John Keats and the times we’re in
I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.
- John Keats
The grave of John Keats (left) in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome. To the right lies artist Joseph Severn, who accompanied Keats to Rome and cared for him to the end. Severn died in 1879. Photo by Sydni Sterling.
In December 1817, twenty-two-year-old poet John Keats penned a gossipy, high-spirited letter to his two brothers rife with speculations about art, the theater, and more gossip. Within the rapid flow of words is a paragraph which would become an internet meme in the dark days of Covid two centuries into the future.
In it, Keats wondered about “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
And so, for a number of modern readers, the young English poet who died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821 at age twenty-five, became a lantern bearer in a time of “uncertainties.” Among the Keats-related posts in those days, the academically driven online site, The Conversation, featured a piece headlined: “John Keats’s Concept of Negative Capability — Or Sitting in Uncertainty — Is Needed Now More Than Ever.”
With a pandemic freshly behind us, here we are again, citizens of a nation divided against itself, trying to negotiate our way through white-capped waters, uncertain of what’s around the bend.
The short life of John Keats, the Shakespearean beauty of his best poems, and the off-hand brilliance of his letters, are still there to help guide us, like the steadfast bright star he poeticized in one of his most famous sonnets.
Keats’s pursuit of Beauty, with a capital B, reflects the human capacity, no matter how dire one’s own circumstances, to reach beyond comfort or consolation for some ultimacy, where all contradictions are resolved.
Echoing his Negative Capability letter, Keats wrote to his beloved Fanny Brawne, “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. It is an experience, beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
Had Shakespeare died at Keats’s age, we would hardly know him; as for Chaucer, not at all.
The eldest of four children, Keats was born into a loving, London household. His father, a stablemaster, died after falling from his horse when Keats was eight; he was fourteen when he lost his mother to tuberculosis. His brother George emigrated to America and sister Fanny fell under the care of a dictatorial guardianship. Tuberculosis killed his beloved brother Tom in 1818, less than three years before the disease brought down the poet. Life, Keats was to write in a letter the year after Tom’s death, was “a vale of Soul-making.”
In 1817, the year his first, mostly ignored book of poems was published, Keats quit the study of medicine. With a barely adequate inheritance, the twenty-one-year-old set out to be a full-time poet. Later that year Keats wrote to a friend proclaiming “the holiness of the heart’s affections.”
There was no turning back.
Words by Medieval Saint Hildegard von Bingen are apropos here: “Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep.”
Keats’s 1817 poem “Sleep and Poetry” contains these lines:
O for ten years that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy! so that I may do the deed
That my own soul to itself has decreed.
Ten years is all he asked for. He had less than four. At an early age Keats learned to the marrow something twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich observed in The Courage to Be: “The anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.”
And yet, Keats was considered the ideal companion for a country weekend. “Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know,” he wrote to his sister in late August 1819. Friends treasured his playful presence, not just his memory.
Rilke noted that a person’s fame is the sum of our misunderstandings. Too often Keats, in the popular imagination, is the symbol of the neurasthenic poet whispering rhymes from the fainting couch, an image derived from the mid-Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite imagination. That image is still in play today, even among writers and poets who should know better.
The truth is more interesting.
Joseph Severn, the artist who accompanied Keats from England to his deathbed in Rome, recalled the author when he was in health, and his “dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen.” In fact, Keats was known for his pugilistic fearlessness on the school playground, especially against bigger bullies.
He stood five feet tall.
As a young man, Keats encountered a hulking fellow in a London alley exhibiting cruelty towards a cat; the future author of “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” quickly remedied the situation.
With the sore throat that augured his doom, he scrambled up, through mist and cloud, treacherous Ben Nevis in Scotland, Great Britain’s highest peak, during his heroic, punishing walking tour to the north in the summer of 1818 with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. At the summit, Keats alarmed Brown by writing a sonnet while perched at the edge of a fifteen-hundred-foot precipice. People still die up there nearly every year.
Like us, Keats lived in uncertain times: the Industrial Revolution and subsequent urbanization uprooted lives and imposed new, existential insecurities. In the burgeoning consumer economy, countless souls were left to forage for, and to forge, their own identities. For Keats, whatever the circumstance, not everything in this life was for sale.
“I shall never be a Reasoner because I care not to be in the right,” je wrote — a shockingly precocious statement for anyone who cares to remember their early twenties. Keats’s desire to vacate the ego constituted, in Christian terms, kenosis — an act not of self-cancellation, but of union, as expressed in this letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey: “nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”
Such equanimity would be needed when the Tory reviewers gleefully bashed Endymion, Keats’s second book of poetry, several months after it was published in April 1818.
Here’s John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review: “It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody,) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius — he has all of these, but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry, which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.”
And this, from John Gibson Lockhart’s review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: “It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.”
The poet of twenty-two didn’t fold.
In a letter to his publisher on October 8, 1818, Keats discussed Endymion: “It is as good as I had the power to make it — by myself…I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice — I was never afraid of failure; I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
The reviews’ vitriol, and the worsening condition of his brother Tom, awaited Keats in London after his summer walkabout with Brown through the north. In jaunty letters to family and friends, Keats chronicled their journey of some six-hundred miles in forty-four days while suffering bad weather and worse food. Biographers note in passing that Keats carried with him three small volumes of the Divine Comedy in Henry Francis Carey’s translation. Dante’s masterwork is the ultimate allegory of a Pilgrim’s Progress towards a sacramental vision of life. That Dante accompanied Keats on his rigorous journey is no minor biographical detail.
Keats chiseled the long, unfinished poem “Hyperion” — grave, granitic — from his experience trekking north through the lens of Dante’s poetics. “Hyperion” contains these lines, whose balm echoes down to our own troubled times:
to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty.
“Sovereignty,” in the old sense, had nothing to do with imperious solipsism, and everything to do with taking responsibility for the exercise of free will.
At this point in his life, wrote W. Jackson Bate in his Pulitzer Prize winning, 1963 biography, John Keats: “The opportunities for self-pity and paralysis were unrivaled. And yet the great poetry for which he had been preparing begins to appear steadily month after month.”
Here began perhaps the most brilliant twelve-month period in the history of English poetry — Autumn of 1818 to Autumn of 1819 — what biographer Robert Gittings called Keats’s Living Year. The great poetry includes: “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Lamia,” “The Fall of Hyperion,” and his last ode, “To Autumn,” which melts into a rich silence.
Though he subscribed to no religion, Keats’s abridged journey under the sun crossed paths with some of our greatest religious writers and thinkers — as all authentic art does — including Dante and T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets is considered the greatest religious poem of the twentieth century. Eliot ended his visionary quartet where “the fire and rose are one” — that place of unsayable beauty Keats had been journeying towards all his life.
On February 23, 1821, in a narrow room above the Spanish Steps in Rome, Keats uttered his last words to Joseph Severn: ““Severn…I am dying–I shall die easy–don’t be frightened–be firm, and thank God it has come.”
Dauntless, steadying his prow into the waves even to the end, the life and art of John Keats offer us, in our days of “uncertainties,” a better way.
Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent book is Nocturne: New and Selected Poems, from Unsolicited Press (2024).
