Mermaid Tavern, Cheapside, London

Where Keats, aged 22, has a drink sometime toward the end of January. At this time, in a kind of dialogical exchange of poems with his very good friend and fellow poet John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats writes an occasional poem about the legendary Mermaid Tavern, noting that famous poets dead and gone (like Beaumont, Jonson, Fletcher, and perhaps Shakespeare) also imbibed there, meeting as a kind of drinking club (known as The Friday Street Club or Mermaid Club). The original tavern is destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and probably had entrances on both Friday and Bread streets. Keats may have spent the evening with two Horaces: Smith and Twiss, though an account of the night is unclear.*

As in much of his earlier poetry, Keats seeks association with or reference to other famous poets of the past, though this poem—Lines on the Mermaid Tavern—is not so striving or pandering as some of his earlier work, in poetry that constantly, and sometimes embarrassingly, desires association with great poets in the hope of becoming one: maybe something will rub off if he invokes them enough. Fortunately, this later poem, while expressing some nostalgia, at least points to what kind of poetry he favors—as well as the community politics of free-thinking and Englishness, which Keats feels has been lost. In this way, the poem contains a kind of sideways political comment about his own times.

Keats repeats this lament of the loss of old times and old values more forcefully in another poem, Robin Hood. To a Friend [Reynolds], pointing to the repressive and materialistic nature of his own era relative to the spirit of Robin Hood’s time. The poem (answering Reynolds) doubts that those times and values of true brotherhood and equality can be revived. Thus Keats’s two poems raise a crucial question: If the spirit of those old times is irretrievable, what kind of poetry will he, Keats, on his own, outside of any living brotherhood, be able to write? This is what Keats will think through in 1818. That Keats decides to publish both of the poems in his final and remarkable 1820 volume suggest they carry some importance for him; Robin Hood is the most openly political poem in the volume.

The Mermaid Tavern poem, though possessing modest poetic merit (remembering that Keats writes it in the more informal context of a dialog with Reynolds), nonetheless has some interest that spins off from the kind of loss described above: it subtly directs us to what Keats begins to reject in poetry and what he aims to embrace—and emulate: poetry that expresses or represents unobtrusive beauty without an ostensible, petty, or overbearing message. Keats’s, obviously self-directing his comments, outlines the need for poetry that carries an ego-less voice and expresses itself in a natural style—unaffected, uncontaminated, and immersed unobtrusively within the subject. Unself-proclaiming poetry, we might call it. Again, toward the end 1818 and into 1819, these characteristics begin to appear in his poetry—balanced and confident—and these will constitute the period of his most remarkable poetry. From within his time, he will attempt to write poetry outside of his time. The brotherhood that Keats will try to join will be via the conversation his greatest poetry makes with other like-minded artists.

To Reynolds on 3 February, Keats musters a declarative tone: he condemns poetry that has a palpable design upon us. Poetry, he argues, should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, ’admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!’ Keats writes that he favors the Elizabethans poets over the modern poets; and, sounding his independent direction, he writes that he will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular. Our desire should, he writes, be for the old Poets, & Robin Hood, poetry that is uncontaminated & unobtrusive. (This is his second use of the word unobtrusive.) He then quotes from his Mermaid Tavern poem.**

The 3 February letter to Reynolds does, then, importantly mark out the direction for and nature of Keats’s progress. He does not want to write poetry that governs a mere petty state; he desires a vast dominion that his poetry can overlook: Why should we be owls, when we could be eagles? The analogy, of a narrow, unmoving, and perhaps huddled perspective—in the dark, no less— vs. a clear, wide perspective, suggests an expansion of what Keats wants to survey, or see, in his poetry; he want to be fly above the scene and small-mindedness. He does not to compose poetry affected and self-regarding poetry. Remarkably, the scope of his poetry-to-come in fact puts his poetic goals and axioms into practice.

Keats signs off the 3 February letter to Reynolds as his Coscribbler, which is fitting since Reynolds is publicly associated with Keats by Leigh Hunt on 1 December 1816 in The Examiner. Hunt also includes Percy Shelley as a young poet who will thoughtfully return the scene of poetry to a genuine love of nature. Reynolds (about a year older than Keats) had also reviewed Keats’s first volume of poetry in March 1817 in TheChampion, and they see much of each other during this period. They no doubt spend much time discussing poetry.

*Twiss is a minor wit, dramatist, raconteur, writer, and, in 1820, elected member of parliament for Wootton Bassett; Smith is a poet, stockbroker, and, later, novelist—and part of the Hunt-Shelley circle.

**Keats transcribes the mermaid poem a number of times, including in a letter of 30 January to his brothers, in which, via Smith’s account of an evening with Twiss, some fun is poked at Twiss for spouting extempore verses when in fact he had written them earlier. Keats notes that a couple of his friends are impressed with his poem, including Reynolds.

The Minor Theatre, Catherine Street, London

Keats goes to this private and mainly amateur theatre with Charles Wells, a minor writer but exuberant character, to see George Colman’s John Bull. (The Minor Theatre was also known as the Harmonic Theatre in 1816.) The play is so bad that after watching only a bit of it they leave to see Shakespeare’s Richard III over at Drury Lane. They then return to The Minor to check out the intriguing and uproarious backstage atmosphere, and then go to a nearby inn and take some delight in observing the actors’ pompous yet carefree manner.

Keats is very social at this moment, calling on friends and going to dinners, dances, and the theatre. Interestingly, his own character allows him to endure and detach himself from the faults and petty grievances of his very closest friends, including Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and John Hamilton Reynolds. In a letter to his brothers, Keats describes their tiffs, ranging from broken social engagements to unreturned silverware (13/19 January). Keats’s attitude in accepting the complexities, inconsistencies, and faults of his friends might be connected to his more philosophical acceptance of uncertainty and doubt as moments of capability rather than rejection.

Meanwhile, and crucially, Keats also sees that his very long poem, Endymion, now under final revision before publication, lacks depth and formal powers, and he contemplates something like a more Miltonic tone and scope in his poetry. Keats is very keen to put Endymion—more or less a self-imposed endurance test—behind him.

In light of conversations with his many friends and acquaintances in the writing, publishing, and art scene, ranging form the minor Wells to the major Wordsworth, Keats is attempting to carve out his own poetics and poetical character, and in hindsight we see how this drive for independence remarkably anticipates the qualities and nature of his greatest poetry, almost exclusively that of 1819. In short, his intense poetics precedes his greatest poetry. Later in the month, Keats implicitly comments upon his own development: Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions, than the very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers (23/24 Jan). Keats believes that (at least at this moment, and inspired by King Lear) that I am getting at it, with a sort of determination and strength. For us, though, the very gradual ripening does not look that gradual at all. Keats goes from writing astonishingly bad poetry to writing astonishing poetry over just a couple of years—and in his early twenties. Again, Keats’s flurries of remarkable commentary about the qualities of great poetry throughout 1818 both anticipate and propel his flurry of great poetry in 1819.

London Coffee Club, 11 Ludgate Hill, London

Keats goes to the very popular London Coffee Club to dance at least three times in January. Keats this month also goes to a dance at the residence of his friend, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and he attends a modest ball. We know he’s at the London Coffee Club to dance 19 February 1819 and 11 January 1820.

Keats’s social life in London is almost always very full, more often than not resulting from the circle of friends and acquaintances spinning off from his introduction to writer, poet, publisher, and celebrity journalist Leigh Hunt, beginning October 1816. The group includes writers, critics, scholars, poets, journalists, publishers, and artists—some of them prominent or at least established, and all of them very supportive of Keats. This intellectual and artistic network is to a significant degree responsible in forming and pushing Keats’s poetic progress.

January 1818 is a full month. Besides dining and socializing with friends (including Dilke, William Haslam, John Hamilton Reynolds, John Taylor, Benjamin Robert Haydon, William Hazlitt, Charles Wells, Charles Brown, Joseph Severn—and seeing much of James Rice), it involves going to Hazlitt’s famous lectures; seeing his publisher, John Taylor; reviewing theatre in place of Reynolds; seeing his sister, Fanny, twice; preparing his long poem Endymion for press and taking it to his publisher; and writing some occasional poems.

During January, Keats also has some intriguing meetings with William Wordsworth, perhaps the greatest poet of the age. Unfortunately, we know almost nothing of what actually transpires, but it is hard to imagine Wordsworth not holding forth about the nature of great poetry—his own poetry, that is. Keats, too, calls on the surgeon Solomon Sawrey (an expert on venereal disease) about his younger brother’s—Tom’s—precarious medical condition, and in particular Tom’s spitting of Blood (5 Jan); Tom’s symptoms obviously point to consumption. Tom will not make it to the end of the year.

The Entrance to Ludgate from Fleet Street

Meanwhile, as Keats thinks about his own poetic progress, and while he muses that he is perplexed in a world of doubts and fancies in which there is nothing stable (13/19 Jan), he says he feels a change in his intellect: I cannot bear to be uninterested or unemployed, I, who for so long a time, have been addicted to passiveness. As a result, he says he is getting at it, with a sort of determination and strength (23/24 Jan).

Some of this conflated doubt and resolution results from Keats imagining a time when he is at last done with his self-imposed poetic trial, his long poem Endymion (he begins it in April 1817; he is done with it in April 1818). There is also the sense that he does indeed feel his poetic purpose and artistic depth is growing—and mainly growing away from the sentimental, affected poetry of sociability associated with Hunt. Although a few passages in the 4,050 lines of Endymion point toward a maturing voice (though less a poetic purpose), in the process of revising and correcting the poem, Keats becomes well aware of its limitations and faults—reading Keats’s eventual preface to the poem is the best pointer to the poem’s frailties and his attitude toward it. Even a couple of reviewers who want to give Endymion a good dressing-down mainly for ideological reasons, also quite rightly point to its rambling purpose and patchy style.

We have to imagine Keats positing the question, What does Endymion achieve? Then we have to imagine him answering: It demonstrates my dedication to poetry, my perseverance in purpose, but it is something to move not just on from but away from. In his own words, he recognizes that although it serves as a Pioneer (27 Feb 1818), he admits that overall it is slipshod, yet diving haphazardly into the poem made him aware of the Soundings, quicksands, & the rocks (8 Oct 1818). In short, he will henceforth avoid those poetic dangers in his poetic progress.

48 Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square, London

Keats, aged 22, sees the great poet William Wordsworth at Thomas Monkhouse’s residence on Mortimer Street. Monkhouse is a cousin of Wordsworth’s wife, Mary. Wordsworth is visiting London for about a month. During this period in early 1818, Keats records he has seen a good deal of Wordsworth (23 Jan).

Keats is originally introduced to Wordsworth by his friend, the historical painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, mid-December 1817. Haydon had painted Wordsworth’s portrait and had also made a life-mask of him in 1815. Haydon also does a life-mask of Keats, likely in December 1816. Haydon will include both poets in a crowd scene in one of his large historical paintings.

We have to imagine what meeting the famous Wordsworth meant for Keats. In his poetic development, coming to critical terms with Wordsworth’s poetic depth, style, and reputation is crucial in establishing his own sense of seriousness and strong poetic voice—what Keats calls the poetical character.

Keats’s poetics intensifies at this time, just when he is seeing much of Wordsworth and discussing art, poetry, and publishing with Haydon, Joseph Severn (another artist), James Rice, William Haslam (an old friend and stellar supporter), John Taylor (one of his publishers), Benjamin Bailey (scholar), Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt (literary critic). In particular, Keats’s singularly important theory of Negative Capability is expressed about ten days or so after his first meeting with Wordsworth (?27 Dec 1817); and is done so in light of critically negotiating Wordsworth’s strong, subjective command and his significant insights: for Wordsworth, this is a seeing-into the life of things, which is how Wordsworth puts it in what for Keats is Wordsworth’s most revelatory poem, Tintern Abbey. To express it too simply, Keats’s negative reaction is not so much to what Wordsworth attempts to explore in much of his best poetry (nature, human nature, suffering, and loss), but how he channels that exploration.

Keats at moments is undecided if Wordsworth’s vision is vast or limited, whether it is truly grand or too brooding and inward. But what Keats does know is that his own poetic progress will be more determined by the poetry’s subject rather than the poet’s subjectivity. This said, the lyric mode Keats assumes in most of his greatest poetry will feature the presence—in thought, sensation, and voice—of a particularized, responsive, probing speaker. Some of the condemnable ideas about Wordsworth no doubt derive from Keats listening to Hazlitt, who, along with a few other commentators, begins to critically associate Wordsworth’s poetry with egotism, which Keats is anxious to contrast with an Elizabethan temper.

Featherstone Buildings, London

On this day during a busy month, Keats sees Charles Wells, a minor poet, and friend of Keats’s via Keats’s younger brother, Tom: they were school-fellows at Enfield at Clarke’s academy, which Keats also attended, 1803-1811.

In June 1816, Keats writes an indifferent occasional poem to Wells, To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses, brought on by a minor dispute between the two, and published in Keats’s first collection, the 1817Poems.

Keats also sees a surgeon, Solomon Sawrey, on this day. He is very concerned about Tom’s blood-spitting. No doubt it is consumption. When Keats is fourteen, he witnesses his mother pass away from this horrible wasting illness. Despite some bad weather, in the evening Keats dines with William Wordsworth as well as with Wordsworth’s wife, Mary; his sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson; and Thomas Monkhouse, who is a cousin of Mary and Sarah.

Keats sees Wordsworth a fair amount around this time, though little of what takes place in their meetings is known. But it might be a safe bet to assume they talk about poetry, with Wordsworth no doubt holding court, as it were. After all, Wordsworth’s status as a poet completely trumps Keats’s. Yet there will be a growing sense that Wordsworth, so highly influential for Keats’s development of serious, deep poetry, is also beginning to seem like a protected, conservative fuddy-duddy and a bit of an egoist; some of Keats’s London crowd begin to express as much. Obvious, too, is that Wordsworth’s political sympathies seemed to taken the opposite direction to a number of Keats’s friends, who are often on the liberal or even reformist side of the question. Keats nevertheless must have felt privileged to have contact with the greatest poet of the age, and, again, it is difficult to imagine exchanges between Wordsworth and Keats—was there question and answer? pontification? poetical gossip? namedropping? poetry recitation? encouragement or advice for the young poet? But there must have been something mutually engaging or at least agreeable between the young nobody and the middle-aged somebody.

There is nothing, however, that gives evidence of Wordsworth having a high regard for or even much interest in Keats, even though he outlived Keats by almost thirty years and no doubt witnessed Keats’s rapidly growing reputation into the Victorian era. Keats sent a copy of his first volume of poems to Wordsworth with a reverential inscription to the older poet, but it appears that only a few of the leaves of the book were cut.

Keats at this time gains confidence in taking his own poetic direction relative to Wordsworth, one that privileges a wide vision determined by the subject itself and with an empathetic imagination, and not obscured or contaminated (3 Feb) by an inward or inconsequential purview. But Wordsworth’s poetic exploration of the meaning of human suffering and loss in the context of nature’s beauty and permanent forms remains for Keats a measure of—a model for?—his progress. Keats’s crucial critical question: How can he go as deep as Wordsworth in a way unlike Wordsworth?

Little Britain (street), adjacent to Christ’s Hospital, London

John Hamilton Reynolds is about a year older than Keats, but he has already had some significant literary experience. Perhaps because his talents are largely derivative (in particular, of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Walter Scott), in 1818 he largely gives up his literary career for a so-so career in the law, though he continues to dabble: he wittily writes, As time increases, / I give up drawling verse for drawing leases. Reynolds’ father is a writing and math master at Christ’s Hospital school. Previously, the Reynolds’ reside at 19 Lamb’s Conduit Street.

Keats meets Reynolds through Leigh Hunt mid-October 1816. Reynolds in turn introduces Keats to Taylor & Hessey, who become Keats’s publisher, and assume right over Keats’s first 1817 collection (which had been published on commission). Among others, but importantly, Reynolds also introduces Keats to Charles Wentworth Dilke, Benjamin Bailey (who becomes good friend and literary influence), and Charles Brown (who also becomes a extremely close friend, travelling companion, collaborator in writing a drama, and a financial supporter in Keats’s time of need).

Keats writes a sonnet based on a visit to the Reynolds’ 16 January, entitled To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat—Mrs. Reynolds being Reynolds’ mother, with whom Keats has, at this time, a very friendly relationship. Reynolds also has four sisters, and Keats greatly enjoys them; later, though, this changes when they seem to collectively disparage someone Keats likes, and then later, loves: Fanny Brawne. The sonnet, which actually addresses the cat—who hast past thy grand climacteric—is light and playful, and certainly written to fulfill a whim rather to mark a literary accomplishment.

Reynolds remains a very strong supporter (both publicly and privately) of Keats’s poetry and abilities, perhaps most strongly after Keats’s death. The two poets share literary tastes (especially Shakespeare), and Reynolds also plays a part in weaning Keats from Hunt’s influence, as does another close friend at the time, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon.

This is a very social period in Keats’s life, but not for the first time is Keats both vaguely amused and put off by petty quarrels between some of his friends, ranging from unkept social engagements, touchy and inconsistent personality traits, and unreturned silverware. He begins to write a number of shorter occasional poems, and not always on important topics, and not always that good. Revisions and corrections to his long poem Endymion are slow-going, and no doubt he needs distraction.

Toward February, Keats will begin to move relatively quickly toward genuine poetic independence and maturity, though signs appear first in his poetics in letters to his closest family and friends. At the same time, making revisions and corrections to Endymion forces a necessary and important re-assessment the poem’s limited achievement and his own poetic goals; these insights inform in his greatest work to come. One of these is that art should not overreach, especially, and paradoxically, when it reaches for deeper knowledge that explores and represents subjects like sorrow, joy, love, and mortality—which takes us to what Keats suggests may be most most important part in Endymion (there are very few): the Pleasure Thermometer passage, as he calls it in a 30 January letter to John Taylor. Keats adds some lines to this part of his poem (Book 1, 777-181). Here we have the idea that the Imagination can be seen as the means to take him to a Truth. The short passage is indeed compelling, appearing, as it does, among the other 4,000 or so lines of a poem that, for the most part, moves uneasily between drowsy, overwrought, and arbitrary sentiments, and an equally drowsy and random plot—not so mention some slack, bumpy, and cutesy rhyming. The passage, despite its complex and somewhat confusing logic of gradations working toward some sense of fulfillment, steadies Keats’s idea that Truth and Beauty, even within the human realm of a quest for happiness, are not exclusive, that they necessarily interpenetrate and complete each other. In this way—in a way we can now call Keatsian—the Imagination is a kind of spiritual faculty that places us in both the mortal and immortal realm, in both the flesh and in the soul, in the human realm and the natural realm. To poetically represent these tensions in a composed, undogmatic manner is the goal, and the result will mark Keats’s progress and characterize some of his best work.

