← In Our Time
In Our Time
John Keats
00:48:07
How one of the great Romantic poets produced so much in his brilliant but short life.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:46]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:45]
Melvyn Bragg
T Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Ever Google a money question and end up 12 tabs deep with 12 different answers? This podcast is your shortcut back to clarity. NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast breaks down financial decisions with a team of trusted journalists, they explain the why behind decisions like investing, home buying and choosing credit cards. With clear research backed insights. No jargon, no misinformation. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast. Apparently this is in our time from BBC Radio 4. And this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the in our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the Episode Description. Wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1819, John Keats wrote some of the most loved poems in English, among them Odes to a Nightingale and On Melancholy. Buoyed up by enthusiastic friends, he'd left his medical career for poetry roughly two years earlier, though some published reviews called him an uncouth Cockney who should have stuck to medicine. Two years later, Keats was dead from TB before his work found wider glory. And some who knew him, including Shelley, believed his true killer was the critics. With me to discuss John Keats are Fiona Stafford, professor of English Language and Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, Mako o', Halloran, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Newcastle, and Nicholas Rowe, Wardlaw professor of English Literature at the University of St. Andrews. Nick Rowe, can I start with you? Tell us something about Keats family background and where that Cockney epithet may have come from.
- [03:48]
Nicholas Rowe
Yes. His family background was based in the City of London. He was born there in late October of 1795 at the Swan and Hoop livery stable or near to there on the City Road at Moorfields. This was a busy livery stable. His parents were Thomas Keats and Francis Jennings. Thomas was a helper in the livery stable. Francis Jennings was the daughter of the leaseholder of the stable and his wife John Jennings and Alice Whalley. And John Jennings was a wealthy man. He was also the Master of the Inholders Guild. Besides John, Thomas and Francis had four other children. There was George, the second son, then Thomas and then Edward, who didn't last very long. And their daughter Frances was born in 1803. That's a momentous year because John and George went off to school to the north of London at Clarke's academy at Enfield. 1803 is also significant because it was the year before their father Thomas died in a tragic riding accident. It left Francis Jennings without a husband and the Keats children without a father.
- [05:07]
Melvyn Bragg
Presumably the financial stability came from the fact that Keats mother was the daughter of a relatively wealthy leaseholder.
- [05:16]
Nicholas Rowe
That's exactly right. But there were problems and Thomas's death initiated the breakup of the family and a long running struggle between Frances Jennings, her parents and her brother who was called Midgley John Jennings. John Jennings left the majority of his fortune, which was over £12,000, a very substantial sum at the time, to his wife Alice. He left a very considerable sum to his Son Midgley John. But he left only an annuity of £50 per year to his daughter, Frances Jennings.
- [05:51]
Melvyn Bragg
So there was going to be financial instability, a recurring theme during Keats's life. Fiona Stafford. Where did Keats go to school? It wasn't Eton or Harrow, was it? But they were clearly able to afford a decent education.
- [06:06]
Fiona Stafford
Yes, he was at the Enfield Academy, which was run by a man called John Clarke, who was a liberal and inspiring teacher, I think. And so Keats, by our standards, had a good education. He's often caricatured as being uneducated because, as you say, he didn't go to Eton like Shelley, he didn't go to Harrow like Byron, but he did have a good education. And it was also an education which wasn't just bookish. He was also encouraged to look up at the stars and look at the natural world, have a curiosity about the world around him. But it was also. I mean, he was taught Latin, so when he was at school, he translated the whole of Virgil's Ineared, which is quite a feat. I think we can be quite impressed by that. So this. This idea of him somehow being working class and not educated is just really far from the truth.
- [06:58]
Melvyn Bragg
He goes on to study medicine, but he gives up his medical career in 1816. Why does he do that?
- [07:05]
Fiona Stafford
Well, he gives it up, I think, because he realizes what a good poet he is and he's meeting other poets and he's just incredibly excited by the whole idea of poetry. I mean, he's a very passionate reader of poetry, I think. I can't think of. I can't think of anyone in the canon who is so excited about reading. So Keats is a real lover of poetry and he has a real gift for it. But, I mean, he did work hard as a medic as well. I think that's another thing that people often don't realise. He passed his medical exams. A lot was involved with that. So he could have practised as an apothecary or a surgeon, but instead he decides he's going to be a poet.
- [07:45]
Melvyn Bragg
And what does he take from those medical studies into his poetry?
