Keats Context

Early Life

• Received little formal education as his father was a livery-stable manager (poor family) - “Cockney Keats”, didn’t study the classics

• Close with his sister and two brothers

• His father died when he was 8, his mother when he was 14

• Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon in 1811

• Broke off his apprenticeship and went to London to work as a dresser (jr house surgeon)

• When Keats was 22, his brother, whom he had been taking care of, died of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

• When walking in Lake District his exposure and overexertions brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die

• His brother Tom was also ill with tuberculosis for some time - moved into Hampstead to watch him, fell in love with Fanny Brawne

• They got engaged but he died before they could marry

• His mother had also died of tuberculosis

Critical History

• “A genius more purely poetical never existed!”

• “He seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world and no hopes for the other.” (Haydon’s tribute)

• “help the new school of poets to revise Nature and to put a spirit of youth in every thing” (Leigh Hunt)

• “mental masturbation” (Byron)

• “Cockney poetry… the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language” (Quarterly Review Article)

Twentieth Century

• Analysed Keats through the Freudian theory of oral fixation (loss of mother at young age, deep yearning for death as a return to then womb)

• “Keats’ longing for death and his mother has become a by-word among the learned” (William Empson)

Year all the Odes published

• Annus mirabilis

• 1819

Shift in Style

• Having achieved his aim to create a realm of “Flora and old Pan”, he wanted to move onto the tragic mode and make “the agony and strife of human hearts”

• Keats believed that human life is “a vale of soul-making” (letter to George and Georgina Keats) and that suffering is necessary to shape identity

Duality in his Works

• Life and love is not internally reconcilable; the loveliness is counterbalanced by the transience

• Within his work, friction between intensity and a natural languorousness and propensity to dream - “addicted to passiveness”

Negative Capability

• Intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge

• “when a man is capable of uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

• Thus, the idea that a person’s potential can be defined by what they don’t possess

• The experience and intuitive appreciation of the beautiful is central to poetic talent and renders irrelevant anything that is arrived at through reason

• Said Shakespeare possessed negative capability “so enormously”

The ‘poetical Character’

• The poetic character is not itself - it has no self - it is everything and nothing

• “The chameleon poet”

• “a poet has no Identity - he is continually informing and filling some other body”

Keats and the Rainbow

• Keats accused Newton of destroying all the poetry of the rainbow by “reducing it to the prismatic colours”

• Wordsworth agreed with this

Keats’ Letters

• “Fancy is the Sails, Imagination is the Rudder” - (to Benjamin Bailey on poetry)

• “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth” (to Benjamin Bailey)

• “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”

• Fear he’s left no immortal work behind

• “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all”

• “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest”

• “I have scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature or another” (to George and Georgina)

• “It surprised me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this end?” (to Charles Brown - his last letter)

Chatterton

• Keats drew influence from the young poet (sonnet to Chatterton)

• “I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”

• 'To Autumn’ - inspired by Chatterton

Nightingale

• While he lived in Hampstead, summer, in love with Fanny

• Brown recalled the day Keats sat under a plum tree in the garden to listen to the nightingale’s song and compose

Grecian Urn

• Explores the relationship between imagined beauty and reality (letters)

• Urns used in ancient Greece to hold the ashes of the dead

Melancholy

• In medieval medicine, considered a pathological condition caused by an excess of black bile on one of the four cardinal humours

• It the Renaissance, it became a fashionable, carefully cultivated sadness linked to creativity

• Robert Burton - ‘Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621) - encyclopaedic investigation of the causes and symptoms + cures for melancholy

• Burton treated melancholy as something to be avoided (Keats considers many remedies in poem)

• Keats argued that melancholy is inseparable from pleasure, as the human life is changeable and all things are transient

On the Sea

• King Lear