of Victorian poetry. Keats’ letters make up a brilliant record of his critical opinions on a wide variety of subjects. His reflections on the process of creation have entered the historical canons of standard literary criticism.