- [07:50]
Fiona Stafford
Well, I think quite a lot, especially his. Well, for example, his pharmaceutical training, which would have been part of his qualification to be an apothecary. The Apothecary's act had just passed in 1815, so it was a moment where medicine was really tightening up and people were having to be more accountable. And part of the training was to take walks on Hampstead Heath and go and look at the flowers, which seems A bit odd to us until we remember that at this time they had no penicillin. So most of the remedies that were being kind of prescribed by the apothecaries were basically dried flowers. So you really had to know your flowers. There were some awful cases where people, you know, children had been given colts for, or they were supposed to be having colts for a bad cough, and actually they were given dried foxglove leaves which kill them. So, you know, there are some really important aspects of his medical training which you then see in his poetry, because he's so very specific about plants. So would be one example of what he took from his medical training and you find it informing his poetry. He's very good on poisonous plants.
- [08:56]
Melvyn Bragg
So in this early stage. Mako, can you tell us who was supporting, encouraging Keats in developing his poetry?
- [09:05]
Mako O'Halloran
Primarily his friends and his brothers. And I would really want to emphasize his fraternal ties with Tom and George, his two younger brothers, who provide a profound emotional and psychological comfort to Keats. They had been buffeted about. They'd had a lot of experience of bereavement in their childhood.
- [09:29]
Melvyn Bragg
Because his mother has died as well.
- [09:32]
Mako O'Halloran
That's right.
- [09:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Relatively early on, yes.
- [09:34]
Mako O'Halloran
His mother dies when Keats is about 14 and the Keats children then going to live with their grandmother. And Keats and his brothers rent a lot of lodgings all around London. And the 1817 collection of poems, Keats first published collection, gives us some helpful insights into who else has been supporting Keats up to that point. And they include Charles Cowden Clarke, to whom Keats addresses an important verse epistle. And Cowden Clarke was the son of the headmaster, John Clarke, and had encouraged Keats and had introduced him to all sorts of works of literature. So in that poem, Keats celebrates the epic poetry that he's been reading with Clarke, Milton, Spenser, Tasso. He also recognises Clarke's influence in introducing him to the ode, the sonnet, the epic, and all these works that he feels have enriched his life and. And then more strategically, Keats is also positioning himself in that volume of 1817, his first collection of poems, with Leigh Hunt, who was a recent supporter of Keats and had published one of his early poems on first looking into Chapman's Homer, and really brought Keats into public attention by introducing him as one of three brilliant young poets from whom great things would be expected. And the other two happened to be Percy Bysshesshe Shelley and John Hamilton Reynolds, who becomes a close friend of Keats too.
- [11:15]
Melvyn Bragg
Leigh Hunt was something of a radical. Did that affect Keats politics, his understanding of London society, British society at the time?
- [11:25]
Mako O'Halloran
Yes, absolutely. So Leigh Hunt was the hero of liberty in lots of ways. He had gone to prison for libeling the Prince Regent in his weekly paper, which he ran through with his brother, the examiner. And Keats had grown up reading that in his boyhood at Clark's Academy. And Hunt is a kind of hero to Keats in that early stage and represents a radical thinking and independence of thought. So one of the poems that Keats, I mean, he actually dedicates the volume of 1817 to Hunt. He also writes a poem celebrating the day on which Leigh Hunt was released from prison. And one of the things Keats admires is that Leigh Hunt, despite being imprisoned, had not been constrained in his imagination. He still managed to fly with Milton through sort of the fields of air, and that independence of thought and liberty are so important to Keats.
- [12:27]
Melvyn Bragg
Nick Rowe, can you tell us a little bit about his tour of Scotland? A four month tour of Scotland? Yes.
- [12:34]
Nicholas Rowe
He made a tour of Scotland in the summer of 1818 with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, who he'd met in the summer of the previous year. In the spring of 1818, Keats had been looking after his brother Tom in Teignmouth, down in Devonshire. Tom was ill with pulmonary tuberculosis. And it seems that over this spring, Keats started to have the idea of making a tour of the north with some thought of gathering imagery, scenery, towards an epic poem that he was contemplating. The poem eventually became Hyperion, and by coincidence, his brother George, who had recently married a girl called Georgiana Wylie, was planning to emigrate to America. They were able to combine their trips to the North, George and Georgiana to Liverpool, where they were going to take their boat across the Atlantic. And then John and Charles Brown were going to continue up through the Lake District, where they failed to meet Wordsworth and didn't climb Helvellyn and made it halfway up Skiddaw.
- [13:41]
Melvyn Bragg
But he was very taken with everything he saw, the landscape.
