Poems

Overview

Keats published three books in his lifetime: Poems in 1817, Endymion in 1818, and the 1820 volume that contains nearly everything he is read for. He died in Rome in February 1821, aged twenty-five, of the tuberculosis that had already killed his mother and his brother.

The compression is the first fact about him. He trained as an apothecary and surgeon, qualified, and gave it up for poetry at twenty-one. Almost the entire body of work dates from 1816 to 1819. The five odes were written between April and September 1819, four of them in a few weeks.

The second fact is the letters. Keats wrote long, unguarded, conversational letters to his brothers, to his sister, to Fanny Brawne and to friends, and they contain remarks about poetry that have been quoted ever since. He is one of the very few poets whose prose is read alongside the verse as part of the achievement rather than as background.

The third is the reception. Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review attacked the 1818 Endymion in class terms, sneering at the Cockney School and advising him to go back to the shop. Shelley’s Adonais, the elegy, blames the reviewers for his death, which is not true but tells you what his friends believed. Byron’s private joke, that Keats was snuffed out by an article, is in the same tradition.

The argument

The early work. The 1817 volume is apprentice work with one exception: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, written at twenty-one after a night reading a Elizabethan translation with a friend, and ending with the explorer on a peak in Darien staring at the Pacific. Keats got the explorer wrong; it was Balboa, not Cortez. The poem is still perfect.

Endymion is four thousand lines of loose couplets about a shepherd and the moon goddess, and it opens with the line about a thing of beauty being a joy for ever. Keats knew it was overwritten and said so in his own preface.

The narrative poems. Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia belong to 1819 and are worth reading for the sensuous surface Keats was criticised for. The Eve of St Agnes is the best: a winter night, a chapel, a girl performing a ritual that should show her her future husband, a young man hidden in her room, and a stanza describing a heap of fruit and spices in the dark that is as thick with detail as anything in English. Whether the poem is a romance or something more troubling, given that Madeline wakes to find Porphyro already in her bed, is a live argument.

The two Hyperion poems are Miltonic epics about the defeat of the Titans, both abandoned. The first was given up because Keats decided there were too many Miltonic inversions; the second, The Fall of Hyperion, recasts it as a dream vision and contains the confrontation with Moneta, who tells the poet that none can usurp the height of the temple but those to whom the miseries of the world are misery and will not let them rest.

The odes. The reason to read Keats.

Ode to a Nightingale begins with the speaker’s heart aching and his senses numb, listening to a bird in a garden. He wants to leave the world of men where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies, which is a description of his brother Tom. He goes not by wine but on the viewless wings of poesy, spends the middle stanzas in a darkness he cannot see through, naming the flowers by smell, half in love with easeful death, and then the word forlorn tolls him back to his sole self and the bird flies off. The question at the end, whether he wakes or sleeps, is not rhetorical.

Ode on a Grecian Urn looks at figures on a pot who will never complete anything and will never age: the lover never kisses and the girl is never less fair, the trees never lose their leaves. The poem cannot decide whether this is enviable or a kind of death, and the famous last two lines have been argued about since Eliot called them meaningless. The punctuation of the manuscripts and the first printing differ, so how much the urn says and how much the poet says cannot be settled.

Ode on Melancholy tells anyone in that state not to seek oblivion but to glut their sorrow on a morning rose, and locates melancholy in the temple of delight itself, available only to those who can taste joy keenly enough.

Ode to Psyche, the first written, builds a shrine to a goddess who arrived too late to have one, and the shrine is in the poet’s own mind.

To Autumn was written in September 1819 after a walk near Winchester. It has no speaker’s crisis and no argument. Three stanzas: the ripening, the personified figure of Autumn sitting careless on a granary floor or asleep on a half-reaped furrow, and the sounds of the day’s end, gnats mourning, lambs bleating, swallows gathering. Nothing is claimed and nothing is resolved. Many readers think it the most nearly perfect poem in English.

The letters. Negative capability appears in a letter of December 1817: the quality that makes a Man of Achievement, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The chameleon poet is in a letter of 1818: the poetical character has no self, it is everything and nothing, it takes as much delight in an Iago as an Imogen. And in the long journal-letter to his brother in America in 1819 comes the vale of soul-making: not a vale of tears from which we are redeemed, but a world whose difficulty is what schools an intelligence into a soul.

How to read it

Read the five odes first, in this order: Nightingale, Grecian Urn, To Autumn, Melancholy, Psyche. That is perhaps four hundred lines and it is the achievement.

Read them aloud. Keats is the most sonically dense poet in English after Milton, and a good deal of what he does happens at the level of vowel and consonant rather than statement.

Read the letters alongside, not afterwards. Take the four or five famous ones, and then read one of the long journal-letters entire to see the mind they came out of, gossip and jokes and money worries and sudden paragraphs about poetry.

Do not skip The Eve of St Agnes for the odes. It is where the famous richness of surface is most concentrated, and it shows what the critics were objecting to.

Keep the biography at the edge rather than the centre. It is almost unbearably poignant, and it can crowd out the poems, which are not about his illness and are much stranger and more intelligent than the legend of the doomed youth allows.

Questions it raises

• Is beauty truth and truth beauty the poem’s conclusion, the urn’s, or a piece of consolation the poem has just shown to be inadequate?
• The nightingale ode ends by asking whether he wakes or sleeps. Does the poem think the escape it describes was real?
• Negative capability values staying in uncertainty over reaching for fact. Is that a description of how poetry works, or an argument against wanting answers?
• To Autumn has no speaker and no problem. Is a poem that makes no claim the highest form of the art, or a retreat from it?
• The odes keep setting something permanent against someone who dies. Does any of them decide which is better off?
• Keats wrote this in four years and thought he had failed. What does it take for a body of work to be recognised, and who decides?