22 Lisson Grove North, London

(Note: The 1799 map here does not show the rapid development that takes place in over the next two decades in the Lisson Grove area. Click the map above for more detail. 22 Lisson Grove North is now No. 1, Rossmore Road.)

After spending time with his friend, the journalist, critic, and poet Leigh Hunt, on 18 January Keats dines at another friend’s residence, the noted historical artist Benjamin Robert Haydon. William Hazlitt (literary critic and lecturer) and William Bewick (Haydon’s student) are present. Keats at the moment is completing revisions to his long poem, Endymion, begun April 1817, with publication scheduled for April.

Given the knowledge, experience, and opinions of Keats’s Triple-H of influences—Hunt, Haydon, Hazlitt—social occasions like these challenge and expand Keats’s ideas about art and propel his poetic progress. Keats is very much the junior member at such gatherings, in not just age but also experience and reputation. That Keats is frequently included in gatherings of established writers and artists attests to something about Keats’s qualities. There is something that points to Keats’s inherent personal and poetical attributes.

With the pace of his socializing from December into January, Keats confesses he has been racketing [socializing, seeking entertainments] too much, & and does not feel over well (10 Jan 1818).

Initially through Haydon, Keats seems to see quite a bit of the great poet William Wordsworth (an increasingly deeply ambivalent figure for Keats) around this time, while his friendship with Haydon may be at a high point. Haydon in a letter to Keats, 11 January, writes from my heart about John Keats’sgenius as something to rejoice at. Haydon gushes about his devotion to and affection for Keats: My Friendship for you is beyond its teens, & beginning to ripen to maturity. Keats is not quite as forthcoming, though he admires Haydon’s paintings. But truth be known, Haydon’s paintings, though grand in topic and scale, and decent in execution, are largely void of imaginative or innovative qualities.

Crucially, in terms of his poetic development, on 23 January, Keats notes to Haydon that, in thinking through a new, Miltonic project— Hyperion—he will leave behind the many bits of the deep and sentimental cast in Endymion, and instead now approach his subject in a more naked and grecian Manner—and the march of passion and endeavor will be undeviating. In writing to his brothers on the same day, he notes a little change has taken place in my intellect lately. [. . .] Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions that a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers. [. . .] So you see I am getting at it, with a sort of determination and strength . . .. Keats sees a way forward from his previous significant poetic deficiencies—the Huntian ornamental and somewhat random qualities—of Endymion and the 1817 volume. Some of Keats’s changing views of literary quality and qualities are beginning to spin off from his contact with and reading of Hazlitt.

It is less than a month since Keats has begun to strongly articulate a poetics that, put in practice by the end of 1818 and into early 1819, results in poetry quite unlike his earlier verse. We will thus find that his mature poetic voice employs a style and voice unobtrusively immersed within the subject, with masterfully measured intensity in approaching his subjects. Importantly, Keats will also use a form, mainly lyrical and shaped by his innovative application of the sonnet with an odal form, and where sound operates with meaning and without distraction. As mentioned, the opposite happens in Endymion, where couplets and capricious detail both bog down and randomize the poem’s sense and direction.

Leigh Hunt’s Cottage, Hampstead

Keats, aged 22, sees his friend and early mentor, the poet, publisher, and journalist Leigh Hunt. Keats writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey (who is studying for holy orders at Oxford) that Hunt has a real authenticated Lock of Milton’s Hair, and that Hunt has decided that, on this day, he and Keats should write poems about it.* Keats tells Bailey that he might have done something better alone and at home (23 Jan 1818). Behind this comment may be the fact that Hunt has just let Keats know that he feels Book I of Endymion has not much merit as a whole (23/24 Jan). Keats thinks that Hunt’s disparagement results from Hunt feeling snubbed in not being consulted in the composition of Endymion. Hunt may have felt some sense of ownership over Keats’s direction, since he was the one to first publish and promote Keats, and early on Keats was indeed smitten by Hunt’s reputation and connections. But by early 1818 Keats is, as it were, his own man—and poet.

Nevertheless, with some enthusiasm, Keats’s to-order ode on Milton pictures a young mortal poet (himself) with his childish rhyme standing in awe before the never-slumbering, immortal powers of Milton. Like many of Keats’s early occasional poems, Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair once more (and rather unevenly) reduces to Keats’s desire to be an enduring poet. Most importantly, though, after a somewhat fallow period, Keats hopes to his apply his poetic aspirations with renewed ardor: writing to his brothers on 24 January, he says, So you see I am getting at it, with a sort of determination & strength.

Keats also notes that his friends do quite a bit of bickering. He particularly mentions Benjamin Robert Haydon, Hunt, and John Hamilton Reynolds, with Haydon in the middle of most squabbles. Keats looks down upon those who seize upon the faults of others, since all have faults. Keats even hopes, in the future, to be peacekeeper between his friends. He also has concerns for his younger brother, Tom, whose spitting of blood continues, thus signaling tuberculosis.

As mentioned, Keats articulates the need to go in a different direction from overly Huntian Endymion (which he begins to see through the press), and he hopes to do so in a more Miltonic poem, Hyperion. Endymion has become a project (an exercise in perseverance, really) that Keats is eager to complete—and forget about.

And so, partially through Haydon, Keats begins to understand that Hunt’s influence is not helpful for his own poetic progress. He recognizes a change has taken place in my intellect lately—I cannot bare to be uninterested or unemployed (23 Jan 1818). As usual, his reading of Shakespeare is in part behind his poetic inspiration, and (not for the first time) reading King Lear reminds him of the profundity of artistic achievement when turned upon the depths of human nature.

No doubt contact with William Hazlitt, the literary critic and lecturer, influences Keats’s poetics. Keats is especially interested in what gives poetry lasting values, and here, along with Shakespeare, Milton’s accomplishments also intrigues him. Keats also says that sees a good deal of Wordsworth about this time (23 Jan), and in a few months Keats will attempt to articulate the differences between Milton and Wordsworth’s forms of greatness and genius. All of this confirms Keats’s progress is determined by a deliberate and developing engagement with the work of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth—and, less and less, Hunt. How very deliberately Keats studies these great writers in an attempt to understand the nuts-and-bolts of their work should never be underestimated; such understanding will, literally, underwrite the qualities of own greatest achievements as a poet.

*Hunt is an avid hair collector: his Book of Hair (now at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin) contains the locks of twenty-one famous persons; the Milton lock has not been authenticated.

1 Well Walk, Hampstead

Keats has Shakespeare’s King Lear on his mind, and along with Hamlet, it remains for Keats the most potent poetic measure of depth and complexity. Today Keats writes a sonnet about the play—Keats remains overwhelmed by the greatness of the thing (23 Jan 1818, to Bailey).

In gauging his own progress, and with King Lear in mind, Keats writes that Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions, than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers (23, 24 Jan). The suggestion, of course, is that Keats is himself feeling or hopes to feel such a ripening, and this (as a metaphor of organic maturation) is important in his self-conception of poetic progress. His long trial-of-invention poem, the 4,050-line Endymion, will, within two months, finally be behind him. He has just shown the opening book of Endymion to Leigh Hunt, who sees himself as Keats’s mentor; and Hunt, in skimming it over, says it has not much merit, and that the conversation between the two main characters is unnatural & too high-flown. Hunt also adds that they would not speak like his own characters in his own poem, The Story of Rimini. Keats finds Hunt’s comments wrong, not to mention both and petty and pompous. More reason for Keats to move from Hunt’s sway of influence, though there is some truth in that Huntian tones do inhabit Keats’s poem.

Although Keats’s sonnet on King Lear is about both Shakespeare’s greatness as well as his own aspirations for greatness, the poem itself is not especially great. Keats resorts to a couple of clichéd, rhapsodic phrases—O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!—on his way to call upon The bitter-sweet of the Shakespearean fruit to help his wings to fly at my desire—his desire to be an enduring poet, that is. This is Keats’s most persistent—and dead-end—topic, especially in its ties to poetic fame. But there is at least something more deliberate and important in the sonnet, something that expresses a specific mandate for this poetic progress: to say good-bye to melodizing romance while welcoming the Shakespearean deep eternal theme of sadness and pain, of immortality and death. This welcoming is significant enough: beginning in his earliest work, Spenserian impulses especially run through Keats’s diction and poetic mannerisms; but as he matures, the charms of chivalric beauty and elfin ambiance increasingly limit his more comprehensive goals, and after Endymion they begin to noticeably drop off. The allegorical-mythical romance of Endymion holds up rather than advances Keats’s progress—but at least he learns what he shouldn’t do again.

At the end of January, Keats writes a kind of follow-up poem—When I have fears—to the Lear sonnet. It may be his first Shakespearean sonnet. Keats fears that time will compromise poetic aspirations. This time, however, the sonnet is personal and less affected. Although the poem Byronically self-dramatizes his fears and status—I stand alone—it remains more controlled in attitude and purposefully dramatic in its rhetoric. Keats also likely writes another poem in January that signals his desire to feel absorbed by the thoughts of earlier writers. The lively Lines on the Mermaid Tavern once more expresses Keats desire for alignment with Souls of poets dead and gone. The mythology revolving around the Mermaid Tavern (where Keats spends at least one evening around this time) is that famous Elizabethan writers gathered there as a club to have drink, converse, debate, and exhibit wit.

As suggested, King Lear, with its speculative, intensive depths, remains perhaps the most powerful single creative work for Keats. We know from Keats’s heavily marked up copy of William Hazlitt’s recently published Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays that he is fully absorbed with trying to understand King Lear’s imaginative portrayal of and control over tensions, passions, conflicts, and oppositions. This becomes Keats’s real work at this time, and, as he copies and revises Endymion, its shortcomings—indeed, its relative haphazard quality—become very clear. Keats recognizes that, to be a significant poet, he needs to embrace depths and complexities in feeling and thought, and in composed and disinterested ways; subjects are to be finely pushed up against excess without crossing over into sentimentality. Keats is coming to see that life, feelings, and thought are necessarily at the call of change, uncertainty, and irresolution; imaginatively embracing and representing this realization and these topics is critical, and something we might call Keats’s reality principle—and they will present in his best work to come.

Likewise, and related to this pursuit, Keats about this time begins to realize that he needs to—and can—profitably engage with the achievement of Milton and Wordsworth, alongside Shakespeare. For Keats, Milton’s verse unshakably holds its subjects, thus turning moving description into stilled drama; Wordsworth’s verse pursues deep, quiet truths beyond both joy and fear—a region that Wordsworth seminally points to as too deep for tears (from Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode). Equally significant, Keats begins to know what he will not emulate: aspects Milton’s style and Wordsworth subjectively channeled vision. In about a year-and-a-half, just as Keats writes his very best poetry, he can say, Shakespeare and the [Milton’s] paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me (14 Aug 1819), and we witness Keats’s recognition of the importance of how Wordsworth can think into the human heart (3 May 1818). We know, then, that Keats’s deliberate study of these figures in particular profoundly propels his own work.

That William Hazlitt is both a friend and critical influence is not coincidental: Keats at this juncture reads his critical work, attends his lecture series on literature, and socializes with him. They no doubt talk about the character of poetic talent, which ties into Keats’s interest in how the actor (and living legend) Edmund Kean embodies Shakespeare’s words—and this is a quality to which Hazlitt is greatly attuned, and something he has written about. This shapes Keats’s idea about how poetic voice assimilates and represents meaning. For Keats, Kean’s ability to physically evoke Shakespeare’s actual words (his physical text, in effect) intrigues Keats: the character becomes the words, and words become the character. That is, Kean’s acting embodies words as much as persona. This anticipates Keats’s own theory of the camelion poet (27 Oct 1818); Kean is, in effect, the camelion actor. Keats’s ultimate ambition, expressed at the height of his powers, is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting (14 Aug 1819); this never happens, though—who knows?—if Keats would have lived beyond twenty-five years, his remarkable poetic gifts may well have been matched in drama.

At this moment, Keats is somewhat defensive about his poetry in light of Hunt’s somewhat patronizing comments about Endymion. The suggestion is that he does not trust Hunt’s comments, which points to the direction of Keats’s progress—a direction no longer under Hunt’s sway. But there may be something that Keats might not want to admit to: that aspects of Hunt’s poetic style (which is overly affected, at times, prettified, sometimes stylistically flippant) lurk in his poetry.

The next day (23 Jan) Keats begins to prepare Book II of Endymion for the press, and his brother’s health (Tom) is not good. As usual, Keats’s finances are uneven at best and precarious at worst.

Surrey Institution, Blackfriars Road, London

William Hazlitt gives three lectures on English poets at the Surrey Institution during January, with more continuing into February and early March. Keats almost certainly attends the third in this series on 27 January.

After condemning poets of the modern school of poetry for excessively expressing morbid feeling and devouring egotism, Hazlitt notes that Shakespeare and Milton owe their power over the human mind to their having had a deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or affecting in the events of human life. This begins to resonate hugely with Keats, who, in his poetic development, now attempts to go beyond romance and lighter, pleasurable, and occasional topics and work toward subjects of a deeper sense, the objects of nature, and events of human life. Keats would have been aware of Hazlitt’s comment about Wordsworth’s style of poetry, that his intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing, expressed first in a review in TheExaminer in 1814.

Throughout 1818, and almost certainly following Hazlitt’s views on Wordsworth’s subjective style of self-expression, Keats is keen to distinguish his own poetical Character from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime and the whims of an egotist, which leads to poetry that has a palpable design upon us (27 Oct 1818 and 3 Feb 1818). This determined self-differentiation from Wordsworth (whom Keats met a number of times fairly recently) is crucial for Keats in developing his own style of reflection and expression, inasmuch as it also means he desires to comprehend Wordsworth’s achievement, which Keats finds to be considerable and pivotal in his own direction. More specifically, Keats realizes that for his poetry to progress, he needs to go as deep as or at least engage Wordsworth’s ideas about the connection between joy and suffering—expressed in Wordsworth’s dominating trope of the human heart; and over the next few months (and reflected in an critical letter of 3 May to John Hamilton Reynolds), Keats is determined to understand if Wordsworth’s explorative genius is limited or grand in its scope. Practical questions for Keats might be these: How do I go as deep as Wordsworth in a style that is not Wordsworthian?How do I write poetry with poetic purpose that does not draw attention to that purpose, but only an overriding sense of Beauty?

Besides being an extremely active month for Keats socially, he manages to write at least eight poems, though, except for his sonnet on King Lear, none mark a clear turn in his thinking or style. They are mainly incidental and trivial, and when he gets a little more serious, as in When I have fears that I may cease to be, he expresses a somewhat Byronic unease that he might not live long enough or be able to poetically express all that he feels and sees. Keats recognizes that he will need to develop his poetic skills rapidly to keep pace with his penetrative poetics.

The end of January shows Keats having, as usual, financial issues. He has received more tricklings of money from the trustee of inherited family funds (Richard Abbey), but as he writes his brothers in a letter postmarked 30 January, money he owes to friends nearly swallowed up the Balance.

Keats also expresses unease his long poem, Endymion, which is in early stages of going to press: I am convinced now that my Poem will not sell. He’s right. But this realization is a good thing, since in the process of preparing his poem for publication, he comes to critically assess its significant shortcomings—a random, stretched plot; too much arbitrary description; an overly dainty tone (especially in the dangling, jingling couplets, where sounds determines sense, rather than supporting it); and a thematics (variations on ideal/real binary) that hardly displays much originality. Endymion’s shortcomings and prospects makes Keats write that he will give his career as a poet three more months, and after that point he will seek other employment (Home or abroad) or find a cheap way to retire in the country. But again, Endymion serves to remind Keats of kind of poetry he will, hereafter, not write.

Surrey Institution, Blackfriars Road, London

Keats attends another of William Hazlitt’s successful lectures on the English poets at the Surrey Institution (mainly on Pope and Dryden). The lectures began 3 January, running until 3 March. Hazlitt, although his passions reside in philosophy and in painting (which he tries in his early years), his fame (yet modest financial success) by 1818 resides mainly in his work as an essayist, journalist, literary critic, and lecturer. He knows many of the great figures of the age, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Robert Southey, and he will have plenty to say about them, particularly in his Spirit of The Age, published 1825. Hazlitt’s natural and energetic prose style, coupled his desire to speak out and have the final say, didn’t always function to create friends.

That Keats, aged 22, knows and converses with someone like Hazlitt tells us about the circles Keats now moves easily within—a faction of liberal London intelligentsia of the day—though he is nowhere near as famous or experienced as most of his literary/artistic friends; that Keats is extremely attentive to Hazlitt’s critical views tells us something about the direction of Keats’s poetic progress.

Hazlitt is the third in what might be called the Triple-H influence on Keats’s poetics, the others being his friends Hunt and Haydon. But Keats has now largely moved away from Hunt’s poetical sway (mainly the poetry of fancy and sociability), especially now that he is close to leaving his year-long project of Endymion behind. Haydon (who casts aspersion on Hunt’s influence) continues to encourage Keats’s independence, ideas, and genius in conversation and letters; and Hazlitt’s thinking about Wordsworth’s poetic egoism and the qualities of truly enduring poetry—like that of Spenser, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan poets in general—are developed by Keats in what might be called his epistolary poetics: letters to his friends.

