Week 8

April 1-3 UNIT 2: Keats

John Keats (1795-1821), died aged 25 (of tuberculosis, also known as consumption)

SEE
Biographical summary
*Keats’ House introductory video, https://youtu.be/tgjZdBEdVs8 (9’47’’)
*Another interesting introduction: "The strangely encouraging life of John Keats"
https://youtu.be/Mxc63WPaksY (9’)

Heritage: the Hampstead Keats House and Rome Shelley-Keats House

*heritage: denoting or relating to things of special architectural, historical, or natural
value that are preserved for the nation.
*John Keats’ House, which can be visited (in Hampstead) and the Keats-Shelley House
(in Rome) are places where they spent some time – consider what kind of museum they
are and why people visit them
 John Keats House – Jesse Waugh Art Vlog https://youtu.be/ED1VOSO8rug (9’06’’)
 "A Walk Through the Keats-Shelley House with Giuseppe Albano"
https://youtu.be/7ZxAGg9qhKg (5’)

READ
*If you haven’t read it yet, read this post from my blog:
http://blogs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/2019/04/01/john-keats-heritage-legacy-and-
bohemian-poverty/

*Some highlights from the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats)

 None of Keats' biographies were written by people who had known him. His friends
argued with each other to the extent that the project was abandoned.
 Leigh Hunt's biographical essay Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries
(1828) gives the first biographical account, strongly emphasising Keats' supposedly
humble origins [he was actually middle class].
 His friends Brown, Severn, Dilke, Shelley and his guardian Richard Abbey, his
publisher Taylor, Fanny Brawne and many others issued posthumous commentary
on Keats' life. These early writings coloured all subsequent biography and have
become embedded in a body of Keats legend.
 Shelley promoted Keats as someone whose achievement could not be separated
from agony, who was 'spiritualised' by his decline [caused by tuberculosis] and too
fine-tuned to endure the harshness of life; the consumptive, suffering image
popularly held today.
 The first full biography was published in 1848 by Richard Monckton Milnes.
Landmark Keats biographers since include Sidney Colvin, Robert Gittings, Walter
Jackson Bate and Andrew Motion. *Nicholas Roe 1812
 Most of the surviving portraits of Keats were painted after his death, and those who
knew him held that they did not succeed in capturing his unique quality and
intensity.

READ
*From “My hero: John Keats by Andrew Motion”, The Guardian, 22 April 2012
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/13/john-keats-my-hero-andrew-motion
(Andrew Motion published John Keats’s biography in 1997)

The story of John Keats has an irresistible pathos: the humble origins; the early
death of his father; his mother's disappearance, reappearance, illness and (again) early
death; the noble labours as a trainee doctor; the even more noble aspirations as a poet;
the peerlessly precocious flowering (he was 23 when he wrote most of the great
poetry); the appalling illness; the courage with which he endured it; the tragic journey
to Roe; the miserable end. It's hard – no, it's impossible– to think of another writer
who suffered and achieved so much in such a short time at such an early age.
(…)
This is where his real heroism resides. We can see it, of course, in the poems –
in their profound concern for the deepest questions in life (what is suffering for?
How can art help us enjoy and endure? How much does love weigh compared to
death?). We can find it even more clearly in his letters, which by their nature allow us
to hear Keats's speaking voice – because their comparative informality encourages him
to produce a different kind of immediacy.
The man we discover is fierce in his dislikes, generous in his friendships,
passionate in his loves, funny, generous, big-hearted, clever, compassionate, brilliant in
his apprehensions about the business of writing, seriously good fun and marvellously
well able to combine what we would call highbrow seriousness with japes, larks and
capers. If that's not a heroic combination I don't know what is.

READ
*This is a review of Motion’s biography of Keats
London Review of Books, “Inspiration, Accident, Genius” Helen Vendler
Keats by Andrew Motion
Faber, 612 pp, £25.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 571 17227 X
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n20/helen-vendler/inspiration-accident-genius

In the sixties, three scholarly biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J.
Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful;
all were admirable, if in different ways. W.J. Bate, who had been interested in Keats
ever since he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the poet in 1939, paid special attention
to Keats’s stylistic development in a discussion that has never been bettered; Aileen
Ward brought to the study of Keats an almost clairvoyant psychological understanding
(drawing on, but by no means limited to, Freudian insights); and Robert Gittings (who,
before he wrote the biography, had published three short books on Keats) displayed an
unexampled mastery of the facts of Keats’s life and its English context.

Thirty years have passed since [the publication of the last major biography], and
Andrew Motion remarks, reasonably enough, in the Introduction to his new life of
Keats, that ‘the lives of all important writers need to be reconsidered at regular
intervals, no matter how familiar they might be’:

SEE
The Biopic
In 2009, director Jane Campion released her biopic (biographical picture, or movie) of
John Keats, Bright Star. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810784/ . He was played by Ben
Wishaw (who reads some poems by Keats in the list of videos below)

Take a look at the following, if you’re curious.

