Abstract
Of the major Romantic poets, Keats was the latest born, the earliest to die, the shortest lived, the most likeable, the most easily lovable. His mature creative life was incredibly brief — his first perfect poem, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, being written in October 1816, his last perfect poem, ‘To Autumn’, slightly less than three years later, on 19 September 1819. In his letters we observe a mind functioning at its best over a period of about three years, when Keats was aged twenty-one to twenty-four years. On 3 February 1820 he suffered a violent haemorrhage of the lungs; in September, dying, he sailed for Italy. Keats wrote some of the finest letters in the language, but until his illness they are the letters of a young man. There was much that he did not have time to read or to think about. These few dates suggest the tremendous intensity with which, for a startlingly brief period, Keats thought about his art and worked to create it.
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Notes and References
In 1963 Walter Jackson Bate spoke of Keats’s poetry as being ‘largely untouched by any direct interest in religion’ (John Keats [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963] p. 133). Recent scholarship has argued convincingly for a life-long interest. For a comprehensive study of this subject, see Robert M. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton University Press, 1976).
Ronald A. Sharp in Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979) focuses more on the poetry than (as had Ryan) on the life and the letters.
Specifically on one poem is Gail McMurray Gibson, ‘Ave Madeline: Ironic Annunciation in Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 26 (1977) pp. 39–50.
On Keats and Wordsworth, see Clarence D. Thorpe, ‘Wordsworth and Keats — A Study in Personal and Critical Impressions’, PMLA, 42 (1927) pp. 1010–26.
John Middleton Murry’s Keats (1955) has a suggestive chapter on Keats and Wordsworth — and one on Keats and Blake.
The best recent brief discussion is at the end of the last chapter of Jack Stillinger’s The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems (1971).
For example, in a letter to his publisher John Murray of 24 August 1819, Byron compares himself to the Aztec chief Guatimozin, who, along with a favourite companion, was being tortured by Cortes to make them reveal the location of the royal treasure. When he saw his companion weakening, Guatimozin checked him by asking, ‘Am I now reposing on a bed of flowers?’ See BLJ, VI, p. 216, and William Robertson, A History of America, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: W. Strahan, etc., 1780) II, p. 427. Matthew Arnold observed ‘flint and iron’ in Keats’s character. See The Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77) IX, p. 211.
KL, I, p. 186. 22 November 1817. Keats’s empathetic power was of such intensity that he could see himself frying in a ‘Gridiron’ (KL, I, p. 162) and as ‘a sort of ethereal Pig’ (ibid., I, p. 223). He once imagined himself a ‘Billiard-Ball’ (I, p. 147), which he conceived might ‘have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness volubility. & the rapidity of its motion’ (The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn. 2 vols [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965] I, p. 59). On another occasion Charles Cowden Clarke, who introduced Keats to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, noted in his Recollections of Writers (1878) that Keats ‘hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, “What an image that is — ‘sea-shouldering whales!’”’ (Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1969, p. 126).
Endymion, ll. 799, 798. Stanley C. Russell, ‘“Self-Destroying” Love in Keat’ (Keats-Shelley Journal, 16 [Winter 1967] pp. 79–91), surveys Keats’s alternating attraction and repulsion to love.
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© 1983 John Clubbe and the Estate of Ernest J. Lovell, Jr
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Clubbe, J., Lovell, E.J. (1983). Keats the Humanist. In: English Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06726-8_8
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