Keats writes a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 February, about the bullying, limiting egoism of contemporary poetry, and he mainly has Wordsworth in mind: We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us [ . . . ] Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. [ . . . ] Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the antients were Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them.—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular [ . . . ] Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be Eagles? Poetry needs to avoid pettiness, pedantry, and personality. Why remain flightless in the dark rather than soar above and see all?

Once more, Keats’s strong and significant declaration of independence—I will cut all this—derives a fair amount from Hazlitt, who is consistently critical of Wordsworth’s all-consuming subjectivity, while applauding the Elizabethans. Keats desires a subtle yet intense poetic voice—great & unobtrusive—and one that comes from the subject rather than from trifling, picky subjectivity and egotism. Keats desires to take in a larger scope, a scope without an obtrusive and petty palpable design. The subject, and not subjectivity, must govern poetry. Much of this desire will, by the end of the year and into 1819, mark a huge and remarkable development from his early poetry.

Keats will not want his poetry to be, as it were, driven by circumscribed, trivial purpose. At this point we Keats more determined than ever to, as it were, distance himself from his contemporaries, those Modern poets. But we have to remember: Keats hugely respects Wordsworth’s depths—his moments of grandeur and genius, in fact—in understanding nature and the complex relationship between joy and suffering, based on restoration and acceptance.

Covent Garden (theatre), London

Keats watches H. H. Milman’s Fazio(first staged as The Italian Wife in December 1816) at Covent Garden—a tragedy mainly about the fall of Italy, with some guilt and jealousy thrown over the subject. Keats writes that the play hung rather heavily on me (14 Feb).

Once more, and much like the month before, this is a busy time for Keats: besides working hard to prepare his long poem Endymion for publication, the night before he is at Leigh Hunt’s with the free-thinking young poet Percy Shelley, writing sonnets on the Nile as friendly competition; the night before that he attends one of William Hazlitt’s influential lectures on English poetry (the fourth in the series; he attends two more on the 10th, and 17th); on the 11th he once more dines at Hunt’s, with Shelley and his wife, Mary (to-be novelist, author of Frankenstein) present, as well as Thomas Love Peacock (poet, critic, and novelist), Claire (Jane) Clairmont (daughter of William Godwin’s second wife, stepsister to Mary Shelley, pregnant by Lord Byron), and Thomas Jefferson Hogg (minor novelist). This is quite a lineup for the young Keats on just one casual night. In a way, the evening of the 11th even rivals the immortal dinner of 28 December 1817, so-called by Keats’s friend, the historical Benjamin Robert Haydon, after he gathers Keats, William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and a few others to view his large canvas which includes some of them.

Sometimes the popular imagination constructs Keats (and the Romantic poet in general) as a self-secluded, lonely, embowered figure. Keats is anything but, and neither are most of his canonical peers: they generally become great writers by reading, studying, writing about, and , crucially , meeting with other writers and thinkers. It turns out an intellectual network is more important than living the life of a solipsistic, solitary, wandering, leaf-loving figure, though the Romantic poet nonetheless often portrays this posture. Byron wonderfully mocks this Romantic stereotype in Canto1, stanzas 90-91, of Don Juan, where poets, like Wordsworth, thinking unutterable things, wander by brooks and, with a mighty heart, throw themselves within the leafy nooks in order to commune with their high soul; the result is unintelligible poetry.

Tomorrow, the 6th, Keats sends Book II of Endymion to his publishers. Book I is delivered 20 January, though he adds what he feels are crucial lines about a week later (Book I, lines 777-81), which introduce the pleasure thermometer passage (see letter, 30 January). By the end of the month, Keats does some of the proofs for Endymion, which is officially published toward the end of March. He will be greatly relieved to have his large, traipsing poem behind him in order to pursue other, quite different directions.

But at this time in his thinking about poetry, Keats finds himself turning away from how vanity, egotism, and pedantry has crept into contemporary poetry. For Keats, some kind of exploration of how how a capable imagination can patiently open itself to both sorrow and joy. Thus on 19 February he writes, let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive. This fits into his larger theory of how the true poetic character embraces its subjects without fractious reasoning or reaching.

British Gallery, No. 52 Pall Mall, London

On this day, or slightly before, Keats sees an exhibition at the British Gallery (also known as the Pall Mall Pictures Galleries or British Institution, and formerly the Shakespeare Gallery). He views a few indifferent contemporary paintings.

This month Keats, aged 22, resolves to escape the poetic and egotistical pinings of his contemporaries (William Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt in particular) for the more direct pleasure of older poets and poetry. On this account, he may be taking the lead of his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon but, more likely, the critic and essayist (and acquaintance) William Hazlitt, whose lectures on English poets he has recently attended (on 10 and 17 February). To his younger brothers Tom and George, he reports attending Hazlitt’s talks and seeing friends at them. Keats also mentions that William Wordsworth recently left London—Keats met with the famous poet a few times—but that by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry left a bad impression around town, yet he is a great Poet if not a Philosopher. This actually captures one aspect of Keats’s deep ambivalence about Wordsworth as he attempts to separate the man from his work; this ambivalence is also rooted in Keats separating one prized aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic character from another he rebukes—genuine poetic depth that explores nature, loss, and shared human suffering vs trivial and self-indulgent topics channeled through an overbearing subjectivity.

In a letter to his good friend John Hamilton Reynolds written 19 February, Keats (perhaps in the spirit of escaping those contemporaries), and with the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness, explores with the notion of indolence. He turns his thoughts on the condition to suggest a promising state closer to musing upon, wandering with, and positively enjoying a grand or spiritual passage of poetry or writing. Keats comes up with a poetically potent little phrase—delicious diligent Indolence. Keats’s playful musing ends with a rambling attempt to portray human life, seeking, and friendships in extended metaphors of spiderwebs, flowers, buzzing bees, and a grand democracy of Forest Trees. His quasi-conclusion: let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive. In one way, this clearly echoes the idea of wise passiveness in Wordsworth’s poem Expostulation and Reply, but it also expresses a crucial concept for Keats: the imaginative ability to assume or become whatever comes to us—to patiently become the subject, and to let its complexity or simplicity be the guide to poetic expression, regardless of the conflicting, contradictory, or even unknowable nature of the subject.

Just more than a year later, during his extraordinary period of composition, Keats takes part of these ideas about idleness and and indolence into a good poem: Ode on Indolence. In working up to the poem, the state as he describes it in a letter (19 March 1819) sounds something very much like meditation, with mind and body unbent as one: in this state, he writes, the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown.

91 Bond Street, London

Keats writes to his publisher, John Taylor, at Bond Street. Taylor & [James] Hessey publish Keats’s Endymion (1818) and his last 1820 volume, and they also assume rights to Keats first volume, Poems, 1817. Taylor & Hessey will generate a loss on Endymion of well over 100 pounds. They will eventually pay Keats for exclusive rights of his poetry, and part of the money will be used by Keats to fund his trip to Italy.

At this time, in February 1818, Keats attempts to put the final touches on Endymion before publication. Keats expresses he is extremely indebted to Taylor for his editorial attentions on Endymion. Taylor, fourteen years Keats’s senior, is confident of the inevitability of Keats’s poetic success, while he also recognizes Keats’s relative inexperience. For his part, Keats, as he copies out Book IV, is keen to put his poem behind him—it has, he writes, moved him into the Go-cart, suggesting the poem taken him from crawling to toddling (a go-cart is a baby walker that assists a child in learning to walk). Despite this view of his own immature state, Keats feels his understanding of Shakespeare is in fact mature. Keats still has to write a preface for Endymion, but again, when he does, it will reveal how Keats, over-apologetically, sees that the poem’s accomplishment seriously compromised by his undeveloped poetic sensibilities. Keats is very keen to publish the poem so that he can, in his own words, forget it and proceed. This is a good self-assessment, and one needed if he is to genuinely progress.

Perhaps thinking of what Endymion does not achieve, to Taylor, Keats outlines three Axioms of Poetry: that it should surprise by fine excess and Singularity; that its Beauty should be natural, complete, calm, and yet leave the reader in the luxury of twilight; and that if poetry does not come naturally, it had better not come at all. The phrase fine excess as poetic goal and principle is particularly striking—and helpful; it captures the idea of embracing and balancing the opposite qualities of impulse and control. And this, in fact, may be key in understanding the nature of Keats’s achievement in his greatest poetry, where intensity is measured by disinterestedness, and the vagaries of truth are necessarily trumped by invariable beauty.

A few days earlier, 22 February, Taylor gets a letter from Benjamin Bailey, Keats’s friend at Oxford with whom he stays in September 1817. Views about Endymion are exchanged, and Bailey’s clear Platonic leanings about the eternal mind are expressed, which brings up the issue of Keats’s own Platonic leanings—or not.

No doubt Platonic ideas fall into Keats’s poetics and poetry, in part as a result of his stay with Bailey. It would, however, be stretching things to suggest that Keats is a Platonist or Neo-Platonist—certainly not in the way the claim can be made for his fellow poet (and implicit competitor) Percy Shelley. No doubt many of Keats’s early idealisms might render a quasi-Platonic reading; further, no doubt Keats’s ideas about truth of beauty (or beauty’s truth) suggests something like the mind’s perception of eternal forms. But in Keats’s best work, the material world in-itself is beautiful with or without the mind’s idealisms; moreover, the eternal form that Keats seeks is, often enough, in the idea of enduring, great poetry. Complicating all this, though, is role of imagination in rendering or representing some sense of eternal truth. A little like Coleridge, there is always the question working behind, as it were, the scenes of Keats’s poetic creation: Is the Imagination a faculty to see Truths, or is the Imagination a kind of Truth in-itself?

At this point, Keats spends much time with Charles Dilke and Charles Brown; he is sad that his good friend Reynolds has been very ill; and he is reading Gibbon and Voltaire. He has been attending Hazlitt’s popular lectures, and he notes that William Wordsworth, during the month or so he was in London (during which Keats met him a number a times), left a bad impression because of Wordsworth’s perceived egotism, Vanity and bigotry—yet he is a great Poet if not a philosopher (21 Feb 1818). In this final comment, Keats picks up on the idea that Wordsworth’s poetry offers forms of deeper, meditative wisdom. Keats may also be calling upon the climax of one of Wordsworth’s key poems, the Immortality Ode, which dramatically takes us to remarkable moment that celebrates a matured vision through the growth of the philosophic mind (line 191). Keats is forcibly struck by Wordsworth’s poetic accomplishment and vision, and he thoroughly engages it in the final two years of his writing. Keats remains less impressed by Wordsworth’s public persona and political values.

Exeter to Teignmouth

Via Exeter, and running into a severe storm that hinders travel, Keats leaves for Teignmouth from London on 4 March. Keats apparently travels on the outside of the coach, which would have been cheaper seating but, in bad weather, very nasty. Keats get to Exeter on 6 March.

Keats, aged 22, is on his way to visit his brother, Tom, aged 18, who is quite ill with consumption. Keats is in a way relieving his other younger brother, George, who has been taking care of Tom. Keats also hopes to get some work done as well as enjoy the countryside. Sadly, Tom has become a huge burden, both for Keats and George. This only increases over the coming months. Before the end of the year, on 1 December, with Keats beside him and George in America, Tom passes away, aged 19. Keats stays at Teignmouth for just under two months, and he is back in Hampstead by about the end of the first week of May.

By the middle of March, Keats has copied out the fourth and final book of his long poem, Endymion. He began working on it Endymion in April 1817. The poem is motivated mainly as a test or trial of his inventive and imaginative powers, as well as exercise of perseverance that he felt, at least initially, might prove his dedication to poetry and earn the title of poet. By the end of the process, his enthusiasm for the project has slumped, though he wants to believe that even failure represents some kind of progress. Before even arriving at Teignmouth, Keats’s desire to move forward is very clear: I am anxious to get Endymion printed that I may forget it and proceed (27 Feb 1818). This is terrific self-advice.

Keats completes a corrected, final draft of Endymion for his publishers (Taylor & Hessey) by 14 March. He struggles with a preface for the poem: awkwardly pressured by his publishers and a friend (John Hamilton Reynolds), he revises the preface. Nevertheless, in its admission of great faults and immaturity, the final version of preface opens Keats and the poem up to public criticism. Endymion, he declares, is a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished. He is right.

Yet, in a way, because of Endymion’s advertised adolescent shortcomings and Keats’s obvious association with a certain kind of poetry revolving around Leigh Hunt (the poetry of fancy and sociability, of occasion and recreation), it clear that Keats desires to carve out his own independent position as a thinker and poet, especially relative to Hunt’s inflated sense of his own poetic accomplishment (to Haydon, 21 March). He has already confessed to one of his publishers and friend John Taylor, that Endymion is a Pioneer of sorts, that his new poetical Axioms will be that poetry display fine excess, implying that the Huntian model luxuriates too much in its excesses. As he progresses, Keats aims for a tone and style that will appear content, emerge naturally, and assume a sober, stilled hold over both the subject and the reader—all the things, that is, that most of Endymion does not do (27 Feb 1818), which is riddled by rhyme and muddled in plot.

Although Keats’s long poem begins with a perfect line that perfectly captures his developing poetic credo—A thing of beauty is a joy forever—and although the opening lines of the poem fluently express how lasting beauty in nature and literature can counter and lift the pall from / From our dark spirits, the bulk of the bulk of the poem is aesthetically unconvincing. It is, in short, hardly a joy forever—though the poem seems to go on forever—and Keats knows this. In his preface, Keats is a good-enough and honest critic to rightly point to its sandy foundations and its mawkish, thick-sighted ambitions. It is not quite as random and ineffectual as, say, his earlier longish non-titled poem I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, but, as in the tip-toe poem, there is little to block the jingling couplets or jam over-employed enjambment. At least in the earlier poem the poet seems to be having a little fun in randomly spotting all the flora and fauna, and in imagining the wonderful human sources of mythology. But the poem’s haphazard direction comes can be represented by an almost laughable line: after noting laburnum, wildbriar, violets, a youngling tree (ouch!), a streamlet’s rushy banks (double ouch!), blue bells, woodbine, sweet peas, skittish minnows, goldfinches, as well the the imagined presence of an auburn-haired, nimble-toed maiden, Keats writes, What next? (29-106). Indeed! Endymion, by comparison, reads more like a job without purpose.

Teignmouth, Devon

Travelling through Exeter during a serious storm, Keats joins his sick brother, Tom, in Teignmouth, Devon, for two months, beginning 6 March. He leaves Teignmouth 4 May and arrives back in London a few days later. Keats wavers about Tom’s recovery. Tom has a hemorrhages about a week after Keats arrives, and they seem to continue. Although during the first week it does nothing but rain, Keats eventually does some walking and sightseeing, but it generally remains wet—splashy, rainy, misty snowy, foggy, haily floody, muddy, he playfully complains to a friend (13 March); a month later, Rain! Rain! Rain! (10 April). His goal is to put the final strokes on his long and testing poem, the four-book, 4,000-line Endymion, which he has been working on for almost a year.

Keats writes to his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, on 14 March: I have copied my fourth Book, and shall try to write the preface soon. I wish it was all done; for I want to forget it and make my mind free for something new. By the third week of March, Keats is in the final stages of copying and sending Endymion to his publishers, Taylor & Hessey. By the end of his stay, Endymion is completed and, at last, behind him. It is published sometime during the last week of April.

The first preface to Endymion that Keats writes at Teignmouth is ill-received by his publishers and Reynolds. They suggest that it hints of his former mentor, Leigh Hunt, and lacks humility. Keats is defensive; to Reynolds, 9 April: I have no feel of stooping. I hate the idea of humility to them [the Public]—[/] I never wrote one single Line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought. Keats nonetheless tries another preface and anxiously hopes it is tolerable (10 April). The publishers accept the new preface, but it, too, has shortcomings. It invites (and will eventually receive) severe criticism of both him and the poem’s advertised murky accomplishment. Keats points to both his and the poem’s immaturity, as well its uncertain foundations and thick-sighted ambitions. Somewhat extraordinarily, he declares that the poem’s two first books, and indeed the two last, might not be worth publication.

Keats is, unfortunately, right about Endymion’s deficiencies, even if, here and there, a few worthy passages rise up out of the ordinary. In the end, though, as Keats notes, there is only so much an inexperienced poet can do to decorate the bare circumstance of a shepherd’s love-sick quest to find his ideal, celestial love—in heroic couplets, no less. Bottom line: too much description in search of atmosphere; too much incident; too many adventures; too many vacillations; too many rhymes arbitrarily forcing sense; and too much sensuality for its own sake. But at least it is done. Time to move forward; and as he writes in the preface, perhaps in the future, with a mature imagination, he can return to the beautiful mythology of Greece.

By the very end of his stay at Teignmouth, Keats formulates significant and complex thoughts about poetry, poetic worth, and the pursuit of genuine wisdom. He does so mainly though contemplating Milton and Wordsworth’s relative style, scope, depth, and accomplishments, while noting what is lacking in Endymion. Keats realizes he must go deeper in both a philosophical and profoundly human way if he is to become a strong, enduring poet.

The noteworthy conclusion Keats comes to is that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton: Wordsworth, more than Milton, has moved forward to think into the human heart, into (he quotes from Wordsworth) the burden of the Mystery. Keats comes to this via a simile of human life; he compares it to a Mansion of Many Apartments, into which Wordsworth has gone further than anyone else in exploring those dark Passages. Gauging and articulating Wordsworth’s accomplishment, Keats will show how tall I stand by the giant [Wordsworth]. To progress, then, Keats feels he too must explore similar regions. This is a singularly important moment for Keats, as he self-consciously-fashions a statement of poetic purpose to which he will strive—and achieve within a year.

Toward the end of his stay in Teignmouth, then, Keats feels that order to move forward, he needs to deliberately study and pursue knowledge. He expresses a more forward-looking mature purpose: I find cavalier days are gone by, he writes (24 April).

Teignmouth, Devon

Keats writes to his good friend, the sensible and witty James Rice. Keats has been in Teignmouth for over two weeks; he stays for about two months. He joins his younger brother, Tom, who has clear signs of consumption. Keats’s hope is to put the final touches (corrections and a preface) on Endymion, the long poem on which he has been working fairly steadily for almost a year.

