B.

A (ENGLISH)
SEMESTER II
CC3
Lecture Notes by Ananya Bose

The students are expected and supposed to study and prepare for the topic on
their own. The following study material should be considered only as a
supplement.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

• Through Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), editor of the liberal Examiner, Keats

met Hazlitt, Lamb and Shelley.
• His 4000-line Endymion (1818) was censured brutally by the critics of
Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly.
• Shelley’s poem Adonais, and Byron’s parody against the reviewers,
beginning, “Who killed John Keats? I, says the Quarterly” have led to the
view that the brutal attacks by the critics hurt the poet so much that
they broke the poet’s spirit and eventually catalysed his death. However,
Keats was strong and relentless, and therefore, instead of quarrelling
with the critics, he kept writing the kind of poetry he had always wanted
to write. As Matthew Arnold says, Keats “had flint and iron in him”,
Keats rose above all his criticism and came up with a volume that
accomplished his purpose.
• Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad
influenced him heavily.
• His Poems appeared in 1820.
• He died of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821.
• On his tomb are carved, according to his own request, the words: “Here
lies one whose name was writ in water.”
• His Works
o Imitation of Spenser (1813) – consists of some Spenserian stanzas
o I Stood Tiptoe upon a Hill – influence of Spenser and Leigh Hunt
o Sleep and Beauty – influence of Spenser and Leigh Hunt
 o His sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer reflects his
wonder and delight at the discovery of the world of Hellenism.
o His Endymion (1818) is the story of the shepherd prince of Mount
Latmos, with whom Selene, the moon-goddess falls in love. The
poem based on a Greek myth is an allegory that represents the
poet’s quest for ideal beauty. The first line of the poem is oft-
quoted – “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
o Isabella or The Pot of Basil (1818) is based on Boccaccio’s The
Decameron and narrates a tragic love story.
o Lamia
o La Belle Dame Sans Merci - ballad
o The Eve of St. Agnes (1819) – written in Spenserian stanzas
o Hyperion – It is a fragment, an abandoned epic poem telling the
story of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians.
Keats did not have the heart to complete it saying it “had too
many Miltonic inversions.
o The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream – an epic poem in which Keats tried
to rework lines from his earlier poem Hyperion. This was also left
incomplete.
o Keats’s great odes – To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To
Psyche, On Melancholy, To Autumn – nearly all of them were
written in 1819.

• Keats as a Poet (Characteristics of His Poetry)

o Sensuousness
Matthew Arnold wrote: “Keats as a poet is abundantly and
enchantingly sensuous…”
Perhaps the strongest trait of Keats’s poetry is its sensuous
appeal. In other words, his poetry gives delight to the senses.
Moreover, his senses are able to excite emotions immediately in
him. What is remarkable about the sensuousness of Keats is that it
embraces all the five senses. He is primarily the poet of sensations
who adds a touch of sensuousness to all that he describes. Keats
admires beauty and it is his senses that allow him to witness
beauty everywhere. He wrote in 1817 – “O for a life of sensations
rather than of thoughts!” Keats’s poetry expresses a wide range of
 sensations – those of sight, sound, smell, touch, joy, pain, sorrow,
hunger, thirst and so on. Examples:
 My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…
(sensation of pain and a feeling of drowsiness)
…
O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
…
O for a beaker full of warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
…
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen…
(Sensation of taste and thirst)
-Lines from Ode to a Nightingale

 She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,

Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eye like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d…
(sight)
- Lines from Lamia

o Hellenism
Hellenism refers to the study, imitation, influence, or adoption of
ancient Greek culture, customs, style, thought, art etc. Shelley
once said – “Keats was a Greek.” Keats’s poetry has often been
seen to have Greek themes. The stories of Hyperion, The Fall of
Hyperion: A Dream, Endymion, and Lamia are based on Greek
legends. In his well-known odes, To Psyche and Ode on a Grecian
Urn, the subjects are Greek. Morover, the paganism of the Greeks
and the Greek way of personifying the powers of nature are
echoed in Keats’s poetry. Just like the Greeks, Keats also liked to
attribute human qualities to the elements of nature. For example,
in the poem To Autumn, Keats describes autumn as:
 Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run…

o Medievalism
Keats revisited the Middle Ages to explore their romantic spirit.
The legend, love and adventure of the Middle Ages are found in
his poems, The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Besides these characteristics, the students should also explore

Keats as a nature poet (observe how he loved nature for its own
sake, instead of trying to add to it a philosophical, spiritual or a
metaphysical perspective.)

Keats’s Concept of Negative Capability

In a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, on 22nd December 1817,

Keats wrote:

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various

subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it
struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement,
especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so
enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is
capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance,
would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the
Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining
content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes
would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet
the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or
rather obliterates all consideration.”

A good poet, thus, according to Keats, has the power to delight

and dwell in uncertainties, immerse himself in a world of
mysteries and magic without being compelled to strive for facts
 and reason. Poetry, after all, is different from science, and a poet
is free to abstain from relying on or imparting factual information
because, as Keats writes:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The eye for beauty and the power of beauty is more important than the
quest for objective facts. Thus, negative capability is the ability in the
poet to negate the urge to hanker after fact and reason, and instead dive
deep in the world of beauty, mystery, magic and doubt. The poet is
allowed to submit to things as they are, without trying to intellectualis e
them.

***