POETS Day! John Keats at Last, Apparently
Illustration by Rene Sears, who defensively replied “I don’t know. Ask him why he had so many wings in his poetry.”
I’m making meatballs for the weekend, and like all the best meatball recipes, the key ingredient in mine is lies. There’s a lot of time spent between minimal exertions of effort. It really is easy, but there’s a fine tradition of pretending to pretend that you didn’t mind cooking – which you barely did – at all. You have to master saying “Oh, it was nothing,” when it really was nothing so it sounds like it you were saying it was nothing when we all know it was something, but you guys are worth it. Oh, Stop it. Really.
I wrote about the recipe and duplicitous grandmotherly types here at OT almost a year ago. Feel free to give it a go, but if you’re going to pretend to take a long time putting dinner together, you’d best cover your tracks and get work complicit in the cover story by ducking out of the job mid-Friday. That way, if anybody doubts you spent all day slaving over a hot stove instead of mixing stuff up in a bowl, popping it in the oven while you do gods know what, and then briefly checking in to finish things off with a few hours of unattended simmering, you can say, “Oh yeah? Well, I wasn’t at work, though I’d prefer you not check because then they might think I wasn’t really sick.”
It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Mangia!
But first, some verse.
***
I could have sworn I’d already done a POETS Day on Keats. This week I’ve been reading about him with a mindset intent on shutting out basic biography I must have covered previously. I figured that, mistakenly but mistakenly was ascendant, having done Keats I’d done “Ode on a Grecian Urn” because that’s the one you have to do even if you’re going through the motions to have it behind you, field cleared for stuff people might not already know.
Everybody knows “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Your high school English teacher told you how great it is. He or she was right, in my opinion. It’s a great poem, though if you left it in a textbook way back when, you should look into the reactions of people who aren’t so high on it. It’s kinda fun. Wikipedia has a section on the “’Beauty is truth debate” you might get a kick out of it. I’m not going to delve in because I thought I already had, but they pull this exchange between I.A. Richards and T.S. Eliot I found pretty funny.
First from Richards:
On the one hand there are very many people who, if they read any poetry at all, try to take all its statements seriously – and find them silly … This may seem an absurd mistake but, alas! it is none the less common. On the other hand there are those who succeed too well, who swallow ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty …,’ as the quintessence of an aesthetic philosophy, not as the expression of a certain blend of feelings, and proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle-mindedness as a result of their linguistic naivety.
And then from Eliot:
I am at first inclined to agree … But on re-reading the whole Ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would have repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement … The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me.
There’s more from Cleanth Brooks and others. Wikipedia does a good job with further commentary. Worth a look here.
I suppose I should offer a link to “Ode on a Grecian Urn” too.
Keats trained as a doctor. In 1816, at the age of twenty-one, he’d positioned himself to open his own surgery, and I’m never not going to be charmed by the common British use of “surgery” as a place name. He’d spent a good bit on his education, as had his guardian, Richard Abbey. That same year, Leigh Hunt, who was an inspiration and friend to Keats, became the first to publish a Keats poem. “O Solitude” premiered in Hunt’s The Examiner and that taste of success seems to have emboldened Keats, to have quickened the young doctor’s restless humours. Giving up medicine for poetry looked less a pipe dream.
O Solitude
John Keats (1795-1821)O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
‘Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
His mother, Francis, died of tuberculosis when he was only fourteen. The same disease would take his brother Tom, and eventually take him. Thomas Keats, John’s father, avoided the same fate by falling off a horse when John was only eight. That was the situation requiring Richard Abbey’s appointment as guardian, along with John Sandell, for him and his three siblings.
Abbey was not happy with the decision to be a poet, and it’s hard not to sympathize. Keats turned into a posthumous giant, but his career was a bit of a disaster. There were good reviews, but you had to sift. It’s estimated that his three books sold two hundred copies. That’s all together. He wasn’t much of a money maker and there’s evidence his early publisher, who he left, may have suggested he find greener patsies. Financial problems plagued his post-doctor years and he made things considerably tougher on himself, lending friends what he couldn’t.
I wonder what would have become of Keats had tuberculosis not claimed him. He had friends and encouragements from great poets, but would he have carried on writing if his career continued sputtering? He had medicine to fall back on. I think a return would have held temptation.
As it happened, he died young and still in possession of vigorous expression. Percy Bysshe Shelley immortalized him in “Adonais.” Young and tragic opens doors. Today he’s considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.
Modern people are invested in not looking foolish. We’re hip, above it all, and keep a toe dragging in ironic in case we get caught up in anything fanciful. Not so the Romantics. The vogue was wearing emotions on puffy, puffy sleaves. It’s eyebrow raising to modern readers. At least it is to me. Some of his stuff is so overwrought, I start making embarrassed excuses for him in my head even though I think it’s great.
Here’s a blousey perpetrator.
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute!
Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away!
Leave melodizing on this wintry day,
Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute,
Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.
Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream,
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
O dost he affect the effects! O must you get caught up in it too! O man is it wonderful because that’s what people did back then – not what we do now, you have to understandable, way of the times, more expressive then, obviously not how I would act, men can cry too.
It wasn’t all that exuberant. This next is one of his best loved and with reason. In it, an awed tone sets the stage for sublime realization.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
I hear fans of his odes say that Keats is more famous for his sonnets, and fans of his sonnets say that he’s more famous for his odes. I think he’s more famous for his odes and you’ll notice all this week’s selections are sonnets, so there’s my hand doubly tipped.
This last is, at least to my knowledge, not one of his better-known works. It’s one of my favorites, though. He died slowly in 1821. Miserably too. It’s tempting to think that “On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour” is a goodbye to the world as he resolves to an early death and the bittersweet mission of making poetry until the end. My Keats collection sets the date of publishing at 1817. It looks like he simply left some friends at an early hour.
Still.
On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour
Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heaped-up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when ’tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
And let there glide by many a pearly car
Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
And half-discovered wings, and glances keen.
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres:
For what a height my spirit is contending!
‘Tis not content so soon to be alone.