In the letter to Rice, Keats expresses, a little playfully, a life-theme—a theory of Nettles. He posits that how happy one’s thoughts might be if they could remain settled and content, with feelings quiet and pleasant. But, he notes, Alas! This never can be. Mutability, complexity, and darker, uncertain elements cannot be kept in check by any philosophy. At his most penetrating moments in his poetry-to-come, these elements will combine in an acceptance of uncertainty and sorrow through an capable imagination that equally embraces despondency and hope, joy and sorrow.

After waggishly wondering if, in a world of non-varying atoms, the smart matter of Milton’s head might find some room in someone else’s empty head, he expresses hope for the health of his ill friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, and he notes Tom’s health, as well: Oh! for a day and all well! And then, to perhaps raise spirits, Keats ends with a lusty doggerel based on visiting a fair at the town of Dawlish, Over the hill and over the dale.

The next day, 25 March, Keats’s writes an offhand epistolary poem to Reynolds—Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed. The poem rambles forward by describing some recent disjointed dreams and what such things might mean. By the poem’s end, he is unsettled about the tooth and claw of nature and the troubling moods of one’s mind (100-6). But most interestingly, in between these, he accepts that reason and ethics can never be settled or knowable—they will tease us out of thought (77); our happiness is sadly flawed because we see beyond our bourne— / It forces us in summer skies to mourn: / It spoils the singing of the nightingale. These lines, if only in passing, anticipate the region of thought and source of great poetry that Keats comes to explore in his best work; they especially anticipate his 1819 odes on the urn and the nightingale, where the human condition and time’s powers encounter each other through an unfaltering imagination. Even the style of these lines, in their simple, uncluttered, calm elegance, anticipate a voice that Keats will, for example, summon in his remarkable ode To Autumn, written in the fall of 1819.

The letter to Reynolds also has a brief, disconnected but charged comment about his friend and former mentor, Leigh Hunt, who, back in October 1816, more less launches Keats’s poetic career while introducing him into a network of writers, poets, publishers, critics, and artists. Keats writes, What affectation in Hunt’s title—’Foliage’! The reference is to a collection of Hunt’s poetry. That Keats points to Hunt’s poetic pretensions is yet another sign of his desire to more away from Hunt’s influence and particular poetic style. Keats seems to feel some contempt for Hunt’s mannered poetic posturing. Keats, we know, has for one of his Axions that poetry must come naturally (rather than display artificiality) or better not come at all (27 Feb). Keats clearly trusts Reynolds to keep these comments private, since Reynold knows Hunt very well, and Keats is still in contact with Hunt, having met and dined with him at least a couple of times the previous month. Worth keeping in mind is that only a year-and-a-half or earlier that is great fan of Hunt as a poet. His comment mocking Hunt’s title is a measure of how far—and in what direction—Keats has come.

Among shorter and largely inconsequential poetry, Keats finishes Isabella. Based on Boccaccio’s tale and likely set off by William Hazlitt’s 3 February 1818 lecture, Keats begins it in February and completes it by 27 April. The poem’s awkward combination of sentimentality, mild lewdness, and idealization is in some ways a sideways step in Keats’s poetic progress, inasmuch as its ostensible lack of purpose recalls earlier work. Keats thus later considers the poem mawkish (19 Sept 1819), weak, simple, and exhibiting too much inexperience—and altogether too smokeable (22 Sept 1819), meaning that he considered the poem easily open to mockery. He did not want it published, but it ends up in his 1820 volume. (Keats also calls his long poem Endymion mawkish in its style and ambition.)

What we see in these two months at Teignmouth is, first, Keats finally able to put Endymion and its shortcomings behind him; second, clear signs that he wants to move forward through application, study, and thought (24 April); third, a deliberate wrestling with the poetic dimensions of Milton and Wordsworth relative to his own poetic character and goals; and fourth, and as an extension of this, further work toward a composed stance that will, in his poetry, allow him to reflect deeper regions of wisdom, knowledge, and feeling—that Burden of the Mystery he refers to twice (on 3 May) in drawing upon Wordsworth’s phrase from Tintern Abbey (38).

93 Fleet Street, London

The offices of [John] Taylor & [James] Hessey, Publishers/Booksellers, launched 1806.

In the last week of April 1818, Keats, aged 22, publishes his Endymion with Taylor & Hessey, with whom he will also publish his next (and final) 1820 collection. Among others, Taylor & Hessey publish work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and Charles Lamb. About two-and-a-half years later, Taylor & Hessey will report a loss on Endymion of over 100 pounds, yet, from the beginning of their relationship with Keats, they fully believe in him and his eventual success.

Keats calls the 4,050-line Endymion a test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination (8 Oct 1817), but in the poem’s preface he awkwardly apologizes for its (and his own) immaturity, thus in some quarters opening himself up to public belittling and criticism. But Keats is right: the poem’s overall qualities are indifferent and uneven. There is some struggle over the Preface to the poem with his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, who is working with the publisher, but Keats expresses that he cares absolutely nothing about the public, which he sees as an Enemy—and he hates Mawkish popularity. The only humility he feels is toward the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty,—and the Memory of great Men. He feels it is time to enlarge my vision (9 April).

Keats has many up-and-down moments in year-long compositional history of Endymion. The poem has just few strong passages, and Keats is perceptive enough to see that, even with its weak foundations, it serves a necessary failure in his poetic development. Even before completion he admits to having a low opinion of the poem (28 Sept 1817), and after completing it he points to its slip-shod nature; with Endymion in mind, he writes, I was never afraid of failure (8 Oct 1818).

The most famous review of Endymion is by Z—John Gibson Lockhart—in the August 1818 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review : to a significant degree Z ridicules the poem for being under the toxic sway of Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School of poetry—a slight that neatly, and purposefully, fuses politics and poetics.

Though the review is also openly coloured by class, Z without the ideologically-inspired invective is generally correct: the poem tackles no sustained problem; it possess only a few moments of deep or complex sense; and it barely has anything original to contribute to the story of (to paraphrase Keats own potted plot, 10 Sept 1817) the Moon’s excessive love for a young, solitary, handsome Shepherd. Moreover, that Huntian style is something Keats needs to move away from in order to progress: as Lockhart puts it, Keats has adopted Hunt’s loose, nerveless versification, and Cockney rhymes. This, again, is generally correct, and not unnoticed by Keats, with or without Z.

In sum, the completion of Endymion does not show that Keats is a great poet; it does, however, show that he is a dedicated poet, one determined to profit from missteps and grow out of his poetic immaturity. The poem’s only saving points are those when it brushes up against issues and topics like dream/reality, mortality/immortality, and empathetic fellowship; but, at best, these passages take up not much more than about 15% of the poem’s total content. (If you gave the poem to an editor in a mood for rampant cutting, you might end up with a decent 500-line lyric poem, void of bowers, mists, shades, mosses, drooping things, bright things, and embroidered scenes; you might imagine this editor writing, And please, no more ’sighs’ in the poem! And as for things gold and silver—what? Hair, rocks, sand, buds, palaces, bugles, lakes, rivers, brooks, clouds . . . .)

April reveals Keats hatching plans for a walking-tour of Scotland and the north of England. But he also begins the month by intended to pursue a life of writing and studying (8 April). And by the end of month, with Endymion just about completely behind him, he tells Taylor that his cavalier days are gone by, and that study and thought will henceforth define the road ahead: I find I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge—quoting Solomon, get wisdom - get understanding (24 April). A few days later, to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s enthusiasm for future directions continues: he has plans to master Italian and Greek, and, as in his letter to Taylor, he expresses that his interests in philosophy and metaphysics are growing, and he longs to feast on old Homer, as we have upon Shakespeare and Milton (27 April).

Keats, then, seems to signal a new phase in his progress, what we might call post- Endymion. With the Principle of Beauty as his premier maxim, and with an expressed desire to pursue knowledge with deliberate study as another maxim (to get wisdom - get understanding), we hear a determined poet in April 1818. By the end of the year and into 1819, such determination takes him to his greatest poetry. The road ahead, though, is not clear, and he will have to see his way past the death of his younger brother, Tom, at the end of 1818, and he will also have moments of uncertainty, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and indolence—not to mention acute financial uncertainty, lingering throat problems, and complex love for a certain Fanny Brawne. Great things are never simple.

47 Paternoster Row, London

The May 1818 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine is published. The London printing of the journal is by Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 47 Paternoster Row.

In a devastating review of poetry by Keats’s earlier mentor and close friend, Leigh Hunt, the anonymous Z—John Gibson Lockhart—notes that a few of the poems in Hunt’s Foliage collection refer to Hunt crowning of himself with laurels with a certain infatuated Bardling, Mister John Keats (p. 197). The review is framed as Letter from Z. to Mr Leigh Hunt, King of Cockneys. Essays and reviews like these often act out one part of the culture wars of the time; in this case, a Scots journal in Edinburgh looks down its Tory nose at English Whigs in London. Politics, class, personality, and poetry are mashed up to deliver the maximum blow—toss in some innuendo about morality and personal weaknesses, add a large measure of condescension with a equal amount of wit and invective, and you have the general recipe. Some do it better than others, and Z is pretty good.

In this case, Z’s review is indeed swamped with commentary motivated mainly by politics and, it seems, personal ire, with class differences thrown in: Hunt’s vulgarity and plebeian origin and education are trumpeted (p.196), as are his apparently indecent values. But then there is Hunt’s verse, and in defense of Z, Hunt’s poetry is hardly strong or deep stuff; and Hunt’s pretensions are worthy of at least some ridicule. Keats has, in fact, come to see Hunt’s limitations as a poet, and he condemns Hunt’s personal delusions of grandeur. Keats himself has already noted the affectation in just the title of Hunt’s collection, Foliage(25 March).

Keats is forever associated with this Hunt-headed Cockney School of Poetry, and, at least for the moment, nominated as Hunt’s unfortunate prototype. It is this charge, and Hunt’s style of affected, sociable poetry, that Keats will, self-consciously, have to write himself away from—with or without Z’s charges.

Given that Endymion is published this month (19 May, likely), Keats has feelings that it, too, will be attacked, since he has already signaled affiliation with Hunt (he dedicates his first volume, the 1817Poems, to Hunt), Hunt has signaled connection with Keats, and Keats has signalling the inadequacies of Endymion in his preface to the poem.

And so, in the August 1818 issue of Blackwood’s, in the fourth of the eight essays on the Cockney School, Keats is indeed administered a large dose of abuse by Z. Keats will be charged with having caught the malady of Metromanie, the mania for writing poetry. The cure: quit writing poetry—and the advice to Keats: return to the medical profession before it is too late. How does Z know all this? Lockhart by chance heard about Keats’s medical qualifications via a mutual friend, Benjamin Bailey; Bailey, had no idea it would become part of the rhetoric in the attack on Keats. His intention was, in fact, to protect Keats.

Teignmouth to Bridport

After just about two months in Teignmouth, Devon, Keats and his brother Tom are on their way back to Hampstead. The trip normally takes little more than two days; it takes them about six horrible days. Tom is very ill with consumption; he’s hemorrhaging. On their return, they stay at Bridport so that Tom can rest. As Tom himself recalls as few weeks later, I was very ill there and lost much blood (17/18 May). Tom improves by the end of the journey, so much so that a doctor, despite obvious indicators of consumption, tells Tom that his illness is all mistaken, making Tom almost giddy. Sadly, Tom, aged 18, does not make it to the end of the year, and he dies with Keats beside him.

Despite some very soggy weather, for Keats the stay in Teignmouth is mainly successful. After about a year of working on his long poem, Endymion, it is at last behind him and published. Keats, however, remains ambivalent about its value, and he was so well before he even completes it: on one hand, his perseverance has been tested and proven by a poem that, at various times, he largely views as a trial or exploration of his imaginative powers; on the other hand, the poem is overwhelmingly weak, and Keats is aware that his slapdash idea for the poem and adolescent imagination is on display. As Keats’s writes about Endymion in his cringeworthy preface to the poem, its foundations are too sandy— it displays great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt. He’s right.

Despite (or maybe because of) the undeveloped nature of Endymion, Keats in fact returns from his trip with maturing, unique, and powerful ideas about human life and poetry. In April he sounds a determination to pursue both the Principle of Beauty and knowledge with deliberate study and thought (9, 24 April). Now, in May, begins to describe what he believes are the complex qualities of the ripening poetic and philosophical mind, one that sees through and beyond bias, contradiction, and misery. Sensation and knowledge, heart and head, good and evil: these are neither exclusive nor binaries, and only by seeing and exploring beyond them with single vision can fears be truly put aside in the name of that Principle of Beauty. Much of this is worked out in an important letter to his friend and fellow writer, John Hamilton Reynolds, of 3 May, as Keats critically probes and gauges the relative poetic qualities and accomplishment of John Milton and William Wordsworth—relative to his own aspirations, of course.

Keats needs some kind of model or metaphor to explain this, and he constructs one: he compares human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments. He pictures chambers of thoughtlessness and delight that delay us, but awareness of the world’s misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression darken these chambers to a vision beyond good and evil. The furthest we can go (or have gone) in the Mansion are to dark passages, to a Mist—to Wordsworth’s burden of a Mystery (as named in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, line 38). Keats believes that Wordsworth’s Genius is to have seen as far as possible into the human heart.

With this fairly intense and important reasoning, Keats extends his idea that doubt and mystery are strengths in thinking, being, and feeling; they are to be explored. Sorrow is Wisdom, he writes; for aught we can know for certainty! All of this propels Keats’s poetry as he move toward his one and only year of great composition, 1819. The poetry he writes will reveal that he can look upon and represent subjects—big subjects, complex subjects—with contained intensity, and without excess of either thought or feeling; and, perhaps most importantly, in an unforced, non-distracting style. In short, he finds a mature voice and poetic forms that allow exploration of a subject through its own nature or qualities, even if this might be ultimately unknowable. It might be the silent form of an antique urn, the woeful experience with a incomprehensible belle dame, or an encounter with a nightingale that evokes thoughts too deep for consciousness and mortality.

But back to the pedestrian realm: the next few weeks after arriving back in Hampstead, Keats frantically catches up with most of his London friends, numbering about a dozen, including the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, William Hazlitt (the important critic and influence on Keats’s poetics), John Taylor (his publisher and supporter), and Reynolds (friend, critic, poet). These occasions are sometimes full of silliness, such as an all-nighter with Haydon and friends on 11 May, when the party members, likely fueled by some drink, pretend to be various musical instruments (apparently Keats is the bassoon).

In the air are his brother’s—George—marriage (28 May) and George’s plans to emigrate to America, as well as Keats’s plans for a tour of Scotland and northern England. Keats will not look forward to the rough treatment he gets from certain conservative reviewing quarters. His friend Benjamin Bailey, however, will write a very favorable review of Endymion at the end of the month, for which Keats thanks him (10 June). Its nice to have friends, and Keats’s supporters number more than a few.

St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, London

Where Keats’s younger brother, George, marries Georgiana Wylie, 28 May 1818. Keats, aged 22, signs the marriage register as witness. Keats, however, is not totally joyful, since the marriage signals the emigration of his brother and sister-in-law to the United States. George’s reasons for going are wrapped around opportunities: to make some kind of living and to acquire property. In a way, this is a moment of minor reckoning: as Keats admits about a year later, My Brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world—Now I find I must buffet it (31 May 1819). The company of his siblings has always propped him up, which is not surprising given that his father died in 1804, his mother in 1810, and his greatly esteemed maternal grandmother in 1814. But now, he’s going to have dealings with the world that may, in a way, force a certain growth in maturity and independence.

Worth noting is that, with George about to leave, with his other younger brother (Tom) sick and sliding toward death, and with his younger sister (Fanny) almost sequestered from him by the family trustee, Richard Abbey, Keats must be experiencing feelings of loss—this, despite his supportive friends and often hectic socializing. Keats has no real job, and no exact prospects. Neither does he have a clear idea of what family money he actually has: given Abbey’s obdurate management style, Keats is largely in the dark about his finances. During May, Keats expresses moments of unease and depression, despite making progress in his thinking about poetry.

By this time, Keats would likely have seen the anonymous, review of Leigh Hunt’s collection of poetry, Foliage—Letter from Z. To Mr. Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys—in the May edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, written by Z—John Gibson Lockhart. The Letter attacks Hunt’s plebeian origins and education as well has his liberal politics, gross vanity, and mainly ineffectual poetry.

Hunt is the target of Z’s Letter, but Keats is mentioned —first, as the amiable but infatuated bardling, Mister John Keats, and then as the person who, with a delicate hand, crowns Hunts with a laurel. Z has in mind the sonnets Hunt addresses to or pictures Keats in Foliage. Hunt suggests that Keats, as his protégé, is likewise destined for poetic fame. These sentiments and barely closeted egotism are easy marks for ridicule, especially because of the laurel-crowning poems, which picture Hunt and Keats crowning themselves. In referring back to these poems, the October 1819Blackwood’s couples Hunt and Keats and nominates them as a pair of blockheads (p.75). Keats is aware of how publicly embarrassing the laurel-crowning scene are in Hunt’s poems, and next month, 10 June, he writes, a little playfully, I have more than a Laurel from the Quarterly Reviewers for they have smothered me in ’Foliage’. In truth, Hunt’s laurel poems are shamelessly self-centered propped by indulgent poeticisms.

Keats’s pubic association with Hunt begins earlier. In a way, Keats himself signals the connection by dedicating his first volume of poems (1817) to Hunt, and by being published in Hunt’s progressive and often controversial journal, The Examiner. Then, in October 1817, the very first of Blackwood’s attacks on Hunt and the On the Cockney School of Poetry opens by citing Keats as son of promise from a poem by Cornelius Webbe. Keats is sure he is next in line for full ridicule (3 Nov 1817). Even letters to the editor of relatively obscure newspaper, the Anti-Gallican Monitor of 8 June 1817, after suggesting that Keats be suspended to Bedlam because of his poetry, ends by saying Keats’s work is mainly an echo of Mr. Hunt’s; his style in every respect. And so it does not take Keats long to both regret and reconsider aspects of his the association with Hunt, and not just because it makes him an easy target. But a side of the association actually aids Keats’s in his poetic progress: in cringing over his perceived affinity with Hunt’s style of poetry, Keats in 1818 begins to avoid writing poetry that whiffs of Hunt’s phraseology and comfy suburban posturing, what Z in the October 1819Blackwood’s calls Hunt’s characteristic Love of sociality (pp.71-73). Thus poetic independence becomes a stated primary drive for Keats: he will take his own direction and not worry about what others say about him. He wants, as it were, to be his own poet, not Hunt’s apprentice.