*Bright Star trailer, https://youtu.be/K2FkxivSuVg

*Jane Campion interview, https://youtu.be/Kp-xNGr28_I (4:44)
*Ben Wishaw interview, https://youtu.be/x3pXZhxpyW0 (4’)

The film is available from https://catalunya.ebiblio.es/opac/#index (you just need a

Catalan public library card, which can now be obtained online)

Legacy
READ
*Shelley wrote a heartfelt elegy about Keats’s death, called “Adonais”
• Adonais, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45112/adonais-an-elegy-on-
the-death-of-john-keats ; the whole poem can be enjoyed on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_y28i9iG4k&feature=youtu.be (44’)
 Among many who have quoted “Adonais”, you can see hear a young Mick Jagger
mourning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4riMPo2gug&feature=youtu.be
(2’25”)

Fiction about Keats

- some Wikipedia highlights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stress_of_Her_Regard
*In Tim Powers' book The Stress of Her Regard (1989) John Keats, along with Percy
Shelley and Lord Byron, is the victim of a vampire and his gift with language and
poetry is a direct consequence of the vampire breed's attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
*The Hyperion Cantos is a series of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The title
was originally used for the collection of the first pair of books in the series, Hyperion
and The Fall of Hyperion, and later came to refer to the overall storyline, including
Endymion, The Rise of Endymion, and a number of short stories.

ENJOY

 Ode on a Grecian Urn (from BBC Romanticism, Peter Ackroyd,

https://youtu.be/Z_1aF8IQ7WQ )
 Ode on Melancholy (read by Sir Ralph Richardson, https://youtu.be/k-LKxH_QfjQ )
 Ode to a Nightingale (Ben Wishaw, https://youtu.be/ImCnbyxzYzU ; Bennedict
Cumberbatch, https://youtu.be/_pkQYLVqBms )
 Ode to Psyche (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYChvrk3vo8)
 To Autumn (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwn6Xaz_uLM )
 To Sleep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFYNuR4QBIw
 7) La Belle Dame Sans Merci – read by Ben Wishaw,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL-L8ExX3kQ&feature=youtu.be
 8) Bright Star – read by Tom Hiddleston, https://youtu.be/cGh0smAt7-w
 Isabella or The Pot of Basil
 The Eve of St. Agnes, https://youtu.be/A39r1jmh0mw (minute 4:30), .
 On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Endymion
(A Poetic Romance) , https://youtu.be/ZgU8KiXkB6E
Lamia
Hyperion – A Fragment

READ

Letters

You will find in the .pdf volume, the following:

To Benjamin Bailey (On the Authenticity of the Imagination) 151

To George and Georgiana Keats (Negative Capability) 153
To John Taylor (Axioms in Poetry) 154
To J H Reynolds (The Chambers of Human Life) 155
To Richard Woodhouse (A Poet has no Identity)159
To George and Georgiana Keats (The Vale of Sould Making) 160
To Percy Bysshe Shelley 164

*highlights from Wikipedia:

Keats' letters were first published in 1848 and 1878. During the 19th century, critics
deemed them unworthy of attention, distractions from his poetic works. During the 20th
century they became almost as admired and studied as his poetry, and are highly
regarded within the canon of English literary correspondence. (…)

Few of Keats' letters are extant from the period before he joined his literary circle. From
spring 1817, however, there is a rich record of his prolific and impressive skills as letter
writer. Keats and his friends, poets, critics, novelists, and editors wrote to each other
daily, and Keats' ideas are bound up in the ordinary, his day-to-day missives sharing
news, parody and social commentary. They glitter with humour and critical intelligence.
Born of an "unself-conscious stream of consciousness," they are impulsive, full of
awareness of his own nature and his weak spots. When his brother George went to
America, Keats wrote to him in great detail, the body of letters becoming "the real
diary" and self-revelation of Keats' life, as well as containing an exposition of his
philosophy, and the first drafts of poems containing some of Keats' finest writing and
thought. Gittings describes them as akin to a "spiritual journal" not written for a specific
other, so much as for synthesis.

Keats also reflected on the background and composition of his poetry, and specific
letters often coincide with or anticipate the poems they describe. In February to May
1819 he produced many of his finest letters".
There are areas of his life and daily routine that Keats does not describe. He mentions
little about his childhood or his financial straits and is seemingly embarrassed to discuss
them. There is a total absence of any reference to his parents. In his last year, as his
health deteriorated, his concerns often gave way to despair and morbid obsessions. The
publications of letters to Fanny Brawne in 1870 focused on this period and emphasised
this tragic aspect, giving rise to widespread criticism at the time.

 Letters to Fanny Brawne

1820, https://youtu.be/os_0BRRrbCw