- [13:45]
Nicholas Rowe
He was extremely taken by, for example, Stockgill Force above Ambleside, he thought, improved his ideas of the sublime. And they then went on through the Burns country, a quick dip over to Northern Ireland and back on up to Burns birthplace at Alloway, and then out to the Western Isles to Mull, to Iona, to Staffa, where they went into Fingal's Cave, up north towards the Great Glen, where they climbed Ben Nevis and then on up to Inverness, where, on a doctor's advice, Keats opted to Take a coastal ship, a smack back to London, and it was a tour that was productive. In poetic terms, do you have any of that, the satirical piece which is Upon My Life, Sir Nevis, I Am Peaked, which is a kind of satirical dialogue between Ben Nevis and a Mrs. C. Sweet Nevis, do not quake. For though I love your honest countenance, all things above truly I should not like to be conveyed so far into your bosom. But the sonnet that he wrote, Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud. Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist, I look into the chasms and the shroud, vaporous, doth hide them Just so much I wist mankind do know of hell I look ahead and there is sullen mist Even so much mankind can tell of heaven.
- [15:16]
Melvyn Bragg
Fiona. So he's having this surge of creativity around the tour to Scotland, but comes home a little prematurely to find his brother Tom dying of tb. What impact does that have?
- [15:30]
Fiona Stafford
Absolutely huge impact, as Mako was saying. He was very close to his younger brothers, I think, having lost their parents, John felt a particular responsibility for them. And also, as a trained doctor, he gets back to Hampstead, he finds Tom really in the final stages of tuberculosis consumption, as they would have called it, and he nurses him, and it is an absolutely harrowing part of his life. But out of that comes an extraordinary surge of creativity. It's very, very strange. And, you know, lots of people think of different reasons for why this could have occurred, and we don't really know, but the following spring, I mean, this is the December 1818. Tom dies on the 1st of December, and already, by within a few months, Keats is pouring out the poems that he's best known for. So we have the Evis antagonist, then we have this extraordinary sequence of odes, the Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Ode on Melancholy, La Belle Danson. Merci. Plus some stunning sonnets as well, and they're just all pouring out of him. So. So it is a very extraordinary sequence of being absolutely, you know, at his lowest, in a way, and out of that comes this creativity. I think it's to do with the intensity of the feelings. He has all that energy and all those new experiences that he has in Scotland and in the North. He'd never seen mountains before, so he's got. Suddenly he's seen the sublime firsthand, and then there he is kind of cooped up in this sick room in Hampstead, and it's all dark and it's terribly unhealthy. It's probably where he contracted the disease that was going to kill him very soon. But some of this seems to just kind of come together in this great, great explosion.
- [17:33]
Melvyn Bragg
And this is where he met Fanny Brawn. So can you give us a couple of lines from one of your favourite sonnets or odes from that great year of creativity?
- [17:43]
Fiona Stafford
Yes. I would have to choose the Ode to a Nightingale. And I think the way the poem finishes is so very Keatsian, because it doesn't end with a conclusion, it ends with a question, and we don't quite know what to make of it, and it just ends. Was it a vision or a waking dream? Flood. Is that music? Do I wake or sleep?
- [18:05]
Melvyn Bragg
Mako, you wanted to come in there.
- [18:08]
Mako O'Halloran
I think I would have to choose some lines from the end of Ode to Psyche. Yes. I will be thy priest and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind where branched thoughts new grown with pleasant pain Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.
- [18:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you. And I really liked Ode to Psyche as well. I thought it was a super poem, really did. It's also really extraordinary, the formal spectrum from incredibly complex forms to actually quite simple forms, and also in terms of subject matter as well.
- [18:49]
Fiona Stafford
And he was trying different things, wasn't he? There's that. There's a month, January 1818, where you look at what he was writing and the. The change of mood. You know, he's writing a poem to Mrs. Reynolds Cat. And then he's. Right, you know, he's writing a sonnet on sitting down three King Lear again. I mean, the shift in register and form is extraordinary.
- [19:09]
Nicholas Rowe
Yeah, yeah. He starts out with Spencerian stanzas, a very difficult form to master. He writes an imitation of Spencer, comes back to the form in the eve of St Agnes, writing a narrative romance in about 40 stanzas, apparently in a very few days. It's an astonishing achievement.
- [19:29]
Melvyn Bragg
That's an incredible thing as well, is he doesn't seem to have spent days and months bent over 14 lines. You know, they seem to come out in a couple of days.
- [19:40]
Fiona Stafford
Yeah. Or less than that. I mean, Oto Nightingale's supposed to be just sort of sits down and writes in about three hours. I mean, I don't know if that's true.
- [19:46]
Nicholas Rowe
I think that's significant in the sense that he seems to write at his best in a single effort, a single creative outpouring, for want of a better word. But when, for example, with his epic project in Hyperion, he was attempting to write that in the autumn of 1818, and being interrupted, understandably by his poor brother Tom, who was dying. He found it very difficult to pick up the creative momentum again and bring the poem to completion, which arguably is one reason, as well as his sense that he was too close to Milton's manner in Paradise Lost. I think it was something much closer as well to his patterns of composition and how he wrote at his best in one sustained push of creativity.