And so this month Keats profitably wrestles with ideas about knowledge, imagination, and poetic genius that both propel and anticipate his poetic progress. In his 3 May letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats theorizes that both knowledge and poetic strength requires a form of speculative knowledge that, fearlessly, looks beyond and through uncertainty, mystery, and mutability. Keats gets to this point partly by gauging the difference between Milton and Wordsworth. In particular, Keats observes how Wordsworth explores the “burden of the mystery” (so named in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” line 38) and how he “thinks” through human suffering and into “the human heart.” This takes us to Keats’s developing ideas—and their origins, some of which he hints at toward the end of the month.

On 25 May in a letter to his good friend Benjamin Bailey—in which a noteworthy element is Keats’s description of his depressed, uninspired, and “degenerating state”—Keats mentions William Hazlitt’s recent lectures on the English poets, just put out by Keats’s own publishers, Taylor & Hessey. Keats in fact has just dined with Hazlitt, and he attends some of Hazlitt’s popular Surrey Institution lectures earlier in the year. In hindsight, what is particularly striking but often ignored is that core features of Keats’s remarkable poetics derive directly from Hazlitt’s ideas about the nature of Shakespeare’s genius as described his third lecture, “On Shakespeare and Milton.” Shakespeare’s mind, Hazlitt observes, has no “peculiar bias”—“He was least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. [ . . . ] His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar.” Shakespeare “had only to think of anything to become that thing”; he could instantly enter and become whatever subject or character he conceived, being able to “pass from one to another.” Like a ventriloquist, “he throws his imagination out of himself.”

Keats obviously echoes and channels these ideas (and the critical lexicon) later in the year when he is on the verge of his producing his own great poetry. He does so to Richard Woodhouse on 27 October in what amounts to his principle statement on “the poetical Character.” Keats writes that the poetic type he aspires to in fact “has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. [ . . . ] he has no identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body— [ . . . ] he has no self.” Keats here famously calls this “the camelion Poet,” as distinguished from “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” but no doubt it is inspired by Hazlitt’s thoughts on Shakespeare’s “plastic” imaginative powers. Using Hazlitt’s terms, Keats aims to write poetry without bias and egotism. It turns out he aims well.

Swan With Two Necks, Lad Lane, London

The Swan With Two Necks is a coaching inn, from which Keats and his friend Charles Brown begin their walking trip north; Keats returns mid-August. The first leg takes them to Liverpool (about 200 miles), where they will part with Keats’s brother, George, and wife, Georgiana, who, for employment and land, are emigrating to America.* In a way, it is fortunate—for us—that George and Georgiana emigrate: Keats writes a number of long, important, and remarkable letters to America that reveal much about his life and thinking—and development as a poet; that is, without these letters, there would be significant gaps in our story and understanding of Keats.

The health of Keats’s other younger brother, Tom, continues to worry Keats, and rightly so: by the end of the year, Tom dies of the family illness, consumption, though Keats left believing Tom’s health was improving. Keats’s own health, too, is not that stable, and on at least one occasion he gets doctor’s orders to stay indoors. The trip north will not help, and eventually only weakens Keats. He continues to draw money in bits and pieces from his estate (managed by the generally unsupportive Richard Abbey), and he never quite knows how much he is entitled to; the sum is actually significant, and knowledge of it would no doubt have calmed some of Keats’s anxieties.

Keats at this time varies in his moods: on one hand, he clearly enjoys the company he keeps and in keeping company; yet his skeptical side—revealed to Benjamin Bailey—is one of resignation: Life, he writes in context of thinking about his own path and family, must be undergone (10 June). Keats’s long poem Endymion, published in late April, begins to circulate, with a few minor friendly reviews, though over May and June his 1817 collection, Poems, is pilloried in a few influential quarters.

Keats begins the walking trip having attempted to articulate a poetic philosophy, one that promotes a speculative mind that conquers bias and uncertainty by welding beauty and truth, and one that values exploration of life’s dark passages with imaginative capabilities. Two of Keats’s implicit goals for (what Tom calls) his northern expedition are to experience the landscape of the Lake District that Wordsworth so powerfully represents. He also plans to visit the birthplace of Robert Burns, and perhaps come to terms with what Burns as a poet might mean relative to his own poetic identity and aspirations. Keats may want to clear his mind of how he is perceived as nothing more than an amiable and infatuated Bardling sitting at the feet of Leigh Hunt—so writes Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in reviewing Hunt’s collection, Foliage. Keats in fact mentions that he feels smothered by such reviews (18 June). The smothering metaphor is apt: in his poetic identity and direction, Keats by mid-1818 feels strongly he needs to breathe freely and independently; even his friends, like Reynolds and Haydon, advise as much. He needs to work in his own style, though he is never egotistical enough to bypass deliberate study (and to draw from), among others, Spenser (in his early writing career), Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dante (in his later writing), and the literary opinions of Hazlitt.

At the prodding of Bailey, who is very much interested in literary and philosophical matters, Keats takes Cary’s 3-volume edition of Dante’s DivineComedy on the trip. (Reverend Cary’s translation is published in 1805, but it takes almost a decade for it to catch on with Romantic readers. Keats strongly praises a passage from Dante in April 1819 [the meeting with Paulo and Francesca], and later in the year, in September, he wants to learn Italian so that he can read Dante.)

Bailey also reviews Endymion (in two parts) over May and June, defending its qualities.

Crown Inn, Liverpool

Where Keats and his loyal friend Charles Brown stay on the first leg of their trip to northern England, Scotland, and (very briefly) northern Ireland. They are saying goodbye to Keats’s brother George, 21, who, with his new wife, Georgiana, will shortly be off to America from Liverpool. George’s goals are relatively simply, though complex and precarious in attaining: employment, property, and relative financial stability—enough so that he might return to England and support his family. George’s first stay ends up in financial loss (Keats feels George has been fleeced by John James Audubon); his second venture in Kentucky (after briefly returning to England to renew finances with some help from Keats), ends up much better. Keats will miss George greatly, but he has great hopes for him. Keats’s letters to George and Georgiana reflect their remarkable trust and closeness. George dies of tuberculosis in 1841, in Louisville, Kentucky.*

By coach, on 24 June, Keats and Brown leave for Lancaster, where, because of the upcoming parliamentary election, accommodation is not easy to find. During the trip, they do much walking, averaging a testing pace of between 15-20 miles/day. The trip includes taking in the Lake District, climbing Skiddaw and Ben Nevis, visiting the tomb and birthplace of Robert Burns, as well as seeing famous natural sites, ruins, and numerous towns and tiny villages. Blistered feet, smoky cottages, and indifferent fare are also part of the trip.

Keats is often captivated by the landscape, some of which is very new to him—interestingly, Keats is at moments struck by the realization that the imagination cannot surpass actual encounters with, for example, mountains, lakes, chasms, and waterfalls. Keats, too, is often struck by the human landscape, ranging from beautiful young faces to those carved by poverty. Keats feels some fatigue quite early in the trip, and his exertion might have encouraged or made him vulnerable to tuberculosis, which may already have been lingering. By early August, throat troubles stalk him quite seriously.

Keats writes a number of poems during the trip, about fifteen in total (over 600 lines), ranging from the serious (On Visiting the Tomb of Burns) to the silly (There was a naughty boy). Clearly some of the poetry is written to pass the time by reflecting lightly on local colour, as well as to commemorate natural features, like Ailsa Rock, Fingal’s Cave, or Ben Nevis. Much of the poetry, despite being occasional, does not put on or display an affected, prettified Huntian style, but rather a somewhat listless desire to write something, when in fact he may not be ready to put anything striking or memorable on the page. Nevertheless, Keats’s various moods and mastery of various poetic forms and voices is on display. Perhaps the most interesting poems are those that attempt to understand what exactly Burns represents, especially in light of poetic reputation and fame, which, mainly via Leigh Hunt, is a topic Keats has struggled to come to terms with. Burns also represents the figure of a outsider, something Keats relates to.

In the background, especially while in the Lake District, but also later, two Wordsworth’s haunt him: one whose conservative associations sadden him (this is accented when they arrive in Lancaster at the moment of a parliamentary election, with Wordsworth siding with Lord Lowther, the Tory incumbent); and the other who is the great poet of deep receptiveness and loss, whose unfading, philosophical gaze (seeing into the life of things, Tintern Abbey, 50) stands outside of any particular time or place. One of Keats’s best poems written on the trip in fact derives its sensibility and form directly from some of the forsaken figures Wordsworth’s early poetry, as well as the Lucy poems: Old Meg she was a gipsey. Keats calls on Wordsworth on 27 June, but he is disappointed not to find him at home. Keats, however, is not disappointed by the landscape; in fact, he is astonished by the countenance and magnitude of area; he hopes to be able to write poetry that will somehow capture the meaning of these scenes (27 June).

Keats is back in Hampstead, via London, by mid August.

*There is very good book about George’s life in America: Lawrence M. Crutcher’s GeorgeKeats of Kentucky(2012).

The Lake District: I shall learn poetry here

The challenging walking trip north with his friend, Charles Brown, begins 24 June from Lancaster, though heavy rains delays them. The trip will take them to the Lake District, through (among other places) Kendal, Ambleside, Rydal, Grasmere, and Keswick, as well as to many sights, like Skiddaw. By the first week of July they are in Scotland, before briefly going to northern Ireland then back to Scotland. Keats returns to London by 18 August. They average a about something between 15-20 miles/day, and by the time they are done they’ve walked probably a little under 650 miles. Along with beautiful sights, saddening poverty, and indifferent food, Keats also experiences a few Blisters (11 July) and increasing fatigue. Bagpipes fall out of favour.

Keats describes what he sees in a purposeful journal-letter to his younger brother, Tom, that he begins 25 June—purposeful inasmuch as he wants to record his experiences in order to later poetically explore them.

On 26 June, after having breakfast in Kendal, Keats records that he is astonished by the landscape in the area of Winandermere (Windermere) and the surrounding mountains—in William Wordsworth’s territory, that is. He sees his first waterfall on the 27th. The landscape makes him feel that there is no such thing as time and space. Echoing Wordsworthian sentiment and language, Keats writes that the combined elements of what he sees have a noble tenderness—they can never fade away—they make one forget the divisions of life. This recalls and reinforces what Keats has thought six months earlier as he attempts to articulate the character of great art: in its intensity [it is] capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth (21/27 Dec 1817). Keats now works to carry over this response to his poetic progress: he believes that what he can take from the remarkable particular physical qualities of this landscape—its space, magnitude, and countenance—will sustain him: I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavor of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from the materials, by the finest spirits, and put into the ethereal existence for the relish of one’s fellows. [ . . . ] I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest (27 June). Early in the morning of the 29th, they climb Skiddaw (a little over 3,000 ft.), which has a summit that offers remarkable panoramic views.

What makes Keats’s responses important is that he is, in a way, less interested in the landscape per se than in understanding his response to the landscape—the relative and intertwined roles of sensation, imagination, and perception, as well as the subjects that he will attempt to poetically represent, including timelessness intimated by these forms of nature. One problem will be how to translate these powerful elements into human and aesthetic terms, and in particular, to mortality, time, and beauty. In short, these topics will hold a place in his poetic progress in the coming year.

While in the Lake District, Keats asks after Wordsworth. Keats met Wordsworth number of times in London just over a half year earlier. (Wordsworth lives at Rydal Mount, Westmorland.) However, Keats discovers that Wordsworth is doing some canvassing for [the Tory] Lowthers. Keats’s reaction: Sad—sad—sad [. . .]. Nevertheless, Keats had hoped to see Wordsworth. After all, Wordsworth—good, bad, or ugly—is already a living legend, and knowing him is an extraordinary circumstance for the young and almost unknown Keats.

That Keats’s close friends—beginning with Leigh Hunt, and continuing with Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Hamilton Reynolds, and Benjamin Bailey—were all well acquainted with Wordsworth’s considerable achievement has steadily encouraged Keats’s study of Wordsworth, which probably begins earnest in the fall of 1817. Keats’s study of Wordsworth is also motivated by another friend, the critic, essayist, and lecturer William Hazlitt, who parses Wordsworth’s poetic character and greatly shapes (and complicates) Keats’s ideas about Wordsworth’s poetic worth. In discovering and thinking through Wordsworth’s early work, and in particular his expression of joy and sorrow, strength and suffering, loss and recompense, Keats’s finds significant directions and resources for his own poetic progress, especially as it accelerates into 1819.

Keats wants to explore many of those same regions as Wordsworth, but not in Wordsworth’s style: thus, in Keats’s important and developing idea of the poetic Character, Keats offers a crucial critique of the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime while favoring the camelion Poet (27 Oct 1818). What the poet negotiates does not have to be channeled through a speaker’s indulgent subjectivity but through an empathetic, unbiased imagination.

Now, at this point in June 1818, in Wordsworth’s territory, Keats wants to reconfirm his acquaintance with Wordsworth, again, despite serious doubts about Wordsworth’s political beliefs so antithetical to his own. He manages to leaves a note for Wordsworth on his mantelpiece before moving on.

Brown will later record some of Keats’s reactions in an essay entitled Walks in the North (1840).

The northern trip does not result in much good poetry, but it does make Keats confront the relationship between human character and endeavor on one side and those grander, lasting forms of nature on the other. The character of Burns, which Keats will soon have to deal with, also complicates his poetic understanding of fame, misery, and accomplishment. Keats returns exhausted and to a very sick brother, Tom—but he also returns with deeper ideas about the direction of his poetry: as he will write on 21 September, I am obliged to write, and as noted, by October his ideas about the poetic character are set. All he needs to do now is write poetry that embraces those characteristics—and in 1819 he will.

Dumfries, Scotland

With his close friend Charles Brown, Keats is in the early stages of an ambitious walking trip north.

Keats and Brown begin their trip 24 June from Lancaster. They have just parted with Keats’s brother, George, and his wife, Georgiana, at Liverpool, 23 June; the newlyweds are emigrating to the US. This is a loss for Keats: he is very close to George, who, although younger than Keats, has often buffered his older brother from, so to speak, the murky business of the world. Our gain is that Keats begins to write long journal letters to George and Georgiana that significantly broaden our understanding of Keats.

The expedition north takes Keats and Brown through and around the Lake District, from Kendal and Ambleside and up to Keswick. The landscape genuinely astonishes Keats, so much so that it challenges his ideas about the relationship between reality and imagination. Keats attempts to express what exactly it is that makes him respond so profoundly. These elements of the landscape have a tone or intellect of their own, he writes. So too does the moment inspire future work: he hopes that from the mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials he will learn and write more than ever . . . for the relish of one’s fellows (25-27 June). In a way, Keats is responding to the landscape in the way he responds to encountering and attempting to understand great literature.

The two travellers then (30 June) head north to Carlisle on their way to Scotland, where, despite being tired, they spend some of the next day sightseeing. Keats is back in London mid August. They average between 15-20 miles/day, and they travel on foot about 650 miles.

Another way to describe this moment: Having left Wordsworth country, Keats enters Robert Burns country. By late afternoon, 1 July, they are St. Michael’s churchyard in Dumfries, where Burns (1759-1796) is buried.

Robert Burns, 1787

Although Burns does not for Keats carry the influential weight (or burden) of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, or even Spenser, the Scots poet represents the self-directed though tragic outsider—a psychological and cultural positioning with which Keats no doubt identifies. Keats composes a sonnet—On Visiting the Tomb of Burns—but he does so, he writes, in a strange mood (1 July). The poem does, however, clarify something central to Keats’s progress. Although it ostensibly honors Burns, the sonnet clarifies what Keats needs to poetically confront: reality—brief human reality—that necessarily holds both beauty and suffering in the face of more lasting forms. All is cold Beauty, he writes; pain is never done. Nature is long; art is long; life is short. Keats is unsettled by what he feels, but, importantly, he will later profitable engage these themes more fully in some of his great odes in 1819. That this sonnet is stylistically uncluttered with few tonal prettifications also anticipates new levels of accomplishment.

Burns’s Tomb, Dumfries

The journey into Scotland—this whiskey country, he calls it (2 July)—continues west after leaving Dumfries. Keats and Brown head toward Kirkcudbright and Portpatrick, making their way through a few villages. While they enjoy some natural beauty, they are also confronted with poverty (wretched Cottages, where smoke has no outlet but by the door [2 July]) and wildly varying lodgings and food (dirty bacon, dirtier eggs, and dirtiest Potatoes, [5 July]). Keats is also strongly put off by what he sees as the church’s tyrannical hold over the poor, which is even apparent in the cultural ambiance. They take in a few sights—ruins, abbeys, castles—but Keats is generally not impressed, though he notes some beautiful areas around Kirkudbright. Two things are constant at this point: he is always hungry and tired.

From Portpatrick, a very brief trip (6-8 July) is made to northern Ireland and to Belfast via a mail-boat. On their walk to Donaghadee, they pass through a large Peat-Bog where they see dirty creatures and a few strong men cutting or carting peat, and they also pass through a most wretched suburb (9 July). Keats finds the poverty more striking than what they have just seen in Scotland. What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of the condition of such people, he writes; with me it is absolute despair. Most memorable for Keats, though, is the sight of a squalid, half-starved, pipe-smoking, ape-like old woman, squatting in something resembling a dilapidated doghouse, and carried about on two old poles by two ragged girls—the Duchess of Dunghill, he names her.

Ayr, Scotland

Keats and his friend Charles Brown are in Alloway, by Ayr, the birthplace of the famous Scottish poet, Robert Burns, who died in 1796 at the age of thirty-seven. They are a few weeks into a challenging walking tour that starts in northern England and takes them into Scotland. Keats, exhausted, is back in Hampstead by mid August, only to find that his younger brother’s (Tom’s) consumption has worsened. Keats had departed thinking Tom was improving.

