John Keats - Selected Poems and Letters

William Collins

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Source ISBN: 9780007558100

Ebook Edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007558117

Version: 2014-08-19

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John Keats is one of the greatest English poets ever to have lived, a leading light of the Romantic movement, famed as much for his sentimental odes and melancholic meditations as for his contemplative correspondence. When Keats died in 1821 at the tragically young age of 25, Lord Byron lamented “his genius … undoubtedly of great promise”, concluding: “He is a loss to our literature.” His legacy is all the more remarkable when one considers that Keats had only been a published writer for four years before his death, that a great many contemporary critics were exceptionally unkind about him, and that he only sold 200 copies of his combined work during his lifetime.

The high regard in which Keats is nowadays held developed during the nineteenth century, in the decades following his death. In his own time, it was really only his publishers and friends who truly appreciated the beauty of his imagination and writing; literary reviewers – those able to inform public opinion – tended to deride him for his lowly upbringing and schooling.

They had a point. Keats was born in Moorgate, at that time the eastern extremity of London, quite possibly at the tavern where his father worked as a stableman. He received an ordinary, inexpensive education and was raised by his grandmother from the age of eight, following the death of his father. Money was tight, and aged fourteen he left school to begin an apprenticeship with his grandmother’s neighbour, a surgeon, seeming for many years to be destined for a career in medicine.

But Keats had also taken to reading poetry, particularly the works of London poets Byron and Leigh Hunt, and increasingly he neglected his studies in order to write. Through his childhood friend, the author Charles Cowden Clarke, Keats was introduced not only to great literature but also to the great writers of his day. In 1816, the same year he qualified as an apothecary and surgeon, Keats composed “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, expressing his wonder at the new world of poetry that had opened up to him: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” By the end of that year, Keats was a published poet – Leigh Hunt had included “O Solitude” in his weekly magazine – and he abandoned medicine for good.

The critics never quite forgave him for his upbringing, however. His first collection of poems in 1817 was almost universally panned or ignored. The influential Blackwood’s Review was particularly harsh, referring to Leigh Hunt and Keats, among others, as the “Cockney School” of poets. Reviewing Keats’ “Endymion” in 1818, the journal commented that the “imperturbable drivelling idiocy” was the symptom of “an able mind reduced to a state of insanity”, advising that “it is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet.”

Neither bad reviews nor poverty could dissuade Keats from writing. In the winter of 1818–19 he moved to Wentworth Place in Hampstead – now the Keats Museum – and wrote a series of odes that are regarded as some of his best work. They include “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale” and the great “To Autumn”, often praised as his most perfect poem. Keats was experimenting with the ode, a form popular with earlier English poets including Spenser and Dryden, as well as older Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the odes he composed in 1819 are regarded as landmarks of the form.