- [20:34]
Melvyn Bragg
There's quite an emphasis on mortality in some of the poems. Is he already considering his own mortality?
- [20:43]
Fiona Stafford
Well, he was considering it even a year before that. He writes his sonnet, when I have fears that I may cease to be before my. And has gleaned my teeming brain a year before that. And I think, you know, I think if you were a medical student at that time, you know, you saw mortality on a daily basis as well as his early experiences. You know, he lost one of his little brothers when he was only nine and he lost his father, as Nick was describing, and his mother. Keats is, you know, he's not under any illusion that death's not there and that it's coming for you. And I think that adds to the intensity. I think it adds to that sort of need to pour it out. I mean, I think that sonnet, which was written before he was ill and before Tom died, which one was that? When I have fears that I may cease to be that, you get this real sense that unless you really keep writing, you're not going to get everything that's in your mind onto paper and into forms that are going to benefit humanity long after you've gone. So I think death's really important to him.
- [21:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you.
- [21:49]
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- [22:28]
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- [23:32]
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- [23:38]
Fiona Stafford
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- [24:01]
Melvyn Bragg
Meiko One of the forms that Keats was fascinated by was epic poetry. Why was that?
- [24:09]
Mako O'Halloran
That's right. Keats had inherited a model of poetic progress from Virgil via Spenser and Milton, in which poets would begin their apprenticeship work in the pastoral genre. So they would write poems about leisure, pleasure, sensuous delight in pastoral settings, and then they would work their way up to the ambitious genre of the epic. And that's what you would do when you were a mature poet and at the height of your powers. So you know, that's when Milton composes his Paradise Lost or Dante, his Divine Comedy. Keats was attempting epic poetry at the age of 22, and I think it is because, exactly as Fiona says, he feels this compression of time. And having lost Tom so at such a sort of young age, he's more aware than ever that he may have a limited amount of time in which to compose his epic poetry. So he does leap from, well, his last published work was A Pastoral Romance into Hyperion, which is an extraordinary attempt at epic. He makes two attempts at epic poetry. They actually kind of bookend what we now think of as his living year, the year in which he writes all the poems that he's most famous for. And the 20th century critic Robert Gittings actually dates it very precisely to 21st September 1818 to 21st September 1819. An extraordinary outpouring of poems. And the first, they begin and end with two epic fragments. So Keats intended these works to be longer, and in the first Hyperion fragment, he slows down and he uses blank verse. He had been using rhyming couplets before, hence what a lot of the critics say. So Cockney rhymes, you know, that's one of the associations with Keats's previous poetry. But he uses blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter, the verse form that Milton uses in Paradise Lost. It's what Wordsworth uses in the Prelude. And he really examines suffering. He is working his way towards writing about Apollo, the Olympian successor to Hyperion, who becomes the God of the sun and of healing and of poetry. So the poet healer that Keats admires and taking forward that medical sort of
- [26:58]
Melvyn Bragg
identity and feeling almost as though he identified with Apollo himself.
- [27:02]
Mako O'Halloran
Yes, he actually really does revere Apollo and writes a lot of poems about Apollo in the lead up to this. So he wants to explore the ascension of Apollo, but what he finds is that he's so imaginatively immersed in the desolate and bewildered condition of the fallen titans, the predecessors to the Olympian gods, that he spends most of the fragment elucidating their sorrow.
- [27:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Fiona, I was struck in advance of this program. I read quite a lot of his. His poetry. I was struck how some of them are very, very romantic, with a small R. There was a particular poem, to a Lady Seen for a Few Moments in Vauxhall, a wonderfully prosaic title about how he saw somebody five years ago, fell in love with her, only saw her for five minutes, but constantly thinks of her ever since then. And some of the other poems are extremely intense in his affection, yet we don't hear about his personal life. What was his personal life like, his love life?
- [28:14]
Fiona Stafford
Well, there's still quite a bit of mystery about some aspects of it. There's a woman called Isabella Jones, for example, who he met and may be the inspiration for his poem Isabella. But it may just be that he liked reading Boccaccio. It's really quite difficult to tell. He was susceptible to women, but, I mean, he lets things slip in his letters. He says he sometimes has, you know, bad thoughts about women. So there is quite a Mystery. But we do know that he fell in love with Fanny Brawn in Hampstead. And this was the young woman. She was quite a lot younger than him, she was only 18. They became engaged towards the end of that annus mirabilis. And there are people who think that it was because he fell in love with Fanny Brawn that he wrote all those wonderful odes. Again, there's lots of discussion about it, but we don't have much evidence. And the woman you're referring to, who he saw in Vauxhall Gardens, we don't know who she is. You know, it's one of those great, great mysteries. But, I mean, he did say early on that actually he was so attached to his brothers that he has a stronger feeling for them than he could ever have for a woman. So that sort of family feeling is really, really deep. But then I think one of the difficulties is that Keats wrote lots of letters. He had lots of friends who we've been. We were hearing about, and he sort of dashes things off often when he's had a drink or whatever. And then scholars of a later year pore over all of these letters and construct things from them. I mean, because we just don't always have the evidence.