The first leg of the trip begins at the end of June: Keats encounters astonishing landscapes in the Lake District—a mass of beauty that cannot be pre-apprehended by the imagination (25-27 June). They continue to Carlisle, and by the late afternoon of 1 July they are in Scotland. They make it to St. Michael’s churchyard in Dumfries, where Burns is buried. Keats recognizes that Burns is greatly honored by his countrymen, but the tomb is not, Keats writes, very much to my taste (1 July).

After travelling east through villages that are, for Keats, more impressive for their poverty than for natural or historical elements, Keats and Brown take a very short detour into northern Ireland as far as Belfast, where the poverty is even more striking and everything more expensive. They return to Scotland, landing at Portpatrick, 8 July. They continue north and take in the dramatic landmark of Ailsa Rock (or Craig), an island about ten miles from shore and over 1100 feet above sea level: Keats finds the conflated perspective of sea, land, and sky startling—he’s never seen anything like it. Keats will write a sonnet about it few days later—one which he thinks has some merit (To Ailsa Rock). (Keats writes five sonnets on the trip.) The poem, however, does not do much more than personify and ponder the rock’s nature and its duel existence, being partly in the sea and partly in the air. That the rock is a like craggy ocean pyramid somewhat recalls the influence of Leigh Hunt’s overly poeticized style.

Keats and Brown then head northeast along the coast, through Ballantrae and Kirkoswald, on their way to Alloway, Burns’s birthplace. As Keats gets closer to Burns’s cottage, he is determined to forget Burns’s misery, and he will therefore look upon the cottage with unmixed pleasure (11 July, to Reynolds). When they actually reach Burns’s territory, Keats is unexpectedly struck by its natural beauty; he imagined a desolate scene. Keats has a few drinks in the cottage (it was by then partly a whiskey house, and Burns already a legend); he characterizes the proprietor as a boring, almost incomprehensible, mahogany-faced old Jackass.

Burns’s Cottage, c.1805

Keats feels obliged to write a sonnet (This mortal body of a thousand days) under Burns’s roof, but it is so bad that he destroys it, though not before Brown makes a copy. This is not altogether a different Keats than a few years earlier, when, within Leigh Hunt’s circle, the such a poem (often on-demand) was valued simply in the spirit of marking occasion and sociability. The poem is indeed an indifferent effort: he mentions that his pulse is warm with couple of drinks of old barley-bree. The drama is minimal, and can be reduced to something quite bland: Burns was here; now he is not; now I am. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the sonnet ends with a reference to the vague irony of poetic fame—Keats’s usually unproductive subject for his early poetry.

Keats, though, while in Ayr, still cannot separate himself from thoughts of Burns’s personal misery, which he mentions on a couple of occasions. And he is also perplexed that, with the black Mountains on the isle of Arran, Burns was not inspired to write some grand epic (13 July, to Tom Keats). Keats wonders about and weighs two things: while he partially identifies with Burns as a poet-outsider with political values and an independent drive not unlike his own, he wonders why Burns’s energies took him in poetical directions so unlike his—as well as to personal drunken, philandering irregularities (Burns fathered seven illegitimate children). Burns’s work strikingly represents his own traditional and nationalistic culture. While Keats, too, consciously (and often proudly) ties himself to the English tradition, this attachment does act to tie or limit him so strongly to what we might call identity politics. Keats is, for example, just as likely drawn to Italian or Greek writers and artists for their larger, deeper values and aesthetics.

Burns, then, is not an influence on Keats in the way of Wordsworth, Milton, or Shakespeare—poets whose depths and poetic character Keats purposefully and profitably studies. Yet the idea of Burns—from his modest origins to his place as enduring poet—does stir and confound Keats. It also upsets him: how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self-defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not (7 July, to Tom). At this point, even with stirring material conditions that surround him and that Burns himself drew upon, the pursuit of broader imaginative capabilities, precarious though they may be, still direct Keats’s progress.

Today, the Burns cottage is a part of a significant museum that celebrates the poet.

Inveraray, Scotland

Mid July: Keats (aged 22) and his good (and perhaps closest) friend Charles Brown are about three weeks into a walking tour that starts in northern England. His plan is to make the trip four months long, but health issues curtail the excursion considerably. Nonetheless, Keats and Brown cover almost 650 miles on foot. Keats in back in London and Hampstead by 18 August.

The trip begins 25 June in the Lake District. The landscape impacts Keats in exceptional and unique ways—compounded and complicated by William Wordsworth’s association with the area. By the afternoon of 1 July, Brown and Keats are in Scotland, where, the same day, they make it to Dumfries in order to visit the tomb of Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns.

Keats and Brown then trek east. Keats notes the poverty at least as much as natural or historical elements. A short detour takes them into northern Ireland as far as Belfast, where the poverty is even more pronounced. Returning to Scotland, they head northeast to Ayr, Burns’s birthplace. Keats imagines finding a desolated area, but he is unexpectedly struck by the natural beauty. Nevertheless, Keats finds it difficult to throw off feelings about Burns’s misery—his dead weight, Keats calls it (13 July, to Reynolds). Keats mainly mulls over the discordant elements of Burns’s life and his poetry, but Burns also turns him to darker thoughts of his own mortality and poetic strivings. What is the meaning of poetic fame?

Keats and Brown pass through Glasgow on the 13-14th, which Keats records as a fine city, though they are stared at, and Keats is accosted by a drunk (13 July, to Tom Keats). By Inveraray, Brown suffers from foot blisters and Keats from the horrors of the bagpipe (18, 20 July, to Tom). At times, they even have to sleep in their clothes on dirt in smoke-ridden huts (23 July). A minor highpoint: on the 24th they visit ruins on the island Iona and the grave where Macbeth (and other Scottish kings) is buried.

But it is in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey this day, 18 July, that Keats, with a sane and sober Mind, reveals something about himself and his motivations. He confesses his tendency to carry all matters to an extreme and with little self possession, which tells us something about the tensions of empathy and intensity in his poetry. Keats also attempts to describe his anxieties about being in the company of women: When among Men I have no evil thoughts [and am . . .] free from all suspicion and comfortable. When I am among Women I have evil thoughts . . .. Marriage for Keats is not viable: besides his love of solitude and freedom, as well his attraction to socializing with like-minded men, he wonders if marriage might compromise his poetic aspirations.

In this letter, Keats also writes about the intended larger purpose of his walking expedition: I should not have consented to myself these four Months tramping in the highlands but that I thought it would give me more experience, rub off more Prejudice, use me to more hardship, identify finer scenes load me with grander Mountains, and strengthen more my reach in poetry, than would stopping at home among Books . . .. In short, Keats had a purpose: gain experience, decrease prejudice, toughen up, and load him up with grander imagery—all in the name of expanding his poetic potential, more so than just studying and reading. But Keats implies that the trip, thus far, though hardening him, has not yet met his goals. He even admits that even the solemn power of mountains is wearing away. What will weight more heavily, perhaps, is more an accumulative experience rather than this wearying trip, that ends up cut short by illness.

Ayr to Ben Nevis, Scotland

Keats climbs Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the British Isles at 4,400 feet.

The climb takes place during a northern walking tour with his good friend Charles Brown are on a northern walking tour. When completed, they will have covered about 650 miles. It begins 25 June, going from Lancaster to the Lake District, where he attempts to come to terms with the impressive countenance of the landscape, which challenges some of his ideas about the imagination; he also attempts to visit William Wordsworth, but the great poet is out canvassing for the Tory party, when saddens Keats. By 1 July, they are in Dumfries, Scotland, where, the same day, they visit the tomb of Scotland’s most famous poet, Robert Burns. A brief detour to Ireland as far as Belfast reveals more striking poverty. By 11 July, they are in Ayr, Burns’s birthplace. Keats finds it difficult to throw off feelings about Burns’s misery and the nature of his fame.

Keats and Brown pass through Glasgow on the 13-14 July. They arrive at Inveraray a few days later. Within a week, they are in Oban and off to the Island of Mull, and then to Iona, with its absorbing history, ruins, and graves. On the 24th, they see Fingal’s Cave on Staffa; the natural features are on a scale that inspires Keats to imagine titanic struggles.

Keats also begins to develop throat problems. An indifferent diet (coarse food, he calls it), crude and sometimes smoky accommodation, getting soaked and cold, and becoming completely exhausted on a testing walks does little to help. He daydreams about having comfy chair and a Cup o’ tea in Hampstead.

Climbing Ben Nevis and bad weather does not help Keats’s slumping health. Negotiating loose, awkward stones makes the ascent tough—and the vile decent tougher, even with a few glasses of whiskey. Keats is nevertheless struck by the mist, the huge crags, and the prospect from such a height. But what challenges his senses most are the chasms: they are, he writes, the most tremendous places I have ever seen—they turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it (3 Aug).

Sitting on a precipice near the top of the mountain, Keats drafts a poem—Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud—which he then re-drafts (written cross-hatched) in a letter to Tom, 3/6 August. The mists, crags, chasms, and stones of Ben Nevis make it into the sonnet, as does Keats’s longest-lasting topic: desire for inspiration. Keats dramatizes himself looking down, looking up, and looking out. Yet despite his high place, except for the craggy stones at his feet, he cannot see into the world of world of thought and mental might. Things remain in a mist—shrouded, vague, and unresponsive. Keats, then, once more allegorizes his own undetermined prospects as a poet—the only clear things are those uneven elements closest to him—but, in the spirit of transforming the personal into the universal, Keats also captures the sullen view of humanity—and the theme of how little we know.

In this sense, the poem, though not a great one, hints of a vital Wordsworthian direction: the uncluttered desire to see into the life of things despite uncertainty. Besides the Romantic sublime, the poem also connects with the Romantic trope of skeptical knowledge, of not being able to see into the dizzying abyss (used, for example, by his acquaintance and exact contemporary, the poet Percy Shelley). The poem does, however, over-employ the idea of mist to suggest (what else?) blindness, mystery, and the limitations of understanding. Again, this is modest poetic progress, and it anticipates how he will go on to deal with topics in much of the great poetry writes over the next year.

While the poem does mark an advance on his earlier standing-on-top poem—I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, written December 1816—it does share the topic of desiring poetic inspiration by looking out. The question remains: By looking out, can we look within? His earlier poem reveals the relative immaturity of Keats’s visionary capabilities; the later poem reveals more complex visionary capabilities—negative ones, in fact.

From Staffa to Cromarty, Scotland

Where, 7-8 August, and at the end of a long northern walking tour, Keats and his good friend Charles Brown pause while Keats makes plans to return to London via a 9-day voyage. Keats cuts the trip short by a month or two because of illness—he suffers from chills, fever, and a sore throat. Brown stays behind.

Beginning from Lancaster the last week of June, Keats and Brown began their excursion in the Lake District—in Wordsworth territory, where Keats finds the landscape astonishing and Wordsworth’s canvassing for the Tory party lamentable. By 1 July, they are in Dumfries, Scotland, to visit the tomb the poet Robert Burns. A brief detour to Ireland as far as Belfast reveals poverty more striking than in Scotland. By 11 July, they are in Ayr, Burns’s birthplace.

Keats and Brown pass through Glasgow July 13-14, and they arrive at Inveraray by the 17th. Within a week, they are in Oban and off to the Island of Mull. On the 24th, they see Fingal’s Cave on Staffa. They head northeast through some wet weather and reach Fort William on 1 August. Beginning very early the next morning they climb nearby Ben Nevis. They continue northeast and arrive at Inverness on 6 August. On 8 August, Keats sails for London from Cromarty, and he arrives at London Bridge on the 18th. Shabby and exhausted, by evening he arrives at Wentworth Place in Hampstead. Keats jokes that just to sit on a comfortable chair is heaven: punning from a line in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Keats says, Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated. Then he goes on to Well Walk to see his younger brother, Tom, who, Keats discovers to his horror, is very ill with consumption—Keats had left on his trip thinking that Tom was improving, and Keats in his heart could no doubt see that there was no hope for Tom, aged 18.

The tour is 43 days long; Brown and Keats cover almost 650 miles on foot.

What does Keats take from his trip?

In a condensed and continuous way, Keats for the first time experiences landscapes and natural features that truly impact him, and some of the grander features open up his perception: lakes, islands, mountains and mountain ranges, waterfalls, tremendous Glens (17 July), caves, crags, and chasms. So too does Keats see endless varieties of plains, cliffs, meadows, peat-bogs, hills and vales, woods, coastlines and shores, rivers, and streams.

In ways relative to the human condition and to his imagination, the meaning of nature and natural space challenges Keats. He also absorbs human history in new ways—often in encounters with ancient tombs, ruins, castles, cloisters, nunneries, monasteries, and graveyards, as well as through old, wretched cottages. He sees towns, villages, and hamlets—some vibrant, many impoverished, some forgettable. He experiences the dirt and misery of the human poor (9 July) up close, and he questions if there are solutions to such conditions. In Scotland he feels church oppression. He encounters everything from rosy-cheeked dancing children to joyless peddlers and belligerent drunks, from the hardy and stout to the feeble and ailing; and how could he ever forget the ape-like, pipe-smoking Duchess of Dunghill in Ireland? He is greeted with kindness, confusion, and mistrust, and he often feels the station of a true outsider. That some of those they meet have not even seen spectacles (which Brown wears) reminds him of his specific cultural station; that Scotland and Ireland are so very different from southern England becomes utterly clear. Keats meets many who speak no English, and getting directions from them is frustrating, humbling, and comical. Keats and Brown are variously taken as French, as soldiers, Spectacle venders, Razor sellers, Jewellers, travelling linnen drapers, Spies, Excisemen, & many things else (6 Aug, to Mrs. Wylie).

In William Wordsworth’s Lake District, where the trip begins, the landscapes take Keats out of himself and to a theme that will now more deliberately brace his poetry and poetics: he experiences views that can never fade away—they make one forget the divisions of life (26 June). The physical countenance and power of what he sees surpasses the powers of imagination; such views are, he writes, are beyond any means of conception (28 June). Here, he declares, he will learn poetry and write more than ever in order to add to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials (27 June, to Tom Keats).

Keats on his tour also confronts what he believes is Burns’s misery, which in turn makes him confront his own poetic character and aspirations. But Burns is a complicated figure for Keats, and though he tries to capture the meaning or significance of the already legendary Burns in a few poems, Keats’s tone toward and understanding of Burns in both his letters and poems remains at the same time inadequate and confused, but this state does allow Keats to profitably reconsider a topic that teases him out of thought: the relationship of the imagination to actuality—real, lived life—within the context of human existence. Although Keats identifies with Burns as the independent outsider driven by his own creative goals, Burns, for Keats, is hardly the figure of the ideal poet.

While no doubt all of this strengthens Keats’s experiential reach in poetry (which is his expressed goal, 22 July)—especially, perhaps, in terms of understanding the range of human suffering while increasing the complexity of his own responses to various sights and conditions—it also weakens him physically. Drawing from his own wording, he comes to see that even in the most abstracted Pleasure there is no lasting happiness (7 July), yet, he realizes, it is all we have and what we must nonetheless pursue.

Keats writes quite a bit poetry on the trip, though most of it is occasional, light, or intended to please those to whom he is writing. Some seems to have been written just to pass the time, or just the obligation he feels that he should write something. No doubt being constantly on the road compromises aspects and quality of the work. Revealingly, none of the fifteen poems he writes during the northern trip are selected for his last volume of poetry, the 1820 collection.

Keats is more changed than directly inspired by the experience of his northern expedition: there is no way the trip cannot have widened his scope of nature, life, culture, and history; and no doubt the trip does, at it were, take him out of himself before it takes him back into himself—and when it does, it has to be with deeper senses and a widened scope, aspects of which will manifests themselves in his greatest work, the poetry of 1819. It this poetry, what we could call the third and final phase of poetic development, the power and limitations of the imagination will come to be maturely restrained and complicated; human mortality in the face of enduring ideas and objects will be explored with controlled intensity; and, perhaps most remarkably, he he will evolve a voice and poetic forms that reflect and sustain his subjects.

Keats began the trip by saying good-bye to one younger brother, George, departing to America from Liverpool—my greatest friend, he calls him (6 Aug. to Mrs. Wylie)—and he ends the trip completely exhausted and with a bad throat, and with the necessity to care for his other younger brother, Tom, who is sinking fairly quickly from the contagious illness of consumption (TB), the wasting disease. This does not bode well, especially given Keats’s own lingering physical weakness and what seems to be a family pre-disposition to the illness. Keats no doubt carried a little guilt in facing Tom, since he left on his walking trip believing that Tom was improving.

93 Fleet Street, London

The address of publishers [John] Taylor & [James] Hessey, who publish Keats’s Endymion in 1818, and will publish the 1820 volume. Where, on the 14th, Keats has an all-nighter with Hessey, Richard Woodhouse (friend and incredible supporter of Keats), William Hazlitt (friend, lecturer, literary and political critic, essayist, and so-so painter), John Percival (from Wadham College, Oxford), and a few others. By around the 20th, Keats reports a worsening throat.

Around this time, Keats becomes aware that Hazlitt has sued Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for libel. The suit is dropped; Blackwood’s settles out-of-court. The suit’s history: Blackwood’s has called Hazlitt an impudent charlatan, a mere quack, a paltry creature, and he is accused of various hypocritical behaviors (the culminating attack in Blackwood’s is called Hazlitt Cross-Examined). In truth, there were some aspects of Hazlitt’s personal history that well deserved a raised eyebrow or two. But no matter: Hazlitt seemed to have three characteristics that made him a target of abuse: his obvious smarts (paired with his gift for assertive prose to express those smarts), clear republican sympathies (today he’d be one of darn radical lefties), and his inability not to speak out on anything that set him off—and many things did (this inability gets translated as gross egotism). He had a pretty good temper. Keats gets much from Hazlitt—ideas about other writers and aesthetics, in particular.

