John Keats, Medicine, and Young Men on the Make

Abstract

Keats worked hard to be able to pursue a career in medicine. It is thus striking that he decided to set aside this career path to pursue poetry. Keats’s choice is most often read within his life story, but his decision fits within a pattern of life choices made by his friends and acquaintances. As Nicholas Roe’s new biography suggests, Keats came of age amidst a group of young men on the make. The question all of them had to answer was whether they wanted to make poetry or make a career. To make poetry was to gamble on immortality. To make a career was not only to earn money but to be able, perhaps, to marry and to make a family. Placing Keats’s decisions within the choices made by figures from Thomas Love Peacock to John Hamilton Reynolds, from Horace Smith to Cornelius Webb enables us to understand not only his personal decision but how his generation of rising young men of promise faced the economic realities of being a writer. We can also see how the poetry of Keats and his circle sought to thematize what Leigh Hunt called the “spirit of money-getting” and what Shelley more simply called “Mammon.”

This chapter is a revised and longer version of an essay, ‘The Poetry of Experience and the Cockney Profession of Poetry’, Wordsworth Circle (Spring/Summer 2016), 119–23, that was originally written in honor of Robert Langbaum, my dissertation director at the University of Virginia. The kind of historical literary work I do today can seem far away from the boldly argued and strikingly phrased insights of Bob’s work from The Poetry of Experience forward. And yet, as I think about this current piece, I see at least two lingering influences. First, I learned from him that literature is always international, always comparative. Second, while I am treating a more mundane sense of experience in this essay than Langbaum does, I still want to assert a connection with his seminal work. For me, the Cockneys are perfect examples of his poets of experience. Since the volume for Bob underwent transformations that precluded a longer tribute to him, I wanted to acknowledge his formative influence on me here. Keats’s poetry and letters are usually quoted from my Norton Critical Edition; letters not in that edition are cited from LJK.