- [29:51]
Melvyn Bragg
They are a useful resource, those letters, aren't they? Because he was pretty good at keeping letters and he wrote a lot of letters.
- [29:58]
Fiona Stafford
He wrote a lot of letters, and other people kept them as well. And they are absolutely wonderful letters. I mean, I think people who only know his poetry actually really miss out. I think he's just a brilliant letter writer and you really get a sense of his personality and his friendships, because he has a slightly different tone depending on whether he's writing to his brothers or whether he's writing to John Hamilton Reynolds. And it's where a lot of our ideas about what he thought about poetry come from, because a lot of the letters are talking about poetry to fellow poets. And this is where he coins the term negative capability, or when he's talking about axioms in philosophy and not axioms until you feel them on the pulses. Lots of those things that we think of as quintessentially Keats. And then we read into the poems are coming from his private correspondence. So it's a wonderful, wonderful resource.
- [30:51]
Melvyn Bragg
So, Nick, he has this incredibly productive year. He's only about 23, 24 years old. What does the outside world make of his poetry?
- [31:01]
Nicholas Rowe
The outside world had not made very much of his poetry up to that point, because his 1817 collection, which he'd put together late in 18 and over Christmas of that year only reached a few dozen readers who were his friends, as he put it, and a few dozen readers who weren't his friends and didn't like the book. So literally you could count the number of readers, perhaps in terms of dozens. Endymion, which appeared In April of 1818, his poetic romance, certainly reached some readership, but it was very widely criticized and in very hostile terms in the leading journals of the day, particularly Blackwood's Magazine, where the Cockney School essays started to appear, and in the Quarterly Review, where Croker admitted to only reading the first canto of the poem, no more of the poem, he brazenly admitted as much, and then said he couldn't understand the poem at all. So it didn't actually reach many readers, although, as one might expect, his publishers weren't downcast because they understood that adverse criticism could also sell the book. So by the time he reaches his year of great productivity and great poems, 1819, he was certainly known to the public, but as what I suppose you could call a risky prospect. Certainly James Hesse, one of his publishers, thought Keats was somewhat unreliable, but hoped that he would do something eventually.
- [32:39]
Melvyn Bragg
So, Fiona, what was the substance of these criticisms of Keats?
- [32:45]
Fiona Stafford
Well, the attacks on Endymion were really very. They're pretty brutal. You know, you read them now and you just think, oh, it's amazing he ever wrote anything again, which I think actually makes that flowering in 1819, just a few months after is even more remarkable. I suspect that's partly sort of proving what he can do as he retreats wounded from these awful, awful reviews. But they are, as Micah said, they're attacking his rhymes. They thought it was an incomprehensible poem. I mean, I think one of the very sort of unfortunate errors he made was to publish a preface with it, which was basically saying, well, I don't think it's actually very good, but I'll get better. I mean, that is not a very strategically sensible thing to do when you've got a very, very hostile press out there. And so everybody just went for it, really. It was a sort of almost invitation for open season. It's very unfortunate, but they were also
- [33:44]
Melvyn Bragg
attacking the person rather than the poem a lot of the time.
- [33:48]
Fiona Stafford
Yeah, well, one of the nastiest ones was by John Lockhart, who really should have known better. He's one of the. One of the Edinburgh wits, and he really goes for Keats being lower class and apothecary and sort of saying, well, why did he give up this Useful job. And it ends up, you know, back to your potions and pills, Mr. Keats, because, you know, at least you'd be doing the world some good that way. So it's very, very unkind and it is partly politically motivated. It's because they know that Keats is associated with Leigh Hunt, they don't like his politics. So there's a sort of right wing ish press having a go at him for those reasons. But I think there are also aesthetic reasons as well that they don't like the poem. And also they found it very hard to follow.
- [34:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Micah. Has there been a revision of Endymion? Do people now regard it actually as a. A rather good piece of work or from a literary point of view, is it seen as. As a bit of a failed attempt on his part?