Hazlitt’s larger idea that the imagination is a representational faculty that works through feeling and thought. That it is a faculty that shapes and connects, even as it is revelatory and penetrating, resonates with Keats as he works toward poetic progress. So too does Hazlitt’s belief that true poetry is the pinnacle of the imagination’s application, that, even though it is never fixed, its has the power to both raise our own being and to animate the universe. Poetry, in short, represents the highest form of our desire to feel and know. When, in his 1818 essay On Poetry in General (Hazlitt’s most high-minded definition of poetry, based on his lecture of early 1818), Hazlitt writes that poetry is the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing, it anticipates what Keats writes to Woodhouse 27 October 1818: he passionately embraces the character of the the camelion poet, one that enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated [ . . . ] It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one.

This issue of Blackwood’s that slams Hazlitt also happens to be the very one in which Keats’s poetry, and particularly Endymion, is attacked: The phrenzy of the [1817]Poems was bad enough in its way, but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion (p. 519); Keats is seen as a mere, callow follower of Leigh Hunt, Keats’s friend and early mentor. When applied to early Keats—that is, to Keats’s published work up until Endymion—there is a fair amount of truth to the charge. By 1818—beginning about mid-1817—Keats is greatly aware that association with Hunt (with both his politics and poetry) is unfortunate and somewhat maddening; however, it might also have stirred him to develop a stronger, independent poetic character.

Fleet Street, c.1830

In fact, during the last part of September 1818, Keats considers his poetic independence and originality—especially relative to the greater accomplishments of Milton, Dante, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. Although he worries that there is no longer anything original to be written, he likely begins work on the ambitious Hyperion, attempting, it seems, to emulate aspects of Milton’s form and voice in order to write poetry of significantly heavier import than Endymion. He will come to realize that Milton’s style is not his own, though in attempting to capture Milton’s elevated tone, he raises his own.

Another ridiculing review of Endymion comes Keats’s way. Predictably, Keats is accused of echoing Hunt’s lightweight, affected verses (John Wilson Croker, Quarterly Review, April 1818). While at first the hostile criticism seems to have hurt Keats, his resolve is, in the end, more striking: failure and criticism will push him forward.

As mentioned, being seen as constantly under the wing of Hunt must not have sat well with Keats, and is no doubt a shadow motivator for his own self-determined progress. But first, he has to deal with not only with his brother’s (Tom’s) waning health, but also his own, and in particular a worsening throat. This is not good.

Bedhampton, Hampshire

From Hampstead, Keats, aged 22, writes to his friend, Charles Wentworth Dilke, in Bedhampton. Dilke is a decently-connected reviewer, critic, journal editor, and scholar, though he held the apparently soft position of a Navy pay officer until 1836. Along with one of Keats’s other close friends, Charles Brown, Dilke is co-owner of Wentworth Place, a double-house in Hampstead built 1814-1816 (in 1925 it becomes a museum—Keats House). With Brown’s kind invitation, Keats will move into Wentworth Place in early December 1818, almost immediately after the death of his younger brother, Tom. Beginning mid-August when Keats returns exhausted from his curtailed walking excursion with Brown, much of his attention is taken with caring for Tom, who agonizingly fades toward death from consumption. Consumption offers anything but a kind death.

Charles Dilke

Keats writes to Dilke that Tom’s condition presses heavily upon him. It compromises his energies and complicates his emotions—he says he is in a funk and feeling nervous on 22 September, though this state of sometimes part Keats’s own emotional pattern. Keats is also unwell enough to be given medical advice to avoid damp nights. Although Keats wants to purposefully study poetry for the sake of his own poetic growth, he instead, and with some guilt, now feels obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his [Tom’s] countenance, his voice and feebleness. At this very moment he writes something similar to another good friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, about the conquering and feverous relief of Poetry: it allows him to escape from the state of Poor Tom into abstractions which are my only life (22 Sept).

And so Keats’s poetic progress is, for the moment, directed to what he should or can do in the face of his Tom’s suffering. He feels it is something of an emotional or ethical crime to even think about the fame of poetry at this time, but he does, which tells us something about Keats’s honesty, ambitions, and complex situation. He writes that he does not have enough self possession and magnanimity to think otherwise (21 Sept, to Dilke). Keats also theorizes that some of his anxiety may have come from recently taking mercury, perhaps to treat his chronic soar throat, or (to speculate) perhaps to treat lingering effects of venereal disease. We have to keep in mind that, in Keats’s time, mercury was given for an impossibly wide range of illnesses and symptoms, ranging from dysentery to rheumatism.

Writing poetry—or at least a certain kind of poetry—then, is a guilt-ridden relief from dealing with Tom’s condition. Yet diving into abstractions takes him into some profitable poetic moments—especially as he begins to write his Miltonically-styled epic, Hyperion. The poem, though abandoned by spring, announces a significant degree of maturity in Keats’s poetic progress, recognizable even in the poem’s assured opening:

Click to see a facsimile version

Much of what we have of Hyperion (about 900 lines) strikes a balance of control and intensity, of clarity and concentration, that he aspires to and describes in various letters as essential to great poetry; as usual, Keats’s poetics precedes his poetry. Keats perhaps overreaches with the poem—the poem’s plot bogs down in some uncertainties (perhaps he intended it as an allegory of self-discovery)—but it doubtlessly stirs his ambitions, signals some confidence, and acts a precursor for what is do come: with Endymion, he thinks, I can do better; with Hyperion, I am doing better. He will soon learn that addressing human suffering and mortality in the face of these abstractions will in fact be part of the material and thinking that leads him to compose his greatest poetry over the next year.

The jump in progress from Keats’s earlier long published poem, Endymion (begun April 1817, completed a year later), is, with Hyperion, glaringly obvious: there are far fewer passages and phrases that jump out, as if to say (borrowing from Keats’s own condemnation of poetry he hates, 3 Feb 1818), Look, this is poetry! Admire me! But he still occasionally gets caught up description governed by analogy, which, poetically, can be hit or miss. He also comes to worry that Milton’s language and syntax is not something he wants to emulate, being at times overfly artful (24 Sept 1819). One of Keats’s poetic axioms is that poetry must both come naturally, and must appear natural. Clearly, most of Endymion neither comes naturally nor does it feel natural (Keats says so himself more than once), but with Hyperion we encounter a deeper, more sustained and unobtrusive voice, though, as mentioned, still not quite his own. But he’s getting there.

Besides Tom and poetry, Keats lists that woman as the third item that takes his attention (22 Sept, to Reynolds). He is likely referring to Jane Cox, whose voice and shape [. . .] has haunted me these two days. Thinking about he has kept him awake at night. Nothing comes of it.

September is also framed by two nasty attacks on Keats and his poetry, one in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, published at the beginning of September, and the other in The Quarterly Review, which appears at the end of the month. Both pillory Keats’s lax and unmanly poetic style, but they are also determined to sink Keats by nominating him as the unfortunate apprentice of Leigh Hunt (poet, celebrity journalist, representative of liberal causes), who was indeed Keats’s mentor the early phase of his poetic development, roughly late 1816 and for a little less than a year. Despite Hunt’s crucial role in introducing Keats’s poetry to significant faction of London’s literary world by publishing Keats, and, more crucially, in introducing Keats himself into a network of writers, poets, editors, and publishers, moving beyond the sway of Hunt and Hunt’s poetry is something that Keats is vitally aware of; the Hyperion work is evidence of such movement. In fact, excising poetic connection with Hunt is crucial, though Hunt remains a strong supporter, and Keats has a side of him that recognizing Hunt’s support. This will be driven home when Keats himself becomes ill.

The Morning Chronicle, 332 The Strand, London

John Wilson Crocker’s nasty attack on Keats’s long poem Endymion in The Quarterly Review is itself attacked by J. S. (the writer and editor, John Scott, perhaps) in a letter to The Morning Chronicle. A few days later, on 6 October, Keats’s friend and fellow poet/critic, John Hamilton Reynolds, defends Endymion in another journal, and he calls out The Quarterly Review for victimizing Keats simply because of his youth. Less than a week later, Leigh Hunt, another of Keats’s supporters and friends, reprints the defense in The Examiner (11 Oct). The terms of reference for the attacks on Keats are motivated at least as much by class and politics as by poetical tastes. Keats’s connection to the liberal-reformist camp centered in London (and centered around Hunt) makes him an easy target; and, in truth, so does the mainly ineffectual nature of his early poetry.

This is a peripheral part of Regency Britain’s culture wars: emerging new ideas of class begin to counter old ideas of rank, with old money being challenged by new market-driven ways, with conservatism challenged by reform; today we would call attack ideological. The Morning Chronicle is itself a clear challenge to the dominant Tory papers. Britain, at this time, feels the rumblings of social change, with the rise of the as-yet unnamed working-class begin to assert itself more openly. Keats, given his poetic interests, and not nearly so driven by politics as his direct contemporary and acquaintance Percy Shelley, would not write a poem to assert the rise and persecution of this new class, but Shelley could, and in September 1819 he writes such a poem, containing the great refrain, Ye are many—they are few. Shelley’s ballad is called The Mask[or Masque]of Anarchy; it remains perhaps the greatest poem of protest and resistance in the English canon to stand against on class inequality; its volatile nature prevents immediate publication, and it does not see print until 1832, a decade after Shelley drowns.

Keats in October writes he is has become a little acquainted with his own strengths and weaknesses, which suggests signs poetic maturation. As far as those bad reviews of Endymion go, Keats remarks that they are only a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own Works. His self-criticism—domestic criticism—is harsher than anything others might dole out. He realizes Endymion is, overall, slack, imperfect, and perhaps even a failure, yet necessary for his own development and poetic independence. Had he stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice, he would not have learned a thing—this seems to be a swipe at Hunt’s suburban school of sociable poetry, from which he is determined to move away (8 Oct 1818)

By the end of October, in an important exchange with his friend and advisor to his publishers, Richard Woodhouse, Keats’s poetics take a further and crucial leap: he distinguishes his poetical character from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime. He praises the camelion Poet, one who is without identity because its character enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. The poet fills what ever body it is in for. As a result, the Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence (27 Oct 1818). Although some of this language and attitude derives from the ideas of his friend, the essayist and critic William Hazlitt (mainly in Hazlitt’s views about Shakespeare in his lectures on the English poets, as well has in his essay On Poetry in General), Keats makes these ideas is own, and with clear passion and determination. He will be that camelion poet that lives within its subject.

Keats’s final burst of poetry, beginning within months, enacts these poetics. He will attempt to compose poetry that does not give into temperament or sentiment; and he will do so mainly in a lyric mode, one that, with remarkable composure, will explore how thought, feeling, and sensation are intertwined. The human condition—one that faces and negotiates suffering, death, and immortality with imaginatively sympathetic capabilities—becomes the poetic condition when manifest in a perfectly complementary and unobtrusive form. This is perhaps the apogee of what great art achieves—and it marks Keats’s most enduring work.

Also noteworthy are Woodhouse’s comments about Keats, made 23 October, to his cousin, Mary Frogley, since they express the very high regard Keats’s friends hold for him. Woodhouse believes that Keats’s poetical merits, his original genius and brilliancy, has not appeared since Shakespeare and Milton. Keats’s work does display some of the faults of his relative youth, but Woodhouse predicts that Keats will rank on a level with the best of the last or of the present generation; and after his death will take his place at their head—. This is a remarkable prediction—more remarkable in that it becomes true.

At this point, Keats’s youngest brother, Tom, whom Keats is nursing, is getting increasingly weaker with consumption. At the beginning of the month, Keats (not for the first time) is reading King Lear, and one point he underlines a phrase that appears half a dozen times in Act 3, Scene 4: poor Tom. Keats has much to face.

The Strand from Villier’s Street

1 Well Walk, Hampstead (now No. 46)

Where Keats lives and from where Keats sends a long letter to his brother, George, and sister-in-law, Georgiana, who emigrate to America in June 1818. They are, like tens of thousand of others from Britain in the first half of the 19th century, looking for new opportunities, mainly in employment and the acquisition of land—and a new politics.

From mid-August until early December Keats’s physical and emotional life is taken up with the day-to-day care of his other younger brother, poor Tom (14 Oct), whose ever-weakening health weighs heavily upon Keats. Taking care of Tom, Keats admits, is Misery (16 Oct).

Tom’s agonizing slide toward death by consumption sets many things in perspective for Keats, including a renewed focus on his poetic ambitions (and understanding his own strength and weakness—8 Oct), as well as lingering fears about his own health. Yet, remarkably, Keats states that the only thing that can ever affect me personally [. . .] is any doubt about my powers for poetry­—I seldom have any, and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none (24 Oct). Keats does make an even more remarkable statement this month in a letter to the George Keats’s: I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death (14 Oct). In fact, in the early months of 1819 he will have some doubt about this hope, yet his prediction becomes fact.

In a continuation of his poetics, Keats attempts to articulate what kind of poetry he wants to produce—and what kind of poet he needs to be. He expresses his desire to produce poetry channeled through and governed by selfless, imaginative empathy, by emotional depths and necessary contraries, and by independent values and beliefs; he turns away from, then, occasional circumstances, immature poetic ambitions, affected and incidental description, and the sociable need to entertain and public demands to conform. Upon and out of these principals, by the end this period of caring for his brother, who passes away on 1 December, Keats will, within a year, produce some of the most striking poetry in the English canon—until, that is, his own deteriorating health levels his progress.

Understandably, at this point, for Keats writing poetry also represents the practice of falling into abstractions—abstract images, he calls them—as a way to escape even his own severe anxieties (21 Sept). He still thinks about poetic fame, but it is no longer a clamoring, restrictive, and even embarrassing topic, as it is his early poetry, where laurels seem to be easily earned and exchanged.

Keats now requires of himself a larger, selfless scale in his poetry-to-come, as well as an elevated but controlled idiom. With Shakespeare at his back and Milton in his mind, he attempts to write a poem that will, he hopes, embody his new seriousness: Hyperion. In a way, Hyperion is King Lear- meets-Paradise Lost, but this combination is complex and daunting, though for stretches in Hyperion he manages a level of performance to match those great precursors. Keats’s rising accomplishment is to balance intensity and disinterestedness. Unfortunately, most of his momentum for the poem’s completion is lost by December, the month Tom passes away. He will have to wait a few fallow months to continue his progress in new and mainly lyrical forms. His serious and deliberate study of poetry—of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth in particular—combined with recent weighty personal experience and close contact with friends who seriously and critically think about art and literature, help to swell Keats’s poetic progress into 1819.

From Fleet Street to Covent Garden, London

Where Keats walks with William Hazlitt, the literary critic, journalist, essayist, and lecturer. Hazlitt is an important, perhaps crucial, influence on Keats’s poetics and, as a result, his poetry. Keats found Hazlitt’s depth of Taste one of few things to rejoice at in the Age (10 Jan 1818).

When Keats runs into him in the middle of London, Keats discovers that Hazlitt is on his way to play Rackets (24 Oct)—a variation of fives (related to handball, or called hand-tennis), but obviously with a racquet. Hazlitt is apparently pretty good and relished taking on all comers. Those who watched him witnessed an intense, hyper-competitive player, capable of screaming, swearing, stomping, groaning, and throwing his racquet in frustration; he did not like to lose or make mistakes. One is tempted to say his on-court performance was simply an outlet for his more cerebral work, but more correctly his on-court behavior may be an extension of his life of the mind. That is, as a writer, Hazlitt often exhibited an equally competitive side—he did not take prisoners, he never like to lose an argument, and he need to have the final word.

Besides pointing Keats toward his considered views on key writers, Hazlitt’s theories of imaginative identification—that the imagination is primarily sympathetic—are taken up and applied by Keats in his exceptionally acute ideas about poetic character. In turn, these ideas soon work themselves into Keats’s best poetry.

Hazlitt’s influence grows from at least as early as September 1817 (Keats reads some of the Round Table essays) and into early 1818, when Keats attends many of Hazlitt’s famous lectures. Keats would almost certainly not have developed his notion of Negative Capability(27 Dec 1817) without Hazlitt’s fueling ideas; and his new poetics articulated at the end of October 1818—how, as the camelion Poet, he wants to be distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime—derive from his accumulative reading of and contact with Hazlitt. Specifically, Keats adopts some of his terminology from Hazlitt, and in particular, disinterestedness, which Hazlitt first describes in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action: An Argument in Defence of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. Here Hazlitt argues that entering the identity or perspective of another is in fact natural and not a form of egotism, and from this it is only a sideways step to how Keats merges this into his idea of how the poet can assume the qualities and character of his subject, thus leaving the ego behind—the camelion poet has no self. For Keats, this a large step forward in his thinking, and he considers disinterestedness a supreme human quality (letters 13 Jan 1818, 19 March 1819).

Keats’s ideas about his own Poetic Character and that a poet has not identity are arousing enough that, at length, Richard Woodhouse reports and quotes them to Keats’s publisher, John Taylor (?27 Oct). Both firmly believe in Keats’s genuine poetic genius.

October is primarily taken with attending to his younger brother’s (Tom’s) quickly slipping health. Keats nevertheless manages to have contact with at least a dozen of his friends during the month. He writes, I have too many interruptions to a train of feeling to be able to write poetry (21 Oct).

34 Gloucester Street, London

The home of the enigmatic (at least for Keats) Mrs. Isabella Jones, with whom Keats has had an earlier romantic encounter near Hastings (in a adjacent village called Bo-Peep), May 1817.

On this day, Keats passes Isabella on the street and he turns back to greet her. He ends up walking her home, to 34 Gloucester Street, off Queen Square, wondering all the while what it might lead to. They spend some time in, he notes, her very tasteful sitting room. Nothing romantic happens. Keats, however, seems to have thought a little kiss might not have been a bad way to part. Isabella, without any prudishness, thought otherwise. It seems a nice handshake will do. Keats recalls that in his earlier encounter he had warmed with her before and kissed her, though what exactly this means is unclear—he differentiates warmed from kissed, so it could be something more or something less than kissing. He writes to his brother and sister-in-law in America (George and Georgiana) that, at this point, I have no libidinous thought about her (14-31 Oct 1818), though it seems otherwise.