- [34:49]
Mako O'Halloran
Endymion does have some admirers, but I would say that they're a fairly niche group on the whole. Endymion, as Keats himself recognizes, is a kind of experiment that fails. So when Keats looks back on Endymion a year after composing it, so he composes it in 1817, and then by the autumn of 1818, when he thinks about it, he says that it was like leaping into the sea and discovering where all the rocks are, that it's an exercise he set himself. He's always aspired to write a long poem, so this, he said, would be a test of invention. And he's feeling his way through this long poem, but he says that it's better to try and fail than not try at all. So he recognises that he's. Maybe it's not his best work and he does want to be taken more seriously, which is why he leaps into
- [35:51]
Melvyn Bragg
Hyperion and did with the odes and the Sonnets of 1818. 1819. Was there any recognition at the time that these were truly great works?
- [36:04]
Mako O'Halloran
Well, the poems of this extraordinary flourishing in 1819, the fruits of that are all collected in his final collection of poems of 1820. So that's Lamia, the Eva, St. Agnes and Isabella and other poems. And the reviews come out quite late, so Keats, sadly is not able to bask in the more positive attention that it draws. But even some of Keats's worst critics, who include Lord Byron, who had been very rude about Keats's poetry and in his private letters he's sort of saying it's, you know, that Endymion is like mental masturbation. It's sort of schoolboy fantasy shared in this really inappropriate, embarrassing, nauseating way. Even Lord Byron sort of Recognizes in the volume of 1820, which finishes with Hyperion, a fragment that this is a work that is a monument that will keep keeps his name.
- [37:06]
Melvyn Bragg
Why does he decide to travel to Rome in 1820? Nick Rowe, what were his hopes?
- [37:14]
Nicholas Rowe
He travelled to Rome because he was seriously ill. He'd been suffering from tubercular symptoms, I think we can probably say, throughout 1819. And in January 1820, Fanny Braun tells us Keats experienced his first hemorrhage from his lungs. She dates it to late January of 1820. And there were other haemorrhages throughout the spring. And clearly, although Keats doctors had what they called the best hopes of him, his condition was getting worse. So that by the late summer, August of 1820, it seemed best for him to go to Rome and try to pass the winter there in the warmer climate, which was thought to be beneficial for tubercular patients. He'd met a doctor in London, Dr. Clark, who was resident at Rome, and when Keats arrived there, having undertaken the long sea voyage from London to Naples with his friend Joseph Seven, the painter, they arrived at Rome eventually in November, and it was Clark who had arranged for apartments next to the Spanish Steps in the Piazza di Spagna. And Keats and Seven were resident there throughout the winter. And as I've said already, their forlorn hope was that Keats would get better. And although he rallied occasionally, the course of his illness was relentlessly for the worse.
- [38:47]
Fiona Stafford
But Shelley, he does write a kind of kind letter to Keats saying, you know, when you get to Italy, come and stay with us. I mean, Shelley's actually really affected by Keats's Il, because Shelley's been out in Italy for quite a while and he's really shocked. And then when Keats starts, he writes Adonais, which is a kind of very elaborate elegy for Keats, which has a lot to do with Keats success in the Victorian period, actually. I mean, rather mixed, because Shelley very much sort of takes the line that Keats has been killed by the critics, which Byron is very scornful of. You know, it's strange the mind, that very fiery particle, should let itself be snuffed out by an article. His. Byron's not very sympathetic response to that, but Shelley's horrified by Keats death and Byron is as well, actually, when it actually happens, he's very embarrassed that he's.
- [39:41]
Nicholas Rowe
Adonais is certainly highly influential over the long term in the 19th century, particularly when the Cambridge apostles, Hallam, Richard Monckton, Mellon, Tennyson, others as well put Adonais back into print in 1829.
- [39:57]
Melvyn Bragg
And when he dies, how does news of his death spread? Or is is his death ignored?
- [40:04]
Nicholas Rowe
He died on the late in the evening of the 23rd of February, and Joseph Seven had nursed him through the last very harrowing days of his illness. And it took a little while for Seven to gather himself and write to London, which he did eventually, in a letter to Charles Brown, Keats close friend with whom he'd been living in the last months of his life in Britain. And the letter arrived there, I think I'm right in saying, on Saturday 10th March, certainly around then. Brown, of course, had been expecting the news, but was devastated when it arrived. He eventually told Fanny Braun and her mother what had happened happened. Brown also informed Keats publisher, John Taylor, and asked him to place a notice in the London papers giving the outline details of the death of John Keats, the poet at Rome. And as was the practice at the time, other London newspapers copied the announcement, as did the provincial newspapers, and so the news spread.
- [41:08]
Melvyn Bragg
So that moment of his death enhanced his reputation without people necessarily having read the poems. Is true, Mako o', Halloran, how important has Keats vulnerability been to his lasting reputation? Because, of course, there's the romantic idea associated with the early death of the poet, but also he was very open himself.
- [41:33]
Mako O'Halloran
Yes, he was open, I would say, to a fault, almost. We heard earlier from Phi about the extraordinary preface to Endymion, in which he diagnoses his own condition as being immature and really undeveloped as a poet. But by the time he comes into his extraordinary flourishing during his living year of poetry, he's able to use that vulnerability in extraordinary ways to access states of being and to inhabit characters so unlike his own experience. For example, on the back of what Fi was saying about the letters, a really important idea to emerge from the letters in that autumn of 1818, is the chameleon poet who. Well, so this is Keats's way of defining his own particular kind of poetry. And he explains that unlike what he calls the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, he's a poet who feels that he has no intrinsic identity of his own. He's forever, he says, fulfilling or filling and entering into these different characters and modes of being. And he goes on to say in that letter that it's a quality, a creative mode that enables a poet to celebrate high and low, rich and poor, to create a Iago or an Imogen, a villain or a heroine. It's a poetry that has no moral agenda. It's not guided by a particular philosophy, but it also does leave the poet vulnerable as well, because the chameleon poet it. And Keats goes on to say that it's an instinctive ability, it's not something that he can control. But in his poetry of 1818 and 1819 we see that gift used in extraordinary ways. So there are all sorts of amazing moments in Keats's poetry where he imagines what it's like for it doesn't even have to be human. It's sort of like a little puff of smoke dies in the Eva St. Agnes all the icy statues seem to be groaning and have this uneasy sense of life. And he uses that in Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion.
- [43:51]
Melvyn Bragg
Nick Rowe he, of course didn't experience recognition much during his lifetime, but over the 19th century that changed with the publication of biographies and so on. Can you explain when the turning point was in the recognition of Keats?
- [44:07]
Nicholas Rowe
His 1820 volume was in fact well received. Taylor and Hesse's legal advisor, Keats collector called Richard Woodhouse, thought that the volume placed Keats with Shakespeare during the 1820s.
- [44:20]
Melvyn Bragg
That's pretty remarkable.
- [44:21]
Nicholas Rowe
Yeah, Very prescient in some senses as well for the. The rapid ascent of Keats's fame. There were a lot of tribute poems written to him during the 1820s. In the 1830s, 1836 at Plymouth, Charles Brown gave a lecture on Keats, which was the first section of his projected biography, and also put on an exhibition of what we'd call Keatsiana at the Plymouth Athenaeum, a copy of Severn's miniature, the medallion depicting Keats and one or two other things. But Brown never completed his biography and handed the manuscript of it, plus his collection of Keats's transcript to Richard Monckton Milnes poet, politician, who put together such materials as he could gather. In the 1840s there was quite a lot manuscripts, transcripts, the Letters. And he published his biography, the Life Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats in 1848, giving us a life narrative, some poems hitherto unpublished, including the Ode to Indolence and of course the Letters, which were a revelation. So this really is the crucial turn.
- [45:30]
Melvyn Bragg
So by the end of the. By the second half of the 19th century, he has become a really major figure in English poetry. Fiona, as a final question, how do we account for Keats popularity being so enduring?
- [45:48]
Fiona Stafford
I think that's very easy. The poems are so good. They're absolutely perfect poems. Keats at his best is just so astonishing. You can read. You can read the odes over and over again and just be absolutely have your breath taken away by how powerful they are, how beautiful they are. So I think it is, you know, just sheer quality.
- [46:09]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, that's a great recommendation to end the program. My thanks to Mako o', Halloran, Nick Rowe and Fiona Stafford. Next week, from potatoes to smallpox, the plants, animals and diseases that spread from continent to continent after 1492. That's the Columbian Exchange. Thanks for listening.
- [46:31]
Fiona Stafford
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
- [46:39]
Melvyn Bragg
What did we miss out?
- [46:41]
Fiona Stafford
I think if we'd had more time, we could have talked about the impact of the Elin Marbles, for example, on Keats, which is absolutely massive and also quite interesting.
- [46:52]
Melvyn Bragg
Tell us about the listeners.
- [46:54]
Fiona Stafford
Well, the Elin Marbles were on display for the first time in the British Museum, and Keats used to go and just marvel at them, really. He went with his friend, the artist Benjamin Robert Hayden, and he. Keats writes two sonnets about the algae marbles and how overwhelming they are. But also they. Then I think they're like kind of frozen figures. They're so lifelike, he can't believe it. And they. And they inform Hyperion and the Eva Syntagmas, I think. I don't know what anyone else thinks about that, but I think alchemy are quite important to Keats.