Mrs. Jones may be responsible for suggesting the Eve of St. Agnes as a poetic topic to Keats, which, in the first few months of 1819, he takes up (remarkably so!) in an engaging and atmospheric narrative poem. The poem contains a sexual moment that, controversially, exists somewhere between an allegory of the sensual imagination and flesh-and-blood rape, coloured by deception. Keats later notes he receives much game (including pheasant) from Mrs. Jones, which he re-gifts.

Keats this month also expresses some barely closeted feelings about a certain Jane Cox, whom he meets via the Reynolds sisters. Within a longer journal letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America, Keats on 14 October bothers to describe her; she has, in fact, made Keats a little hot and bothered: Miss Cox, he writes, has fine eyes and fine manners, and When she comes into a room she makes the impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess [. . . ] a man is drawn toward her with a magnetic power. She intrigues him, and he confesses to losing sleep thinking about her.

In this journal letter (14-31 Oct) in which he writes about his personal circumstances, Keats also communicates, I hope I shall never marry. He says, Solitude is sublime, that there is Pleasure in Solitude, and that he has a barrier against Matrimony which I rejoice in.

The interesting feature about the ideas he develops this October is how he plays off the mighty abstract Idea of Beauty, his strengthening imagination, and concerns about his powers for poetry against domestic happiness. His desire for and love of poetical solitude greatly outweigh any other personal circumstance. Keats’s commitment to poetry is clear and his path extraordinarily confident: I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death, he writes 14 October to George Keats. A week later he sets out his determination and direction: The only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day, is any doubt about my powers for poetry—I seldom have any. As he assesses his own happiness in light of solitude, he confesses his yearning Passion I have for the beautiful, connected and made one with the ambition of the intellect. This appears to be a passing train of thought—Enough of this, he adds—but the idea is definitive in terms of his progress: embracing the truthfulness of beauty in a measured, controlled manner sets the way for the leap his poetry will take as he passes in 1819.

Keats’s accumulating comments about poetic directions and conditions, as well as his confidence in his poetic powers, point to lurking, immanent achievement. For us, though, with the hindsight of knowing his actual achievement in 1819, this is an easy prediction.

50 Poland Street, London

Where Keats’s much respected, supportive, and witty friend James Rice, an attorney, lives. On this day, Keats writes to him to explain what seems to be a social misunderstanding involving meeting with Rice (and possible another) in the morning. Keats tries to avoid and to explain hurt feelings.

November is difficult for Keats, though earlier in the month he receives a gift of 25 pounds from someone calling him- or herself P. Fenbank, along with an lackluster though flattering Sonnet to John Keats that praises him as a Star of high promise who illuminates this dark age: Keats is bestowed with mild light, clear beam, and bold integrity of song that will shine through all ages. This somewhat bolsters his spirits, though later, with a little pride, he writes that the present galls me a little (29 Dec).

But this month is dominated by caring for his younger brother, Tom, just turned nineteen, as he slips toward death from tuberculosis. Keats has been nursing for him almost continuously since returning from his northern walking tour, mid-August. In October, writing to his other younger brother George and his wife Georgiana in America, he sadly admits that he is Tom’s only comfort, and he calls the situation my Misery. His own emotional struggle with Tom’s grim condition holds him back from being able to write much about it (14, 16 Oct). On the evening of last day of November, it is clear that Tom’s death is very near.

Not only does caring for Tom exhaust and depress Keats, but it also prevents him from any sustained work on his ambitious Hyperion, which he has recently begun. He’s been thinking about the topic (the displacement of the Titans by the Olympians) for almost a year. Relative to his earlier long and at moments flighty poem Endymion (published April 1818, which he is anxious to put behind him), he sees Hyperion as more deeply abstract, unsentimental, and classical. He’s right. There’s little poetic prettification and affectation in it.

Tom’s grave condition also pulls Keats away from the rounds of socializing that he normally keeps up with his London and Hampstead friends. During the period of caring for Tom, and even when goes out more frequently, he notes that it leaves him without anything fresh to speculate upon. Until mid-October, at least, his actual poetic progress is stymied: the way I am at present situated, I have too many interruptions to a train of feeling to be able to write Poetry (16 Oct). This, however, does not stop Keats thinking about the kind of poetry he wants to write, and the kind of poet he wants to become.

So in November, we have to imagine Keats at Tom’s bedside, with no family support; with nagging financial issues and the family estate clogging his energies (he sees the family guardian, Richard Abbey a number of times in late October and into early November); with further struggles with Abbey about having his younger sister, Fanny, get permission to visit with Tom; with his fears about his own health issues (his chronic sore throat); with recent malicious reviews of his poetry in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Quarterly Review to contend with; and with the desire to write an epic poem of significant (Miltonic) scope and pitched at an entirely new level that might erase association with Leigh Hunt and the Cockney School to which those reviews rightly point. Keats’s friends notice his overwrought state. Behind all this must be Keats’s associative feelings of about eight years before when he closely witnessed his mother’s fall to the same agonizing disease.

Along with attempts to move forward with Hyperion (which contains perhaps his best poetry written thus far, though he abandons it for about four months), Keats may have written a few shorter poems during November. But it would be difficult for this poetry not to be at least partially inflected by what literally stares him in face: Tom’s agonizing descent to the so-called wasting disease. Given its subject, Keats possible writes Bards of passion and of mirth in November: the poem idealizes poetry’s immortal—heavenly—qualities, with the idea these sustained qualities with their wisdom of sustained melodious truths might teach those who suffer earthly inconstancies, weaknesses, doubts. Keats writes that the poem is on the double immortality of Poets (2 Jan 1819, in a letter begun 16 Dec).

Perhaps significantly, Keats inserts the Bards of passion poem into a letter just after quoting at length his critical mentor and friend William Hazlitt; Hazlitt is describing William Godwin’s genius: the key, Hazlitt writes, is Godwin’s study of the human heart and his empathetic imagination. These, in fact, are central to Keats’s poetics. That they derive from Hazlitt is not surprising, given Keats’s respect for Hazlitt as well as how Keats’s most famous critical formulations—Negative Capability (21/27 Dec 1817) and the camelion Poet (27 Oct 1818)—to a significant degree are adapted from Hazlitt, as are Keats’s ideas about artistic intensity, disinterestedness, and the interpenetration of truth and beauty.

Wentworth Place, Hampstead

The death of Keats’s younger brother, 1 December 1818. On the heartfelt invitation of his very good friend, the minor writer Charles Brown, Keats is invited to room and board (for 5 pounds/month) at Wentworth Place (a double-house). Tom, who had just turned 19, dies of consumption—tuberculosis—which also claimed Keats’s mother and will eventually claim him. Keats’s other brother, George, also dies of TB in 1841. Tom is buried 7 December at St. Stephen’s on Coleman Street.

Keats will share half of one side the double-house with Brown. He has a small sitting room downstairs and an upstairs bedroom. The Dilke family (close friends with Keats) live in the other side of the house. Today, Wentworth Place is known as Keats House, a wonderful museum celebrating Keats’s life and achievement.

George had earlier shouldered much of the care of Tom’s long-lingering illness, but with George having emigrated to America in June, much was left to Keats, including maintaining interest in the fate of his teenaged sister, Fanny, over whom he has a kind of tugging match with the family’s trustee/guardian, Richard Abbey. All of Keats’s friends have been, Keats records, exceedingly kind to him in the aftermath of Tom’s death (16 Dec). They know of Keats’s deep love of Tom.

Keats admits that in the last phase of Tom’s slow, agonizing decline (beginning in the middle of August), he could not work very much. He will later say that the last days of poor Tom were of the most distressing nature (to the George Keatses, 16 Dec). Getting started on sustained composition is difficult; his Miltonic Hyperion is stalled. He writes, my pen seems to have grown too goutty for verse (16 Dec).

Sometime between mid-August and December 1818, Keats meets the intriguing Fanny Brawne (the best bet might be mid-November), in whom he begins to take some coy yet serious interest. Keats describes Fanny to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana in a long letter (16 Dec 1818-4 Jan 1819): he finds her beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange, and he goes to some length to describe her hair, fine nostrills, mouth, shape, profile, arms, and feet—and her manner. At this point, the Brawne family (the fairly well-to-do widow Frances and her three children, with Fanny, 18, being the eldest) live not far from Wentworth Place.

Although Keats is attracted to the stylish Fanny, during this fall he has some lingering interests in an older woman of apparently independent means, Isabella Jones. Keats had an amorous sea-side adventure dating back to May 1817, but he has reconnected with Isabella by chance. And for at least for one period of this fall he remains distantly haunted by a certain striking and flirtatious Jane Cox (Charmian), and he confesses to a sleepless night thinking about her (14 Oct). Through the next two months, Keats has lingering throat problems (perhaps set off while on the Island of Mull in July 1818), which may be related to early signs of consumption. Keats’s has become impatient with Leigh Hunt’s literary tastes and aspirations. Almost as a response to go beyond Leigh Hunt’s poetry and poetics (which begins to irritate him), he cites William Hazlitt’s comments (on William Godwin’s genius) to suggest a possible direction: intense study of the human heart and engaging the value of a capable, ranging imagination.

Keats’s emergence as a great poet involves his struggle with being a modern poet, yet, more importantly, his stronger desire is to represent and embrace larger, transhistorical topics—joy and sorry, death and immortality, nature and art, certainty and mystery, truth and beauty, dream and reality, thought and feeling, sensation and knowledge. This can be said again in a slightly different way: While Keats is of course tied to history (who isn’t?), and he can be subject to what might be called hyper-contextualization, it is clear that Keats’s progress is determined by his hope is to write poetry that not only transcends history but functions to deny history’s hold over the quality and direction of his work—and the subjects on which he works. Keats desire, then, is for independence, intensity, and endurance—not for passing relevance and transient topics. He does not want to be pegged as merely suburban poet with suburban tastes. Keats also evolves forms—in particular, a shorter odal form the complicates the idea of praise—that don’t compromise his tone and expression.

So yes, we can place Keats in history, and within a certain Regency London milieu, but as his letters and greatest poetry clearly sound, the drive behind and the meaning in his poetry is to challenge the single-mindedness of historicization. What is it in art, in the truth of beauty, that teases us out of our own moment and into all moments? Look upon the silent urn, listen to the song of a fading nightingale, perfect the experience and representation of a stilled season . . . . The principle of beauty and complex capabilities of the imagination move Keats forward—not the sentimental leisures of composition or the need to give direct voice to his own time and place.

We should perhaps think back to the moment, in early March 1817, when Keats looks upon the Elgin Marbles. Keats is struck by the silent yet eternal power of the beauties. What do they possess that sees them through and beyond their own time? Those solicited feelings of grandeur and magnitude weigh heavily upon mortality, and the feeling is undescribable (On Seeing the Elgin Marbles). Keats will hope to lift his own poetry to solicit that same feeling, to that moment of sublime, profound uncertainty and paradoxical truth.

Crawley Hunt (or Crawley Down), Sussex

Keats watches the famous prize-fight between Ned Turner and Jack Randall (a.k.a. The Nonpareil) on Saturday, 5 December.*

As one sports writer records the fight, the amazing struggle lasts no less than two hours, nineteen minutes, and thirty seconds—34 rounds—with Randall (16-0-1) the victor. The match was likely the most betted-upon event of the era. Perhaps going to the event was intended as a diversion (and release) from the recent death of his younger brother, Tom, on 1 December, as his friends rally around him.

Keats struggles to make some progress with his largely Miltonic Hyperion during this period, and it remains a fragment that overlaps with and then falls into the extraordinary period of composition that begins spring 1819. He gives up Hyperion in April 1819, attempts the topic again, later, in July 1819, yet gives it up once more by September 1819.

Hyperion nevertheless remains a substantial step forward in the application of Keats’s poetics: the topic as he approaches it prescribes the commingling of intensity with disinterestedness in an elevated, controlled style, without any of his early poeticisms and wooly affectations.

Keats’s friends remain supportive of and confident about Keats’s poetic gifts, including but especially John Hamilton Reynolds (poet and critic), Benjamin Robert Haydon (noted painter and passionate supporter), Richard Woodhouse (lawyer and scholar), and Charles Wentworth Dilke (civil servant and scholar).

On this day, in fact, another friend, John Taylor (Keats’s publisher), takes the trouble to write to the influential Sir James Mackintosh: Taylor believes Keats is a real Genius, and though he notes that the flaws in Keats’s Endymion (published 1818) are many, Taylor believes Keats’s gifts and potential will no doubt make him the brightest ornament of this Age. This is quite a proclamation, though it turns out Taylor is right.

* The fight had first been scheduled for 1 December, but the death of the much-loved Princess Charlotte, aged twenty-one, on 5 November, followed by a massive public funeral and two weeks of mourning, put the event back; her death was caused by a still-born birth complicated by very poor medical treatment.

St. Stephen’s (church), Coleman Street

Keats’s youngest brother, Tom, is buried at St. Stephen’s 7 December, a week after he dies of consumption. Keats has watched over Tom since mid-August, after a walking tour mainly through Scotland. At the invitation of his friend Charles Brown, Keats moves into half of Wentworth Place in Hampstead, which is a double house.

Caring for Tom has been extraordinarily demanding—physically and psychologically. Keats’s own lingering health problem—a chronic sore throat—continues to trouble Keats now and into the new year.

Tom’s death is both a relief and a stark reminder of his own life’s course and present situation: his parents passed away when he was still young; his other younger brother, George, has moved to America; and his younger sister, Fanny, is (for the lack of a better term), tightly managed by the family trustee, Richard Abbey, who protects her from the sway of her brothers, and especially Keats. He does get to see Fanny on at least three occasions in December.

Abbey is also the guardian of the Keats financial estate, and he often seems to keep the brothers in the dark about family money, now made more complicated by Tom’s death. The situation will become more complicated when George returns from America in January 1820 to re-finance his failing business ventures in America. Keats is himself often desperate for money, and at moments Abbey appears equally desperate not to give him any. Then again, Keats had used up a good portion of his inheritance money by October 1816, when he turned twenty-one, and much of it on his medical training; Keats subsequently had to live off credit based on the remaining funds—but this could only last so long, since it is clear Keats is spending quite a bit more than the credit renders him.

This month finances are a nagging issue since he asks for money from one friend, while another asks Keats for a loan—and he did get some cash form Abbey (20 pounds) just after Tom’s funeral. That Keats is in the habit of loaning money out to friends is also hardly prudent: as his very good friend Richard Woodhouse puts it when it becomes absolutely clear that Keats is in financial despair, I wish he could be cured of the vice of lending—for in a poor man, it is a vice (31 Aug 1819).

Keats’s personal itinerary shows that his friends keep him busy with dining engagements, the theatre, socializing and visiting, a few minor outings, and even some shooting (he manages to kill a little bird). But Keats also comes to see this month that, in order to get on with his poetry, he needs to put a damper on his socializing, which, in its rules of society actually make him look like an Idiot (18 Dec). His work on a potentially great poem, the Miltonically-toned Hyperion, moves slowly, but he knows he needs to reform and apply himself if he is to move forward with his poetic progress; as he writes to his friend Richard Woodhouse on 18 December, I have a new leaf to turn over—I must work—I must read—I must write . . . This self-motivation carries some positive prediction, since Keats is on the verge of his only period of compositional greatness—1819.

Elm Cottage, Hampstead

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Elm Cottage, Hampstead: Where the Brawne family lives—not far away from Keats at Wentworth Place, where he lives in one half of the double house with his very good friend, Charles Brown.

When Keats first meets Fanny Brawne, aged 18, is not perfectly clear, but was probably not long after Keats returns from his northern walking tour with Brown, mid-August 1818.

Keats spends some of this Christmas day with the Brawnes, though he makes a social faux pas by accepting two invitations for Christmas. There is also a vague but unsupportable suggestion that Keats and Fanny are unofficially engaged on Christmas day, since a few years later Fanny recalls it as her happiest day. This, however, could mean anything, including a simple mutual declaration of love or a first kiss. Keats also has dinner with the Brawnes on New Year’s Day, 1819.

Fanny, with her interest in dances and fashion, and her fairly open flirtatious and witty ways, tends to confound and even madden Keats; it eventually makes him irrationally jealous. Her interest in clothes and appearance may have come from the fact that her uncle was the age’s most famous male fashion icon, the dandy Beau Brummel. Generally missing from assessments of Fanny is that she was also not just in Keats’s eyes beautiful, but she was also bright, full of life, and testing of Keats’s opinions; there were reasons for Keats to be attracted to her. Keats’s love for Fanny grows into the new year and beyond, but the complexity of his circumstances—his dedication to poetry, wavering health, stretched finances, the negative opinion of her from some of his friends, and hesitancy about Fanny’s suitability—place much pressure on the relationship.

Fanny Brawne

In December, as Keats thinks over attacks made on his very long and largely unconvincing poem Endymion (published in spring 1818), and as he criticizes Leigh Hunt, his friend and former mentor, for over-aestheticizing things otherwise fine and beautiful (and also for his perceived egotism), Keats works hard to get on with his lingering and serious project, Hyperion. Now and into the new year Keats puts demands upon himself for a controlled, elevated style and idiom, and thus the poem remains a working ground for Keats to practice and find some experience in the expression of a mature poetic voice. Hyperion, though, with its two incarnations ( Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, the latter written July-Sept 1820), remained unfinished and unfinishable, but the project remains important inasmuch as it keeps Keats working at poetry, and thus his mind, body, and spirit remain (temporarily) enthused and, just as importantly, occupied. The result, although a fragment, is somewhat astonishing: though for readers the poem’s sympathies are complicated and uncertain, Hyperion’s restrained tone and style place it substantially above anything he has written; it puts into clear perspective the relative immaturity of his earlier long poem, Endymion, first drafted April-November 1817.

Keats has also begun to recognize his own vices as a poet, which reduce to the touchy desire for fame and admiration, though he also shuns these in favor of solitude and hidden or quiet achievement—greatness in a Shade, he calls it (22 Dec).

Keats’s chronic sore throat continues to bother and sometimes confine him, and this continues into January and February 1819. It does not bode well.