- [47:28]
Nicholas Rowe
Yes, they certainly are. And when he visited them In March of 1817, they became a kind of ideal of artistic achievement against which he measured his own possible attainment and at that moment in his life felt somewhat lacking and not up to the kind of pinnacle represented by the art of classical Greece.
- [47:54]
Mako O'Halloran
Yes, I think that it also brings us to thinking about the unfinished and seeing things in fragments, which almost leave more to the imagination. And Keats is fascinated by that sense of brokenness or incompletion. And I think that also invites us to think about Keats own life being cut short and his sense of unfinished business, of his never fully achieving the arc that he. The ambitious kind of arc that he sets out for himself.
- [48:30]
Nicholas Rowe
We need to mention also the significance of Tennyson's poetry, poetry, poems, chiefly lyrical, which I think is 1830, certainly around that date, which is saturated with Keats language and imagery and rhythms and poetic names, this kind of thing. And Keats reputation develops along with Tennyson's during the 1830s and 1840s. And it's arguably Tennyson who helped helps familiarize the reading public with a kind of Keatsian idiom for poetry. So that, as it were, complements the influence of what Shelley had done in Adonais.
- [49:13]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, before we get offered a cup of tea or coffee by the producer, Simon, let me ask you one final question that interests me. He was obviously influenced by a range of classical writers and poets. Did he have any engagement with contemporary European poetry and literature or was he very, very English in that sense?
- [49:36]
Mako O'Halloran
I would say he's very English.
- [49:38]
Fiona Stafford
I was going to say very English, actually. I think you don't get much reference to French or German poets. Italian, I mean, stante. But not contemporary.
- [49:52]
Melvyn Bragg
I mean, contemporary.
- [49:53]
Nicholas Rowe
Yeah, he knew about composers, he knew about Haydn, he knew about Mozart. But his knowledge of European literature would be from the classics and from the Italian poets of the 13th and 14th century.
- [50:08]
Melvyn Bragg
Dante, obviously, is a real hero, but in translation.
- [50:13]
Fiona Stafford
He's reading Cary's translation of Dante on the walking tour.
- [50:18]
Mako O'Halloran
Yeah. Yes. But then closer to home, I think, you know, one of the poets he thinks a lot about is a near contemporary. Well, from the first generation of Romantic poets is Wordsworth. And Wordsworth is so important to Keats. And in his letter of 3 May to Reynolds, in which he's, sorry, 1818, in which he's thinking about what it takes to create great poetry, he compares Milton and Wordsworth and he says that what Milton doesn't do is think into the human heart in the way that Wordsworth does. So I think that sense that Wordsworth is slightly ahead of him in being willing to go into these dark spaces of the human mind, progressing through what he says is a kind of mansion of many apartments, a kind of analogy of life in which we move from the infant chamber of thought to a maiden chamber of dawning awareness of pain, and then lots of dark passages. And that's where he feels that Wordsworth is ahead of him. And in that space, it's a sort of sense of clouded vision and uncertainty, and it's a kind of further thinking through. Of negative capability, of that state of being in mystery, uncertainty, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact, fact or reason that he'd been exploring earlier in 1817.
- [51:40]
Melvyn Bragg
Some of it's very dark indeed. You know, Ode to a Nightingale, which I thought was, you know, just sort of lyrical. I read it and I thought, he's going in. He's going into some really, really strange places here.
- [51:53]
Nicholas Rowe
Yeah.
- [51:54]
Melvyn Bragg
Simon, tea or coffee, anybody? Tea for me.
- [51:58]
Mako O'Halloran
Coffee would be lovely.
- [51:59]
Fiona Stafford
Coffee for me, actually.
- [52:00]
Nicholas Rowe
Thank you very much.
- [52:01]
Fiona Stafford
Thank you. In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson.
- [52:06]
Mako O'Halloran
And it's a BBC Studios production.
- [52:09]
Fiona Stafford
I'm Eleni Jones.
- [52:10]
Nicholas Rowe
And I'm Mark Kermode and in screenshot we guide you through the ever changing landscape of the moving image.
- [52:17]
Podcast Advertiser
I really like any story about self delusion.
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Nicholas Rowe
My intent is to allow the audience to see the shining through these people's
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Fiona Stafford
eyes, meeting those on both sides of
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Nicholas Rowe
the cabinet camera and uncovering fascinating insights
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Melvyn Bragg
into what we watch.
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Mako O'Halloran
How would you describe the difference between the doppelganger and the clone?
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Melvyn Bragg
Why is it such a cinematic subject?
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Fiona Stafford
What was your relationship like with your Double?
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Nicholas Rowe
Screenshot from BBC Radio 4 Listen now on BBC Sounds.
- [52:47]
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